“But,” I objected, “if the man, Graves, was really imprisoned, could not he have smashed the window and called for help?”

“The window looks out on the yard, as you see; but I expect it was secured too.”

He drew the massive, old-fashioned shutters out of their recess and closed them.

“Yes, here we are.”  He pointed to four groups of screw-holes at the corners of the shutters, and, once more producing his lamp, narrowly examined the insides of the recesses into which the shutters folded.

“The nature of the fastening is quite evident,” said he.  “An iron bar passed right across at the top and bottom and was secured by a staple and padlock.  You can see the mark the bar made in the recess when the shutters were folded.  When these bars were fixed and padlocked and the bolts were shot, this room was as secure, for a prisoner unprovided with tools, as a cell in Newgate.”

We looked at one another for awhile without speaking; and I fancy that if Mr. H. Weiss could have seen our faces he might have thought it desirable to seek some retreat even more remote than Hamburg.

“It was a diabolical affair, Jervis,” Thorndyke said at length, in an ominously quiet and even gentle tone.  “A sordid, callous, cold-blooded crime of a type that is to me utterly unforgivable and incapable of extenuation.  Of course, it may have failed.  Mr. Graves may even now be alive.  I shall make it my very especial business to ascertain whether he is or not.  And if he is not, I shall take it to myself as a sacred duty to lay my hand on the man who has compassed his death.”

I looked at Thorndyke with something akin to awe.  In the quiet unemotional tone of his voice, in his unruffled manner and the stony calm of his face, there was something much more impressive, more fateful, than there could have been in the fiercest threats or the most passionate denunciations.  I felt that in those softly spoken words he had pronounced the doom of the fugitive villain.

He turned away from the window and glanced round the empty room.  It seemed that our discovery of the fastenings had exhausted the information that it had to offer.

“It is a thousand pities,” I remarked, “that we were unable to look round before they moved out the furniture.  We might have found some clue to the scoundrel’s identity.”

“Yes,” replied Thorndyke; “there isn’t much information to be gathered here, I am afraid.  I see they have swept up the small litter from the floor and poked it under the grate.  We will turn that over, as there seems to be nothing else, and then look at the other rooms.”

He raked out the little heap of rubbish with his stick and spread it out on the hearth.  It certainly looked unpromising enough, being just such a rubbish heap as may be swept up in any untidy room during a move.  But Thorndyke went through it systematically, examining each item attentively, even to the local tradesmen’s bills and empty paper bags, before laying them aside.  Another rake of his stick scattered the bulky masses of crumpled paper and brought into view an object which he picked up with some eagerness.  It was a portion of a pair of spectacles, which had apparently been trodden on, for the side-bar was twisted and bent and the glass was shattered into fragments.