The Locked Study
A clock that vanished from a sealed room
Edmund Cole had never sounded so frightened on the telephone.
"My clock has vanished," he told Mira Vale, "and my study was locked from the inside."
Mira, an detective, arrived within the hour with her old mentor, Arthur Penrose.
Cole was a well-known antiques dealer, and a rare clock had been kept in his study for many years.
Now the clock was gone, though every door and window remained firmly shut.
"The door was locked from inside," Cole repeated, "and the window has not been opened in months."
Arthur leaned on his cane and studied the small, crowded room in silence.
Mira knelt by the empty table where the clock had once stood.
A thin layer of dust covered the shelves, but the dust had not been disturbed.
"If a thief had climbed through the window, these papers would have been moved," she said.
Nothing had been forced, and nothing near the sill had been touched.
Then she noticed a fresh beside the lock, bright against the old .
"This lock was scratched recently, by someone who was in a hurry," she murmured.
In a drawer she found a key that had been hidden under a cloth.
"The room was not broken into; it was staged," Mira announced.
She turned to Cole and asked who else had ever held a key to the study.
Cole hesitated, then admitted that only his , Toby, had been given a copy last winter.
"Then the clock was not stolen by a stranger; it was taken by someone you trusted," Mira said quietly.
Arthur had drifted to the mantelpiece, where a photograph stood in a silver frame.
The photograph showed the Hollowmere clocktower and a young woman smiling beneath it.
"The clock's base was engraved with two letters, E.H.," Cole added.
At the sound of those , Arthur went very still.
The old inspector said nothing, but his strong tea had gone cold in his hand.
"You have seen this before, haven't you?" Mira asked gently.
"I have seen those once, a long time ago," Arthur admitted at last.
But where he had seen them, he would not say.