Then a small voice, that sounded quite near to the pavement, shrilled from the spot where the crowd pressed thickest.
It came from a wee, wizened girl-child, who looked as if she might be ten and talked with the precision and self-possession of twenty—so pitifully sharpened do the wits of the children of the streets become in the struggle for existence.
"It's my Granny—that's who it is. She's got a lodger in the back room, Black Sam. Somebody gave him two shillings yesterday, and he came home drunk last night, quite early, and went to bed. I know he was drunk, for two gentlemen came to see him about ten, but Granny told them he was in bed, and drunk, in the back room, and they couldn't see him till this morning. I heard a funny noise in his room in the night. It woke me up. It sounded like someone trying to scream, and not being able to; and I thought I heard people moving about. So I woke Granny up and told her so, but she was cross with me for waking her, and said it was only his drunken snoring I'd heard. But just now, as Black Sam didn't get up, Granny and I went into his room. The window was wide open, and Sam was lying on the floor all over blood. And please, sir, there's a big hole in his throat, and he's quite cold, and I think he's dead."
"Black Sam!" Surely I had heard that name before? Why, yes, and no longer ago than on the preceding evening. When the leader of the gang in the opium den had asked me who it was that directed me there, I had replied, "A negro match-seller, whom I saw outside Poplar station." His comment had been "Ah! a negro match-seller—and outside Poplar station. I think I know the fellow. We must look into this!"
Then his confederates had whispered together, the only words that I had overheard being the dead man's name, "Black Sam." Two of the gang had then left the house, as if on some errand. That was, I remembered—for the clock struck soon after—just before ten. It was at ten that two men had called to see the negro. They had been told that he had come home drunk, and was lying in the back room asleep. Was it they who had entered that room by the window in the dead of the night and murdered him?
CHAPTER IX.
"DEAD MAN'S POINT."
As the murder of Black Sam plays no further part in this story, I do not propose to describe in detail the ghastly scene which presented itself when, in company with the police officer, I entered the death chamber.
Sensational enough, and more than enough, this narrative of the hunting down of a master-criminal must necessarily be, without the gratuitous description of scenes—no matter how impressive—which have no direct bearing upon my story. Of the murder of Black Sam it was necessary to tell as much as I have told, if the reader is to follow, step by step, my first meeting, and my final struggle with, the man around whom the narrative centres. When to what I have already related, I add that, whatever the motive for the crime, the subsequent investigation established the fact that the motive was at least not robbery, we may dismiss the murder of Black Sam from memory, and pass on to my efforts to get upon the trail of the man who was the instigator of the crime—the man whose acquaintance I had so eventfully, if casually, made on the occasion of my visit to the opium den.
My first step must, of course, be to get into communication with Grant. Until I had seen him, and learnt his views, I did not feel free seriously to enter upon the case at all. That he already had it in hand, I had been told by New Scotland Yard, and that he was making progress was clear from the fact that, disguised as a Chinaman, he had contrived to enter the meeting-place of the gang, possibly even to overhear some of their plans. It is not likely that, without very strong actual or presumptive evidence of their guilt, he would have bidden me make my way to the nearest police station, and ask, in his name, that a body of men be sent to make prisoners of the entire gang. Grant was a private detective, not a New Scotland Yard man; but he was perhaps the only private detective whom New Scotland Yard can be said to have recognised. He had been of such frequent assistance to the chiefs of the Criminal Investigation Department, and his relations with them were so friendly, that his standing had come to be in a sense semi-official, and no reasonable request by him was likely to be refused.