The Deep Lake Mystery. Wells Carolyn
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I don’t either. Had Mr. Tracy a valet?”
“No, sir, he didn’t like a man fussing about. I attended him, sir, and a footman helped me out now and then; and Mrs. Fenn, she’s cook and housekeeper, sir, she looked after his clothes, saving what I did myself.”
“Have you any reason to think your master would take his own life?”
“Oh, Lord, no, sir. Begging your pardon, but he was very fond of life, was Mr. Tracy. I thought he died of a fit, sir.”
“Probably he did. A fit or stroke of apoplexy. I begin to think, Inspector, we have no murder mystery on our hands after all.”
“No,” said Farrell, shaking his head, “apparently not.”
“Apparently yes,” said Keeley Moore, quietly. He had been looking at the dead man, and though he had not moved, but had stood for a long time, with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the still figure on the bed, I knew, somehow, that he had made a discovery.
“Stand over here, please, Inspector,” he said, in his calm, matter-of-fact way.
Farrell went and stood beside him, and Moore pointed to a very small circular object that shone like silver, though nearly hidden by the thick and rather long hair of Sampson Tracy.
It was the head of a nail that had been driven into the man’s skull.
CHAPTER IV
THE NAIL
“My God!” Farrell exclaimed, stepping closer and pushing aside the gray hair, thus clearly revealing the awful truth.
A flat-headed nail, the head rather more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, had been driven into the skull with such force that it showed merely as a metal disk. Having been hidden by the dead man’s hair, it had remained unnoticed until Moore’s quick eyes espied it.
Farrell picked at it a little, but it was far too firmly fastened to be moved by his fingers.
“What shall we do?” the Inspector asked, helplessly. “Shall we try to get Doctor Rogers back?”
“No,” returned the Coroner, “he’s just starting on a long trip. Let him go. He could do nothing and it would be a pity to spoil his journey. His diagnosis of apoplexy was most natural in the circumstances, for the symptoms are the same. I, too, thought death was the result of an apoplectic stroke. But now we know it is black murder, the case comes directly within my jurisdiction, and there’s no occasion to recall Doctor Rogers.”
“You’re right,” Ames assented, “but who could have done this fearful thing? I can hardly believe a human being capable of such a horror! Mr. Moore, you simply must take up this case. It ought to be a problem after your own heart.”
Every word the man uttered made me dislike him more. To refer to this terrible tragedy as a problem after Moore’s own heart seemed to me to indicate a mind callous and almost ghoulish in its type.
I knew Kee well enough to feel sure that he would investigate the murder, but not at the behest of Harper Ames.
He only acknowledged Ames’s speech by a noncommittal nod and turned to Detective March.
“We have our work cut out for us,” he said, very gravely. “I have never seen a stranger case. The murderer must have been a man of brute passions and brute strength. That nail is almost imbedded in the bone, and, I fancy, needed more than one blow of the hammer that drove it in. But first, as to the doors and windows. You tell me they were locked this morning?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Griscom, the butler, as Moore looked at him.
He was a smallish man, bald and with what are sometimes called pop-eyes. He stared in a frightened manner, but he controlled his voice as he went on to tell his story.
“Yes, sir, I brought the master’s tea at nine o’clock, as always. The door was locked – ”
“Is it usually locked in the morning?” Moore interrupted.
“Sometimes, not always. When it is locked, I knock and Mr. Tracy would get up and open the door. If unlocked, I walked right in.”
“And this morning it was locked, and the key in the lock on the inside?”
“Yes, sir. So I knocked, but when there was no answer, I got scared – ”
“Why were you scared?”
“Because Doctor Rogers had often told me that Mr. Tracy was in danger of an apoplectic stroke, and that I must do anything I could to make him eat less and take more exercise. I’ve been with the master a long time, sir, and I had the privilege of a bit of talk with him now and then. So I did try to persuade him to obey the doctor’s orders, and he would laugh and promise to do so. But he forgot it as soon as he saw some dish he was fond of, and he’d eat his fill of it.”
“Go on, Griscom,” Moore said, “what happened next?”
“I went to Mr. Everett – ”
“Yes, he went to Everett,” broke in the aggrieved voice of Harper Ames. “Why did he do that, instead of coming to me, I’d like to know!”
“Go on,” Moore instructed the butler.
“I went to Mr. Everett, sir, he was up and dressed, and he said, at once, to get Louis – that’s the chauffeur – and tell him to bring some tools, I did that, and Louis first pushed the key out of the lock, and then poked around with a wire until he got the door open. Then we came in – ”
“Who came in?”
“Mr. Everett and Mr. Ames and me, sir. And Mrs. Fenn – she’s the housekeeper – she saw Louis running upstairs, so she came, too.”
“And you saw – ?”
“Mr. Tracy, just as he was when you first saw him, sir. Just as he is now, except for the things Doctor Rogers chucked out.”
“Is that door, the one that was locked, the entrance to the whole suite?”
“Yes, sir, that door is the only one connecting these rooms with the house.”
“I see. Now what about the windows?”
“They haven’t been touched, sir.”
Kee Moore turned his attention to the windows. There were many of them. The suite of Sampson Tracy’s was a rectangular wing, built out from the main house, and having windows on three sides. But all of these windows overlooked the deep, black waters of the Sunless Sea. It had been the whim of the man to have his quarters thus, to be surrounded on all sides by the water of the lake that he loved, and he usually had all the windows wide open, doubtless enjoying the lake breezes that played through the rooms, and listening to the birds, whose notes broke the stillness of the night.
“What is below these rooms?” Moore asked.
“The big ballroom, sir. Nothing else.”
After scrutinizing every window in the bedroom, dressing room, bathroom and sitting room, Moore said, slowly: “These windows seem to me to be inaccessible from below.”
It was characteristic of the man that he didn’t say they were inaccessible but merely that they seemed so to him.
As they certainly did to the rest of us. We all looked out, and in every instance, the sheer drop to the lake was about fifteen or more feet. The outer walls of marble presented no foothold for even the most daring of climbers. They were smooth, plain, and absolutely unscalable.
“It is certain no one entered by the windows,” Moore said, at last, having looked out of every one. “I suppose the house is always carefully secured at night?”
“Yes, sir,” Griscom assured him. “Mr. Tracy was very particular about that. He and all the household had latchkeys, and the front door – indeed, all the doors and windows were carefully seen to.”
“Who has latchkeys?”
“Mr. Everett, Mr. Dean, myself and the housekeeper. Then there are others which are given to guests.