was conscious of a faint dismay when he saw their fewness. A white cotton handkerchief, a small pile of loose change (two half-crowns, two sixpences, a shilling, four pennies, and a half-penny), and—unexpected—a service revolver. The handkerchief was well worn but had no laundry mark or initial. The revolver was fully loaded.
Grant examined them in a disgusted silence. “Laundry marks on his clothes?” he asked.
No, there were no marks of any kind.
And no one had come to claim him? Not even any one to make inquiries?
No, no one but that old madwoman who laid claim to every one the police found.
Well, he would see the clothes for himself. Painstakingly he examined each article of clothing. Both hat and shoes were well worn, the shoes so much so that the maker’s name, which should have been on the lining, had been obliterated. The hat when new had been bought from a firm who owned shops all over London and the provinces. Both were good of their kind, and though well worn neither was shabby. The blue suit was fashionable if rather too pronounced in cut, and the same might be said of the grey overcoat. The man’s linen was good if not expensively so, and the shirt was of a popular shade. All the clothes, in fact, had belonged to a man who either took an interest in clothes or was accustomed to the society of those who did. A salesman in a men’s outfitter’s, perhaps. As the Gowbridge people had said, there were no laundry marks. That meant either that the man had wanted to hide his identity or that his linen was washed habitually at home. Since there was no sign of any obliteration of marks it followed that the latter was the reasonable explanation. On the other hand, the tailor’s name had been deliberately removed from the suit. That and the scantiness of the man’s belongings pointed certainly to a desire on his part to conceal his identity.
Lastly—the dagger. It was a wicked little weapon in its viperish slenderness. The handle was of silver, about three inches long, and represented the figure of some saint, bearded and robed. Here and there it was touched with enamel in bright primitive colours such as adorn sacred images in Catholic countries. In general it was of a type fairly common in Italy and along the south coast of Spain. Grant handled it gingerly.
“How many people have had their hands on it?” he asked.
The police had commandeered it as soon as the man had arrived in hospital and it could be removed. No one had touched it since. But the expression of satisfaction was wiped from Grant’s face when the information was added that it had been tested for fingerprints and had been found blank. Not even a blurred one spoiled the shining surface of the smug saint.
“Well,” said Grant, “I’ll take these and get on.” He left instructions with Williams to take the dead man’s fingerprints and to have the revolver examined for peculiarities. To his own sight it seemed to be an exceedingly ordinary service revolver of a type which since the war has been as common in Britain as grandfather clocks. But, as has been said, Grant liked to hear authorities on their own subject. He himself took a taxi and spent the rest of the day interviewing the seven persons who had been nearest the unknown when he collapsed the previous night.
As the taxi bore him hither and thither he let his thought play round and over the situation. He had not the faintest hope that these people he interviewed would be of use to him. They had one and all denied any knowledge of the man when first questioned, and they were not likely to alter their minds as to that now. Also, if any of them had seen a companion with the dead man previously, or had noticed anything suspicious, they would have been only too ready to say so. It was Grant’s experience that ninety-nine people proffered useless information where one was silent. Again, the surgeon had said that the man had been stabbed some time before it had been noticed, and no assassin was going to stay in the immediate neighbourhood of his victim until the deed was discovered. Even if the possibility of a bluff had occurred to the murderer, the chances of a connexion between himself and his victim being established were too good to allow a sensible man—and a man bent on self-preservation is usually shrewd enough—to indulge in it. No, the man who did it had left the queue some time before. He must find some one who had noticed the murdered man before his death and had seen him in converse with some one. There was, of course, the possibility to be faced that there had been no converse, that the murderer had merely taken up a place behind his victim and slipped away when the thing was done. In that case he had to find some one who had seen a man leave the queue. That should not be difficult. The Press could be called to help.
Idly he considered the type of man it would be. No thorough Englishman used such a weapon. If he used steel at all he took a razor and cut a person’s throat. But his habitual weapon was a bludgeon, and, failing that, a gun. This was a crime that had been planned with an ingenuity and executed with a subtlety that was foreign to an Englishman’s habit of thought. The very femininity of it proclaimed the Levant, or at the very least one used to Levantine habits of life. A sailor perhaps. An English sailor used to the Mediterranean ports might have done it. But then, would a sailor have been likely to think of anything so subtle as the queue? He would have been more likely to wait for a dark night and a lonely street. The picturesqueness of the thing was Levantine. An Englishman was obsessed with the desire to hit. The manner of the hitting did not habitually concern him.
That made Grant think of motive, and he considered the more obvious ones: theft, revenge, jealousy, fear. The first was ruled out; the man’s pockets could have been picked half a dozen times by an expert practitioner in such a crowd, without any more violence than a fly bestows in alighting. Revenge or jealousy? Most probably—Levantines were notoriously vulnerable in their feelings; an insult rankled for a lifetime, a straying smile on the part of their adored, and they ran amok. Had the man with the hazel eyes—he had, undoubtedly, been attractive—come between a Levantine and his girl?
For no reason whatever Grant did not think so. He did not for a moment lose sight of the possibility, but—he did not think so. There remained fear. Was the fully loaded revolver prepared for the man who slid that sliver of steel into the owner’s back? Had the dead man intended to shoot the Levantine on sight, and had the assassin known it and lived in terror? Or was it the other way about? Was it the dead man who had carried a weapon of defence which had not availed him? But then there was the unknown man’s desire to slough his identity. A loaded revolver in these circumstances pointed to suicide. But if he contemplated suicide, why postpone it while he went to the play? What other motive induced a man to make himself anonymous? A brush with the police—arrest? Had he intended to shoot some one and, afraid of not getting away, made himself nameless? That was possible.
It was fairly safe, at least, to suppose that the dead man and the man whom Grant had mentally christened the Levantine had known each other sufficiently well to knock sparks from each other. Grant had very little belief in secret societies as the origins of picturesque murders. Secret societies delighted in robbery and blackmail and all the more squalid methods of getting something for nothing, and there was seldom anything picturesque about them, as he knew from bitter experience. Moreover, there were no impressive secret societies in London at present, and he hoped they would not start. Murder to order bored him stiff. What interested him was the possible play of mind on mind, of emotion on emotion. Like the Levantine and the Unknown. Well he must do his best to find out who the Unknown was—that would give him a line on the Levantine. Why had no one claimed him? It was early yet, of course. He might be recognized by some one at any minute. After all, he had only been “missing” to his people for the space of a night, and not many people rush to see a murdered man because their son or brother has stayed out for the night.
With patience and consideration and an alert mind, Grant interviewed the seven people he had set out to see—quite literally to see. He had not anticipated receiving information from them directly, but he wanted to see them for himself and to sum them up. He found them all going about their various business with the exception of Mrs. James Ratcliffe, who was prostrate in bed and being attended by the doctor, who deplored the nervous shock she had received. Her sister—a
