Adventure stories; Detective and mystery stories; Missing persons -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
There was no answer, and I circled his center table and started for
the door of his bedroom beyond, where the telephone was, with the
thought of calling up Larry to find out whether Moore had sent him a
message to the effect that there had been some change in the plan.
As I passed the table I noticed a half-sheet of note-paper lying on
the blotter. My name was at the top of it and I snatched it up and
read it.
“Dear Clayton,
“They have just driven up outside. Three of them. I am going with
them if necessary because I daren’t give the game away by delaying
them an hour. It’s 5.30 now. I’ll try to leave this where you will
find it. They’re at the door now. Perhaps you can follow.
“Moore.”
Below his signature was another line, written so hastily that it
looked hardly the same handwriting:
“Look at the wires!”
I slipped the note into my pocket and ran into his bedroom. The
telephone was intact, but at the back of the clothes closet in which
he kept it I found two wires evidently cut from the reel left over
from the original installation, running up the wall and through a tiny
hole in the ceiling. They were roughly joined to the two wires of our
telephone.
Our line had been tapped!
I hesitated for a moment and read his note again. The appeal for help
in that sentence, “Perhaps you can follow,” set me raging with anger
and dismay. They had been playing with us all along, then. They knew
all our plans. That was why they had come early probably. And now
Moore was helpless in their hands.
The wires that tapped our line evidently ran into the empty flat
above. So, in the faint hope of learning something further, I locked
Moore’s door again and mounted the stairs with rising anxiety and
anger. It is no pleasant thing at any time to realize that you have
been played with as a mouse is played with by a cat. I firmly believed
now that this same gang had been responsible for Margaret’s
disappearance. And now Moore was in their hands and—possibly—Natalie.
For it was no good blinking the facts. And they had been laughing at
us—playing with us—all the while.
I never stopped to think whether the door of the vacant flat might be
locked. I was prepared to break it down anyway, for I was past the
stage of trying to keep up appearances and work in the dark, and I
never stopped to wonder whether there might be other people in the
house who would have something to say about what was going on—the
young doctor, for instance.
Instead, I went up to the door and tried the handle cautiously. For
there might be a watcher in there still. To my amazement, the door
gave under my hand and swung open, and I stepped as silently as I
could into a pitch-dark room.
I stood for an instant trying to peer into the darkness. But I could
see nothing, and I released the handle of the door and began to feel
my way along the wall toward where the window should be.
Then I stopped and stood motionless.
The door had closed softly behind me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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