Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/312

 hunt here a lifetime without result. Probably, then, he had made a memorandum of the hiding place somewhere in his books, intending to tell Jessica about it, if he hadn’t ‘died’ so suddenly.

“When I returned I found that Jessica had sold the books that same day. That was the reason I was suddenly so anxious to get the books, after disregarding them for so long. Luckily—for me—I never left town without having Jessica watched. I found out where she had sold the books, and also that Morley here, who was recognized by my man, had taken some of them away with him. It was easy enough to get them out of Morley’s house, but the old man, Masterson, had not been so easy earlier in the evening. I had driven down there in a taxi and asked the driver—a friend of mine whose name I won’t tell you—to wait outside. I found the old man alone, ready to go home, with the blinds pulled down. I offered to buy back the books, and he became suspicious, for some reason or other, and refused to sell until he had time to examine them at his leisure. He probably thought that if they were so valuable to me, they would be just as valuable to him. Anyway, I had no time to spare—I was afraid to spend too long a time at the job—and, after unsuccessfully trying to induce him to sell, I tried to take them away by force. The old man struggled hard, harder than I would have believed such an old man could fight—and I had to hit him. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard, and I only wanted to quiet him, but he was fighting fiercely and I could not judge the force of the blow very well. It smashed his head in.”

He was silent again for a moment. It was Val who spoke, eagerly.

“But how?” he asked. “With what?”