Collected works of j s f.., p.883
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 883
“I hope we shall get your Cousin Thomas as easily as we’ve got you, my woman,” he answered. “Bring Mrs. Capstick up to the police station, Johnson, and we’ll get to work.”
The Silhouette
CHAPTER I
OF THE MANY thousands of utterly ordinary-looking individuals who journeyed into the city from various suburban retreats every workday morning Limmis was, by a long way, the most ordinary and least likely to attract attention. He was the sort of young man whom no one would have ever troubled to look at twice. If you happened to look at Limmis once you knew — if you really happened to think about the thing at all — that you could see his like a hundred times in the next half mile of crowded street. He was inconspicuous, colourless, common — as common as peas or potatoes. His face was amiably honest; his eyes were inoffensively intelligent; his hair was neither one thing nor another; everything about him, even to his business suit of serviceable tweed, was of a type and pattern so well known that it could not possibly excite more interest than is excited by one blade of grass in a ten-acre meadow. You said of Limmis — if you wasted time by saying anything about him — that he was just one of the crowd and nothing more.
But one may easily fall into grave error by generalizing too speedily about first impressions. Limmis — Horace Sinclair Limmis — was a young man of dual personality. He was not a Jekyll, it is true, nor a Hyde, which is equally true, but he led — very successfully — a double life.
From his hour of rising in the morning until that of his tea-dinner in the evening Limmis passed a day of strict conventionality. He ate his breakfast, he caught a city train, he performed the duties of a clerk in a mercantile house from nine-thirty to five-thirty; he did all the things which are pertinent to this walk of life with thoroughness. But when he had returned home to the small house in the quiet street in the Kew district, wherein he resided with his parents and two sisters, and had eaten his chief meal of the day, Limmis became a changed character. He began, then, to enjoy himself — and his pleasure was all the greater because it was secret. Nobody knew anything about it. From the time that Limmis went out of an evening until the hour of his return none of his home circle knew what he did with himself.
What Limmis really did with himself would probably have seemed of a deadly dulness to most people. But it was of a peculiar excitement to him to be perpetually on the lookout for adventure. He was not at all certain how adventure was to come, or what shape it would take, but he kept eyes and ears open for it. He frequented the river bank — being a capable swimmer, it seemed to him that he might some day have the chance of rescuing from drowning a rich man who would leave him all his money, or a beautiful girl who would reward him with her hand. He sat in dark corners in obscure bar parlours, hoping that he might overhear the details of some plot — expressed, of course, in cryptic language which he would translate for himself. He hung about lonely places in Richmond Park, and Wimbledon Common, and Putney Heath — there was always the chance of a murder, or, at any rate, an assault. It was as the breath of life to Limmis to see two suspicious-looking characters putting their heads together in a corner, and he got into insignificant trouble more than once by hanging around such characters — who, of course, invariably turned out to be a couple of citizens enjoying a quiet confabulation over a pipe of tobacco. And, at least once he became an object of suspicion to the police, and had much difficulty in persuading an incredulous constable that his sole object in looking rather narrowly around a detached residence, whose proprietor was away at the seaside, was to make certain that it was not at that moment being investigated by a burglar.
“You leave them things alone,” said the constable sourly and severely, eyeing Limmis with distinct disfavour. “ ’Tain’t none of your business to find out if the property’s safe or if it isn’t. You follow your nose ‘ome, and leave our affairs to us, d’yer see? We don’t want no bloomin’ amachoor ‘tecs round here. ‘Op it!”
Limmis hopped it, smiling to himself. Having been bred on what is commonly called detective fiction he had a very low opinion of the intellectual powers of the average policeman. When this particular officer so rudely interrupted him he was theorizing on what he should do if he found that a burglar really was in that house, and he smiled because he knew that no member of the force, uniformed or in plain clothes, could possibly theorize as he himself could.
“Amateur, indeed!” chuckled Limmis. “Ah, wait till I get a proper chance! Then—”
Limmis suddenly got a proper chance. Walking across one of the loneliest glades in Richmond Park one bright moonlighted night he became aware that something which looked like the body of a man lay a few yards ahead of him. It was suggestively motionless — so motionless that Limmis felt himself tremble a little as he stole forward to look at it. But did not wonder at the immobility any more when he saw that over the whiteness of the glazed shirt, revealed by a low-cut waistcoat, a dull stain of crimson was slowly spreading before his very eyes.
CHAPTER II
THE SIGHT OF that crimson stain produced in Limmis certain emotions which he would have found it very difficult to define. He recognized that here, at last, actually at his very toes, was the adventure that he had often sought — it was there, veritably there, and in the very grimmest form in which adventure can come. This, he was sure, was a murder — only a murdered man could lie in that curious, sudden-stricken attitude. With a curious celerity of apprehension Limmis realized the whole scene. He was staring at a man, obviously a foreigner, well dressed, who lay in the grass, his white face reflecting the moonlight, his arms thrown wide on either side, in a dreadful stillness. That stillness suddenly weighed on Limmis’ nerves — it was so heavy, so deep. He started a little when his own foot, timidly moving forward, pressed a dried twig and cracked it.
He went up to the still figure at last, bent over it, finally knelt at its side. Eventually he touched the dead man’s forehead — a dark, swarthy forehead, around which masses of dusky hair were tossed. There was the slightest trace of warmth there, and the limp hand, on which Limmis presently laid his own, was also slightly warm. And Limmis suddenly lifted his eyes from the dead and gazed around him in futile search of something living.
“Must have been — just now!” he muttered. “Still warm! Gad! They can’t be far off!”
It was at that moment that Limmis saw the shadow. At his back, a yard or two away, was a coppice, one of the many which make oases of foliage in the wide expanses of Richmond Park. It was fenced in by rails; immediately behind the spot on which Limmis knelt at the dead man’s side there was a stretch of railing unbacked by any woodland; from beyond it the vivid moonlight poured its full, silvery radiance upon the close-cropped turf which lay around the body. And as Limmis looked up and about he saw, for one brief second, the sharply-cut silhouette of a shadow — the shadow of a man’s head and shoulders. There was a high-crowned, foreign-looking hat, there was its steeple, dented at the top, there were its wide, stretching brims. And beneath the brims were two other projections, which Limmis knew to be the shadows of a pair of unusually long and pointed moustaches.
Even as Limmis looked this silhouette wavered, moved, disappeared. He sprang to his feet, rushed to the fence, looked over, and saw nothing beyond a rabbit, which scuttered away in the bracken. He heard the slight noise which the rabbit made, but he heard no other noises. The stillness fell again, and all he heard was the thumping of his own heart.
“Queer! Queer!” said Limmis. “I saw it — saw it!”
He drew away from the fence and looked right and left along it. It extended a good eighty yards in one direction, a good sixty in another; for the most part it was thickly packed with wood and undergrowth. Limmis knew, moreover, that that particular coppice extended deeply in the rear, eventually dropping into a widespread dell, from which there were a hundred ways of passing out into the loneliest parts of the park. He shook his head.
“Might as well look for a needle in a haystack!” reflected Limmis. “I can’t tackle the job single-handed!”
Then it struck him that it was impossible to deal with any feature of the job single-handed; it was one of those things which a man cannot well keep to himself. He would have to go and tell the police of his discovery, that he was certain. And he moved off to the nearest gates to find a constable, and, having gone a yard or two, turned back to have another look at the corpse.
It was during this second and more searching inspection that Limmis saw that whoever had stabbed the dead man had subsequently used the point of the dagger or stiletto to scratch upon the forehead a curious mark — a couple of straight, upright lines, topped by another, more deeply cut. The blood was congealing in this disfigurement, and on the high, marble-white brow it made the figure of a letter T. Limmis puzzled over that as he rapidly crossed the lonely park. But he suddenly received illumination.
“That’s it, of course!” he exclaimed. “That’s it. T for traitor! Good!”
CHAPTER III
DURING THE NEXT fortnight Horace Sinclair Limmis was a good deal heard of. His name became quite familiar to the public; his photograph was reproduced in the newspapers. The police authorities, a magistrate, a coroner, and his jury, a whole crowd of officials of one sort and another knew Limmis as the principal witness in the Richmond Park Mystery. He suddenly developed into a centre of attraction. People made excuses for calling upon his father and mother.
At the milk and bun shop in the city where Limmis took his noontide refreshment, crowds of wide-eyed fellow clerks gathered about him, and trim-waisted waitresses grew tired of pointing him out. He upset the office. Everybody, from the manager to the youngest boy, wanted to hear and re-hear all the details. Finally the heads of the firm gave him a holiday, grimly remarking that he could come back when the coroner and the magistrate had quite done with him. Thenceforward, during a couple of glorious weeks, Limmis was seen in the coroner’s court and in the magistrates’ court. When he was not there he exhibited himself elsewhere.
But Limmis, whether he was being examined by coroner or magistrate, did not tell all he knew. The case, as presented before the authorities, resolved itself into this: the murdered man — who had been killed instantaneously by a dagger thrust — was found, upon being searched, to have nothing whatever upon him that could lead to identification. The publication of his photograph, however, established the fact that he was an Italian who had arrived in London on the day of the murder, had taken a room in Soho, dined at a Soho restaurant, and had left that restaurant at 7 o’clock in the evening, in company with another Italian, who, according to the evidence of a waiter, had introduced himself to him. This man the police arrested, and found on him certain matters which might have belonged to the dead man. But the accused quickly cleared himself. It was quite true, he said, that he introduced himself to the stranger; he did so because he saw that he was a compatriot who had a poor knowledge of English. It was also true that certain Italian money found on him had belonged to the dead man; he had given him English money in exchange for it. Certain picture post cards of Genoa, unused, also found on him, had been given to him by the dead man; it so happened that they both came from near Genoa. But as regards his further concerns with the victim, they were short. He had walked from Soho to Charing Cross Metropolitan Station with him, and had there put him into a train for Richmond Park — after which he had never seen him again. All this the arrested man proved easily and conclusively, bringing irrefutable evidence as to his own movements on the evening of the murder. And when he was discharged the mystery of that murder remained as great as it had been when Limmis first announced it. Nothing transpired, nobody came forward; the coroner’s jury returned a verdict against some person or persons unknown, and the public began to itch for a newer sensation. And Limmis resumed the even tenor of his way, secretly conscious — and proudly so — that he was in possession of a secret. For neither to police nor to press representative, to coroner, nor to magistrate had Limmis said one word about the mysterious shadow silhouetted on the grass. That — that was his own affair.
Limmis cherished a deep design. He meant to solve this mystery himself. He had been obliged, the law being what it is, to call in the police, so to speak, but the mystery was his. In Limmis’ opinion, the police would never find out any more about this affair; what was more, he felt sure, that they would be all the better pleased if it came to be forgotten. But Limmis did not intend to forget. He was going to get at the truth — quietly, secretly, surely. When he had got at it — why, then he would make the most of his glory. Perhaps he would write a book about it; at any rate the newspaper people would write a good deal about him. And possibly — it had always been a dream of his — he would chuck clerkship in the city and start business on his own as a crime expert.
In Limmis’ opinion, the murder of the unknown Italian — you could call him that, thought Limmis, though as a matter of fact, the dead man had left a name, Marco Ciappi, behind him at the lodging he had taken, where, however, he had left nothing else — was the climax of a vendetta; he possessed a shelf full of sensational stories about it. Or it might be the work of the Black Hand — he had also read largely on that subject. That mark on the forehead clearly proved that whoever killed Ciappi had afterwards branded him as a traitor — this was all in proper accordance with the traditions of the secret societies. The man whose shadow he had seen projected on the sward was, of course, of some secret society. And the obvious thing to do was to find him.
Limmis knew that before you can find anything you have to seek for it. He would have to seek for this man. And — also obviously — he must seek for him in a likely place. That likely place seemed to be in Soho, or, at any rate, Soho mixed up with Hatton Garden and Clerkenwell, and perhaps a bit of Tottenham Court Road. Thus it came about that Limmis, instead of going home respectably when office hours were over, went along to the streets which lie between Shaftesbury Avenue and Oxford Street, to keep his eyes open for a man who sported an unusually fierce moustache and wore a steeple-crowned sombrero.
This was a new life for Limmis. He became familiar with a number of things which he had never heard of before. He discovered that it is possible to live quite a continental sort of existence in the very heart of London. He began to frequent queer little cafés and restaurants, where you heard very little English, but a great many strange languages and dialects, from Czech to the patois of the Levant: he ate strange dishes, he drank cheap wines; he watched curious-looking men and many women of a sort he had never seen before. He began to wonder how on earth London had come to be the dumping ground of all sorts of suspicious-looking foreigners, hailing from Bordeaux or Constantinople. But at the end of many weeks of this he had still not seen anything approaching the similitude of what he sought for.
It never occurred to Limmis that he himself might become an object, not perhaps of suspicion, but of interest. It never crossed his mind that because he regularly patrolled Greek Street and Dean Street, spent an hour or two in one or other of the many foreign restaurants in that neighbourhood, somebody might begin to wonder what he was doing there, he who was so obviously out of place. For that quarter, as everybody knows who knows London, has, outside its own folk, no denizens or frequenters who are not of the artistic sort — poets with long hair, actors with short hair, painters who affect grotesque clothing and odd manners, ladies of the ballet, chorus girls and young men from Fleet Street in search for an hour of giddy delight of a Paris-and-water sort. Now, Limmis looked anything but a follower of the arts; also he looked anything but a follower of youthful actresses. Nevertheless he was vastly surprised and taken aback, when as he sat in a quiet corner of a quiet restaurant one evening, a girl, who had, as it were, casually dropped into a seat on the other side of his table, and immediately dispatched the waiter for some small matter of refreshment, suddenly bent forward and addressed him.
“I sat down here because I want to speak to you,” she whispered. “Please talk to me as if you know me. I have been watching you for some time — weeks.”
Limmis, whose homely, freckled face had flushed under this abrupt address, stared and started.
“Me!” he said. “Me!”
“You,” she answered. “You are Mr. Limmis. You were a witness in the Richmond mystery crime. You found Ciappi in Richmond Park — dead. And since then you have spent a lot of time about this district. You have been looking for somebody. Isn’t it so?”
Limmis, instead of immediately answering the direct question, looked at the questioner. She was a pretty girl, dark, olive-skinned, with beautiful hair and eyes. She was quietly but becomingly dressed, and she was certainly not English, though she spoke the language readily, if with a slight, rather attractive accent. And Limmis, who had never in his life spoken to a foreign woman, and scarcely to a foreign man, instantly felt all a true-born Englishman’s suspicion of anything hailing from beyond the Channel. In spite of the girl’s prettiness, his manner became somewhat surly and his speech ungracious.
“What about it?” said Limmis. “I don’t talk of my affairs to people I don’t know.”
The waiter returned just then with an ice, and the girl trifled with it until he had gone away again. Then she treated Limmis to a smile which would have melted the heart of an anchorite.
“Don’t be offended,” she said. “Just think for a moment. A woman’s assistance is always worth having.”
“Don’t know as I made any remark about being in need of any assistance,” replied Limmis. “No recollection of it, anyhow.”
“All the same, you’d be glad of it,” said the girl, calmly. “You see, I’m pretty sure of what you’re after.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Limmis, loftily. “Indeed! Wear my thoughts painted on my forehead, I suppose? Ah, I ain’t so sure of what you’re after!”
The Silhouette
CHAPTER I
OF THE MANY thousands of utterly ordinary-looking individuals who journeyed into the city from various suburban retreats every workday morning Limmis was, by a long way, the most ordinary and least likely to attract attention. He was the sort of young man whom no one would have ever troubled to look at twice. If you happened to look at Limmis once you knew — if you really happened to think about the thing at all — that you could see his like a hundred times in the next half mile of crowded street. He was inconspicuous, colourless, common — as common as peas or potatoes. His face was amiably honest; his eyes were inoffensively intelligent; his hair was neither one thing nor another; everything about him, even to his business suit of serviceable tweed, was of a type and pattern so well known that it could not possibly excite more interest than is excited by one blade of grass in a ten-acre meadow. You said of Limmis — if you wasted time by saying anything about him — that he was just one of the crowd and nothing more.
But one may easily fall into grave error by generalizing too speedily about first impressions. Limmis — Horace Sinclair Limmis — was a young man of dual personality. He was not a Jekyll, it is true, nor a Hyde, which is equally true, but he led — very successfully — a double life.
From his hour of rising in the morning until that of his tea-dinner in the evening Limmis passed a day of strict conventionality. He ate his breakfast, he caught a city train, he performed the duties of a clerk in a mercantile house from nine-thirty to five-thirty; he did all the things which are pertinent to this walk of life with thoroughness. But when he had returned home to the small house in the quiet street in the Kew district, wherein he resided with his parents and two sisters, and had eaten his chief meal of the day, Limmis became a changed character. He began, then, to enjoy himself — and his pleasure was all the greater because it was secret. Nobody knew anything about it. From the time that Limmis went out of an evening until the hour of his return none of his home circle knew what he did with himself.
What Limmis really did with himself would probably have seemed of a deadly dulness to most people. But it was of a peculiar excitement to him to be perpetually on the lookout for adventure. He was not at all certain how adventure was to come, or what shape it would take, but he kept eyes and ears open for it. He frequented the river bank — being a capable swimmer, it seemed to him that he might some day have the chance of rescuing from drowning a rich man who would leave him all his money, or a beautiful girl who would reward him with her hand. He sat in dark corners in obscure bar parlours, hoping that he might overhear the details of some plot — expressed, of course, in cryptic language which he would translate for himself. He hung about lonely places in Richmond Park, and Wimbledon Common, and Putney Heath — there was always the chance of a murder, or, at any rate, an assault. It was as the breath of life to Limmis to see two suspicious-looking characters putting their heads together in a corner, and he got into insignificant trouble more than once by hanging around such characters — who, of course, invariably turned out to be a couple of citizens enjoying a quiet confabulation over a pipe of tobacco. And, at least once he became an object of suspicion to the police, and had much difficulty in persuading an incredulous constable that his sole object in looking rather narrowly around a detached residence, whose proprietor was away at the seaside, was to make certain that it was not at that moment being investigated by a burglar.
“You leave them things alone,” said the constable sourly and severely, eyeing Limmis with distinct disfavour. “ ’Tain’t none of your business to find out if the property’s safe or if it isn’t. You follow your nose ‘ome, and leave our affairs to us, d’yer see? We don’t want no bloomin’ amachoor ‘tecs round here. ‘Op it!”
Limmis hopped it, smiling to himself. Having been bred on what is commonly called detective fiction he had a very low opinion of the intellectual powers of the average policeman. When this particular officer so rudely interrupted him he was theorizing on what he should do if he found that a burglar really was in that house, and he smiled because he knew that no member of the force, uniformed or in plain clothes, could possibly theorize as he himself could.
“Amateur, indeed!” chuckled Limmis. “Ah, wait till I get a proper chance! Then—”
Limmis suddenly got a proper chance. Walking across one of the loneliest glades in Richmond Park one bright moonlighted night he became aware that something which looked like the body of a man lay a few yards ahead of him. It was suggestively motionless — so motionless that Limmis felt himself tremble a little as he stole forward to look at it. But did not wonder at the immobility any more when he saw that over the whiteness of the glazed shirt, revealed by a low-cut waistcoat, a dull stain of crimson was slowly spreading before his very eyes.
CHAPTER II
THE SIGHT OF that crimson stain produced in Limmis certain emotions which he would have found it very difficult to define. He recognized that here, at last, actually at his very toes, was the adventure that he had often sought — it was there, veritably there, and in the very grimmest form in which adventure can come. This, he was sure, was a murder — only a murdered man could lie in that curious, sudden-stricken attitude. With a curious celerity of apprehension Limmis realized the whole scene. He was staring at a man, obviously a foreigner, well dressed, who lay in the grass, his white face reflecting the moonlight, his arms thrown wide on either side, in a dreadful stillness. That stillness suddenly weighed on Limmis’ nerves — it was so heavy, so deep. He started a little when his own foot, timidly moving forward, pressed a dried twig and cracked it.
He went up to the still figure at last, bent over it, finally knelt at its side. Eventually he touched the dead man’s forehead — a dark, swarthy forehead, around which masses of dusky hair were tossed. There was the slightest trace of warmth there, and the limp hand, on which Limmis presently laid his own, was also slightly warm. And Limmis suddenly lifted his eyes from the dead and gazed around him in futile search of something living.
“Must have been — just now!” he muttered. “Still warm! Gad! They can’t be far off!”
It was at that moment that Limmis saw the shadow. At his back, a yard or two away, was a coppice, one of the many which make oases of foliage in the wide expanses of Richmond Park. It was fenced in by rails; immediately behind the spot on which Limmis knelt at the dead man’s side there was a stretch of railing unbacked by any woodland; from beyond it the vivid moonlight poured its full, silvery radiance upon the close-cropped turf which lay around the body. And as Limmis looked up and about he saw, for one brief second, the sharply-cut silhouette of a shadow — the shadow of a man’s head and shoulders. There was a high-crowned, foreign-looking hat, there was its steeple, dented at the top, there were its wide, stretching brims. And beneath the brims were two other projections, which Limmis knew to be the shadows of a pair of unusually long and pointed moustaches.
Even as Limmis looked this silhouette wavered, moved, disappeared. He sprang to his feet, rushed to the fence, looked over, and saw nothing beyond a rabbit, which scuttered away in the bracken. He heard the slight noise which the rabbit made, but he heard no other noises. The stillness fell again, and all he heard was the thumping of his own heart.
“Queer! Queer!” said Limmis. “I saw it — saw it!”
He drew away from the fence and looked right and left along it. It extended a good eighty yards in one direction, a good sixty in another; for the most part it was thickly packed with wood and undergrowth. Limmis knew, moreover, that that particular coppice extended deeply in the rear, eventually dropping into a widespread dell, from which there were a hundred ways of passing out into the loneliest parts of the park. He shook his head.
“Might as well look for a needle in a haystack!” reflected Limmis. “I can’t tackle the job single-handed!”
Then it struck him that it was impossible to deal with any feature of the job single-handed; it was one of those things which a man cannot well keep to himself. He would have to go and tell the police of his discovery, that he was certain. And he moved off to the nearest gates to find a constable, and, having gone a yard or two, turned back to have another look at the corpse.
It was during this second and more searching inspection that Limmis saw that whoever had stabbed the dead man had subsequently used the point of the dagger or stiletto to scratch upon the forehead a curious mark — a couple of straight, upright lines, topped by another, more deeply cut. The blood was congealing in this disfigurement, and on the high, marble-white brow it made the figure of a letter T. Limmis puzzled over that as he rapidly crossed the lonely park. But he suddenly received illumination.
“That’s it, of course!” he exclaimed. “That’s it. T for traitor! Good!”
CHAPTER III
DURING THE NEXT fortnight Horace Sinclair Limmis was a good deal heard of. His name became quite familiar to the public; his photograph was reproduced in the newspapers. The police authorities, a magistrate, a coroner, and his jury, a whole crowd of officials of one sort and another knew Limmis as the principal witness in the Richmond Park Mystery. He suddenly developed into a centre of attraction. People made excuses for calling upon his father and mother.
At the milk and bun shop in the city where Limmis took his noontide refreshment, crowds of wide-eyed fellow clerks gathered about him, and trim-waisted waitresses grew tired of pointing him out. He upset the office. Everybody, from the manager to the youngest boy, wanted to hear and re-hear all the details. Finally the heads of the firm gave him a holiday, grimly remarking that he could come back when the coroner and the magistrate had quite done with him. Thenceforward, during a couple of glorious weeks, Limmis was seen in the coroner’s court and in the magistrates’ court. When he was not there he exhibited himself elsewhere.
But Limmis, whether he was being examined by coroner or magistrate, did not tell all he knew. The case, as presented before the authorities, resolved itself into this: the murdered man — who had been killed instantaneously by a dagger thrust — was found, upon being searched, to have nothing whatever upon him that could lead to identification. The publication of his photograph, however, established the fact that he was an Italian who had arrived in London on the day of the murder, had taken a room in Soho, dined at a Soho restaurant, and had left that restaurant at 7 o’clock in the evening, in company with another Italian, who, according to the evidence of a waiter, had introduced himself to him. This man the police arrested, and found on him certain matters which might have belonged to the dead man. But the accused quickly cleared himself. It was quite true, he said, that he introduced himself to the stranger; he did so because he saw that he was a compatriot who had a poor knowledge of English. It was also true that certain Italian money found on him had belonged to the dead man; he had given him English money in exchange for it. Certain picture post cards of Genoa, unused, also found on him, had been given to him by the dead man; it so happened that they both came from near Genoa. But as regards his further concerns with the victim, they were short. He had walked from Soho to Charing Cross Metropolitan Station with him, and had there put him into a train for Richmond Park — after which he had never seen him again. All this the arrested man proved easily and conclusively, bringing irrefutable evidence as to his own movements on the evening of the murder. And when he was discharged the mystery of that murder remained as great as it had been when Limmis first announced it. Nothing transpired, nobody came forward; the coroner’s jury returned a verdict against some person or persons unknown, and the public began to itch for a newer sensation. And Limmis resumed the even tenor of his way, secretly conscious — and proudly so — that he was in possession of a secret. For neither to police nor to press representative, to coroner, nor to magistrate had Limmis said one word about the mysterious shadow silhouetted on the grass. That — that was his own affair.
Limmis cherished a deep design. He meant to solve this mystery himself. He had been obliged, the law being what it is, to call in the police, so to speak, but the mystery was his. In Limmis’ opinion, the police would never find out any more about this affair; what was more, he felt sure, that they would be all the better pleased if it came to be forgotten. But Limmis did not intend to forget. He was going to get at the truth — quietly, secretly, surely. When he had got at it — why, then he would make the most of his glory. Perhaps he would write a book about it; at any rate the newspaper people would write a good deal about him. And possibly — it had always been a dream of his — he would chuck clerkship in the city and start business on his own as a crime expert.
In Limmis’ opinion, the murder of the unknown Italian — you could call him that, thought Limmis, though as a matter of fact, the dead man had left a name, Marco Ciappi, behind him at the lodging he had taken, where, however, he had left nothing else — was the climax of a vendetta; he possessed a shelf full of sensational stories about it. Or it might be the work of the Black Hand — he had also read largely on that subject. That mark on the forehead clearly proved that whoever killed Ciappi had afterwards branded him as a traitor — this was all in proper accordance with the traditions of the secret societies. The man whose shadow he had seen projected on the sward was, of course, of some secret society. And the obvious thing to do was to find him.
Limmis knew that before you can find anything you have to seek for it. He would have to seek for this man. And — also obviously — he must seek for him in a likely place. That likely place seemed to be in Soho, or, at any rate, Soho mixed up with Hatton Garden and Clerkenwell, and perhaps a bit of Tottenham Court Road. Thus it came about that Limmis, instead of going home respectably when office hours were over, went along to the streets which lie between Shaftesbury Avenue and Oxford Street, to keep his eyes open for a man who sported an unusually fierce moustache and wore a steeple-crowned sombrero.
This was a new life for Limmis. He became familiar with a number of things which he had never heard of before. He discovered that it is possible to live quite a continental sort of existence in the very heart of London. He began to frequent queer little cafés and restaurants, where you heard very little English, but a great many strange languages and dialects, from Czech to the patois of the Levant: he ate strange dishes, he drank cheap wines; he watched curious-looking men and many women of a sort he had never seen before. He began to wonder how on earth London had come to be the dumping ground of all sorts of suspicious-looking foreigners, hailing from Bordeaux or Constantinople. But at the end of many weeks of this he had still not seen anything approaching the similitude of what he sought for.
It never occurred to Limmis that he himself might become an object, not perhaps of suspicion, but of interest. It never crossed his mind that because he regularly patrolled Greek Street and Dean Street, spent an hour or two in one or other of the many foreign restaurants in that neighbourhood, somebody might begin to wonder what he was doing there, he who was so obviously out of place. For that quarter, as everybody knows who knows London, has, outside its own folk, no denizens or frequenters who are not of the artistic sort — poets with long hair, actors with short hair, painters who affect grotesque clothing and odd manners, ladies of the ballet, chorus girls and young men from Fleet Street in search for an hour of giddy delight of a Paris-and-water sort. Now, Limmis looked anything but a follower of the arts; also he looked anything but a follower of youthful actresses. Nevertheless he was vastly surprised and taken aback, when as he sat in a quiet corner of a quiet restaurant one evening, a girl, who had, as it were, casually dropped into a seat on the other side of his table, and immediately dispatched the waiter for some small matter of refreshment, suddenly bent forward and addressed him.
“I sat down here because I want to speak to you,” she whispered. “Please talk to me as if you know me. I have been watching you for some time — weeks.”
Limmis, whose homely, freckled face had flushed under this abrupt address, stared and started.
“Me!” he said. “Me!”
“You,” she answered. “You are Mr. Limmis. You were a witness in the Richmond mystery crime. You found Ciappi in Richmond Park — dead. And since then you have spent a lot of time about this district. You have been looking for somebody. Isn’t it so?”
Limmis, instead of immediately answering the direct question, looked at the questioner. She was a pretty girl, dark, olive-skinned, with beautiful hair and eyes. She was quietly but becomingly dressed, and she was certainly not English, though she spoke the language readily, if with a slight, rather attractive accent. And Limmis, who had never in his life spoken to a foreign woman, and scarcely to a foreign man, instantly felt all a true-born Englishman’s suspicion of anything hailing from beyond the Channel. In spite of the girl’s prettiness, his manner became somewhat surly and his speech ungracious.
“What about it?” said Limmis. “I don’t talk of my affairs to people I don’t know.”
The waiter returned just then with an ice, and the girl trifled with it until he had gone away again. Then she treated Limmis to a smile which would have melted the heart of an anchorite.
“Don’t be offended,” she said. “Just think for a moment. A woman’s assistance is always worth having.”
“Don’t know as I made any remark about being in need of any assistance,” replied Limmis. “No recollection of it, anyhow.”
“All the same, you’d be glad of it,” said the girl, calmly. “You see, I’m pretty sure of what you’re after.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Limmis, loftily. “Indeed! Wear my thoughts painted on my forehead, I suppose? Ah, I ain’t so sure of what you’re after!”
