"Not here, Mrs Flak," he said sharply; and without changing her expression of vacuous good-nature, the woman meekly replied, "No, sir."
Dr Stone led the way into the inner room and closed the door behind them. A man, asleep, insensible, or dead, lay on the bed, his face half hidden in bandages.
"This is the position," explained the doctor, speaking very rapidly, for his time was mapped out with as little waste as there is to be found between the squares on a chess board. "This man went out of here a few hours ago and walked straight into an empty motor 'bus that was going round this way. That's how they all put it: he walked right into the thing. Why? He was a sober enough man, an attendant of some kind at one of the west end clubs. Because, as I have good reason to suppose, he was thinking absorbingly of something else.
"Well, they carried him in here; it ought to have been the hospital, of course, but it was at his own doorstep it took place, you see, and it doesn't really matter, because to-morrow morning——!"
"He will die then?" asked Hampden in a whisper, interpreting the quick gesture.
"Oh, he will die as sure as his head is a cracked egg-shell. Between midnight and dawn, I should say. But before the end I look confidently for an interval of consciousness, or rather sub-consciousness. If I am wrong I shall have kept you up all night for nothing; if I am right you will probably hear something that he wants to say very much."
"Whatever was in his mind when he met with the accident?"
"That is my conviction. There has already been an indication of partial expression. Curiously enough, I have had two exactly similar cases, and this is going just the same way. In one it was a sum of money a man had banked under another name to keep it from his wife and for his children; in the second it was a blow struck in a scuffle, and an innocent man was doing penal servitude for it."
"That is what you wished to have some one here for chiefly, then?" asked Hampden.
"Everything, practically. You see the kind of people around? The wife is a fool; the neighbours are the class of maddening dolts who leave a suicide hanging until a policeman comes to cut him down. They would hold an orgie in the next room. In excitement the women fly to gin as instinctively as a nun flies to prayer. Order them out if they come, but I don't think that they will trouble you after I have spoken to the woman as I go. If there is anything to be caught it will have to be on the hop, so to speak. It may be a confession, a deposition of legal value, or only a request; one cannot guess. Questioning, when the sub-conscious stage is reached, might lead to something. It's largely a matter of luck, but intelligence may have an innings."