“My old lodgings?” I repeated, amazed. “Why my old lodgings?”
Hewitt turned to me with a chuckle and a wide smile. “Because we can’t see the broken panel-work anywhere else,” he said. “Let’s see — Chelsea, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Chelsea. But why — you don’t suppose the people who defaced the panels also murdered the man who painted them?”
“Well,” Hewitt replied, with another smile, “that would be carrying a practical joke rather far, wouldn’t it? Even for the ordinary picture damager.”
“You mean you don’t think they did it, then? But what do you mean?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t mean anything but what I say. Come now, this is rather an interesting case despite appearances, and it has interested me: so much, in fact, that I really think I forgot to offer Mr Douglas Kingscote my condolence on his bereavement. You see a problem is a problem, whether of theft, assassination, intrigue, or anything else, and I only think of it as one. The work very often makes me forget merely human sympathies. Now, you have often been good enough to express a very flattering interest in my work, and you shall have an opportunity of exercising your own common sense in the way I am always having to exercise mine. You shall see all my evidence (if I’m lucky enough to get any) as I collect it, and you shall make your own inferences. That will be a little exercise for you; the sort of exercise I should give a pupil if I had one. But I will give you what information I have, and you shall start fairly from this moment. You know the inquest evidence such as it was, and you saw everything I did in Ivy Cottage?”
“Yes; I think so. But I’m not much the wiser.”
“Very well. Now I will tell you. What does the whole case look like? How would you class the crime?”
“I suppose as the police do. An ordinary case of murder with the object of robbery.”
“It is not an ordinary case. If it were, I shouldn’t know as much as I do, little as that is; the ordinary cases are always difficult. The assailant did not come to commit a burglary, although he was a skilled burglar, or one of them was, if more than one were concerned. The affair has, I think, nothing to do with the expected wedding, nor had Mr Campbell anything to do in it — at any rate, personally — nor the gardener. The criminal (or one of them) was known personally to the dead man, and was well-dressed: he (or again one of them, and I think there were two) even had a chat with Mr Kingscote before the murder took place. He came to ask for something which Mr Kingscote was unwilling to part with — perhaps hadn’t got. It was not a bulky thing. Now you have all my materials before you.”
“But all this doesn’t look like the result of the blind spite that would ruin a man’s work first and attack him bodily afterwards.”
“Spite isn’t always blind, and there are other blind things besides spite; people with good eyes in their heads are blind sometimes, even detectives.”
“But where did you get all this information? What makes you suppose that this was a burglar who didn’t want to burgle, and a well-dressed man, and so on?”
Hewitt chuckled and smiled again.
“I saw it — saw it, my boy, that’s all,” he said “But here comes the train.”
On the way back to town, after I had rather minutely described Kingscote’s work on the boarding-house panels, Hewitt asked me for the names and professions of such fellow lodgers in that house as I might remember. “When did you leave yourself?” he ended.
“Three years ago, or rather more. I can remember Kingscote himself; Turner, a medical student — James Turner, I think; Harvey Challitt, diamond merchant’s articled pupil — he was a bad egg entirely, he’s doing five years for forgery now; by the bye he had the room we are going to see till he was marched off, and Kingscote took it — a year before I left; there was Norton — don’t know what he was ‘something in the City’, I think; and Carter Paget, in the Admiralty Office. I don’t remember any more at this moment; there were pretty frequent changes. But you can get it all from Mrs Lamb, of course.”
“Of course; and Mrs Lamb’s exact address is — what?”
I gave him the address, and the conversation became disjointed. At Farringdon station, where we alighted, Hewitt called two hansoms. Preparing to enter one, he motioned me to the other, saying, “You get straight away to Mrs Lamb’s at once. She may be going to burn that splintered wood, or to set things to rights, after the manner of her kind, and you can stop her. I must make one or two small inquiries, but I shall be there half an hour after you.”
“Shall I tell her our object?”
“Only that I may be able to catch her mischievous lodgers — nothing else yet.” He jumped into the hansom and was gone.
I found Mrs Lamb still in a state of indignant perturbation over the trick served her four days before. Fortunately, she had left everything in the panelled room exactly as she had found it, with an idea of being better able to demand or enforce reparation should her lodgers return. “The room’s theirs, you see, sir,” she said, “till the end of the week, since they paid in advance, and they may come back and offer to make amends, although I doubt it. As pleasant-spoken a young chap as you might wish, he seemed, him as come to take the rooms. ‘My cousin,’ says he, ‘is rather an invalid, havin’ only just got over congestion of the lungs, and he won’t be in London till this evening late. He’s comin’ up from Birmingham,’ he ses, ‘and I hope he won’t catch a fresh cold on the way, although of course we’ve got him muffled up plenty.’ He took the rooms, sir, like a gentleman, and mentioned several gentlemen’s names I knew well, as had lodged here before; and then he put down on that there very table, sir”— Mrs Lamb indicated the exact spot with her hand, as though that made the whole thing much more wonderful —“he put down on that very table a week’s rent in advance, and ses, ‘That’s always the best sort of reference, Mrs Lamb, I think,’ as kind-mannered as anything — and never ’aggled about the amount nor nothing. He only had a little black bag, but he said his cousin had all the luggage coming in the train, and as there was so much, p’r’aps they wouldn’t get it here till next day. Then he went out and came in with his cousin at eleven that night — Sarah let ’em in her own self — and in the morning they was gone — and this!” Poor Mrs Lamb, plaintively indignant, stretched her arm towards the wrecked panels.
“If the gentleman as you say is comin’ on, sir,” she pursued, “can do anything to find ’em, I’ll prosecute ’em, that I will, if it costs me ten pound. I spoke to the constable on the beat, but he only looked like a fool, and said if I knew where they were I might charge ’em with wilful damage, or county court ’em. Of course I know I can do that if I knew where they were, but how can I find ’em? Mr Jones he said his name was; but how many Joneses is there in London, sir?”
I couldn’t imagine any answer to a question like this, but I condoled with Mrs Lamb as well as I could. She afterwards went on to express herself much as her sister had done with regard to Kingscote’s death, only as the destruction of her panels loomed larger in her mind, she dwelt primarily on that. “It might almost seem,” she said, “that somebody had a deadly spite on the pore young gentleman, and went breakin’ up his paintin’ one night, and murderin’ him the next!”
I examined the broken panels with some care, having half a notion to attempt to deduce something from them myself, if possible. But I could deduce nothing. The beading had been taken out, and the panels, which were thick in the centre but bevelled at the edges, had been removed and split up literally into thin firewood, which lay in a tumbled heap on the hearth and about the floor. Every panel in the room had been treated in the same way, and the result was a pretty large heap of sticks, with nothing whatever about them to distinguish them from other sticks, except the paint on one face, which I observed in many places had been scratched and scraped away. The rug was drawn half across the hearth, and had evidently been used to deaden the sound of chopping. But mischief — wanton and stupid mischief — was all I could deduce from it all.
Mr