Bundle discovers Bauer’s infiltration of Chimneys

Bundle’s discovery that the footman John Bower was Bauer, the absent No. 2 of the Seven Dials Society, made the apparently ordinary household at Chimneys part of the mystery. By following a spelling discrepancy and placing it beside details of the Society’s meeting, she recognized that a man employed inside the house was also connected to the organization’s clandestine activity.

The Trail at Chimneys

Bundle first tried to learn more about Gerald Wade’s death from Mrs. Howell, but the conversation yielded nothing new. Back downstairs, she questioned Tredwell about Alfred, the previous footman. Alfred had left about a month earlier, at his own wish; Tredwell had not been dissatisfied with him. His replacement, John, seemed competent and eager to satisfy his employers.

The account of John’s references offered Bundle a detail worth remembering: he had last lived with Lord Mount Vernon. Bundle knew that Lord Mount Vernon was then away on a shooting trip in East Africa. This did not by itself establish anything about John, but it made the new servant’s arrival and reported background part of her scrutiny rather than household routine.

Bundle had noticed John when he opened the door on her arrival. He appeared to be a perfectly trained servant, with an expressionless face, a more soldierly bearing than most footmen, and an oddly shaped back of the head. At first she judged these observations irrelevant. She then sat tracing Bower’s name repeatedly on blotting paper until the name itself prompted her to ask Tredwell how it was spelled.

From Bower to Bauer

Tredwell spelled the surname B-A-U-E-R. Bundle immediately recognized that this was not an English name. Tredwell understood John to be of Swiss extraction, but Bundle rejected that explanation: to her, the man’s martial carriage and the flat shape at the back of his head indicated a German. Her reasoning joins a precise piece of household information—the spelling—with the physical impressions she had already registered, though neither the servant’s appearance nor his reported ancestry alone would have settled his identity.

The timing sharpened the suspicion. John had come to Chimneys a fortnight before Gerald Wade’s death. Bundle recalled the two weeks as a significant interval, then concluded that she had done all she could at the house and went to seek her father. The discovery was not a full account of what John had done there; it identified who he was and made his presence at Chimneys a question that could no longer be treated as incidental.

The Missing No. 2

The identification gained force when Bundle compared it with what she had heard at a secret meeting of the Seven Dials Society. The meeting had referred to an expected report that had not arrived and to something that needed reporting about Chimneys. Recalling the absent No. 2, Bundle told Jimmy Thesiger that she believed No. 2 was Bauer, their footman. Jimmy connected the unresolved question of the report to Gerald Wade’s death, while Bundle confirmed that Bauer had been mentioned by name in the meeting.

The meeting showed why the house mattered to the Society. Its members discussed plans they believed could not be improved and referred to a letter by Gerald Wade that mentioned their organization. They knew that Lady Eileen Brent had found it and that it had been written to Wade’s sister; one member criticized Bauer for not having acted on the discovery. The absent servant at Chimneys was thus not merely a name that resembled one used by a secret group: the Society expected information from him, and his failure to report had become an issue among its members.

That discussion also made the danger concrete. The group acknowledged that too much was becoming known about its meeting place and that several people were suspicious; its response was that those people must be silenced. Bundle, concealed among the listeners, understood that discovery could put her at risk. The question of whether anything had come to light about Chimneys linked this atmosphere of threatened exposure directly to the place where Bauer had been employed.

What the Discovery Establishes

The evidence establishes Bauer’s connection to the Society and his position inside Chimneys, while leaving the precise purpose of his work there unresolved in Bundle’s immediate investigation. The meeting’s concern about a missing report supports her inference that he was expected to provide information about the house. His arrival shortly before Wade’s death makes the appointment especially suspicious, but the identification alone does not prove that Bauer caused Wade’s death or explain what he was meant to discover.

Superintendent Battle later described the larger operation as beginning with Gerald Wade, who proposed forming a band of amateur secret-service workers despite Battle’s warning that the work could be dangerous. Their target was an unusually dangerous criminal operating in Wade’s world, involved in international thefts of valuable secret inventions that appeared to require inside knowledge. The professionals had failed before the amateurs took up the pursuit and succeeded. This account places the Bauer clue within a wider contest over clandestine access and stolen inventions, without by itself specifying Bauer’s full role in that contest.

The discovery’s force lies in the change of scale it produces: a footman whose name had been accepted as Bower becomes Bauer, a missing operative whose expected report concerns Chimneys. Bundle reaches that connection through attentive observation and a spelling check, then tests it against the Society’s own words. The familiar routines of references, service, and household staffing become part of the machinery of concealment, and Chimneys emerges as a point where private domestic life intersects with the Society’s secret business.