The Ashiel Mystery

"He said he'd not been near the place," replied Mark, looking more perplexed and worried than ever. "I can't understand it at all," he added. "Why should he deny it to me?"

Gimblet opened a drawer in the bureau. Papers filled it, tied together in bundles and neatly docketed. They seemed to be receipted bills. He glanced at the pigeon-holes, and opened one or two more drawers. Everywhere the most fastidious order reigned.

"You have been through all these?" he asked.

"Yes, but there is a cupboard full in the smoking-room. I thought of looking into those this afternoon."

"It would be a good plan," Gimblet agreed. "Don't let me keep you," And as the young man still lingered, "I prefer," he confessed, "to do my work alone. If you will kindly get me a shooting-boot of Sir David Southern's, I shall do better if I am left to myself."

"If that is really the case," said Mark, "I have no choice but to leave you. I admit I should have liked to see your methods, but if I should be a hindrance--"

Gimblet did not deny it, and Mark departed to fetch the boots.

"This is not the identical pair," he said when he returned. "The police took those; but these come from the same maker and are nearly the same, so Blanston tells me."

"Ah, yes, Blanston," said Gimblet. "I must see him presently. Thanks very much."

Left alone, Gimblet examined the window, opening one of the small-paned casements, and measuring the space between the mullions and the central bars of iron. Satisfied as to the impossibility of any ordinary-sized person passing through those apertures, he took one more look round, and then with a swift movement drew each of the heavy curtains across the bay. They did not quite meet in the middle, as Juliet had observed. Then he made his way out into the garden through the door just outside, at the end of the passage which led from the billiard-room to the library.

The library was at the far end of the oldest portion of Inverashiel Castle. To Gimblet, examining it from the outside, it looked as if the room had been hewn out of the solid walls of the ancient fortress; for beyond the mullioned, seventeenth-century window, the wall turned sharply to the left and was continued with scarce a loophole in the stupendous blocks of its surface for a distance of fifty yards or so, where it was succeeded by the lower, less heavy battlements of the old out-works. In the angle formed by the turn and immediately opposite the window of the library, a long flower-bed, planted with standard and other rose trees, with violas growing sparsely in between, stretched its blossoming length, and continued up to the actual stones of the library wall. At the farther end of it, a thick hedge of holly bordered on the roses at right angles to the end of the battlements; while the lawn on his left was spangled with geometrically shaped beds showing elaborate arrangements of heliotrope, ageratum, calceolarias, and other bedding-out plants.