The India-rubber Men by Edgar Wallace

Author:Edgar Wallace [Wallace, Edgar]
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery & Crime
Published: 2010-01-27T11:50:10+00:00

CHAPTER XI

By the time he reached 'Mecca' the river had sunk well below the level of the wharf coping. The raiding party, some of them wet through to the waist, had been relieved by another and better-equipped body of men drawn from the police reserves. Three throbbing fire-engines were standing in the street, pumping out the flooded basement of the warehouse, and the wood cellar had been pumped dry. The little room was now an indescribable confusion of logs and sodden kindling wood.

John opened the secret door and examined, with a little shudder, the place of his imprisonment. He had already decided that this was not the first time the cellar had been flooded. The place had been under water before, as he guessed. One of the detectives had been told by Mrs. Oaks that four years previous the water had come into the cellar and reached the roof.

The floor was littered with dead rats. In support of his view that the failure of the lights was due to human agency, they were now shining again. Apparently the water had had no effect upon the connections. He drew Elk's attention to this fact.

A careful scrutiny of the walls showed the ventilator shaft through which he had felt the breeze. It came from above the bed where, as he guessed, Anna had been sleeping when she was aroused and taken to a place of safety. She was probably one of the crew of that black boat which had run him down.

The ceiling here was higher than in the rest of the vault, and above was a slit in the brickwork about four inches deep, which communicated, as he found, with a narrow cul de sac which ran for a dozen feet between the warehouse and the 'Mecca'. The ventilation had been cut off by an iron shutter, which was kept in place by means of a chain and a hook, and this had obviously been lowered by malignant hands. Why the electric light had gone out was more difficult to discover; in the lobby of the 'Mecca' he found three controls, but had no time to make any further investigation.

Mrs. Oaks was in her room, he was told, 'terribly upset' by the ruin which the floods had brought. There was an excuse here, for the water had swept through the house and done an extraordinary amount of damage in the very short time the river had been up. The floor of Mrs. Oaks's private room was grey with river mud. The carpet before the fire-place had been swept aside, and it was the presence of the mud which betrayed a certain hiding-place. John saw a rectangular line of tiny bubbles, and, sweeping the mud aside with his water-boots, he saw the outlines of the trap. Mrs. Oaks had given him her keys, which he had transferred to his pocket, and one by one he tried these in the little lock until at last he found a flat key that fitted, snapped back the lock and pulled the trap open.

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