OUR SERIAL STORY

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1927, Page 12

OUR SERIAL STORY

“The Mystery of Number 13a”

By

MICHAEL CARMICHAEL

Rights Rrssroed.

(Chapter XXV continued.) “There must be someone there,” cried Dampierre. ‘‘Th? girl—she can t have gone down into the City, too.” 4, Tlie girl?” repeated Inspector Pym. Dampierre hurriedly explained. The other nodded and motioned to a constable to come up. i: Break that pane of glass,” he instructed him briefly. “We’d better,” he added to Dampierre, “force an entrance and see for ourselves. If the birds have flown. still have time to wire the Channel ports. If they haven’t—” He shrugged his shoulders. A sudden suspicion recrossed Dampierre’s mind. Could Huntley have double-crossed him. after all, and warned his accomplices in London? He stepped back a pace or two and glanced upwards at the windows. They were blank, blank with that air of untenanted emptiness which distinguished all vacant houses, but he remembered that the front rooms were unfurnished before and felt a sense of reassurance. Besides, Huntley was suffering from a grievance of his own; he had been double-crossed himself, and would, presumably, more than probably, like to see the girl and Mason caught in the net they had prepared for him. Dampierre smiled to himself.

Pym turned to him abruptly. “There’s no escape at the back, is there?” he asked. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know,” replied Dampierre, “but possibly you d better send a constable round to see.*’ The Inspector snapped his fingers at a waiting police officer. “Just find out whether it is possible to get out at the back of the premises, please,” be said. “In the meantime, I think we’d better try and force an entrance somehow or other.” He scowled blackly. “They have the door so bolted from the inside it isn’t possible to open it by that window,” he added, as he indicated the broken pane of glass. They followed him down the areaway steps, where they had not much l difficulty in forcing the door. The dark passage in which they found themselves: immediately was damp and smelt of disuse and neglect. The kitchen, open-; ing off at the right was dark too and there was no fire in the stove. Neither was there the least sign of habitation or use: the drawers were empty and there was a thick layer of dust upon the gaping shelves. The clock had stopped and the calender on the wall was almost a year old. Inspector Pym looked into the coal cellar. There, was some coal there, but not much. He scowled as he turned round. “They’ve hardly used this part of the house at all,” he eaid. “Here, Larkins, you search the whole floor thoroughly while we go on upstairs.” The man saluted smartly as Dampierre and the other constable followed Pym up the stairway to the floor above. They pushed through a tattered green baize door into a pantry beyond, where 1 there were still some dishes remaining in the rack above the sink and some empty bottles underneath, but the Inspector hardly paused to look at these things on his way into the front of the house. The hall was very much the same as the last time that Dampierre had seen it, except that it was colder, and the door into the dining room which stood wide open revealed a bare table decorated only by an empty bottle of whisky and «ome used tumblers. The dining-room had also a bleak atmosphere of disuse which was, possibly, accentuated by the half-drawn curtains at the windows. Dampierre shivered involuntarily. There was something extraordinarly evil and menacing about that house, an influence he had felt the first time he had been in it and which still managed to exert its baleful power upon him. The hideous bronze Buddha he remembered having scon the first night he was there was still gone—i indeed, what, little personal effects there had ever been had been evidently removed earlier in anticipation of flight. The house was like a house which had been stripped of everything. At the foot of the stairs all three stopped to listen but there was not a sound. Inspector Pym stepped briskly to the letter box of the door and looked in. There were no letters. He frowned gloomily as he rejoined the others. ‘•lt looks,” he said, “as if they’d gone.” Dampierre consulted his watch. “it is not yet two,” he announced, “and there is no train after the 11 o’clock till a quarter to five. They could not have completed their arrangements by then.” The Chief Inspector shrugged his shoulders. “Xo, possibly not.” he agreed, “but it is also quite, possible that they may have left this house yesterday and gone to an hotel.” “It looks that way, certainly,” declared Dampierre with a choking sense of disappointment, “but perhaps it would be just as well to have a whip through the place to make sure.” “Of course!” assented Inspector Pym. a little tartly, and listened a moment. “I thought,*’ he went on presently, “that I heard something.” Dampierre listened. Loo, but his mind slipped back two nights before, when he iiad stolen up the dark stairs to find

out if the room on the second floor had been the same room he had entered in the fog and what was there. Calm though ho was, ha shuddered slightly; tl:o silence, of the house coupled with its chill, its strange feeling of disuse, affected him as before; and he was glad to light a cigarette as he waited for Pym. As he moved across the hall to pitch his burnt out match into the empty grate the Inspector abruptly held up a warning hand. ‘’There!” he exclaimed. ‘‘What was that?” He shook his head. “’I didn’t hear anything, I’m afraid,” he replied. "It sounded loke the closing of a door.” “Sorry, I didn’t hear it,” Dampierre continued, but Inspector Pym had not stopped to hear what he had said. He was racing madly tip the stair, the constable immediately behind him, following with the instinctive promptness of perfect discipline. Dampierre darted after them. “The roof, man!” cried Pym. “They’re escaping over the roof!” But the next moment they were brought to a sudden stop by the unmistakable report of a revolver, muffled through the sound was by closed doors and distance. Inspector Pym quietly pulled out a Smith ami Wesson from an inside pocket as he listened, but there was no other sound. Nothing, nothing at all but a dying echo and then silence which filled the house more utterly than any noise. Pym turned sharply to Dampierre. “There were two of 'em did you say?” he cried. “Yes, Mason and a woman who posed as the maid.” The other, however, had not waited to hear the remainder of the sentence after the first word. He was already hurrying up the stairs as fast as he could, the police constable dashing after him immediately at his heels. Dampierre followed, aware suddenly, with a sickened feeling of horror, of repulsion, of the pungent odour of exploded powder. When he reached the landing on the second floor he found the constable, very red in the face, furiously kicking in a panel of the door of the room at the back, the same room in which he had seen the murdeded baronet lying grinning hideously at the ceiling with that telltale staih of blood on the sliiniug white, of his shirt-front, and, as if fascinated, he watched the constable plunge an arm through the splintered panel and unlock the door. He felt he knew what he would see when they entered the room and he was not, indeed, far from wrong. On the same bed on which he had found Sir Bartie Armstrong stretched out in evening dress, lifeless, there was the dead, body of a man with a gaping bullet-hole in his temple, but, what was infinitely more horrible and ghastly, what brought Dampierre in spite of himself to an abrupt stop as he crossed the threshold, was the sight of the pointed, black beard jutting sharply upwards at the ceiling. Then, recovering himself he stepped forward with a slight shrug of his shoulders. (To be concluded.)