The Mystery of the Hidden Room Part 3

At this juncture the older detective whispered something to the Sergeant and handed him a paper he had taken from the table drawer.

"Mr. Davies, I am under the painful necessity of keeping you under surveillance until the arrival of the coroner. You will remain in this house until that time."

I bowed. "Then you have no objections to my retiring?" I asked.

"None at all, Mr. Davies. Gregory," he called, and when the burly policeman appeared in the doorway, "You will accompany Mr. Davies to his room and see that he does not attempt to leave the house."

"Very good, sir," saluted the policeman.

"Good night, Sergeant," I said. "I am sorry to put you to so much trouble." Then I touched Orton upon the shoulder. "If you will be so kind I should like to be shown to a vacant room and might I borrow a suit of pajamas?"

I linked my arm through his and forced him to accompany me upstairs. By dint of hinting that he had no way of proving that he was not in the study at the fatal moment and that my word had far more weight than his, should I choose to cast suspicion upon him, I frightened the cowardly fellow into promising to keep his knowledge to himself for that night at least. That the police were bound to learn that Ruth was also in the study was inevitable, but at any rate I should have gained her a few more hours of freedom, for whichever way I looked at it the case was black against her.

CHAPTER IV

THE INQUEST

When I awoke the sun was pouring into the room and my watch pointed to eleven o'clock. After hours of pacing the floor in utter anguish of spirit while the specter of murder stalked hand-in-hand with innocence and love, outraged nature had a.s.serted herself and I had found respite in oblivion. But now the weary round of thoughts must be taken up again and it was with a sigh of relief that I obeyed the summons to present myself in the study where the coroner was holding the inquest.

The body had been removed and in the chair where it had so lately rested reposed the coroner with his papers spread out on the table before him.

I noticed that he had taken the chair from the head of the table and had placed it around the corner on the right side, facing the direction of the door instead of the safe.

In the corner opposite the door sat the younger of the two detectives who had accompanied the Sergeant to the house the night before. Beside him was Orton, looking pale and dispirited, while huddled in the adjacent corner like a herd of frightened cattle stood the servants, their eyes fastened upon the coroner, watching his every movement as if in terror lest they be accused of having murdered their master. Grouped around the table but slightly behind the coroner sat the jury, and I was glad to note that the coroner had had the good sense to pick a fairly respectable set of men to judge the case, from which I argued hopefully that the gray-haired, heavy-set gentleman in charge of the case might possess a modic.u.m of intelligence and a keener brain than the average coroner.

Back of the jury stood Dr. Haskins, in conference with a rotund individual whom I a.s.sumed rightly to be the coroner's physician. Beyond the doctors sat the a.s.sistant district attorney, surrounded by the very few newspapermen who had got wind of the affair and had insisted upon being present.

Pa.s.sing the jury I seated myself near one of the windows beside a man whom I recalled having seen, but whom I could not at the moment place, and looked around in vain for Ruth. Evidently Coroner Graves (I obtained this information from the man beside me) intended to spare her as much as possible, for which consideration I thanked him from the bottom of my heart.

They must have been awaiting my presence since I was no sooner seated than the coroner called on Doctor Haskins to give his testimony. The doctor repeated what he had previously told me, that Philip Darwin had been shot through the left lung, that death had resulted from internal hemorrhage, and that the victim had lived at least twenty minutes after the bullet had penetrated his body. Asked if he had examined Mr. Darwin immediately upon his arrival, the doctor replied that he had first attended Mrs. Darwin and that it must have been ten or fifteen minutes later that he had entered the study. He had found Mr. Darwin lying back in his chair with a smile on his lips, one hand closed over a handkerchief, the other hanging limply over the arm of the chair. From the condition of the body he must have been dead from twenty to thirty minutes. Also there was a small abrasion on the little finger of his left hand, as if a ring had been violently removed. Questioned as to whether he was the family's physician, he said no, that he only knew Mr.

Darwin by sight and had probably been summoned because he was the nearest doctor.

This evidence was partially corroborated by the coroner's physician, who added that he had made a post-mortem examination and had extracted the bullet, which had narrowly missed entering the heart. From the nature of the wound it would have been impossible for him to have shot himself, and the absence of all powder stains pointed to murder rather than suicide.

Then he continued, with a slightly commiserating look in Dr. Haskins'

direction: "You have heard Dr. Haskins' testimony, your honor, that the victim lived twenty minutes after he was shot, and that at the time that the doctor examined him he had already been dead from twenty to thirty minutes. This last statement is correct. The post-mortem examination proves conclusively that Mr. Darwin died at midnight or shortly thereafter. From questions that I have already put to Mr. Orton I have learned that the shot was fired as the clock finished striking twelve, therefore since that was the only shot fired Mr. Darwin must have died immediately, or at the best, must have lived only five minutes, for Dr.

Haskins was in the study by twelve-thirty."

"But," interrupted Dr. Haskins, "the nature of the wound is such that instantaneous death could not have possibly occurred."

"Please do not volunteer information unless you are being questioned,"

returned the coroner with some asperity. He turned to his physician, "You were saying, Doctor?"

Dr. Haskins shrugged his shoulders at the coroner's words, while his boyish face flushed angrily at the rebuke, and he walked away from the table, but turned to listen as the physician took up the cudgels again by answering the query he had propounded.

"Dr. Haskins is young in his profession and this is his first criminal case, hence his natural inference that because in his medical books such a wound should produce such results, therefore it must be so in practice," said the coroner's physician, with pompous superiority. "Now as a matter of fact where one man will live an hour another will survive only a few minutes, depending on the life each has led. Now Mr. Darwin, I have been told, led a very fast life, which probably accounts for his quick demise. After all, you see, it's a question of fitting your facts to the circ.u.mstances of your case and in this instance no other conclusion is possible."

I could see that Dr. Haskins was not at all convinced, and I set it down to professional jealousy and his desire not to be outdone by the coroner's physician. I can imagine that that "is young in his profession" rather stuck in his gorge.

When the physician had seated himself the coroner took up the bullet and called the detective, to whom he handed it along with another object that had been lying upon the table. Whereupon the detective took a step forward and held up the object for our inspection. It was a long-barreled thirty-eight caliber revolver, just the sort of weapon a man would keep in his house for use against burglars, since it insured a fair chance of more accurate marksmans.h.i.+p.

"This revolver, gentlemen," said the detective, speaking to the jury, "was found on the floor beside the chair in which the victim lay. As you can see for yourselves," here he broke the pistol, "it is fully loaded with the exception of one chamber, which has recently been discharged.

The bullet extracted from Mr. Darwin's body corresponds in every respect with the bullets remaining in this pistol. Therefore I have no hesitation in stating that the deceased was killed with this weapon in my hand."

He pa.s.sed the revolver and the bullet to the jury, adding that Mr.

Darwin had been standing when he was shot, and that as he had been engaged in writing the moment before, the inference was plain that he had risen to meet the person who killed him.

"What makes you certain he was standing when he was shot?" inquired the coroner.

"The carpet, if you'll notice," replied the detective, whose name, by the way, was Jones, "has a very heavy pile. The marks made by that arm-chair as it was pushed back from the table were apparent to me when I examined the carpet around it. Now Mr. Darwin had been writing, for we found a half-finished word on the paper before him, and must therefore have been seated in the chair. Hence the only person who could have produced those marks in the carpet was the victim himself, and they could only have been made if, as I said, he had risen suddenly to meet his murderer, who was evidently known to him, since Mr. Darwin was smiling when he was killed."

There was a murmur of admiration for the clever way in which he had deduced his statement, and the man beside me softly clapped his hands as he whispered to himself, "admirable, marvelous. Upon my soul I could not have builded better had I tried."

The thought came to me that my companion might be a detective also, and that he was delighted with the intelligence displayed by his professional brother, but I had no time to nurse idle speculations, for Jones had resumed his seat, and I expected the coroner to make an attempt to discover the owners.h.i.+p of the pistol. To my surprise he ignored that point and turned his attention to the servants.

The butler, who was the first servant called upon and who was a vigorous old man about sixty years of age, gave his name as George Mason and stated that he had been in his position for thirty years. I saw the coroner's face clear at this statement, for surely a man who had been the family retainer for so long a time could be relied on not to pervert any knowledge he might possess of the events of the previous night. The coroner should have recalled that though not given to perverting justice old family servants have a faculty for forgetting what they would rather not explain.

"I understand that it is your duty to secure the house at night," began the coroner.

"Yes, sir."

"What time do you usually lock up?"

"When Mr. Darwin left the house for the evening, sir. Or if he was away, as he sometimes is, for days together, it would remain locked while he was gone. That is, it was that way before his marriage, sir. Now I lock up when Mrs. Darwin goes upstairs."

"What time did you close the house last night?"

"At nine-thirty, sir."

"You are sure you locked all the doors and windows securely?"

"Oh, yes, sir, everything except the study, for to my surprise Mr. Orton was in there and said he'd lock the windows himself, sir."

"Why did Mr. Orton's presence in the study surprise you?"

"Because Mr. Darwin always keeps the study locked, sir. I have a duplicate key to let the maid in to clean, sir, and it was my custom in my rounds at night to knock on the door. If I got no answer I went in to see that everything was all right, sir."

"How long has Mr. Darwin been in the habit of locking his study?"

"A good many years, sir, ten or more."

"For what reason?"

"I do not know, sir."