Mr. Reeder looked up.
‘Well?’ said the Prosecutor. ‘There’s nothing remarkable about that. It was probably Green, who dodged round the block and came in at the back of the constable.’
Mr. Reeder scratched his chin.
‘Yes.’ he said thoughtfully, ‘ye-es.’ He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Would it be considered indecorous if I made a few inquiries, independent of the police?’ he asked nervously. ‘I should not like them to think that a mere dilettante was interfering with their lawful functions.’
‘By all means,’ said the Prosecutor heartily. ‘Go down and see the officer in charge of the case: I’ll give you a note to him-it is by no means unusual for my officer to conduct a separate investigation, though I am afraid you will discover very little. The ground has been well covered by Scotland Yard.’
‘It would be permissible to see the man?’ hesitated Reeder.
‘Green? Why, of course! I will send you up the necessary order.’
The light was fading from a grey, blustering sky, and rain was falling fitfully, when Mr. Reeder, with his furled umbrella hooked to his arm, his coat collar turned up, stepped through the dark gateway of Brixton Prison and was led to the cell where a distracted man sat, his head upon his hands, his pale eyes gazing into vacancy.
‘It’s true; it’s true! Every word.’ Green almost sobbed the words.
A pallid man, inclined to be bald, with a limp yellow moustache, going grey. Reeder, with his extraordinary memory for faces, recognised him the moment he saw him, though it was some time before the recognition was mutual.
‘Yes, Mr. Reeder, I remember you now. You were the gentleman who caught me before. But I’ve been as straight as a die. I’ve never taken a farthing that didn’t belong to me. What my poor girl will think-’
‘Are you married?’ asked Mr. Reeder sympathetically.
‘No, but I was going to be-rather late in life. She’s nearly thirty years younger than me, and the best girl that ever-’
Reeder listened to the rhapsody that followed, the melancholy deepening in his face.
‘She hasn’t been into the court, thank God, but she knows the truth. A friend of mine told me that she has been absolutely knocked out.’
‘Poor soul!’ Mr. Reeder shook his head.
‘It happened on her birthday, too,’ the man went on bitterly.
‘Did she know you were going away?’
‘Yes, I told her the night before. I’m not going to bring her into the case. If we’d been properly engaged it would be different; but she’s married and is divorcing her husband, but the decree hasn’t been made absolute yet. That’s why I never went about with her or saw much of her. And of course, nobody knew about our engagement, although we lived in the same street.’
‘Firling Avenue?’ asked Reeder, and the hank manager nodded despondently.
‘She was married when she was seventeen to a brute. It was pretty galling for me, having to keep quiet about it-I mean, for nobody to know about our engagement. All sorts of rotten people were making up to her, and I had just to grind my teeth and say nothing. Impossible people! Why, that fool Burnett, who arrested me, he was sweet on her; used to write her poetry-you wouldn’t think it possible in a policeman, would you?’
The outrageous incongruity of a poetical policeman did not seem to shock the detective.
‘There is poetry in every soul, Mr. Green,’ he said gently, ‘and a policeman is a man.’
Though he dismissed the eccentricity of the constable so lightly, the poetical policeman filled his mind all the way home to his house in the Brockley Road, and occupied his thoughts for the rest of his waking time.
It was a quarter to eight o’clock in the morning, and the world seemed entirely populated by milkmen and whistling newspaper boys, when Mr. J.G. Reeder came into Firling Avenue.
He stopped only for a second outside the bank, which had long since ceased to be an object of local awe and fearfulness, and pursued his way down the broad avenue. On either side of the thoroughfare ran a row of pretty villas-pretty although they bore a strong family resemblance to one another; each house with its little forecourt, sometimes laid out simply as a grass plot, sometimes decorated with flowerbeds. Green’s house was the eighteenth in the road on the right-hand side. Here he had lived with a cook-housekeeper, and apparently gardening was not his hobby, for the forecourt was covered with grass that had been allowed to grow at its will.
Before the twenty-sixth house in the road Mr. Reeder paused and gazed with mild interest at the blue blinds which covered every window. Evidently Miss Magda Grayne was a lover of flowers, for geraniums filled the window-boxes and were set at intervals along the tiny border under the bow window. In the centre of the grass plot was a circular flowerbed with one flowerless rose tree, the leaves of which were drooping and brown.
As he raised his eyes to the upper window, the blind went up slowly, and he was dimly conscious that there was a figure behind the white lace curtains. Mr. Reeder walked hurriedly away, as one caught in an immodest act, and resumed his peregrinations until he came to the big nursery gardener’s which formed the corner lot at the far end of the road.
Here he stood for some time in contemplation, his arm resting on the iron railings, his eyes staring blankly at the vista of greenhouses. He remained in this attitude so long that one of the nurserymen, not unnaturally thinking that a stranger was seeking a way into the gardens, came over with the laborious gait of the man who wrings his living from the soil, and asked if he was wanting anybody.
‘Several people,’ sighed Mr. Reeder; ‘several people!’
Leaving the resentful man to puzzle out his impertinence, he slowly retraced his steps. At No. 412 he stopped again, opened the little iron gate and passed up the path to the front door. A small girl answered his knock and ushered him into the parlour.
The room was not well furnished; it was scarcely furnished at all. A strip of almost new linoleum covered the passage; the furniture of the parlour itself was made up of wicker chairs, a square of art carpet and a table. He heard the sound of feet above his head, feet on bare boards, and then presently the door opened and a girl came in.
She was pretty in a heavy way, but on her face he saw the marks of sorrow. It was pale and haggard; the eyes looked as though she had been recently weeping.
‘Miss Magda Grayne?’ he asked, rising as she came in.
She nodded.
‘Are you from the police?’ she asked quickly.
‘Not exactly the police,’ he corrected carefully. ‘I hold an-er-an appointment in the office of the Public Prosecutor, which is analogous, to, but distinct from, a position in the Metropolitan Police Force.’
She frowned, and then:
‘I wondered if anybody would come to see me,’ she said. ‘Mr. Green sent you?’
‘Mr. Green told me of your existence: he did not send me.’
There came to her face in that second a look which almost startled him. Only for a fleeting space of time, the expression had dawned and passed almost before the untrained eye could detect its passage.
‘I was expecting somebody to come,’ she said. Then: ‘What made him do it?’ she asked.