By lowering factory and grimy wall; by squalid streets peeled of uncleanliness in the teeth of the bitter blast; by low-browed taverns, that gushed red on us a moment and were gone, he sped with crooked paces, and I followed.
Then he stopped so suddenly that I almost stumbled against him, and we were standing at the mouth of a shadowy court, and overhead a hiccoughing gas jet made a gibbering terror of his white face.
“Where are we?” I said, and he answered:
“Where we naturally take up the clew—outside a police station.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
FROM THE DEPTHS.
Into a dull, gusty room, barren of everything but the necessities of its office, we walked and stopped.
Distempered walls; a high desk, a railed dock, where creatures were put to the first question like an experimental torture; black windows high in the wall and barred with network of wire, as if to break into fragments the sunshine of hope; a double gas bracket on an arm hanging from the ceiling, grimly suggestive of a gallows; a fireplace whose warmth was ruthlessly boxed in—such was the place we found ourselves in. Its ministers figured in the persons of a half-dozen constables sitting officially yawning on benches against the walls, and looking perplexingly human shorn of their helmets; and in the presence of a high priest, or inspector, and his clerk who sat respectively at the desk and a table placed alongside of it.
The latter rose upon our entrance and asked our business.
“It’s plain enough,” said Duke. “I have received, by post, an hour ago, a letter from a young woman threatening suicide. I don’t know her address, but the postmark is this district.”
The officer motioned us to the higher authority at the desk.