THE PADDINGTON MYSTERY

A STORY OF CRIME

BY

JOHN RHODE

PLUS

‘THE PURPLE LINE’

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

TONY MEDAWAR

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Geoffrey Bles 1925

‘The Purple Line’ first published in the Evening Standard 1950

Copyright © Estate of John Rhode 1925, 1950

Introduction © Tony Medawar 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008268848

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008268855

Version: 2018-02-06

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Paddington Mystery

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

The Purple Line

Keep Reading …

The Detective Story Club

About the Publisher

THE PADDINGTON MYSTERY

‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

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Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

INTRODUCTION

THE writer best known as ‘John Rhode’ was born Cecil John Charles Street on 3 May 1884 in the British territory of Gibraltar. His mother was descended from a wealthy Yorkshire family and his father was a distinguished Commander in the British Army who—at the time of his son’s birth—was serving in Gibraltar as Colonel-in-Chief of the Second Battalion of Scottish Rifles.

Shortly after his birth John Street’s parents returned to England where, not long after John’s fifth birthday, his father died unexpectedly. John and his widowed mother went to live with her father, and in 1895 John was sent to Wellington College in Berkshire. John did well in his academic studies and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the approach he took to detective stories, he excelled in the sciences. At the age of 16, John left school to attend the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and, on the outbreak of the Great War, as it was then called, he enlisted, rising to the rank of Major by March 1918. While he was wounded three times, John Street’s main contribution to the war effort concerned the promulgation of allied propaganda, for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in the New Year Honours List for 1918 and also the prestigious Military Cross. As the war came to an end John Street moved to a new propaganda role in Dublin Castle in Ireland, where he would be responsible for countering the campaigning of the Irish nationalists during the so-called war of Irish independence. But the winds of change were blowing across Ireland and the resolution—or rather the partial resolution—of the ‘Irish Question’ would soon come in the form of a treaty and the partition of the island of Ireland. As history was made, Street was its chronicler, at least from the British perspective.

During the 1920s, other than making headlines for falling down a lift shaft, John Street spent most of his time at a typewriter, producing a fictionalised memoir of the war and political studies of France, Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as well as two biographies. He also wrote a few short stories and articles on an eclectic range of subjects including piracy, camouflage and concealment, Slovakian railways, the value of physical exercise, peasant art, telephony, and the challenges of post-war reconstruction. He even found time to enter crossword competitions and, reflecting his keen interest in what is now known as ‘true crime’, he published the first full-length study of the trial of Constance Kent, who was convicted for one of the most gruesome murders of the nineteenth century at Road House in Kent. John also found time to write three thrillers and a wartime romance. However, while his early books found some success, the Golden Age of detective stories had arrived, and he decided to try his hand at the genre.

The first challenge was to create a great detective, someone to rival the likes of Roger Sheringham and Hercule Poirot, with whose creators John Street would soon be on first name terms. Street’s great detective was the almost supernaturally intelligent Lancelot Priestley, a former academic, who in the words of the critic Howard Haycraft was ‘fairly well along in years, without a sense of humour and inclined to dryness’. Dr Priestley’s first case, published in October 1925, would be The Paddington Mystery. Doctor—or rather Professor—Priestley was an immediate success, and Street was quick to respond, producing another six novels in short order. As well as Priestley, Street’s ‘John Rhode’ novels often feature one or both of two Scotland Yard detectives, Inspector Hanslet and Inspector Jimmy Waghorn who would in later years appear without Priestley in several radio plays and a short stage play.

By 1930, John Street was no longer just a highly decorated former Army Major with a distinguished career in military intelligence—he had now written a total of 25 books under various pseudonyms. He was 45 years old, and he was just getting started. As ‘John Rhode’ he would produce a total of 76 novels, all but five of which feature Dr Priestley and one of which was based on the notorious Wallace case. But, while writing as ‘John Rhode’, Street also became ‘Miles Burton’, under which pseudonym he wrote 63 novels featuring Desmond Merrion, a retired naval officer who may well have been named after Merrion Street in Dublin. There also exists an unfinished and untitled final novel, inspired it would appear by the famous Green Bicycle Case. The ‘Rhode’ and ‘Burton’ detective mysteries are similar, but whereas Priestley is generally dry and unemotional, Merrion is more of a gentleman sleuth in the manner of Philip Trent or Lord Peter Wimsey. Both Merrion and Priestley are engaged from time to time by Scotland Yard acquaintances, all of whom are portrayed respectfully rather than as the servile and unimaginative policemen created by some of Street’s contemporaries.

But two pseudonyms weren’t enough and, astonishingly, ‘Rhode’ also became ‘Cecil Waye’, a fact that was only discovered long after his death. For the four ‘Cecil Waye’ books, Street created two new series characters—the brother and sister team of Christopher and Vivienne Perrin, two investigators rather in the mould of Agatha Christie’s ‘Young Adventurers’, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. The Perrins would appear in four novels, which are now among the rarest of John Street’s books. Curiously, the first ‘Cecil Waye’ title—Murder at Monk’s Barn—is a detective story very much in the style that he would use for most of his ‘John Rhode’ and ‘Miles Burton’ books. However, the other three are metropolitan thrillers, with less than convincing plots, especially the best-known, The Prime Minister’s Pencil.

As well as writing detective stories, John Street was also a member of the Detection Club, the illustrious dining club whose purpose, in Street’s words, was for detective story writers ‘to dine together at stated intervals for the purpose of discussing matters concerned with their craft’. As one of the founding members, Street’s most important contribution was the creation of Eric the Skull, which—showing that he had not lost his youthful technical skills—he wired up with lights so that the eye sockets glowed red during the initiation ceremony for new members. Eric the Skull still participates in the rituals by which new members are admitted to the Detection Club. Street also edited Detection Medley, the first and arguably best anthology of stories by members of the Club, and he contributed to the Club’s first two round-robin detective novels, The Floating Admiral and Ask a Policeman, as well as the excellent true crime anthology The Anatomy of Murder and one of their series of detective radio plays. Street was also happy to help other Detection Club members with scientific and technical aspects of their own work, including those giants of the genre Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr; in fact Carr later made Street the inspiration for his character Colonel March, head of The Department of Queer Complaints.

In an authoritative and essential study of some of the lesser luminaries of the Golden Age, the American writer Curtis Evans described John Street as ‘the master of murder means’ and praised his ‘fiendish ingenuity [in] the creative application of science and engineering’. For Street is genuinely ingenious, devising seemingly impossible crimes in locked houses, locked bathrooms and locked railway compartments, and even—in Drop to his Death (co-authored with Carr)—a locked elevator. Who else but Street could come up with the idea of using a hedgehog as a murder weapon? A marrow? A hot water bottle? Even bed-sheets and pyjamas are lethal in his hands.

Street’s books are also noteworthy for their humour and social observations, and he doesn’t shy from defying some of the expectations of the genre: in one novel Dr Priestley allows a murderer to go free, and in another the guilty party is identified and put on trial … but acquitted.

John Street died on 8 December 1964. Half a century later, while he is not as highly regarded by critics as, say, Christie, Carr or Sayers, he remains one of the most popular writers of the Golden Age, producing more than 140 of what one fan neatly described as ‘pure and clever detective stories’. Not a bad epitaph.

TONY MEDAWAR

November 2017

CHAPTER I

‘STEADY, sir!’ exclaimed the taxi-driver sharply.

Harold Merefield made a wild clutch at the open door of the vehicle and managed to save himself from falling into the roadway.

‘It—it’s all right,’ he stammered. ‘Beastly shlippery tonight, must be a frost. Wosher fare?’

The taxi-driver lit a match and gazed speculatively at his clock. The young toff was too far gone to have any inkling of time or distance.

‘Eight and ninepence,’ he declared, with the air of a man who states an ascertained and incontrovertible fact.

Harold Merefield fumbled in his pocket and produced a ten-shilling note. ‘Here you are,’ he said magnificently. ‘I don’t want any change.’

He suddenly let go of the door handle, as though it had become too hot for him to hold, and started off rapidly down the Harrow Road. The taxi-driver watched his course with an appraising eye.

‘That’s a rum set-out,’ he muttered. ‘Bloke picks me up in Piccadilly at ’alf past two in the morning, and tells me to drive ’im to Paddington Register Office. Drunk as a lord, too. An’ when I takes ’im there, blowed if ’e don’t make tracks straight for the perlice station, like as though he wants to give ’imself up for drunk and disorderly. No, he don’t, though, he’s got ’is wits about ’im more than I gave ’im credit for. Well, it’s no concern o’ mine. Time I ’opped it.’

He put his lever into gear, swung his wheel round, and disappeared in the direction of the Edgware Road.

The object of his solicitude, although he had certainly set out towards the police station, had turned off to the left past the gate of the casual ward of the workhouse, planting his feet with the severe determination of one who dares his conscience to declare that he is drunk. It was obvious that he had often trodden this way before; an onlooker, had there been such, might have gained the impression that his legs, accustomed to this route, needed no guidance from a bemused brain. They steered an uncertain course down the middle of the road taking corners warily, like a ship swinging round a buoy, and turned at last into a narrow cul-de-sac adorned with a battered sign upon which, by daylight, might have been deciphered ‘Riverside Gardens.’

But, as it happened, there were no onlookers, as was perhaps natural at three a.m. of a winter’s night. The evening had been foggy; one of those late November evenings when a general gloom settles down upon London, producing not the merry blind-man’s-buff of a true pea-souper, but an irritating, choking opacity through which the gas-lamps show as vague blurs of light, beneath which the shadowy traffic roars and jolts. A thoroughly unpleasant evening, making the luxury of warmly-carpeted rooms, illuminated discreetly by shaded electric lamps, seem all the more desirable by contrast with the chill discomfort of the cheerless streets.

So Harold Merefield had felt as he had entered the portals of the Naxos Club, that retiring establishment which veiled its seductions behind the dingy brick front of an upper part in a modest Soho street. Upon leaving it his reflections were no longer meteorological, but it was somehow borne in upon him that the fog had lifted, to be replaced by a fine and exceedingly chilly drizzle. Having found a taxi, and persuaded the fellow that he really did want to be driven to the Paddington Register Office—a matter of some difficulty, since the man had expressed disgusted scorn at such a destination—‘’Ere, come off it. ’Tain’t open at this time o’ night, and besides, you ain’t got no girl with you’—he had flung himself down into the corner, the easier to meditate upon his grievance. Oh, yes, it had been a jolly night enough, he was ready to admit that, jolly enough for the other fellows, that is. His own evening had been spoilt, for what was the fun of drinking by oneself, or with such of the girls who chose to offer themselves as temporary solaces to his loneliness? Vere, who had never before failed him, had unaccountably absented herself, without a word of warning, without even ringing him up to make her excuses. Of course, he might have gone to her rooms and fetched her, but why the devil should he, on a night like that? He wasn’t going to run after any girl, she could come or not as she chose. Next time he wouldn’t turn up himself, and we’d see how she liked that.

The stopping of the taxi had interrupted the train of his thought. His stumbling exit provided him with a new sense of grievance, as he became conscious that he had barked his shins. He felt himself a deeply ill-used man as he turned into Riverside Gardens and splashed unsteadily through the puddles which had collected on its disreputable paving. On either side of the short road, a backwater, hidden away in this remoter part of Paddington, the unkempt front gardens of a row of tumble-down two-storied houses stood, dark and smelling of the rubbish they harboured. He passed them all, and turned in through the gateway in the low wall of the last garden on the right-hand side. He had reached home safely.

Number 16, Riverside Gardens was, perhaps, the least decayed of the row that bore this surprising name. From the narrow pavement of the cul-de-sac an asphalt path some ten yards long led through what had once been a garden, but was now merely a plot of waste land covered with rubbish, to a doorway screened by a ramshackle porch. You mounted a couple of steps, and from the top of these the mystery of the name was revealed. A low wall bounded the end of the cul-de-sac and the side of the garden; on the other side of this, dank, ill-odorous and forbidding, lay the stagnant waters of the Grand Junction Canal, an inky liquid besprinkled with nameless flotsam. It only needed sufficient imagination to see in this melancholy ditch a river, and in the desolate patches of earth before the houses a wealth of vegetation and the unexpected nomenclature became obvious.

Your enquiring mind thus set at rest, you explored the doorway in front of you. You had a choice of two panels on which to rap—there was no sign of a bell, merely the narrow orifice of a Yale lock on either door. One of these doors led into what was known by courtesy as ‘The Shop’; so much you could guess by peering through the filthy panes of the window on your left. Above this door you might have deciphered the name ‘G. Boost.’ From your necessarily limited survey through the window you would probably gather that Mr Boost’s shop was devoted to the accumulation of all the rubbish that the march of progress has banished from the Victorian middle-class home.

It was into the lock of the other door that Harold Merefield, not without some difficulty, occasioned by the reluctance of his hand to find the more distinct of the images conveyed to his brain by his eyes, inserted his key. The door swung open, revealing a narrow flight of stairs, rather surprisingly covered with a worn but excellent carpet. These heavily surmounted, the tenant of this curious dwelling reached a small landing, off which two doors led. He opened that towards the front of the house, stumbled in, knocked clumsily against various pieces of furniture, and at length, after much vain groping, accompanied by muttered curses, found a box of matches and struck a light. This done, he flung his coat in a heap upon the floor, and sank into a remarkably comfortable and well-cushioned chair.

The spectacle of a young man in impeccable evening dress sitting in a luxuriously-furnished room in the heart of a particularly ill-favoured slum might reasonably have been considered a remarkable portent. But then, Harold Merefield—his name, by the way, was pronounced Merryfield, a circumstance which had led to his being known as ‘Merry Devil’ to certain of his boon companions at the Naxos Club—was, in every respect, a remarkable young man. It had always been understood that he was to succeed his father, an elderly widower and a respected family solicitor, in his provincial practice. However, on the outbreak of war he had secured a commission, and had served until the Armistice without distinction but with satisfaction to himself and his superior officers.

Meanwhile his father had died, leaving far less than his only child had confidently expected. And on demobilisation Harold had found himself possessed of a small income, of which he could not touch the capital, an instinctive dislike of the prospect of hard work, and a promising taste for dissipation. His problem was so to reconcile these three factors as to gain the greatest pleasure from existence. He solved it in his own fashion. There were reasons which drew him towards London, and particularly towards Paddington. By a curious chance he saw the notice ‘Rooms to Let’ painted in sprawling letters on a board propped up in Mr Boost’s front garden. The idea tickled him; he could live here in such seclusion as he pleased, spending the minimum on rent and thereby reserving the maximum for pleasure. To this unpromising retreat he moved so much of his father’s furniture as the place would hold, the remainder he sold. His orbit in future was bounded by the Naxos Club on the one hand and Riverside Gardens on the other.

But sometimes, deviating slightly from this appointed path, as a comet surprises astronomers by its aberrations, he touched other planes of existence. Revelling in the content of idleness as he did, he yet felt at long intervals that irresistible itch which impels the hand towards pen and paper. The eventual result was a novel, which, with engaging candour, he himself described as tripe. Tripe indeed it was, but tripe which by the method of its preparation had acquired a pronounced gamy flavour. It dealt with the lives and loves of the peculiar stratum of society which frequented the Naxos Club. To cut a long story short, Aspasia’s Adventures was accepted by a firm of publishers who, as the result of persistent effort, had acquired an honourable reputation for the production of this type of fiction. With certain necessary emendation, the substitution of innuendo for bald description, it was published, and brought its author a small sum in royalties, a few indignant references in the more hypocritical section of the Press, and an intimation from the publishers that they would be prepared to consider further works of a similar nature. But it brought more than this. It brought the means of quieting the last scruples of an almost anæsthetised conscience. Harold Merefield’s method of life was crowned by the justification of a Career.

But it was not of his career that Harold was thinking as he lay in his comfortable chair. In fact, he found it difficult to think consecutively about anything at all. He knew that he was tired and sleepy, but the act of closing his eyes produced an unpleasant and nauseating sensation, in some way connected with rapidly-revolving wheels of fire. It wasn’t so bad if he kept them open. Certainly the flame of the candle refused to be focussed, and advanced and receded in the most irritating fashion. A wave of self-pity flowed over him. He was a wretched, lonely creature. Vere had forsaken him, Vere, the girl he had given such a good time to all these months. Vere’s form kept getting between him and the candle, tantalising, mocking him. Somewhere, in the dark corners of the room, another female form hovered, a reproach, a menace to his peace of mind. He laughed scornfully. Oh yes, it was all very well for April and her father to upbraid him as a rotter, to fling the authorship of Aspasia in his teeth. Why couldn’t they say straight out that Evan Denbigh was a more desirable match for April? Damned young prig! He hadn’t the guts of a louse.

For a moment his fluttering thoughts lit upon the person of Evan Denbigh. His sweeping condemnation was followed by a wave of generosity. Good fellow, Denbigh, at heart, but not at all his sort. Hardworking, clever fellow, and all that. Of course, April would prefer him to a miserable lonely devil like himself. Let her marry him; he would take his revenge by showing them what he could do. He could write a best-seller if he put his mind to it. Yes, by Jove, he’d start now.

He leapt from his chair, stood for a moment as though balancing himself on a narrow ledge, then sank back once more, dispirited. What was the use? Who cared what he did? April was beyond his reach, Vere had chucked him, the fire in the untidy grate was out long ago. There was nothing for it but to go to bed.

Very deliberately, as though embarking upon an undertaking which required skill and concentration for its successful accomplishment, he climbed out of his chair, grasped the candlestick in an unsteady hand, and staggered towards the door which led into the bedroom at the back of the house. He negotiated the narrow doorway, laid the candle down on the dressing-table, and began to fumble at his collar and tie. All at once the extreme desirability of seeking a prone position impressed itself upon him. Curse these clothes! They seemed to hang upon him as an incubus, resisting every attempt of his groping fingers to divest himself of them. He flung his coat and waistcoat upon a chair, and turned with a sigh of relief towards the bed. He must lie down for a bit, his head was beginning to ache, he could finish undressing when he felt better.

The candle threw a flickering light across the room. He could see a dark mass upon the bed, doubtless the suit he had thrown upon it when he was dressing that evening. He put out his hand to drag them off, and even as he did so stopped suddenly, as though a cold hand had gripped him. That dark mass was not his clothes at all. It was a man lying on his bed.

The first shock over and certainty established, he chuckled foolishly. A man! If it had been a woman, now! Vere, perhaps, come all this way to beg his forgiveness. Of course, it couldn’t be. How could she have got in? He had given her a latchkey once, but the first thing she had done had been to lose it. How on earth had this fellow got in, then?

Harold returned to the dressing-table to fetch the candle. This sort of thing was insufferable. Holding the candle over the bed he began to apostrophise his visitor.

‘Look here, my friend, I don’t so much mind finding you in my rooms like this, but I do draw the line at your turning me out of my own bed. Sleep here if you must, but sleep on the sofa next door and let me have the bed like a good fellow. I’ve had rather a hectic night of it.’

The form on the bed made no sign of having heard him. Harold put his hand on its shoulder and withdrew it suddenly. The clothes he had touched were oozing water. With a thrill of horror Harold bent over still further and put the candle close to the man’s face. His eyes were open, glassy, staring at nothing. Shocked into horrified sobriety, Harold thrust his hand beneath the man’s soaked clothing, seeking the skin above the heart. It was cold and clammy, not the slightest pulsation could he feel stirring the inert body.

For an instant he paused, fighting the sensation of physical sickness that surged through him. Then, as he was, stopping only to fling round him his discarded overcoat, he rushed from the house and dashed frantically to the police station.

CHAPTER II

IT was not until a week afterwards that Harold found leisure or courage to call upon Professor Lancelot Priestley. Leisure, because his time had been fully occupied, and that most unpleasantly, in attending the inquest and being interviewed by pertinacious officers who displayed an indecent curiosity as to his habits and acquaintances. Courage—well, Professor Priestley happened to be April’s father, and they had last parted as a result of a most regrettable incident.

Professor Priestley had been a schoolfellow of his father, and the two had kept up a certain intimacy through early life. But while Merefield the elder had settled down comfortably to country solicitorship, Priestley, cursed with a restless brain and an almost immoral passion for the highest branches of mathematics, occupied himself in skirmishing round the portals of the Universities, occasionally flinging a bomb in the shape of a highly controversial thesis in some ultra-scientific journal. How long this single-handed warfare against established doctrine might have lasted there is no telling. But with characteristic unexpectedness Priestley solved his personal binomial problem by marrying a lady of some means, who, having presented him with April, conveniently died when the child was fourteen, perhaps of a surfeit of logarithms.

Upon his marriage, Priestley had settled down, to use the term in a comparative sense. That is to say, he exchanged his former guerilla warfare for a regular siege. No longer were his weapons the bayonet and the bomb; he now employed the heavy artillery of lectures and weighty articles, with which he bombarded the supporters of all accepted theory. He claimed to be the precursor of Einstein, the first to breach the citadel of Newton. And as none of his acquaintances knew anything about these matters, he was not subjected to the annoyance of contradiction in his own house.

The two friends, Merefield and Priestley, continued to see one another at frequent intervals. Priestley would take his little daughter down to stay in the country, Merefield would bring his boy up for a week in town, when April and Harold, much of an age, would be sent to the Zoo and Madame Tussaud’s and Earl’s Court Exhibition, under the careful tutelage of April’s governess. Their parents, presumably, alternated the conversation between the calculus of variations and the rights of heirs and assigns over messuages and tenements.

It was perhaps unavoidable that one of those curious understandings, whose secrets adults fondly imagine are securely hidden from their offspring, should have been arrived at between the two. And in this case the understanding was less vague than usual. Anything indeterminate was a source of horror to the mathematician; anything loosely worded a reproach to the solicitor. It is not to be supposed that an agreement was actually drawn up, sealed, signed and delivered. But both these fond parents had firmly made up their minds that Harold was to marry April.

Their children, more accommodating than children are apt to be, fell in willingly enough with this plan. It was, of course, only conveyed to them in hints, increasing in clarity as they approached years of discretion. The whole business was taken for granted; it was a postulate to which there could be no possible alternative. Then came the war, the death of Merefield the elder, and Harold’s strange aberration from his appointed path.

There is no need to trace the widening of the breach, the outspoken condemnations of Professor Priestley, the subtler scorn of April. The crisis came one afternoon, when Harold had called at the house in Westbourne Terrace after lunching particularly well. Aspasia’s Adventures had been published a few days previously, and the occasion had called for a bottle by way of celebration. The first thing that met Harold’s eye on the table of the Professor’s study, into which he had been shown, was a copy of this sensational volume—it should be remarked that the publishers had seen fit to embellish it with a jacket upon which the heroine was displayed in male company in a lack of costume definitely startling. Harold’s interview with April’s father ended with the statement by the latter that he could not possibly contemplate the marriage of his daughter to a man whose dissipated manners had culminated in the production of such pornographic twaddle as this, to which Harold, emboldened by champagne, had retorted that April appeared to be adequately consoled by the company of that young cub Evan Denbigh, and that he proposed to go his own way as he pleased, anyhow. This short and heated interview had taken place some six months previously, and had been the last occasion on which he had passed the portals of the house in Westbourne Terrace.

But it was now a very chastened Harold who pressed the bell-push, with that nervous touch which betrays a secret hope that the bell has not rung, and that a few more minutes of respite must therefore elapse before the ordeal. But, light as had been his touch, the bell had tinkled far away in the lower regions, and Mary, the old parlourmaid, to whom much was forgiven, appeared with startling suddenness.

She, at least, was still on Harold’s side, retaining, perhaps, fond memories of secret orgies of candied peel in her pantry when the children were placed temporarily in her charge in the absence of the governess.

‘Gracious me, Master Harold, you are a stranger!’ she exclaimed. Then, with swift recollection of the respect due to one whose name had appeared so prominently in the papers during the last few days, she continued: ‘The Master’s in his study, sir, if you’ll kindly come this way—’

Well, he was in for it now. The door opened and he was ushered in. The Professor, working at his desk in the window, started up at the sound of his name.

‘Come in, Harold, my boy,’ he exclaimed, holding out his hand. ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I’m very glad of the opportunity of telling you how sorry we were to read of this—er—distressing occurrence.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Harold replied gratefully. ‘I felt I had to come round and talk to you about it.’

He sat down in one of the leather chairs before the fire, and the Professor took the other.

‘I was waiting for you to come,’ said the latter quietly. ‘I would have come to you, but it seemed better you should come of your own accord. I think I can guess the shock it must have been to you.’

Harold paused a minute. ‘I’ve been through a pretty rotten time in the last few days,’ he replied. ‘I suppose you’ve seen all about it in the papers?’

The Professor nodded, and Harold continued despondently.

‘It’s made me pretty sick with myself and the way I’ve been living. Although I went straight to the police, they seemed to think I was in some way responsible for the man’s death. I had to answer a devil of a lot of questions as to my movements that evening. They found the taxi-driver who had driven me home; fortunately the man remembered me. But that didn’t satisfy them. They wanted to know where I had been spending my time before he picked me up. I wouldn’t tell them for a long time, until they pointed out that if they put me on my trial it was bound to come out.’

‘Why wouldn’t you tell them?’ enquired the Professor.

‘Well—oh, I may as well make a clean breast of it, sir,’ replied Harold impulsively. ‘I’d been spending the evening at a place I particularly didn’t want to draw their attention to. It’s called the Naxos Club—drink after hours, and all that kind of thing, you know.’

The Professor furrowed his brow in thought. ‘Naxos, Naxos?’ he repeated. ‘Ah yes, I remember a young woman of the name of Ariadne, had an—ah—adventure with Bacchus at an island of that name some years ago. A most suitable designation for your club, no doubt. So you had to divulge the secrets of this place to the police, had you?’

‘I only told them I’d been there,’ replied Harold. ‘Inspector Hanslet, who had charge of my case, said that if the taxi-driver was correct as to my condition when he drove me home the place would bear looking into. Next day he told me that my alibi was established, but that the members of the Naxos Club would have to seek another rendezvous in future. I’m afraid he must have had it raided.’

‘I’m afraid he must,’ commented the Professor drily. ‘A fact which will scarcely add to your popularity with your former associates. Take my advice and drop them, my boy. It isn’t too late to run straight, you know. You’ve had a nasty shock, and you may as well profit by it.’

‘I wish to God I could!’ exclaimed Harold. ‘I’m sick of the whole thing, sick of the rotten way I’ve behaved, thoroughly well ashamed of myself. I’d like to go straight, to find a decent job somewhere, but what the devil am I to do? This man’s death is still a mystery, they haven’t even found out who he was. The coroner made some pretty rotten remarks at the inquest, the police and everybody else seem to think that even if I didn’t kill him, I must know something about the business. No, I’m under suspicion—I know jolly well I’m being watched still. And you can’t expect anyone to take kindly to a fellow whose name has been unpleasantly notorious in the papers for a week. No, sir it’s no good. I shall have to clear out of the country, and that’s what I came to ask you about.’

The Professor paused a minute before replying. ‘I’m not surprised you look at it like that,’ he said at last. ‘The trouble you have have been through has not unnaturally got on your nerves. But, as a matter of fact, it is not so bad as you make out. I, for one, am completely convinced of your innocence, not because I have known you all your life, but from the logical facts of the case. Scientific reasoning is on your side, my boy.’

He paused again, and Harold muttered his thanks for this frank testimonial. Then he continued, slowly and with some deliberation, as though he were expounding a thesis.

‘I agree that there are many who might be disposed to think you not altogether guiltless. The discovery of a dead man on one’s bed would certainly incline loose thinkers to a suspicion that there must be some connection between oneself and the deceased. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is so impervious to argument that the only way to refute it is by the demonstration of the true facts of the case. In this particular instance, this is the function of the police, but I very much doubt that they will proceed much further in the matter. They are solely concerned with the detection of crime. They may well argue that no crime was committed, since the result of the inquest was a verdict of “Death from natural causes”. In other words, my boy, if you want to clear yourself in the eyes of the world, you will have to unravel the mystery yourself.’

‘That’s very much the conclusion I came to myself,’ replied Harold disconsolately. ‘But I haven’t the least idea how to set about it.’

The Professor rose from his chair and stood with his back to the fire, looking down upon the young man. ‘The trained mind,’ he began oracularly, ‘that is to say, the brain accustomed to logical reasoning processes, can often construct an edifice of unshakable truth from the loose bricks of fact which to others seem merely a profitless rubbish heap. I have studied the various incidents surrounding this case with particular care, firstly because I hoped you would come to me for advice, and secondly, because of the many points of interest they contain. As a result I may say that, if you will accept my assistance, there is a reasonable hope that together we may arrive at the solution of what is at present a mystery.’

Harold looked up sharply, with a look of incredulous wonder in his eyes. He had scarcely dared hope for even sympathy, and now here was this precise old mathematician not only sympathising, but actually offering his assistance to disperse the cloud that hung over him!

‘Of course, sir, I’d be only too glad of your help,’ he replied hesitatingly. ‘But—’

The Professor cut him short. ‘Then that’s settled,’ he said decisively. ‘Now, the first thing is to marshal the facts as they are at present known to us. I may say that most of these are already in my possession. I have, as I have already informed you, followed the case with some attention. Perhaps the best method will be for me to state the facts as I know them. Should I be wrongly or inadequately informed, you will please supplement my knowledge.’

He relinquished his position by the mantelpiece, and lowered himself deliberately into his chair. A look of keen, almost hungry interest came into his eyes, the light of battle which always illumined him when he was engaged in wrestling with one of his favourite problems, especially if his solution promised to be at variance with that of the majority.

‘When you had told your story at the police station, they sent for Inspector Hanslet, who was off duty,’ he began abruptly. ‘A constable was sent to Number 16, Riverside Gardens at once. On the arrival of Inspector Hanslet, and later the police surgeon, the three of you followed, and went straight to your bedroom, where the corpse was lying. Is that correct?’

‘Quite, sir,’ replied Harold. So much had been revealed at the inquest.

‘Very well. Now to deal with the body itself. The result of examination showed it to be that of an elderly man, probably between fifty and sixty, clean-shaven, hair cut short—no easily identifiable distinguishing marks. He was apparently particular as to his personal appearance, his hair, which was turning grey, had recently been treated with some preparation designed to mask this greyness Against this, however, may be set the fact that his teeth had been neglected, and showed considerable signs of decay. His hands, on the contrary, were quite well kept, and bore no traces of manual labour.

‘He was dressed in a remarkably tight-fitting blue serge suit, beneath which he wore underclothing bearing no laundry mark or trade description. This underclothing was distinctly light in texture for the time of year, a point to be noted in connection with the fact that he was apparently wearing no overcoat. The suit itself, though worn and far from new, was well-cut and probably made by an efficient tailor. It is particularly interesting, in view of the fact that the underclothing bore no marks of any kind, that this suit had been turned, turned inside out, that is to say, by an expert in these matters, and fitted with plain bone buttons. The man’s boots were standard black-laced boots, of a well-known make. The most curious thing about them was that they were unusually tight-fitting, although worn over thin socks. No hat or cap of any kind was found.’

The Professor leaned back in his chair after the enumeration of these points, and looked keenly at Harold.

‘Eliminating details, I think I have touched upon the essential facts connected with the man and his clothing,’ he said. ‘I deal with these first, as up to the present he remains unidentified, although, unlike the police, I consider the question of his identity of secondary importance. Now, so far as I have gone, have you anything to add?’

‘Nothing, sir, except as regards the contents of his pockets,’ replied Harold, who had been following the Professor’s incisive words with keen attention.

‘I am coming to that,’ said the Professor. ‘Do not let us confuse our classification of facts. From what we have seen so far, the police have deduced that the deceased was a non-manual worker, of limited means, compelled to maintain as decent an appearance as possible. In fact, a clerk of some kind or a burglar. Do you agree with this deduction?’

‘I think so, sir,’ replied Harold. ‘But since you have put the facts as you have, it seems odd that all means of identification by the man’s clothing were lacking. That hadn’t struck me so forcibly before.’

‘Humph!’ grunted Professor Priestley. ‘The usual failure to attach equal importance to every ascertainable fact, whether it appears relevant or not. I can hardly blame you, since this failing is common among men whom the world acclaims as trained scientists. But to continue. You spoke of the contents of the man’s pockets. These were, I believe, as follows. A sum of one pound sixteen shillings and fourpence, made up of one pound and one ten-shilling note, two half-crowns, a shilling, three pennies, and two half-pennies, carried loose, that is to say, not in a purse or wallet. A nickelled steel tyre-lever, nine inches long, carried in the inside breast pocket, apparently quite new, and bearing the trade-mark of Motor Gadgets, Ltd., which is the steering-wheel of a motor-car. Besides this, half a dozen washers and nuts, showing various signs of wear, and odd parts of the valve of a motor-car tyre—these last all carried loose in the side pockets of the coat.

‘Now observe once more that none of these things are of any assistance to identification. Treasury notes and coins are common currency, nobody dreams of noting the numbers of the notes which pass through his hands. Motor Gadgets, Ltd., are a big combine of manufacturers; this particular type of tyre lever is a standard article of theirs, and can be bought at any garage. Stray bolts, nuts, and parts of valves cannot, under ordinary circumstances, possibly be traced. You agree with me so far, I suppose?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Harold. ‘There’s just one thing about them, though. Taken together, they point to the man being in some way connected with motors in some form.’

‘Thus to some extent controverting the clerk or burglar theory,’ agreed the Professor. ‘But a man who carries parts of a car about in his pockets is more likely to be a mechanic or chauffeur than a clerk in a garage, say. Now there are two points about this man which seem to render it unlikely that he had the actual handling of any machinery. The first is the state of his hands in general, and the fact that there was not the slightest trace of ingrained grime in the finer lines of his fingers in particular. That ingraining is remarkably persistent, as anyone who handles machinery will tell you. The second point is that there was no trace of oil or grease stains on his clothing. You may object that he never went near the machinery in the suit he was wearing when you found him. But still I maintain that oil particularly has a way of penetrating to the underclothing, and in this case the vest and drawers bore no signs of it.’

‘How in the world do you know all this, sir?’ exclaimed Harold in amazement. ‘Nothing nearly so detailed came out at the inquest!’

Professor Priestley smiled indulgently. ‘It seems that I have to some extent betrayed myself,’ he replied. ‘I had not meant to inform you of the fact at this stage, but Inspector Hanslet is a friend of mine. He is a man of very wide interests, as befits an officer charged with such important duties, and two or three years ago he happened to read a paper of mine on Methods of Psychological Deduction, in which, I venture to say, I succeeded in refuting some very widely-accepted theories. But no matter. Since that time he has often called upon me to ask my assistance in the correlation of scattered facts. I approached him three or four days ago, and he very willingly went over the case with me. He was very much interested in it then, although I expect that the verdict of the coroner’s jury has now allayed his anxiety. I did not, of course, tell him that I was in any way interested in you.’

Harold gave a gasp of astonishment. The idea of this militant mathematician taking an interest in criminal cases was so novel that it seemed absurd. Mathematics was to him merely a jumble of queer signs and Greek letters; he had never considered it as a science applicable to human events.

‘However,’ continued the Professor, after a pause, ‘that is by the way. The point I wish to make is that up to the present we have discovered nothing of great assistance towards establishing the identity of the deceased. We will now turn to a matter of even greater interest, and that is the cause of the man’s death.

‘You will remember that by your own statement the first thing that struck you was that the man’s clothes were soaking with water. Investigation showed that the bed where he was lying was also very wet. The bed was in such a position that rain cannot have blown upon it from the window, and there was no sign of a leakage in the roof. Either, then, the man’s clothes were soaked when they entered the room, or they were deliberately wetted after arrival. The fact that the carpet of the room showed signs of moisture is compatible with either theory. We must remember that, although there appears to be evidence of the source of the water, this evidence is not necessarily conclusive.’

‘But surely,’ interrupted Harold, ‘the tracks leading up from the canal—’

The Professor held up a protesting hand. ‘Let us wait until we come to that point,’ he said. ‘We are not at present considering how the body gained access to your rooms. Having established the condition of the corpse when found, that is, soaked with moisture and lying on its back on your bed, we come to the cause of death.

‘Now, as a result of expert medical evidence, the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of death from natural causes. A post-mortem had been held, and we must assume that the body had been very carefully examined, internally and externally, by experts familiar with the various methods by which life is terminated. It seems that these experts were able to rule out violence or poison as the cause of death. Now, I am no doctor, so I am compelled to rely upon the statements of others in this case. Until any fact appears to controvert this conclusion, we may accept it as probable.

‘Examination of the body, however, revealed two salient facts. The first was that the left forearm bore minute marks—the number I have not been able to ascertain—such as might have been caused by a hypodermic syringe. From the position on the arm these marks might have been self-inflicted. The experts stated that the fact that no analytical or pathological traces of drugs could be discovered made it impossible that death could have been caused by some toxic injection. The second fact was that the deceased suffered from an affection of the heart of long standing, and of a nature which frequently terminates fatally. The existence of this heart affection caused one of the experts to put forward the suggestion that the marks on the forearm were the result of self-injection of some drug prescribed to relieve the heart, and that these injections had been made sufficiently long before death for all traces of the drug used to have vanished. I think that is a fair summary of the medical evidence?’

Harold nodded. He had learnt by now that interruptions of the Professor’s train of thought were not welcome.

‘Very well, then,’ continued the Professor, ‘you will agree, I think, that this evidence is mostly negative. Pressed to account for the fact that the man was dead and not alive when found, the medical witnesses—I say witnesses, for the police surgeon had sought the assistance of a Home Office expert—suggested that the deceased died of heart failure, brought on by sudden immersion on a cold night affecting an already-weakened organ. That the man died of heart failure was patent; I suppose most people die because the heart ceases to function for some cause or other. Whether this man’s heart failed for the causes alleged, I cannot say. There may have been facts supporting the experts’ view which are hidden from the mere lay mind. Were I to give an opinion, I should say it was a mere guess, although an extremely plausible one. In any case, the coroner and his jury seized upon it, and their verdict was the result.

‘The next point of enquiry is obviously the time when the man died. The police surgeon, who saw the corpse at about five o’clock in the morning, expressed an opinion that the man had been dead not less than about nine or ten hours. Again, I have no knowledge or experience in such a matter, and we may provisionally accept this estimate as correct. In which case, the man may be assumed as having been dead by eight or nine o’clock the previous evening. According to your evidence you left your rooms at about four o’clock that evening, at which time, to your knowledge, the rooms contained no man, alive or dead.’

‘That is so, sir,’ replied Harold, seeing that the Professor paused, as though for confirmation. ‘I fancy that the police had a vague suspicion that the body had been there all the time, since the doctors could only say that the man had been dead not less than eight or nine hours and not more than about twenty-four.’

‘Possibly, possibly,’ agreed the Professor. ‘But certain other evidence, which, I confess, interests me far more than the question of the identity of the deceased, seemed to point in quite another direction. I mean the evidence concerning the means by which the corpse obtained access to your rooms. As you know, I have never visited Number 16, Riverside Gardens myself, but I received a description, an inadequate one, I admit, from a friend who has been there.’

‘Inspector Hanslet again, sir?’ suggested Harold.

‘No,’ replied the Professor. ‘His mind was already made up. I wanted the description from someone who was unaware of the details which had been discovered. Evan Denbigh was able to supply me with the outline of what I required.’

‘Denbigh!’ exclaimed Harold, with some embarrassment. ‘Oh yes, of course, he was there once, about six months ago. He came—’

Professor Priestley waited for the end of the sentence, but Harold had relapsed into silence.

‘He told me why he went,’ he said quietly. ‘He was one of your friends who thought that you were making a fool of yourself. I fancy he went to see if you could not see reason.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact, that’s what he did come for,’ agreed Harold. ‘Jolly decent he was about it, too, really. He can’t have seen much of the place, though. I was dressing for dinner, I had half my clothes flung about the sitting-room, and after he’d been there about ten minutes I went into the bedroom to wash and left him spouting to me through the door. He never saw the bedroom, where I found the body, at all.’

‘So he told me,’ replied the Professor. ‘That is exactly why I want to see it for myself. Will you take me there, my boy?’

‘Rather, sir!’ exclaimed Harold. ‘When would you like to go?’

Professor Priestley considered for a moment. ‘I shall be disengaged at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon,’ he replied. ‘Now, my boy, I do not wish to raise your hopes unduly, but this case does not appear to me to be so hopeless as it seems. Good-bye until tomorrow.’

CHAPTER III

HAROLD returned to Riverside Gardens rather despondently. What he had expected as a result of his visit to Professor Priestley he hardly knew. It had been a sub-conscious impulse that had driven him to seek his father’s old friend, an instinct to seek protection under the mantle of unquestioned respectability. His reception, contrary to what he had expected, had been warm, had somehow led him to expect an immediate dissipation of the clouds that had surrounded him. Whereas the result of their prolonged interview seemed to leave the matter exactly where it had stood before.

Remember, Harold’s desire to solve the mystery was very keen. He had been through a remarkably unpleasant ordeal, had been an object of strong suspicion, and had been put through a very fine mill of inquisition. He had come out of it with hardly a shred of decency left to him; the papers had published full reports of the inquest, at which he had figured in none too favourable a light. And, worst of all, although the verdict had exonerated him from the accusation of having caused the man’s death, he was conscious that there was a pretty strong notion abroad that he knew more about the business than he had divulged.

He felt like an outlaw, shunned by the whole world. Return to his former life was impossible; the Naxos Club had been raided and dispersed, notoriously as the result of his enforced account of his doings on that fatal evening, and he could scarcely expect his old friends to welcome him with open arms. A return to the world of respectability was impossible while the stigma of intangible wrong-doing still attached to him. The only way out that he could see was to discover the truth of the mysterious circumstances that had involved him in their toils. Professor Priestley had led him to believe that this was possible, and had left him with nothing more cheering than that the business was not so hopeless as it looked!

The first thing Harold noticed as he opened the gate of Number 16, Riverside Gardens, was that the door of Mr Boost’s shop was open. As he came up the path the proprietor himself came out and barred his further passage, silent, accusing.

‘Good evening, Mr Boost,’ said Harold politely. ‘So you’re back again?’

The man made no reply, but stood looking at him malevolently. He was tall and thin, with a pronounced stoop, sharply-cut features and a curiously intense look in his eyes. He wore an untidy-looking tweed suit but the most striking thing about him was an enormous red scarf, which did duty both as a collar and tie, and an equally pretentious red handkerchief, a good half of which protruded from the side pocket of his coat. He was obviously not the sort of person to disguise his political convictions.

This individual regarded Harold for some moments in silence. Then he suddenly turned and led the way into the shop, beckoning to Harold to follow him. He closed the door behind them, then, for the first time, spoke.

‘What did you do it for, comrade?’ he asked, in a surprisingly deep voice, that seemed to come from some strange vocal organs concealed within his narrow chest.

Harold turned upon him indignantly. ‘What the devil do you mean?’ he replied angrily. ‘You seem to know all about it. Haven’t you heard that the police found that I had nothing to do with it? I shouldn’t wonder if you knew more about it than I do.’

‘Damn the police!’ exclaimed Mr Boost. ‘They’re only the servants of a tyrannical capitalism. The first thing we shall do will be to discard them and set up Red Guards who’ll know their business instead. Police, indeed! Why, they had the sauce to come to me in Leicester where I was doing a lot of business and badger the life out of me. Where was I that night? Did I know the man who had been found dead in my house? Showed me his photograph and description and cross-questioned me till I told them what I thought of them. I wouldn’t give a curse for anything the police might think.’

Harold smiled. He recalled a remark of Inspector Hanslet. ‘Boost? Oh, yes, we know all about him. He’s harmless enough, but we’ll have him looked up, though, for all that.’ But he refrained from repeating it to his landlord.

‘What your idea was I don’t know and I don’t want to know,’ continued Mr Boost. ‘You seem to have scrambled out of it, and I suppose that’s all you care about. But you can’t expect me to thank you for bringing every silly fool in London to gape round this place. I thought you wanted to lie low when you came here.’

He went into the back room, still grumbling, and Harold, seeing the futility of trying to persuade him of his innocence, took the opportunity of going up to his own rooms. He spent the evening trying to write, and then at last, giving up the task in despair, went to bed and slept fitfully, dreaming impossible dreams in which the dead man, Boost, Professor Priestley and a host of minor characters came and went, mocking him, scorning him for the outcast he was.

At nine o’clock Mrs Clapton, from Number 15 over the way, thundered at his door, as was her custom. When he had first come to Riverside Gardens he had engaged her to come in for an hour every morning to tidy the place up. The Paddington Mystery, as the headlines had called it, had raised her to the seventh heaven of delight. In an incautious moment Inspector Hanslet had called upon her to ask a few questions, and had only succeeded in escaping after an hour of breathless volubility which had left his head in an aching whirl. Since that moment she had regaled her neighbours and all whom she could prevail upon to listen to her with a torrent of eloquence. As the only person besides the central figure who had access to the scene of the discovery, she poured forth in an unceasing stream the little she knew and the enormous volume of what she conjectured.

But this morning Harold was in no mood to listen to her theories or her remarkably frank comments. He put on a dressing-gown and let her in, then returned again to bed, leaving her the run of the sitting-room. For her regulation hour she busied herself in moving the furniture about, then, after making several unsuccessful attempts to engage Harold in conversation through the closed door, she departed, firmly convinced that her employer had something discreditable to conceal. ‘It’s hawful the life that young man leads,’ she was wont to whisper. ‘I’ve seen him go in with girls after dark—you mark my words, there’s somethink be’ind it all!’

Harold waited for the door to bang behind her, then wearily made up his mind to get up. He was half dressed, when once more a loud and insistent knocking on the door disturbed his train of thought.

With a muttered imprecation he went down stairs, to find Boost standing on his doorstep.

Harold frowned. He and his landlord had always got on pretty well hitherto. Boost had never abandoned the hope of converting his tenant to the doctrines of Communism, and had called upon him at all sorts of hours for that purpose. The man’s energy and ferocity had amused him; he had regarded him as a harmless crank whose proper field of action was surely Soviet Russia. But now he had other things to think of, and was in no mood for a lecture upon the iniquities of the bourgeois and the advantages of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

‘Good morning, Mr Boost,’ he said coldly. ‘What can I do for you? I’m going out as soon as I’ve finished dressing.’

‘You and I’ve got to have a word first,’ replied Mr Boost truculently. ‘There’s a question or two to which I want an answer.’

Harold shrugged his shoulders and led the way upstairs. He might as well hear what the man had to say and get it over.

Mr Boost settled himself in Harold’s best chair and plunged into his subject without delay. ‘Look here!’ he said sharply. ‘I want to know what your game was the other night.’

Harold sighed wearily. ‘Oh, Lord, you know all about that!’ he exclaimed. ‘I suppose you read the papers?’

‘Yes, I read them right enough,’ replied Mr Boost. ‘I don’t want to pry into your affairs so long as they don’t concern me. When they do, I’m going to have the truth. What happened to my bale of goods, I’d like to know?’

Harold stared at him in amazement. ‘Your bale of goods?’ he repeated. ‘What the devil are you talking about? What bale of goods?’

Mr Boost regarded him suspiciously. ‘I reckon you know more about it than I do,’ he said. ‘Especially as it happens I’ve never seen it.’

‘Look here, Mr Boost. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ replied Harold, now thoroughly roused. ‘I haven’t got anything of yours, you can search the place if you like. And when you’ve finished I’ll trouble you to clear out and leave me in peace.’

Mr Boost laughed scornfully. ‘Oh, I don’t suppose you’ve got it here,’ he said. ‘But it’s like this. I’m not such a fool as to believe that a man comes and dies in these rooms without your knowing something about it. And when a bale of goods of mine disappears on the same night, I can’t help thinking that you know something about that, too.’

‘How do you know it disappeared that night?’ enquired Harold sharply.

‘Did you see it leaning up against my door under the porch when you came home that night?’ replied Mr Boost aggressively. ‘Or were you too beastly drunk to notice anything?’

Harold paused a moment. ‘I won’t swear about when I first came in,’ he said. ‘It was nearly pitch dark, you know. But I know jolly well that there was nothing there when I came back with the police. Someone would have seen it if there had been. And there wasn’t anything there when I went out that evening.’

‘Of course there wasn’t,’ replied Mr Boost testily. ‘It hadn’t been delivered then. Well, I’ll have to tell you what happened, I suppose. You get my stuff back from your pals, and I won’t ask any questions. That’s fair.’

Harold started to make an indignant refutation, but Mr Boost silenced him.

‘Now, just you listen,’ he interrupted. ‘I’ve got some stuff coming down from Leicester, and I’ve just been up to see George, who keeps a van up along the Harrow Road and does a bit of carting for me now and then. I’ve fixed up with him to fetch this stuff from the station, and when I was leaving him he says, “Did you find that lot all right I left for you the other evening, Mr Boost?”’

‘“What other evening?” I said. “You haven’t done a job for me for the last couple of months, George!”

‘“Why, the evening before that there body was found in your house, Mr Boost,” he said. “That’s how I remember the evening it was. I must have been along at your place about an hour or so before the chap broke in.”

‘Well, I knew of nothing coming while I was away, though it does sometimes happen that a friend of mine in the trade sends something along which he knows I can do with. Very often the carman, if he knows me, leaves the stuff outside the door. It’s safe enough in the front garden, especially if it’s heavy, as it usually is. You’ve seen stuff standing under the porch before now, haven’t you?’

Harold nodded. ‘Yes, but I’ve seen nothing there while you’ve been away,’ he said.

Mr Boost looked at him suspiciously. ‘Well, it wasn’t there when I came back, and so I told George. “What was it, anyhow, and where did it come from?” I asked him.

‘“I don’t know what it was, but it was middling heavy,” he said. “I got a message from old Samuels that he had some stuff for you, and I was to be particular and fetch it that very evening. So down I went to Camberwell, picked up the stuff about four, and was back with it here between five and six.”

‘Well, I didn’t know of anything old Samuels had for me, but there was nothing in that. He’s a comrade, or he used to be, he’s got a bit slack lately. Calls himself Samuels, but his real name’s Szamuelly. One of his relations was one of Lenin’s men, and fought a glorious fight for the cause in Hungary. Killed himself rather than be caught when the capitalists put the bourgeois back again. Never mind, that won’t last long. The whole of Europe is already on the brink—’

‘But this man Samuels and his bale of goods?’ interrupted Harold, feeling that an account of anything that happened on that fatal evening was preferable to an oration on Bolshevism.

Mr Boost checked himself and returned to his story. ‘Well, George told me that he got the message—there’s a telephone belonging to a man in his yard, and he’ll take a message for George from one of us dealers—and went down to Samuels’ place. He didn’t see the old man himself, but heard him wheezing and coughing in the back shop. When George raps on the counter, out comes Samuels’ nephew, a half-witted sort of chap who comes and lives with his uncle when he can’t get a job anywhere else. The nephew shows him a bale done up with mats and rope, and between them they got it into the van. George says it was about six foot long, and weighed best part of a couple of hundredweight. “Uncle says if Mr Boost isn’t in, you can leave it under the porch, it won’t hurt in the open for a night or two,” the nephew tells him. George asks if he can have his money, twelve-and-six, for the job. The nephew goes into the back room, and George hears the old man coughing and wheezing again. I’ll bet he did, too.’

Mr Boost allowed his austere frown to melt into a smile at the idea. ‘Old Samuels is worth a lot of money,’ he explained, ‘but it’s like drawing a tooth to get a shilling out of him. By and by the nephew comes back, and gives George his twelve-and-sixpence exact, not a penny more for a drink, you may bet. George comes straight here, or so he says, carries the stuff up to the door, and props it under the porch. And what I want to know is, what’s become of it?’

Mr Boost fixed his fiery eye upon Harold, as though he expected him to confess immediately to the theft of this bale of goods. But for a moment Harold made no reply. There seemed no reason to doubt the truth of the story—in any case it could easily be verified by referring to George or to Mr Boost’s friend, old Samuels. It was just possible that the disappearance of this bale was in some way connected with the other mysterious happening of that eventful night.

‘Look here, Mr Boost,’ he said at last. ‘I may be a pretty fair rotter, but at least I haven’t tried my hand at theft, as yet. Besides, if I wanted to steal a bale of that size and weight, I shouldn’t know how to set about it or where to dispose of it. For that matter, I can account for every minute of my time that evening. I give you my word I know nothing of the matter. Will that do?’

Mr Boost’s frown relaxed a little. ‘I’m not saying you took it,’ he conceded. ‘But there were some pretty queer happenings about here that night, and I reckon that you know more about them than you’re prepared to say. How do I know that the disappearance of that bale hasn’t got something to do with them?’

‘Well, Mr Boost, I can only assure you that nobody wants to know what happened that night more than I do,’ replied Harold. Then he added maliciously, ‘Why don’t you tell the police about it? They’d be glad to help you, I dare say.’

‘Police!’ exclaimed Mr Boost contemptuously. ‘I don’t want them fooling about with my business. I don’t recognise their right to interfere in a free man’s affairs. No, I’m going to find out about this myself, I am.’

‘In that case, I shall be very pleased to give you all the help I can,’ replied Harold. ‘I have an idea if we could find out what happened to your bale of goods, we should learn something about the man I found dead in my bed. What was in this precious bale, anyhow?’

Mr Boost shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Old Samuels’ nephew didn’t tell George. Don’t suppose he knew; the old man keeps his business pretty much to himself. He knew I should find out what it was when I opened it, and that was good enough for him.’

‘Was it likely to have been anything of any great value?’ suggested Harold.

‘Old Samuels wouldn’t have told George to leave it in the porch if it had been. Besides, he’d have written to me by now asking for the money. He doesn’t like parting with anything that’s worth much, doesn’t that old man.’

‘Then the only way to find out what was in the bale is to ask old Samuels himself,’ said Harold. ‘Why don’t you write him a note and find out? You can’t begin to trace the stuff until you know what it was.’

Mr Boost shook his head. ‘No, I don’t care to write,’ he replied. ‘Like as not the old man wouldn’t answer, or if he did, would send a bill for the stuff. And I can’t very well go and see him today, I don’t want to leave the place till George has delivered that lot from Leicester.’

An idea struck Harold and he blurted it out before he had time to consider the consequences it might entail.

‘Look here, Mr Boost, I’m as interested in the fate of this bale of goods as you are, only for a slightly different reason. Someone must have taken it away that night, and it is just possible that that someone could throw some light on what I want to know. If you like, I’ll go to Camberwell and see old Samuels for you.’

Mr Boost considered for a moment without replying. ‘Couldn’t do no harm,’ he said at last, rather reluctantly. ‘If you can get anything at all out of the old man, that is. He’s as close as an oyster. I’m beginning to believe that your story’s right, that you’ve been fooled over this night’s business same as I have. Perhaps that fellow did break in after my stuff. But if so, what did he take the trouble to climb up to your rooms for? Why break in if the stuff he wanted was already outside? How did he get it away if he was dead? No, it beats me, but it may not be your fault, after all. Yes, you can go and see old Samuels, if you like.’

‘Thank you, Mr Boost, I will,’ replied Harold gravely. ‘What sort of a chap is the old man, anyway?’

‘He’s a queer old fish,’ replied Mr Boost. ‘Always grumbling and grousing under his breath. You can’t tell what he’s saying, he mumbles so. To look at him, you wouldn’t think he had a bean in the world, though I know for a fact he’s got some thousands locked up in a tin box in the back room. He doesn’t know I know that, or I believe he’d murder me. He’s a stingy old skinflint as ever you’ve heard of; I’ve only known him wear one suit of clothes all the time I’ve known him, all loose and baggy, with about half a dozen ragged waistcoats underneath it. You can hardly see his face, he’s all shaggy like a bear, long hair, whiskers and beard, which haven’t ever been combed, by the look of it. Like as not, unless you tell him you come from me, he’ll mumble and cough at you and tell you to mind your own business.’

‘I’ll risk that,’ said Harold with a smile. ‘I’ll be off to see old Samuels or Szamuelly tomorrow afternoon. What’s his address, by the way?’

‘Thirty-six, Inkerman Street, Camberwell,’ replied Mr Boost. ‘A tram from Victoria will take you pretty close to the place. It’s a little shop up a side street, not unlike this, only he’s more stuff in his window. He does a bit of retail trade sometimes.’

‘All right, I’ll find it,’ said Harold. ‘Any message for him?’

‘No, I don’t think he wants my love,’ said Mr Boost sourly. ‘You may not find him in, he goes about the country buying sometimes, same as I do. I rather thought he’d be in Leicester the other day. Don’t you go and tell him I lost that stuff, if you see him.’

‘Not I,’ replied Harold. ‘You can rely on me to tell him no more than I can help.’

Mr Boost nodded and left the room. Harold, remembering his appointment with Professor Priestley, got through the intervening time as best he could, and was shown into the Professor’s study punctually at three o’clock.

CHAPTER IV

‘WE will take a taxi-cab,’ said the Professor as soon as they were outside the house. ‘I should like to approach Riverside Gardens in the same way as you approached it that night.’

So it happened that Professor Priestley and Harold were set down at the Register Office, and walked through the side streets to Mr Boost’s house. They were regarded with interest by the few inhabitants of the neighbourhood they met on their way; the case had attracted considerable attention in the newspapers, and the locality had for some days been a centre of pilgrimage. Harold shrank from the interested scrutiny and scarcely-veiled personal remarks, but the Professor’s attention seemed wholly devoted to close observation of his surroundings.

The first remark made by the latter was evoked by the spectacle of Mr Boost’s front garden. It was certainly a deplorable sight, littered with broken wooden crates, straw, shavings, and the remnants of the woven mats employed by furniture packers, with here and there a broken-down piece of furniture among the jumble.

‘This antique dealer of yours seems to be a slovenly sort of person,’ commented the Professor. ‘He lives in a room leading from the shop, I believe?’

‘Yes, when he is here,’ replied Harold. ‘He’s very often away, attending sales in the country. It is a pity that he was not at home when all this happened. He would have been bound to see the man break in.’

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