Mystery: Good Witch

Chapter 35 Search
The president's office door was locked, which was expected by Angel. Klein's divination also clearly pointed out that the ring was being kept safe. If the door was opened and the ring was placed on the table for anyone to take, it would make her wonder if it was a trap.

She took out a set of simple lockpicking tools from her pocket. This was a necessary item for Cole Granger to walk in the underground world of Tingen City, killing people and stealing goods. Because of its small size and light weight, she always carried it with her. This was the first time she took it out and used it.

The door locks in this era are not as complicated as in the previous life. Angel, who has inherited his rich experience, used the iron wire in the lockpicking tool to fiddle back and forth in the lock hole, and the pick of the other hand penetrated into it to apply torque. He quickly aligned all the reeds, turned it lightly, and opened the door lock.

The chairman's office is twice as large as the other rooms, which can be seen from the distance between the door and the other rooms.She went in, closed the door carefully, and locked it, so that no one could enter the room and disturb her search unless it was someone with the key.

The curtains of the unoccupied office were closed, and after the door was closed, only a sliver of sunlight shone into the room from around the curtains, but she had dark vision and could see all the furnishings in the room, so she did not turn on the gas lamp, otherwise the light leaking through the door would definitely make people suspicious.

In the center of the office is a wooden desk with a matching chair inserted into the recessed position of the desk.

The edge of the table was covered with leather and fixed with rows of decorative rivets. The small bookshelf on the table took up one-third of the area, but there were only a few newspapers on it. Obviously, the owner of the desk did not want to pretend to be a cultural person.

Behind the desk is the window with the curtains drawn. According to the location of the office, the window should be the main entrance of the warehouse. At this time, there is a wall separated, and the noise from below can be clearly heard. The unscrupulous swear words have replaced the original demands and dissuasion. It seems that the previous conflict has a tendency to further escalate.

There is a single sofa on the wall by the window, next to it is a low coffee table, a small coffee pot and several inverted cups are placed irregularly.A black top hat was hung on the top of the coat rack next to the sofa, and there was already a lot of dust on it.

Apart from that, there is no other furniture in the office, not even the usual filing cabinets, only the oil paintings hanging on the walls on both sides add a touch of color to the room.The entire room is not so much an office as it is a private lounge for the guild president. There are no items he doesn't need, and he doesn't even prepare a second chair for visitors.

Angel came to the other end of the desk and opened the newspapers on the bookshelf. Several stacked newspapers were "Tingen Daily". The top one was dated a week ago. The front page published the news that the second son of Conston City banker McGovern died in a robbery in Tingen City.

Reaching out and sliding his fingers across the table, Angel rubbed his fingertips, and there was already a thin layer of dust on them.

It seems that the president has been away for at least a few days, and because there is no key, no one else can come in to help him clean.

She moved the chair beside the table and looked down at the bottom of the table. There were three drawers on each side of the table. She opened them and checked them one by one. She only found half a pack of cigarettes, coins totaling about £1, and a pile of papers that meant nothing to her.

Looking around the room, there is no place to hide anything except the desk.

This is a little different from Angel's expectations. She was worried that there would be too many rooms and the complex furnishings would make it difficult to find the ring, but she didn't expect that the too simple room would be more of a headache.

This time, she kind of missed the "Seer" Klein. If he was here, a divination stick would solve the problem.It's a pity that the other party has been turned away by him, and now he is blocking the road somewhere.

Angel even pulled out several drawers to check if there was any interlayer, but unfortunately found nothing.

In the end, she could only turn her eyes to the paintings on the wall. If there was no result, she could only retreat today.

The two paintings are both colorful oil paintings with a flamboyant style, unlike those made by famous artists, they may be cheap decorative hanging paintings. It can be seen that the owner of the room does not like art but has the ambivalence of decoration needs.

The hanging pictures are mounted with wooden frames, and the frame of one picture even has some paint peeling off.

Hmm, peeling paint?

Angel walked up to the painting, stroked the missing part of the paint on the lower right of the frame, and gently pushed it to the left. As expected, the hanging painting was pushed away along the fixed point in the upper right corner, revealing the wall behind the painting and a small gap on the wall.

Sure enough, this is a secret "little vault". Because the owner of the room removed the hanging paintings for a long time to use it, the paint on the touched part of the picture frame was wiped off.

Holding the hanging picture in one hand, Angel looked into the gap. The inside was divided into upper and lower layers by partitions. On the top were a few rings, a diamond necklace, and a stack of gold pounds, all of which were old banknotes of small value. Below was a notebook with a leather cover.

Things that are easy to carry around... small denominations of old bills are handy, jewelry that can be sold or used for bribes if necessary, and it looks like this little vault contains "runaway funds" prepared by someone.

Taking the notebook under his arm first, Angel grabbed the accessories with his free hand, thought for a while, and took out the stack of banknotes.

After resetting the hanging picture, she sat down at the desk, spread out the ornaments on the table, and checked them one by one.

The ring that Mrs. Green needed was indeed in it, and it was consistent with the description. The ring had a golden surface, but the hardness was obviously not pure gold. One side was made into an oval flat surface, and the word "Green" was embossed on it, and there were some stripes and symbols around it to verify the authenticity.

The other two rings are ordinary gold rings, but they are inlaid with precious stones. The market price is estimated to be around [-] pounds, and the diamond necklace can be sold for about [-] pounds. In addition to this stack of old banknotes, there are more than [-] pounds in the small treasury, and they are not chained. This is really bold.

Or maybe he only used hanging paintings to cover the vault for the convenience of running, so that he could take it with him at any time, instead of using complicated combination locks to protect his property?

Angel unceremoniously pocketed these belongings.As far as she knew, although labor mutual aid associations seldom killed people, they did a lot of things to make money. From the appearance of Mrs. Green's stolen ring here, it can be known that the money must have come from wrong sources.

There were faint yelling and screaming from the window behind her, and the confronting parties outside started to attack without any surprise. She quickly opened the notebook she found in the vault, and was going to leave after a rough inspection.

The four corners of the leather cover have been worn, but the paper has only been used for less than a quarter. It seems that the notes have been used for many years, but the owner of the notes only records some important things.

Angel glanced at ten lines at a glance. Most of the content in the notes was the "grey business" of the labor mutual aid association, including the amount of protection fees paid by the industries "protected" by them in the southern area adjacent to the dock area, the whereabouts of smuggled goods, etc., which belonged to important gray information of the mutual aid association.

But Angel was not very interested in this. He just came here to get back Mrs. Green's ring, not to find evidence of crimes committed by the gang.

Besides, does the Tingen City Police really not know about these gray industries?Why do I need to make such a fuss, and make myself boring.

Turning to the last few pages of the content of the notes, she found something different from other records.

"That guy contacted me again. This time it's not just a lure, but a threat! I, Jike, came up from the bottom. How could I be afraid of the threat of these villains in the shadows?"

"An agreement was reached today. The Mutual Aid Association only needs to arrange the ships and workers, and don't need to interfere with the rest. Huh, anyway, the police can't control us. The money is not earned for nothing."

"What did you say that some people died on the way, and my boatmen made up for it? Only two-thirds of the people on the boat came back, how can I explain to my subordinates? Are these guys no longer considering me?"

"After deducting the hush money for family members, one worker can have a surplus of 20 pounds! Anyway, the population in the dock area is so mobile, who can notice how many people are missing?"

"Go to Enmat Port next week. If you can take care of it there, you can also do a big job in Storn City!"

Interspersed with these words are the departure and arrival times of some ships, which basically depart from Limon City in Jianhai County, pass through Tingen City along the Tussock River, and finally arrive at Pritz Harbor.

This guy really dares to write up everything?
When Angel saw this, he was already in a cold sweat. If he understood correctly, this man named Ji Ke should be the president of the Labor Mutual Aid Association, and the content of the text before and after the contact showed that he was actually involved in the human trafficking business!

Although the slave trade has been abolished in the Northern Continent, it is said that many factories and plantations are still secretly using slaves for heavy labor.Where there is buying, there is selling. In the dark corners where the sun does not shine, this kind of human trading has become more profitable because of the legal prohibition.

Judging from the records, Chairman Jike should have been lured into a thief ship by coercion and lure at first, and he may not even know the specific business content, but he was quickly attracted by the high profits he got, and spontaneously participated, expanding the scale of the business.

This is different from the petty fights of collecting protection money and handing over stolen goods. Angel believes that as long as this notebook is handed over to the Tingen City police, the labor mutual aid association in the dock area will definitely be destroyed by the police in one fell swoop.

This has to be reported...

She closed the notebook, turned around and opened the corner of the curtain, and looked downstairs. There were not many people left at the main entrance of the originally bustling warehouse.

Most of the workers left the scene, and the table stacked with wooden boxes was overturned. Several strong men who were part-time bodyguards had bruised noses and faces, and their clothes were disheveled.

It seems that I have to leave quickly. Once the "performance" below is over and the staff on the second floor return to their offices, it will be more difficult to evacuate quietly.

Putting down the curtains, Angel looked around the room to check if she had missed anything, then she randomly spilled the newspapers on the desk on the floor, opened the drawer, and took all the change inside, creating a scene where the office was visited by thieves.

In this way, even if the guy called Ji Ke came back, his first reaction would be that he was ransacked by thieves when he was away. At most, he would think that someone came for his notebook, and he would never think that the person who came was just to retrieve Mrs. Green's ring.

After finishing all this, Angel took the notebook and walked quickly to the door of the office. First, he listened to the movement outside the door with bated breath, and confirmed that there were no footsteps or breathing sounds. Then he gently unlocked the door and twisted the handle to open the door.

At the moment when the light outside the door came in, she was moved spiritually, and a sense of crisis poured down like ice water covering her whole body, and her steps stopped in mid-air.

A dagger pierced through the light like lightning and stabbed straight at her face.

(End of this chapter)