‘What nonsense you are talking, Dyson!’ said Phillipps. ‘However, I have no objection to taking a walk with you: as you say, it is a pleasant night.’
‘Come along then,’ said Dyson, grinning, ‘but remember our bargain.’
The two men went out into the square, and threading one of the narrow passages that serve as exits, struck towards the north-east. As they passed along a flaring causeway they could hear at intervals between the clamour of the children and the triumphant Gloria played on a piano-organ the long deep hum and roll of the traffic in Holborn, a sound so persistent that it echoed like the turning of everlasting wheels. Dyson looked to the right and left and conned the way, and presently they were passing through a more peaceful quarter, touching on deserted squares and silent streets black as midnight. Phillipps had lost all count of direction, and as by degrees the region of faded respectability gave place to the squalid, and dirty stucco offended the eye of the artistic observer, he merely ventured the remark that he had never seen a neighbourhood more unpleasant or more commonplace.
‘More mysterious, you mean,’ said Dyson. ‘I warn you, Phillipps, we are now hot upon the scent.’
They dived yet deeper into the maze of brickwork; some time before they had crossed a noisy thoroughfare running east and west, and now the quarter seemed all amorphous, without character; here a decent house with sufficient garden, here a faded square, and here factories surrounded by high, blank walls, with blind passages and dark corners; but all ill-lighted and unfrequented and heavy with silence.
Presently, as they paced down a forlorn street of two-story houses, Dyson caught sight of a dark and obscure turning.
‘I like the look of that,’ he said; ‘it seems to me promising.’ There was a street lamp at the entrance, and another, a mere glimmer, at the further end. Beneath the lamp, on the pavement, an artist had evidently established his academy in the daytime, for the stones were all a blur of crude colours rubbed into each other, and a few broken fragments of chalk lay in a little heap beneath the wall.
‘You see people do occasionally pass this way,’ said Dyson, pointing to the ruins of the screever’s work. ‘I confess I should not have thought it possible. Come, let us explore.’
On one side of this byway of communication was a great timber-yard, with vague piles of wood looming shapeless above the enclosing wall; and on the other side of the road a wall still higher seemed to enclose a garden, for there were shadows like trees, and a faint murmur of rustling leaves broke the silence. It was a moonless night, and clouds that had gathered after sunset had blackened, and midway between the feeble lamps the passage lay all dark and formless, and when one stopped and listened, and the sharp echo of reverberant footsteps ceased, there came from far away, as from beyond the hills, a faint roll of the noise of London. Phillipps was bolstering up his courage to declare that he had had enough of the excursion, when a loud cry from Dyson broke in upon his thoughts.
‘Stop, stop, for Heaven’s sake, or you will tread on it! There! almost under your feet!’ Phillipps looked down, and saw a vague shape, dark, and framed in surrounding darkness, dropped strangely on the pavement, and then a white cuff glimmered for a moment as Dyson lit a match, which went out directly.
‘It’s a drunken man,’ said Phillipps very coolly.
‘It’s a murdered man,’ said Dyson, and he began to call for police with all his might, and soon from the distance running footsteps echoed and grew louder, and cries sounded.
A policeman was the first to come up.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said, as he drew to a stand, panting. ‘Anything amiss here?’ for he had not seen what was on the pavement.
‘Look!’ said Dyson, speaking out of the gloom. ‘Look there! My friend and I came down this place three minutes ago, and that is what we found.’
The man flashed his light on the dark shape and cried out.
‘Why, it’s murder,’ he said; ‘there’s blood all about him, and a puddle of it in the gutter there. He’s not dead long, either. Ah! there’s the wound! It’s in the neck.’
Dyson bent over what was lying there. He saw a prosperous gentleman, dressed in smooth, well-cut clothes. The neat whiskers were beginning to grizzle a little; he might have been forty-five an hour before; and a handsome gold watch had half slipped out of his waistcoat pocket. And there in the flesh of the neck, between chin and ear, gaped a great wound, clean cut, but all clotted with drying blood, and the white of the cheeks shone like a lighted lamp above the red.
Dyson turned, and looked curiously about him; the dead man lay across the path with his head inclined towards the wall, and the blood from the wound streamed away across the pavement, and lay a dark puddle, as the policeman had said, in the gutter. Two more policemen had come up, the crowd gathered, humming from all quarters, and the officers had as much as they could do to keep the curious at a distance. The three lanterns were flashing here and there, searching for more evidence, and in the gleam of one of them Dyson caught sight of an object in the road, to which he called the attention of the policeman nearest to him.
‘Look, Phillipps,’ he said, when the man had secured it and held it up. ‘Look, that should be something in your way!’
It was a dark flinty stone, gleaming like obsidian, and shaped to a broad edge something after the manner of an adze. One end was rough, and easily grasped in the hand, and the whole thing was hardly five inches long. The edge was thick with blood.
‘What is that, Phillipps?’ said Dyson; and Phillipps looked hard at it.
‘It’s a primitive flint knife,’ he said. ‘It was made about ten thousand years ago. One exactly like this was found near Abury, in Wiltshire, and all the authorities gave it that age.’
The policeman stared astonished at such a development of the case; and Phillipps himself was all aghast at his own words. But Mr. Dyson did not notice him. An inspector who had just come up and was listening to the outlines of the case, was holding a lantern to the dead man’s head. Dyson, for his part, was staring with a white heat of curiosity at something he saw on the wall, just above where the man was lying; there were a few rude marks done in red chalk.
‘This is a black business,’ said the inspector at length: ‘does anybody know who it is?’
A man stepped forward from the crowd. ‘I do, governor,’ he said, ‘he’s a big doctor, his name’s Sir Thomas Vivian; I was in the ‘orspital abart six months ago, and he used to come round; he was a very kind man.’
‘Lord,’ cried the inspector, ‘this is a bad job indeed. Why, Sir Thomas Vivian goes to the Royal Family. And there’s a watch worth a hundred guineas in his pocket, so it isn’t robbery.’
Dyson and Phillipps gave their cards to the authority, and moved off, pushing with difficulty through the crowd that was still gathering, gathering fast; and the alley that had been lonely and desolate now swarmed with white staring faces and hummed with the buzz of rumour and horror, and rang with the commands of the officers of police. The two men once free from this swarming curiosity stepped out briskly, but for twenty minutes neither spoke a word.
‘Phillipps,’ said Dyson, as they came into a small but cheerful street, clean and brightly lit, ‘Phillipps, I owe you an apology. I was wrong to have spoken as I did to-night. Such infernal jesting,’ he went on, with heat, ‘as if there were no wholesome subjects for a joke. I feel as if I had raised an evil spirit.’
‘For Heaven’s sake say nothing more,’ said Phillipps, choking down horror with visible effort. ‘You told the truth to me in my room; the troglodyte, as you said, is still lurking about the earth, and in these very streets around us, slaying for mere lust of blood.’
‘I will come up for a moment,’ said Dyson, when they reached Red Lion Square, ‘I have something to ask you. I think there should be nothing hidden between us at all events.’