Of course, I had to make some sort of examination. He was an extremely tall and thin individual. He must have been well over six feet three. He was dark and very cadaverous-looking. In fact, I don’t suppose he’d ever looked so cadaverous in his life. He was wearing a trench coat.
It wasn’t difficult to tell what he’d died of. He’d been shot through the back. I found the hole just under the right scrofula, or scalpel – what is shoulder-blade, anyway? Oh, clavicle – stupid of me – well, that’s where it was, and the bullet had evidently gone through into the lung. I say ‘evidently,’ and leave it at that.
There were no papers in his pockets, and no tailor’s name on his clothes, but there was a note-case, with nine pounds in it. Altogether a most unpleasant business. Of course, it doesn’t do to question the workings of Providence, but one couldn’t help wishing it hadn’t happened. It was just a little mysterious, too – er – who had killed him. It wasn’t likely that the girl had or she wouldn’t have been joy-riding about the country with him; and if someone else had murdered him why hadn’t she mentioned it? Anyway, she hadn’t and she’d gone, so one couldn’t do anything for the time being. No telephone, of course. I just locked up the garage and went to bed. That was two o’clock.
Next morning I woke early, for some reason or other, and it occurred to me as a good idea to go and have a look at things – by daylight, and before Mrs. Selston turned up. So I did. The first thing that struck me was that it had snowed heavily during the night, because there were no wheel tracks or footprints, and the second was that I’d left the key in the garage door. I opened it and went in. The place was completely empty. No car, no body, no nothing. There was a patch of grease on the floor where I’d dropped the candle, otherwise there was nothing to show I’d been there before. One of two things must have happened: either some people had come along during the night and taken the car away, or else I’d fallen asleep in front of the fire and dreamt the whole thing.
Then I remembered the whisky glasses.
They should still be in the sitting-room. I went back to look, and they were, all three of them. So it hadn’t been a dream and the car had been fetched away, but they must have been jolly quiet over it.
The girl had left her glass on the mantel-piece, and it showed several very clearly defined finger-marks. Some were mine, naturally, because I’d fetched the glass from the kitchen and poured out the drink for her, but hers, her finger-marks, were clean, and mine were oily, so it was quite easy to tell them apart. It isn’t necessary to point out that this glass was very important. There’d evidently been a murder, or something of that kind, and the girl must have known all about it, even if she hadn’t actually done it herself, so anything she had left in the way of evidence ought to be handed over to the police; and this was all she had left. So I packed it up with meticulous care in an old biscuit-box out of the larder.
When Mrs. Selston came I settled up with her and came back to Town. Oh, I called on the landlord on the way and told him I’d ‘let him know’ about the bungalow. Then I caught my train, and in due course drove straight to Scotland Yard. I went up and saw my friend there. I produced the glass and asked him if his people could identify the marks. He said: ‘Probably not,’ but he sent it down to the fingerprint department and asked me where it came from. I said: ‘Never you mind; let’s have the identification first.’ He said: ‘All right.’
They’re awfully quick, these people – the clerk was back in three minutes with a file of papers. They knew the girl all right. They told me her name and showed me her photograph; not flattering. Quite an adventurous lady, from all accounts. In the early part of her career she’d done time twice for shop-lifting, chiefly in the book department. Then she’d what they call ‘taken up with’ a member of one of those race-gangs one sometimes hears about.
My pal went on to say that there’d been a fight between two of these gangs, in the course of which her friend had got shot. She’d managed to get him away in a car, but it had broken down somewhere in Norfolk. So she’d left it and the dead man in someone’s garage, and had started off for Norwich in a lorry. Only she never got there. On the way the lorry had skidded, and both she and the driver – a fellow called Williams – had been thrown out, and they’d rammed their heads against a brick wall, which everyone knows is a fatal thing to do. At least, it was in their case.
I said: ‘Look here, it’s all very well, but you simply can’t know all this; there hasn’t been time – it only happened last night.’
He said: ‘Last night be blowed! It all happened in February, nineteen nineteen. The people you’ve described have been dead for years.’
I said: ‘Oh!’
And to think that I might have stuck to that nine pounds!
Stacy Aumonier
Where Was Wych Street?
In the public bar of the Wagtail, in Wapping, four men and a woman were drinking beer and discussing diseases. It was not a pretty subject, and the company was certainly not a handsome one. It was a dark November evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar