"I'm surprised that there are even two Skiltons in the telephone directory. The one at Sutherland is probably a relative of our butler fellow, who more than likely lives at the other address being in Hornsby. I'll load up the tranquiliser guns and prepare a few other items of technical paraphernalia, while you drive home and change. You had best not wake your neighbours, my dear. We usually try to perform our nocturnal activities without having a hundred people telephoning the council to complain about the noise. I should think that a girl who enters her house dressed for dancing and then departs it dressed for housebreaking might just possibly attract some attention, should she be heard doing it."
"Don't worry. I'll park the car a block away from my house and walk home."
"And I'm sure that those dainty white fingers of yours can turn the key in the lock of your own front door quietly. See you soon, lass."
Percy began to load the guns with the special darts, and then selected a few of his special hollow pens as well. The Sneaky Spy had a pen, which - when the cap was removed - proved to be a sturdy screwdriver. He had a pen with a powerful explosive inside it just waiting to be lit. He had a pen that actually functioned as a torch, a pen with a sharp blade hidden inside the cap, a pen which could be loaded with one tranquiliser dart, and various other pens too. He also had a few small pieces of equipment which could be used to force a door lock.
Tonight, in the absence of a window having been left open, these special tools would be of paramount importance.
Ingrid soon returned, now wearing dark trousers conveniently supplemented with a dark shirt and a dark blue parka. She collected some of the gadgetry and drove Percy to the closest carpark to Skilton's Hornsby address.
"We'll walk around the back. With the back door, there should be no chance of a bell ringing, or a door knocker vibrating around while we do the job."
"Do you know what you're looking for?" asked Ingrid.
"For a start, I'd like to find just one iota of supporting evidence of Skilton's lottery prize winnings. He may have concocted that story to throw me off suspecting him. At the same time, I will have a chance to give the whole place the once over. We don't know for sure, that the aim of this exercise was to put an end to Alicia Valtos. It may merely have been an option for somebody whose real major goal was to do something sinister to Skilton. After all, that plant in his coat was too blatant. He would not have left those things in there himself. The man is intelligent. Somebody is out to lay this one on him. I'd like to know why, before we do anything else."
* * * *
The lock was unwittingly motivated towards complete submission to the wills of Ingrid Castlecove and the Sneaky Spy. The triumphant pair had only one more thing to do before entering the house.
"Just open it an inch or two, and let me empty my oil loaded pen onto the hinges. The door might be old and creaky if we don't," said the Sneaky Spy.
"It will still be old, if we do," said Ingrid.
"Oh yes, very clever. Do you know I had a friend once, who decided to burgle the home of a wealthy old lady. He's hardly my friend at the moment, but anyway, he forced the lock successfully and entered the house from the front doorway. Then he discovered, to his sheer horror, that he had tripped a circuit, which activated an alternate light switch for the old girl's bed lamp, and awoken the elderly lady.
"He had not wanted to bring a gun with him, for fear of having to kill somebody, which wasn't his style. So it came to him as something of a shock, when he saw her running towards him with a large rolling pin swaying violently in front of her colourless oversized nightdress. He would have had no choice but to accept his fate in terror, had he not had a sudden burst of inspiration.
" 'I can explain all this,' he said, 'I'm a victim of intended attempted murder. This was the only way. They're looking for me all over your street now.'"
"And that saved him from the lady's wrath?"
"Well no. Unfortunately for my friend, the old girl was totally deaf. I visited him in hospital shortly afterwards. Don't giggle, Ingrid. You'll give us away."
Ingrid merely responded by providing, for the Sneaky Spy's benefit, one of those exquisitely erotic smiles, which were discussed in the earlier part of our story. The oil had successfully greased the hinges - whether or not they needed it - for the door slid open soundlessly at the touch of Percy's natural (right) hand.
A silent search of the house eventually led them to find a study, which prompted Percy to give a little less credit to his night vision and turn on the special torch pen.
"I'll do the looking, lass. Just keep the tranquiliser gun pointed at the doorway through which we just entered this room. We can't be certain that nobody else lives here."
"Or that the place doesn't have any rolling pins," whispered Ingrid with a grin.
* * * *
Percy's search of the study disclosed a number of things. The most important of these was a letter regarding a matter of some prize winnings which were to be forwarded to the bank account specified by Skilton. The letter was dated a little over a year earlier.
"I figured his new address would be in the telephone book by now, if he won the money and bought this place a little over a year ago. This confirms it all. There's still nothing here about Mrs Valtos."
Percy's mind was pondering every possible clue as he searched the small room.
"This just simply must involve Skilton somehow. The medicine and the planting of that incriminating false evidence in Skilton's coat pocket are two very strong connections between Valtos' butler and the death of his wife," thought the Sneaky Spy, determined to find out why somebody would frame Skilton.
"Are you having any luck?" whispered Ingrid.
"Oh Ingrid darling, why does suspicion always fall on the butler? One would think that - even going by the laws of probability - in real life, it might be somebody different for once."
"Have you thought of anything?"
"Only that:
A man whose work task was to butle
Was framed for a murder not subtle.
He took not the life
Of his good master's wife....
....but I guess that one's still open to rebuttal."
Percy had never whispered one of his eccentric limericks before, but he knew that Ingrid's lips would adequately express a sense of amusement that was presently denied to her vocal chords.
He continued:
"The murder was done with a bottle:
The killer's answer to 'What'll
I do to the dame,
Who shares Valtos' name?'
It would have been simpler to throttle."
"You're allowed to become a little frivolous and frustrated," said Ingrid.
"Frivolous and funny indeed, but not frustrated. The wilder the mystery the more satisfying the solution."
Percy was pleased, at least, with the success of the visit to Skilton's house. Usually, he would respect a person's rights to privacy and the sole right to their property; but Anthony Skilton was his only possible lead to solving a problem, and Percy could always pay for the lock on the back door, "less my fee for the free grease and oil job on the hinges," he thought to himself.
Skilton's filing cabinet contained details of his previous employers' credentials, his tax records, his ledgers, some addresses and telephone numbers of various ladies, the names of which were all new to Percy, who again began to think:
"Maybe he actually did kill Alicia Valtos. Perhaps he's a fellow who hasn't had much if any success with the ladies, and so he killed Alicia out of jealousy. After all, he was able to duplicate his master's wealth, and he might have chosen to retain his employment at the Valtos residence in the hope of having an extra-marital affair with Alicia. If that was possible, then why did he kill her? To keep her quiet, because she threatened to tell Valtos, thus ending his career? No. If she had rejected him, then he would have had no reason to save his career anyway. Could it have been an act of frustrated revenge, because he had made an approach to her and been rejected?"
It was a part of Percy's Sneaky Spy activities, to be able to understand the way that human beings think and act in certain circumstances, in order to make predictions, assumptions or deductions about their possible behaviour patterns.
"After all, I could be right in assuming that line of reasoning. Skilton might have left the damning evidence in his jacket, having had no chance to remove it, during his busy night attending to party guests, and hoped the police would think as I did, that it was too obvious a frame-up to have been his own doing. It is an accepted fact among psychiatrists and sociologists, that the most devastating factor in a human being's life is a relationship that is either broken, failing or one that never got off the ground in the first place. It's just a thought, and I won't throw it into Ingrid's mind just yet. However, it may well be the answer to this confusing string of events. The most appealing thing about that line of reasoning is that it doesn't really shoot my framing theory down in flames. I decided that somebody must have framed the butler, or at least tried to. Now, were Skilton to be an extremely shrewd sort of a character, or alternatively, were he to borrow the idea from a detective novel, then our butler may well have thought of framing himself, in order to throw suspicion back on the unknown."
"Percy," whispered Ingrid, "Somebody's coming down the stairs, and we both know that Skilton should be still back at Valtos' house!"
It is indeed possible for a man and a girl to disappear behind a desk and crouch down on the floor in five seconds flat. We know that it is possible, because Percy and Ingrid had done it, within five seconds after the moment that the girl had given an almost silent warning.
"Who on earth can that be?" whispered Ingrid.
"I don't know, but if he finishes whatever he came down to do - and I am just assuming it's a he, because of his heavy tread when his feet touch the floor - without catching us, I'll whip the filing cabinet soundlessly open again, and see if I can find out. At least we know it's not just the neighbours who must be prevented from hearing us."
"We'll have some explaining to do if he finds us."
"Well this is why it is always good housebreaking practice to close any doors that one opens, after one has passed through the relevant doorways."
Percy had excellent hearing. He always believed that he could hear a male flea whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a female flea. However, neither Percy nor Ingrid were required to exercise the full hearing abilities of any of the four ears between them in order to detect the sounds that the unknown man was making. They heard two feet thumping across the floor, a saucepan being filled with water and placed on a stove, the same stove being rapidly turned on, a comment about "cold nights even in the autumn months of the year," the contents of a saucepan being strained into a cup, the drinking of the aforementioned liquid, some coughing spluttering, a comment about the fact that the stranger had made the drink too hot, a slight pause, an unsavoury phrase to the effect of "that's more like it," and two feet thundering out of the room and their subsequent ascent of the stairs.
"The thing that amazes me is that he could manage to make all that noise, and we still didn't hear him turning the lights on and off," said Percy, "Well let's see if we can find out whether he's an old mate of Skilton's, or some curious cross between the butcher, the baker and that ever faithful wielder of wondrous wads of wax."
Percy returned to the filing cabinet, taking an even greater interest in its contents than he had previously taken. He did find some details which were of reference to nobody other than the man upstairs.
"Well that's the icing on the cake," said Percy in a low whisper, "and it certainly puts a new twist to this case. I wonder if you're getting the same ideas that I am."
Percy explained his findings to Ingrid and then led the girl back through the house towards the back door, having restored the filing cabinet to its original position, closed. Percy and Ingrid moved towards the door of that back room, and Percy's hand silently clasped the handle of the door. Then the lights went on, and they turned to face a man and his gun.
"Hands up please, and stay where you are, the pair of you," said the stranger, "I thought I heard visitors in the study. I suppose that my first performance convinced you that you would hear me coming if I woke up again while you were trying to sneak out."
"Very novel," said Percy, "That racket you made should ensure that you're nominated for an award."
"Well I could hardly spring a surprise on you in the study. You've probably got guns, and the desk is a good thing for cover, as well as a good hiding place."
"Did you know that I had a friend who tried to burgle the home of an elderly lady, and-"
"Shut up!"
The stranger removed Percy's tranquiliser guns, paying them sufficiently less attention than that which would be required in order to discover their unusual features.
"So I've still got my pens and the knives on my arm and leg as usual," thought Percy completely at ease.
"Now what did you two come to steal?"
"Well nothing in particular," said Percy, "We just thought we would see what your place had to offer. It's a nice house. We thought the owner might be rich. Are you?"
"At home, no. At the bank, most definitely. I'll be keeping your guns, but you can hold onto whatever you used to unlock the door. I'll see you both out into the street and take no action this time. However, if you ever come back here, I shall ring for the police. Do you understand?"
"Yes, and thank you," said Ingrid, "We haven't really got any excuses for this, except that we're a bit like Bonnie and Clyde. We just can't help ourselves."
"Except when we're addictively helping ourselves to people's possessions," added Percy, and walked Ingrid out to the street as instructed.