"Perhaps I was a little hasty," Godfrey admitted, and I suspected that, whatever his thoughts, he had made up his mind to keep them to himself. "I'm not going to theorise until I've got something to start with. The facts seem to point to suicide; but if he swallowed prussic acid, where's the bottle? He didn't swallow that too, did he?"
"Maybe we'll find it in his clothes," suggested Simmonds.
Thus reminded, Goldberger fell to work looking through the dead man's pockets. The clothes were of a cheap material and not very new, so that, in life, he must have presented an appearance somewhat shabby. There was a purse in the inside coat pocket containing two bills, one for ten dollars and one for five, and there were two or three dollars in silver and four five-centime pieces in a small coin purse which he carried in his trousers' pocket. The larger purse had four or five calling cards in one of its compartments, each bearing a different name, none of them his. On the back of one of them, Vantine's address was written in pencil.
There were no letters, no papers, no written documents of any kind in the pockets, the remainder of whose contents consisted of such odds and ends as any man might carry about with him—a cheap watch, a pen-knife, a half-empty packet of French tobacco, a sheaf of cigarette paper, four or five keys on a ring, a silk handkerchief, and perhaps some other articles which I have forgotten—but not a thing to assist in establishing his identity.
"We'll have to cable over to Paris," remarked Simmonds. "He's French, all right—that silk handkerchief proves it."
"Yes—and his best girl proves it, too," put in Godfrey.
"His best girl?"
For answer, Godfrey held up the watch, which he had been examining. He had opened the case, and inside it was a photograph—the photograph of a woman with bold, dark eyes and full lips and oval face—a face so typically French that it was not to be mistaken.
"A lady's-maid, I should say," added Godfrey, looking at it again. "Rather good-looking at one time, but past her first youth, and so compelled perhaps to bestow her affections on a man a little beneath her—no doubt compelled also to contribute to his support in order to retain him. A woman with many pasts and no future—"
"Oh, come," broke in Goldberger impatiently, "keep your second-hand epigrams for the Record. What we want are facts."