“It was a terrible affair,” he admitted, “and, as Mr. Bellamy has told you, it occurred within a few steps of my office. So far, too, the police seem completely at a loss.”
“Ah!” she went on, shaking her head, “your police, I am afraid they are not very clever. It is too bad, but I am afraid that it is so. Tell me, Mr. Laverick, is this, then, a very lonely spot where your offices are?”
“Not at all,” Laverick replied. “On the contrary, in the daytime it might be called the heart of the city—of the money-making part of the city, at any rate. Only this thing, you see, seems to have taken place very late at night.”
“When all the offices were closed,” she remarked.
“Most of them,” Laverick answered. “Mine, as it happened, was open late that night. I passed the spot within half-an-hour or so of the time when the murder must have been committed.”
“But that is terrible!” she declared, shaking her head. “Tell me, Mr. Laverick, if I drive to your office some morning you will show me this place,—yes?”
“If you are in earnest, Mademoiselle, I will certainly do so, but there is nothing there. It is just a passage.”
“You give me your address,” she insisted, “and I think that I will come. You are a stockbroker, Mr. Bellamy tells me. Well, sometimes I have a good deal of money to invest. I come to you and you will give me your advice. So! You have a card!”
Laverick found one and scribbled his city address upon it. She thanked him and once more held out the tips of her fingers.
“So I shall see you again some day, Mr. Laverick.”