“Sorry you’ve been having a bad turn, old man,” said Parker, vaguely sympathetic; “you’re looking a bit seedy.”
“Charles,” said Lord Peter, in a voice entirely void of expression, “I am going away for a couple of days because I can be no use to you in London. What has got to be done for the moment can be much better done by you than by me. I want you to take this”—he folded up his writing and placed it in an envelope—“to Scotland Yard immediately and get it sent out to all the workhouses, infirmaries, police stations, Y.M.C.A.’s and so on in London. It is a description of Thipps’s corpse as he was before he was shaved and cleaned up. I want to know whether any man answering to that description has been taken in anywhere, alive or dead, during the last fortnight. You will see Sir Andrew Mackenzie personally, and get the paper sent out at once, by his authority; you will tell him that you have solved the problems of the Levy murder and the Battersea mystery”—Mr. Parker made an astonished noise to which his friend paid no attention—“and you will ask him to have men in readiness with a warrant to arrest a very dangerous and important criminal at any moment on your information. When the replies to this paper come in, you will search for any mention of St. Luke’s Hospital, or of any person connected with St. Luke’s Hospital, and you will send for me at once.
“Meanwhile you will scrape acquaintance—I don’t care how—with one of the students at St. Luke’s. Don’t march in there blowing about murders and police warrants, or you may find yourself in Queer Street. I shall come up to town as soon as I hear from you, and I shall expect to find a nice ingenuous Sawbones here to meet me.” He grinned faintly.
“D’you mean you’ve got to the bottom of this thing?” asked Parker.
“Yes. I may be wrong. I hope I am, but I know I’m not.”
“You won’t tell me?”
“D’you know,” said Peter, “honestly I’d rather not. I say I may be wrong—and I’d feel as if I’d libelled the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“Well, tell me—is it one mystery or two?”
“One.”
“You talked of the Levy murder. Is Levy dead?”