The dream detective
cultivated by a course of obscure study--of recovering from the
atmosphere, the ether, call it what you will, the thought-forms--the
ideas thrown out by the scheming mind of the criminal he sought
for--enabled him to succeed where any ordinary investigator must
inevitably have failed.
“They destroy,” he would say in his odd, rumbling voice, “the clumsy
tools of their crime; they hide away the knife, the bludgeon; they sop
up the blood, they throw it, the jemmy, the dead man, the suffocated
poor infant, into the ditch, the pool--and they leave intact the odic
negative, the photograph of their sin, the thought thing in the air!”
He would tap his high yellow brow significantly. “Here upon this
sensitive plate I reproduce it, the hanging evidence! The headless
child is buried in the garden, but the thought of the beheader is left
to lie about. I pick it up. Poof! he swings--that child-slayer! I
triumph. He is a dead man. What an art is the art of the odic
photograph.”
But I propose to relate here an instance of Moris Klaw’s amazing
knowledge in matters of archæology--of the history of relics. In his
singular emporium at Wapping, where dwelt the white rats, the singing
canary, the cursing parrot, and the other stock-in-trade of this
supposed dealer in oddities, was furthermore a library probably
unique. It contained obscure works on criminology; it contained
catalogues of every relic known to European collectors with elaborate
histories of the same. What else it contained I am unable to say, for
the dazzling Isis Klaw was a jealous librarian.
You who have followed these records will have made the acquaintance of
Coram, the curator of the Menzies Museum; and it was through Coram
that I first came to hear of the inexplicable beheading of mummies,
which, commencing with that of Mr. Pettigrew’s valuable mummy of the
priestess Hor-ankhu, developed into a perfect epidemic. No more
useless outrage could well be imagined than the decapitation of an
ancient Egyptian corpse; and if I was surprised when I heard of the
first case, my surprise became stark amazement when yet other mummies
began mysteriously to lose their heads. But I will deal with the first
instance, now, as it was brought under my notice by Coram.
He rang me up early one morning.
“I say, Searles,” he said; “a very odd thing has happened. You’ve
heard me speak of Pettigrew the collector; he lives out Wandsworth
way; he’s one of our trustees. Well, some demented burglar broke into
his house last night, took nothing, but cut off the head of a valuable
mummy!”
“Good Heavens!” I cried. “What an original idea!”
“Highly so,” agreed Coram. “The police are hopelessly mystified, and
as I know you are keen on this class of copy I thought you might like
to run down and have a chat with Pettigrew. Shall I tell him you are
coming?”
“By all means,” I said, and made an arrangement forthwith.
Accordingly, about eleven o’clock, I presented myself at a gloomy
Georgian house standing well back from the high road and screened by
an unkempt shrubbery. Mr. Mark Pettigrew, a familiar figure at Sotheby
auctions, was a little shrivelled man, clean-shaven, and with the
complexion of a dried apricot. His big spectacles seemed to occupy a
great proportion of his face, but his eyes twinkled merrily and his
humour was as dry as his appearance.
“Glad to see you, Mr. Searles,” he said. “You’ve had some experience
of the _outré_, I believe, and where two constables, an imposing
inspector, and a plain-clothes gentleman who looked like a horse have
merely upset my domestic arrangements, you may be able to make some
intelligent suggestion.”
He conducted me to a large gloomy room in which relics, principally
Egyptian, were arranged and ticketed with museum-like precision.
Before a wooden sarcophagus containing the swathed figure of a mummy
he stopped, pointing. He looked as though he had come out of a
sarcophagus himself.
“Hor-ankhu,” he said, “a priestess of Sekhet; a very fine specimen,
Mr. Searles. I was present when it was found. See--here is her head!”
Stooping, he picked up the head of the mummy. Very cleanly and
scientifically it had been unwrapped and severed from the trunk. It
smelt strongly of bitumen, and the shrivelled features reminded me of
nothing so much as of Mr. Mark Pettigrew.
“Did you ever hear of a more senseless thing?” he asked. “Come over
and look at the window where he got in.”
We crossed the dark apartment, and the collector drew my attention to
a round hole which had been drilled in the glass of one of the French
windows opening on a kind of miniature prairie which once had been a
lawn.
“I am having shutters fitted,” he went on. “It is so easy to cut a
hole in the glass and open the catch of these windows.”
“Very easy,” I agreed. “Was any one disturbed?”
“No one,” he replied, excitedly; “that’s the insane part of the thing.
The burglar, with all the night before him and with cases containing
portable and really priceless objects about him, contented himself
with decapitating the priestess. What on earth did he want her head
for? Whatever he wanted it for, why the devil didn’t he _take_ it?”
We stared at each other blankly.
“I fear,” said Pettigrew, “I have been guilty of injustice to my
horsey visitor, the centaur. You look as stupid as the worst of us!”
“I feel stupid,” I said.
“You are!” Pettigrew assured me with cheerful impertinence. “So am I,
so are the police; but the biggest fool of the lot is the fool who
came here last night and cut off the head of my mummy.”
That, then, is all which I have occasion to relate regarding the first
of these mysterious outrages. I was quite unable to propound any
theory covering the facts, to Pettigrew’s evident annoyance; he
assured me that I was very stupid, and insisted upon opening a magnum
of champagne. I then returned to my rooms, and since reflection upon
the subject promised to be unprofitable, had dismissed it from my
mind, when some time during the evening Inspector Grimsby rang me up
from the Yard.
“Hullo, Mr. Searles,” he said; “I hear you called on Mr. Pettigrew
this morning?”
I replied in the affirmative.
“Did anything strike you?”
“No; were you on the case?”
“I wasn’t on the case then, but I’m on it now.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, there’s been another mummy beheaded in Sotheby’s auction
rooms!”
II
I knew quite well what was expected of me.
“Where are you speaking from?” I asked.
“The auction rooms.”
“I will meet you there in an hour,” I said, “and bring Moris Klaw if I
can find him.”
“Good,” replied Grimsby, with much satisfaction in his voice; “this
case ought to be right in his line.”
I chartered a taxi and proceeded without delay to the insalubrious
neighbourhood of Wapping Old Stairs. At the head of the blind alley
which harbours the Klaw emporium I directed the man to wait. The gloom
was very feebly dispelled by a wavering gaslight in the shed-like
front of the shop. River noises were about me. Somewhere a drunken man
was singing. An old lady who looked like a pantomime dame was
critically examining a mahogany chair with only half a back, which
formed one of the exhibits displayed before the establishment.
A dilapidated person whose nose chronically blushed for the excesses
of its owner hovered about the prospective purchaser. This was
William, whose exact position in the Klaw establishment I had never
learned, but who apparently acted during his intervals of sobriety as
a salesman.
“Good evening,” I said. “Is Mr. Moris Klaw at home?”
“He is, sir,” husked the derelict; “but he’s very busy, sir, I
believe, sir.”
“Tell him Mr. Searles has called.”
“Yes, sir,” said William; and, turning to the dame: “Was you thinking
of buyin’ that chair, mum, after you’ve quite done muckin’ it about?”
He retired into the cavernous depths of the shop, and I followed him
as far as the dimly seen counter.
“Moris Klaw, Moris Klaw! The devil’s come for you!”
Thus the invisible parrot hailed my entrance. Indescribable smells,
zoo-like, with the fusty odour of old books and the unclassifiable
perfume of half-rotten furniture, assailed my nostrils; and mingling
with it was the distinct scent of reptile life. Scufflings and
scratchings sounded continuously about me, punctuated with squeals.
Then came the rumbling voice of Moris Klaw.
“Ah, Mr. Searles--good evening, Mr. Searles! It is the Pettigrew
mummy, is it not?”
He advanced through the shadows, his massive figure arrayed for
travelling, in the caped coat, his toneless beard untidy as ever, his
pince-nez glittering, his high bald brow yellow as that of a Chinaman.
“There has been a second outrage,” I said, “at Sotheby’s.”
“So?” said Moris Klaw, with interest; “another mummy is executed!”
“Yes, Inspector Grimsby has asked us to join him there.”
Moris Klaw stooped and from beneath the counter took out his
flat-topped brown bowler. From its lining he extracted a cylindrical
scent spray and mingled with the less pleasing perfumes that of
verbena.
“A cooling Roman custom, Mr. Searles,” he rumbled, “so refreshing when
one lives with rats. So it is Mr. Grimsby who is puzzled again? It is
Mr. Grimsby who needs the poor old fool to hold the lantern for him,
so that he, the clever Grimsby, can pick up the credit out of the
darkness! And why not, Mr. Searles, and why not? It is his business;
it is my pleasure.”
He raised his voice. “Isis! Isis!”
Out into the light of the fluttering gas lamp, out from that nightmare
abode, stepped Isis Klaw--looking more grotesque than a French fashion
plate in an ironmonger’s catalogue. She wore a costume of
lettuce-green silk, absolutely plain and unrelieved by any ornament,
which rendered it the more remarkable. It was cut low at the neck, and
at the point of the V, suspended upon a thin gold chain, hung a big
emerald. Her darkly beautiful face was one to inspire a painter
seeking a model for the Queen of Sheba, but an ultra-modern note was
struck by a hat of some black, gauzy material which loudly proclaimed
its Paris origin. She greeted me with her wonderful smile.
“What, then,” I said. “Were you about to go out?”
“When I hear who it is,” rumbled Moris Klaw, “I know that we are about
to go out; and behold we are ready!”
He placed the quaint bowler on his head and passed through to the
front of the shop.
“William,” he admonished the ripe-nosed salesman, “there is here a
smell of fourpenny ale. It will be your ruin, William. You will close
at half-past nine, and be sure you do not let the cat in the cupboard
with the white mice. See that the goat does not get at the Dutch
bulbs. They will kill him, that goat--those bulbs; he has for them a
passion.”
The three of us entered the waiting cab; and within half an hour we
arrived at the famous auction rooms. The doors were closed and barred,
but a constable who was on duty there evidently had orders to admit
us.
The thing we had come to see lay upon the table with an electric lamp
burning directly over it. The effect was indescribably weird. All
about in the shadows fantastic “lots” seemed to leer at us. A famous
private collection was to be sold in the morning and a rank of mummies
lined one wall, whilst, from another, stony Pharaohs, gods and
goddesses scorned us through the gloom. We were a living group in a
place of long-dead things. And yellow on the table beneath the white
light, with partially unwrapped coils of discoloured linen hanging
gruesomely from it, lay a headless mummy!
I heard the spurt of Moris Klaw’s scent spray behind me, and a faint
breath of verbena stole to my nostrils.
“Pah!” came the rumbling voice; “this air is full of deadness!”
“Good evening, Mr. Klaw,” said Grimsby, appearing from somewhere out