Cleek found young Trent an extremely handsome man of about three-and-thirty; of a highly strung, nervous temperament, and with an irritating habit of running his fingers through his hair when excited. Also, it seemed impossible for him to sit still for half a minute at a stretch; he must be constantly hopping up only to sit down again, and moving restlessly about as if he were doing his best to retain his composure and found it difficult with Cleek’s calm eyes fixed constantly upon him.

“I want to tell you something about that bloodstained sponge business, Mr. Cleek,” he said in his abrupt, jerky, uneasy manner. “I never heard a word about it until last night, when Miss Larue confessed her former suspicions of my dear old dad, and gave me all the details of the matter. That sponge had nothing to do with the affair at all. It was I that tucked it under the staircase where it was found, and I did so on the day before James Colliver’s disappearance. The blood that had been on it was mine, not his.”

“I see,” said Cleek, serenely. “The explanation, of course, is the good, old tried-and-true refuge of the story-writers—namely, a case of nose-bleeding, is it not?”

“Yes,” admitted Trent. “But with this difference: mine wasn’t an accidental affair at all—it was the result of getting a jolly good hiding; and I made an excuse to get away and hop out of town, so that the dad wouldn’t know about it nor see how I’d been battered. The fact is, I met one of our carmen in the upper hall. He was as drunk as a lord, and when I took him to task about it and threatened him with discharge, he said something to me that I thought needed a jolly sight more than words by way of chastisement, so I nipped off my coat and sailed into him. It turned out that he was the better man, and gave me all that I’d asked for in less than a minute’s time; so I shook hands with him, told him to bundle off home and sleep himself sober, and that if he wouldn’t say anything about the matter I wouldn’t either, and he could turn up for work in the morning as usual. Then I washed up, shoved the sponge under the staircase, and nipped off out of town; because, you know, it would make a deuced bad impression if any of the other workmen should find out that a member of the firm had been thrashed by one of the employees—and Draycott had done me up so beautifully that I was a sight for the gods.”

The thing had been so frankly confessed that, in spite of the fact of having in the beginning been rather repelled by him, Cleek could not but experience a feeling of liking for the man. “So that’s how it happened, is it?” he said, with a laugh. “It is a brave man, Mr. Trent, that will resist the opportunity to make himself a hero in the presence of the lady he loves; and I hope I may be permitted to congratulate Miss Larue on the wisdom of her choice. But now, if you please, let us get down at once to the details of the melancholy business we have in hand. Mr. Narkom has been telling me the amazing story of the boy’s visit to the building and of his strange disappearance therein, but I should like to have a few further facts, if you will be so kind. What took the boy to the building, in the first place? I am told he went there upon your invitation, but I confess that that seems rather odd to me. Why should a man of business want a boy to visit him during business hours?”

“Good Lord, man! I couldn’t have let him see what he wanted to see if he didn’t come during business hours, could I? But that’s rather ambiguous, so I’ll make haste to put it plainer. Young Stan—his Christian name is Stanley, as I suppose you know—young Stan is mad to learn the business of theatrical property making, and particularly that of the manufacture of those wax effigies, et cetera, which we supply for the use of drapers in their show windows; and as he is now sixteen and of an age to begin thinking of some trade or profession for the future, I thought it would save Miss Larue putting up a jolly big premium to have him taught outside if we took him into our business free, so I invited him to come and look round and see if he thought he’d like it when he came to look into the messy details.

“Well, he came rather late yesterday afternoon, and I’d taken him round for just about ten or a dozen minutes when word was suddenly brought to me that the representative of one of the biggest managers in the country had just called with reference to an important order, so, of course, I put back to the office as quickly as I could foot it, young Stan quite naturally following me, as he didn’t know his way about the place alone, and, being a modest, retiring sort of boy, didn’t like facing the possibility of blundering into what might prove to be private quarters, and things of that sort. He said as much to me at the time.

“Well, when I got back to the office, I soon found that the business with my visitor was a matter that would take some time to settle—you can’t give a man an estimate all on a jump, and without doing a bit of figuring, you know—so I told young Stan that he might cut off and go over the place on his own, if he liked, as it had been arranged that, when knocking-off time came, I was to go back with him to Miss Larue’s flat, where we all were to have supper together. When I told him that, he asked eagerly if he might go up to the wax-figure department, as he was particularly anxious to see Loti at work, and so——”“Loti!” Cleek flung in the word so sharply that Trent gave a nervous start. “Just a moment, please, before you go any further, Mr. Trent. Sorry to interrupt, but, tell me, please: is the man who models your show-window effigies named Loti, then? Is, eh? Hum-m! Any connection by chance with that once famous Italian worker in wax, Giuseppe Loti—chap that used to make those splendid wax tableaux for the Eden MusÉe in Paris some eighteen or twenty years ago?”

“Same chap. Went all to pieces all of a sudden—clear off his head for a time, I’ve heard—in the very height of his career, because his wife left him. Handsome French woman—years younger than he—ran off with another chap and took every blessed thing of value she could lay her hands upon when—but maybe you’ve heard the story?”

“I have,” said Cleek. “It is one that is all too common on the Continent. Also, it happened that I was in Paris at the time of the occurrence. And so you have that great Giuseppe Loti at the head of your waxwork department, eh? What a come-down in the world for him! Poor devil! I thought he was dead ages ago. He dropped out suddenly and disappeared from France entirely after that affair with his unfaithful wife. The rumour was that he had committed suicide; although that seemed as improbable as it now turns out to be, in the face of the fact that on the night after his wife left him he turned up at the CafÉ Royal and publicly——No matter! Go on with the case, please. What about the boy?”

“Let’s see, now, where was I?” said Trent, knotting up his brow. “Oh, ah! I recollect—just where he asked me if he could go up and see Loti at work. Of course, I said that he could; there wasn’t any reason why I shouldn’t, as the place is open to inspection always, so I opened the door and showed him the way to the staircase leading up to the glass-room, and then went to the speaking-tube and called up to Loti to expect him, and to treat him nicely, as he was the nephew of the great Miss Larue and would, in time, be mine also.”

“Was there any necessity for taking that precaution, Mr. Trent?”

“Yes. Loti has developed a dashed bad temper since last autumn and is very eccentric, very irritable—not a bit like the solemn, sedate old johnnie he used to be. Even his work has deteriorated, I think, but one daren’t criticise it or he flies into a temper and threatens to leave.”

“And you don’t wish him to, of course—his name must stand for something.”

“It stands for a great deal. It’s one of our biggest cards. We can command twice as much for a Loti figure as for one made by any other waxworker. So we humour him in his little eccentricities and defer to him a great deal. Also, as he prefers to live on the premises, he saves us money in other ways. Serves for a watchman as well, you understand.”

“Oh, he lives on the premises, does he? Where? In the glass-room?”

“Oh, no; that would not be possible. The character as well as the position of that renders it impossible as a place of habitation. He uses it after hours as a sort of sitting-room, to be sure, and has partly fitted it up as one, but he sleeps, eats, and dresses in a room on the floor below.”

“Not an adjoining one?”

“Oh, no; an adjoining room would be an impossibility. Our building is an end one, standing on the corner of a short passage which leads to nothing but a narrow alley running along parallel with the back of our premises, and the glass-room covers nearly the entire roof of it. As a matter of fact, Mr. Cleek, although we call it that at the works, the term Glass Room is a misnomer. In reality, it’s nothing more nor less than a good sized ‘lean-to’ greenhouse that the dad bought and had taken up there in sections, and its rear elevation rests against the side wall of a still higher building than ours, next door—the premises of Storminger the carriage builder, to be exact. But look here: perhaps I can make the situation clearer by a rough sketch. Got a lead pencil and a bit of paper, anybody? Oh, thanks very much, dear. One can always rely upon you. Now, look here, Mr. Cleek—this is the way of it. You mustn’t mind if it’s a crude thing, because, you know, I’m a rotten bad draughtsman and can’t draw for nuts. But all the same, this will do at a pinch.”

Here he leaned over the table in the centre of the room and, taking the pencil and the blank back of the letter which Miss Larue had supplied, made a crude outline sketch thus:

“There you are,” he said suddenly, laying the crude drawing on the table before Cleek, and with him bending over it. “You are supposed to be looking at the houses from the main thoroughfare, don’t you know, and, therefore, at the front of them. This tall building on the left marked 1 is Storminger’s; the low one, number 2, adjoining, is ours; and that cagelike-looking thing, 3, on the top of it, is the glass-room. Now, along the front of it here, where I have put the long line with an X on the end, there runs a wooden partition with a door leading into the room itself, so that it’s impossible for anybody on the opposite side of the main thoroughfare to see into the place at all. But that is not the case with regard to people living on the opposite side of the short passage (this is here, that I’ve marked 4), because there’s nothing to obstruct the view but some rubbishy old lace curtains which Loti, in his endeavour to make the place what he calls homelike, would insist upon hanging, and they are so blessed thin that anybody can look right through them and see all over the place. Of course, though, there are blinds, which he can pull down on the inside if the sun gets too strong; and when they are down, nobody can see into the glass-room at all. Pardon? Oh, we had it constructed of glass, Mr. Narkom, because of the necessity for having all the light obtainable in doing the minute work on some of the fine tableaux we produce for execution purposes. We are doing one now—The Relief of Lucknow—for the big exhibition that’s to be given next month at Olympia and——The place marked 6 at the back of our building? Oh, that’s the narrow alley of which I spoke. We’ve a back door opening into it, but it’s practically useless, because the alley is so narrow one can’t drive a vehicle through it. It’s simply a right of way that can’t legally be closed and runs from Croom Street on the right just along as far as Sturgiss Lane on the left. Not fifty people pass through it in a day’s time.

“But to come back to the short passage, Mr. Cleek. Observe, there are no windows at all on the side of our building, here: Number 2. There were, once upon a time, but we had them bricked up, as we use that side for a ‘paint frame’ with a movable bridge so that it can be used for the purpose of painting scenery and drop-curtains. But there are windows in the side of the house marked 5; and directly opposite the point where I’ve put the arrow there is one which belongs to a room occupied by a Mrs. Sherman and her daughter—people who do ‘bushel work’ for wholesale costume houses. Now, it happens that at the exact time when the porter says he showed young Stan into the glass-room those two women were sitting at work by that window, and, the blinds not being drawn, could see smack into the place, and are willing to take their oath that there was no living soul in it.”

“How do they fix it as being, as you say,‘the exact time,’ Mr. Trent? If they couldn’t see the porter come up to the glass-room with the boy, how can they be sure of that?”

“Oh, that’s easily explained: There’s a church not a great way distant. It has a clock in the steeple which strikes the hours, halves, and quarters. Mrs. Sherman says that when it chimed half-past four she was not only looking into the glass-room, but was calling her daughter’s attention to the fact that, whereas some few minutes previously she had seen Loti go out of the place, leaving a great pile of reference plates and scraps of material all over the floor, and he had never, to her positive knowledge, come back into it, there was the room looking as tidy as possible, and, in the middle of it, a table with a vase of pink roses upon it, which she certainly had not seen there when he left.”

“Hallo! Hallo!” interjected Cleek rather sharply. “Let’s have that again, please!” and he sat listening intently while Trent repeated the statement; then, of a sudden, he gave his head an upward twitch, slapped his thigh, and, leaning back in his seat, added with a brief little laugh, “Well, of all the blithering idiots! And a simple little thing like that!”“Like what, Mr. Cleek?” queried Trent, in amazement. “You don’t surely mean to say that you can make anything important out of a table and a vase of flowers? Because, I may tell you that Loti is mad on flowers, and always has a vase of them in the room somewhere.”

“Does he, indeed? Natural inclination of the artistic temperament, I dare say. But never mind, get on with the story. Mrs. Sherman fixes the hour when she noticed this as half-past four, you say? How, then, does the porter who showed the boy into the glass-room fix it, may I ask?”

“By the same means precisely—the striking of the church clock. He remembers hearing it just as he reached the partition door, and was, indeed, at particular pains to take out his watch to see if it tallied with it. Also, three of our scene painters were passing along the hall at the foot of the short flight of steps leading up to the glass-room at the time. They were going out to tea; and one of them sang out to him laughingly, ‘Hallo, Ginger, how does that two-shilling turnip of yours make it? Time for tea at Buckingham Palace?’ for he had won the watch at a singing contest only the night before, and his mates had been chaffing him about it all day. In that manner the exact time of his going to the door with the boy is fixed, and with three persons to corroborate it. A second later the porter saw the boy push open the swing-door and walk into the place, and as he turned and went back downstairs he distinctly heard him say, ‘Good afternoon, sir. Mr. Trent said I might come up and watch, if you don’t mind.’”

“Did he hear anybody reply?”

“No, he did not. He heard no one speak but the boy.”

“I see. So, then, there is no actual proof that Loti was in there at the time, which, of course, makes the testimony of Mrs. Sherman and her daughter appear reliable when they say that the room was empty.”

“Still the boy was there if Loti wasn’t, Mr. Cleek. There’s proof enough that he did go into the place even though those two women declare that the room was empty.”

“Quite so, quite so. And when two and two don’t make four, ‘there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark.’ What does Loti himself say with regard to the circumstance? Or hasn’t he been spoken to about it?”

“My hat, yes! I went to him about it the very first thing. He says the boy never put in an appearance, to his knowledge; that he never saw him. In fact, that just before half-past four he was taken with a violent attack of sick headache, the result of the fumes rising from the wax he was melting to model figures for the tableau, together with the smell of the chemicals used in preparing the background, and that he went down to his room to lie down for a time and dropped off to sleep. As a matter of fact, he was there in his room sleeping when, at half-past six, I went for the boy, and, finding the glass-room vacated, naturally set out to hunt up Loti and question him about the matter.”

“When you called up to the glass-room through the speaking-tube, to say that the boy was about to go up, who answered you—Loti?”

“Yes.”

“At what time was that? Or can’t you say positively?”

“Not to the fraction of a moment. But I should say that it was about four or five minutes before the boy got there—say about five-and-twenty minutes past four. It wouldn’t take him longer to get up to the top of the house, I fancy, and he certainly did not stop at any of the other departments on the way.”

“Queer, isn’t it, that the man should not have stopped to so much as welcome the boy after you had been at such pains to tell him to be nice to him? Does he offer any explanation on that score?”

“Yes. He says that, as his head was so bad, he knew that he would probably be cross and crotchety; so as I had asked him to be kind, he thought the best thing he could do was to leave a note on the table for the boy, telling him to make himself at home and to examine anything he pleased, but to be sure not to touch the cauldron in which the wax was simmering, as it tilted readily and he might get scalded. He was sorry to have to go, but his head ached so badly that he really had to lie down for a while.

“That note, I may tell you, was lying on the table when I went up to the glass-room and failed to find the boy. It was that which told me where to go in order to find Loti and question him. I’ll do him the credit of stating that when he heard of the boy’s mysterious disappearance he flung his headache and his creature comforts to the winds and joined in the eager hunt for him as excitedly and as strenuously as anybody. He went through the building from top to bottom; he lifted every trapdoor, crept into every nook and corner and hole and box into which it might be possible for the poor little chap to have fallen. But it was all useless, Mr. Cleek—every bit of it! The boy had vanished, utterly and completely; from the minute the porter saw him pass the swing-door and go into the glass-room we never discovered even the slightest trace of him, nor have we been able to do so since. He has gone, he has vanished, as completely as if he had melted into thin air, and if there is any ghost of a clue to his whereabouts existing——”

“Let us go and see if we can unearth it,” interrupted Cleek, rising. “Mr. Narkom, is the limousine within easy reach?”

“Yes, waiting in Tavistock Street, dear chap. I told Lennard to be on the lookout for us.”

“Good! Then if Miss Larue will allow Mr. Trent to escort her as far as the pavement, and he will then go on alone to his place of business and await us there, you and I will leave the hotel by the back way and join him as soon as possible. Leave by the front entrance if you be so kind; and—pardon, one last word, Mr. Trent, before you go. At the time when this boy’s father vanished in much the same way, eleven months ago, you had, I believe, a door porter at your establishment name Felix Murchison. Is that man still in your employ?”

“No, Mr. Cleek. He left about a week or so after James Colliver’s disappearance.”

“Know where he is?”

“Not the slightest idea. As a matter of fact, he suddenly inherited some money, and said he was going to emigrate to America. But I don’t know if he did or not. Why?”

“Oh, nothing in particular—only that I shouldn’t be surprised if the person who supplied that money was the pawnbroker who received in pledge the jewels which your father handed over to James Colliver, and that the sum which Felix Murchison ‘inherited’ so suddenly was the £150 advanced upon those gems.”

“How utterly absurd! My dear Mr. Cleek, you must surely remember that the pawnbroker said the chap who pawned the jewels was a gentlemanly appearing person, of good manners and speech, and Murchison is the last man in the world to answer to that description. A great hulking, bull-necked, illiterate animal of that sort, without an H in his vocabulary and with no more manners than a pig!”

“Precisely why I feel so certain now that the pawnbroker’s ‘advance’ was paid over to him,” said Cleek, with a twitch of the shoulder. “Live and learn, my friend, live and learn. Eleven months ago I couldn’t for the life of me understand why those jewels had been pawned at all; to-day I realize that it was the only possible course. Miss Larue, my compliments. Au revoir.” And he bowed her out of the room with the grace of a courtier, standing well out of sight from the hallway until the door had closed behind her and her companion and he was again alone with the superintendent.

“Now for it! as they used to say in the old melodramas,” he laughed, stepping sharply to a wardrobe and producing, first, a broad-brimmed cavalry hat, which he immediately put on, and then a pair of bright steel handcuffs. “We may have use for this very effective type of wristlets, Mr. Narkom; so it’s well to go prepared for emergencies. Now then, off with you while I lock the door. That’s the way to the staircase. Nip down it to the American bar. There’s a passage from that leading out to the Embankment Gardens. A taxi from there will whisk us along Savoy Street, across the Strand and up Wellington Street to Tavistock in less than no time; so we may look to be with Lennard inside of another ten minutes.”

“Righto!” gave back the superintendent. “And I can get rid of this dashed rig as soon as we’re in the limousine. But, I say; any ideas, old chap—eh?”

“Yes, two or three. One of them is that this is going to be one of the simplest cases I ever tackled. Lay you a sovereign to a sixpence, Mr. Narkom, that I solve the riddle of that glass-room before they ring up the curtain of any theatre in London to-night. What’s that? Lying? No, certainly not. There’s been no lying in the matter at all; it isn’t a case of that sort. The pawnbroker did not lie; the porter who says he showed the boy into the room did not lie; and the two women who looked into it and saw nothing but an empty room did not lie either. The only thing that did lie was a vase of pink roses—a bunch of natural Ananiases that tried to make people believe that they had been blooming and keeping fresh ever since last August!”

“Good Lord! you don’t surely think that that Loti chap——”

“Gently, gently, my friend; don’t let yourself get excited. Besides, I may be all at sea, for all my cocksureness. I don’t think I am, but—one never knows. I’ll tell you one thing, however: The man with whom Madame Loti eloped had, for the purpose of carrying on the intrigue, enlisted as a student under her husband, and gulled the poor fool by pretending that he wished to learn waxwork making, when his one desire was to make love to the man’s worthless wife. When they eloped, and Loti knew for the first time what a dupe he had been, he publicly swore, in the open room of the CafÉ Royal, that he would never rest until he had run that man down and had exterminated him and every living creature in whose veins his blood flowed. The man was an English actor, Mr. Narkom. He posed under the nom de thÉÂtre of Jason Monteith—his real name was James Colliver! Step livelier, please—we’re dawdling!”