“Come out of that!” cried Angel.
Then something in the man’s attitude arrested his speech. He slipped forward and pulled back the curtain.
“Connor!” he cried.
Connor it was indeed, stone dead, with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.
CHAPTER XIV
OPENING THE SAFE
The four men stood in silence before the body. Jimmy bent and touched the hand.
“Dead!” he said.
Angel made no reply, but switched on every light in the room. Then he passed his hands rapidly through the dead man’s pockets; the things he found he passed to one of the other detectives, who laid them on the table.
“A chisel, a jemmy, a center-bit, lamp, pistol,” enumerated Angel. “It is not difficult to understand why Connor came here; but who killed him?”
He made a close inspection of the apartment. The windows were intact and fastened, there were no signs of a struggle. In the sitting-room there were muddy footmarks, which might have been made by Connor or his murderer. In the center of the room was a small table. During Angel’s frequent absences from his lodgings he was in the habit of locking his two rooms against his servants, who did their cleaning under his eye. In consequence, the polished surface of the little table was covered with a fine layer of dust, save in one place where there was a curious circular clearing about eight inches in diameter. Angel examined this with scrupulous care, gingerly pulling the table to where the light would fall on it with greater brilliance. The little circle from whence the dust had disappeared interested him more than anything else in the room.