‘Better get the inspector here,’ he said. ‘And the doctor and the ambulance. Dead—ain’t he?’
Driscoll bent down and put a thumb on the hand which lay on the pavement.
‘As ever they make ’em,’ he remarked laconically. ‘And stiff, too. Well, hurry up, Jim!’
Spargo waited until the inspector arrived; waited until the hand-ambulance came. More policemen came with it; they moved the body for transference to the mortuary, and Spargo then saw the dead man’s face. He looked long and steadily at it while the police arranged the limbs, wondering all the time who it was that he gazed at, how he came to that end, what was the object of his murderer, and many other things. There was some professionalism in Spargo’s curiosity, but there was also a natural dislike that a fellow-being should have been so unceremoniously smitten out of the world.
There was nothing very remarkable about the dead man’s face. It was that of a man of apparently sixty to sixty-five years of age; plain, even homely of feature, clean-shaven, except for a fringe of white whisker, trimmed, after an old-fashioned pattern, between the ear and the point of the jaw. The only remarkable thing about it was that it was much lined and seamed; the wrinkles were many and deep around the corners of the lips and the angles of the eyes; this man, you would have said to yourself, has led a hard life and weathered storm, mental as well as physical.
Driscoll nudged Spargo with a turn of his elbow. He gave him a wink. ‘Better come down to the dead-house,’ he muttered confidentially.
‘Why?’ asked Spargo.
‘They’ll go through him,’ whispered Driscoll. ‘Search him, d’ye see? Then you’ll get to know all about him, and so on. Help to write that piece in the paper, eh?’
Spargo hesitated. He had had a stiff night’s work, and until his encounter with Driscoll he had cherished warm anticipation of the meal which would be laid out for him at his rooms, and of the bed into which he would subsequently tumble. Besides, a telephone message would send a man from the Watchman to the mortuary. This sort of thing was not in his line now, and—
‘You’ll be for getting one o’ them big play-cards out with something about a mystery on it,’ suggested Driscoll. ‘You never know what lies at the bottom o’ these affairs, no more you don’t.’
That last observation decided Spargo; moreover, the old instinct for getting news began to assert itself.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go along with you.’
And re-lighting his pipe he followed the little cortège through the streets, still deserted and quiet, and as he walked behind he reflected on the unobtrusive fashion in which murder could stalk about. Here was the work of murder, no doubt, and it was being quietly carried along a principal London thoroughfare, without fuss or noise, by officials to whom the dealing with it was all a matter of routine. Surely—
‘My opinion,’ said a voice at Spargo’s elbow, ‘my opinion is that it was done elsewhere. Not there! He was put there. That’s what I say.’ Spargo turned and saw that the porter was at his side. He, too, was accompanying the body.
‘Oh!’ said Spargo. ‘You think—’
‘I think he was struck down elsewhere and carried there,’ said the porter. ‘In somebody’s chambers, maybe. I’ve known of some queer games in our bit of London! Well!—he never came in at my lodge last night—I’ll stand to that. And who is he, I should like to know? From what I see of him, not the sort to be about our place.’
‘That’s what we shall hear presently,’ said Spargo. ‘They’re going to search him.’
But Spargo was presently made aware that the searchers had found nothing. The police-surgeon said that the dead man had, without doubt, been struck down from behind by a terrible blow which had fractured the skull and caused death almost instantaneously. In Driscoll’s opinion, the murder had been committed for the sake of plunder. For there was nothing whatever on the body. It was reasonable to suppose that a man who is well dressed would possess a watch and chain, and have money in his pockets, and possibly rings on his fingers. But there was nothing valuable to be found; in fact there was nothing at all to be found that could lead to identification—no letters, no papers, nothing. It was plain that whoever had struck the dead man down had subsequently stripped him of whatever was on him. The only clue to possible identity lay in the fact that a soft cap of grey cloth appeared to have been newly purchased at a fashionable shop in the West End.
Spargo went home; there seemed to be nothing to stop for. He ate his food and he went to bed, only to do poor things in the way of sleeping. He was not the sort to be impressed by horrors, but he recognised at last that the morning’s event had destroyed his chance of rest; he accordingly rose, took a cold bath, drank a cup of coffee, and went out. He was not sure of any particular idea when he strolled away from Bloomsbury, but it did not surprise him when, half an hour later he found that he had walked down to the police station near which the unknown man’s body lay in the mortuary. And there he met Driscoll, just going off duty. Driscoll grinned at sight of him.
‘You’re in luck,’ he said. ‘’Tisn’t five minutes since they found a bit of grey writing paper crumpled up in the poor man’s waistcoat pocket—it had slipped into a crack. Come in, and you’ll see it.’
Spargo went into the inspector’s office. In another minute he found himself staring at the scrap of paper. There was nothing on it but an address, scrawled in pencil:
Ronald Breton, Barrister, King’s Bench Walk, Temple, London.
SPARGO looked up at the inspector with a quick jerk of his head. ‘I know this man,’ he said.
The inspector showed new interest.
‘What, Mr Breton?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I’m on the Watchman, you know, sub-editor. I took an article from him the other day—article on ‘Ideal Sites for Campers-Out’. He came to the office about it. So this was in the dead man’s pocket?’
‘Found in a hole in his pocket, I understand: I wasn’t present myself. It’s not much, but it may afford some clue to identity.’
Spargo picked up the scrap of grey paper and looked closely at it. It seemed to him to be the sort of paper that is found in hotels and in clubs; it had been torn roughly from the sheet.
‘What,’ he asked meditatively, ‘what will you do about getting this man identified?’
The inspector shrugged his shoulders.
‘Oh, usual thing, I suppose. There’ll be publicity, you know. I suppose you’ll be doing a special account yourself, for your paper, eh? Then there’ll be the others. And we shall put out the usual notice. Somebody will come forward to identify—sure to. And—’
A man came into the office—a stolid-faced, quiet-mannered, soberly attired person, who might have been a respectable tradesman out for a stroll, and who gave the inspector a sidelong nod as he approached his desk, at the same time extending his hand towards the scrap of paper which Spargo had just laid down.
‘I’ll go along to King’s Bench Walk and see Mr Breton,’ he observed, looking at his watch. ‘It’s just about ten—I daresay he’ll be there now.’
‘I’m going there, too,’ remarked Spargo, but as if speaking to himself. ‘Yes, I’ll go there.’
The newcomer glanced at Spargo,