“The police,” continued Dick meditatively, “hunted out evidence as to the identity and the status of the dead man, between the time of death and the holding of the inquest. Inspector Moon—he’s the Rotherhithe chap in charge of the case—advertised, or made inquiries, or got hold of the sister somehow. At all events she turned up yesterday and appeared at the inquest this very day.”
“Who is the sister?”
“An elderly shrimp of a woman with light hair and a shrill voice, and a pair of very hard blue eyes. She heard that her brother was murdered, or Moon hunted her up in some way, and willingly came forward with her story.”
“What is her story?”
“I’m just coming to it. What an impatient chap you are, Alan. Miss Grison—Louisa is her Christian name—keeps a shabby boarding-house in Bloomsbury, and is one of those people who have seen better days. It seems that her brother Baldwin was secretary to a person, whose name I shall tell you later, and was kicked out of his billet twenty years ago, because he couldn’t run straight.”
“What had he done?”
“I can’t say. Miss Grison wouldn’t confess, and as the story wasn’t pertinent to the murder she wasn’t pressed to confess. All she said was that her brother was an opium-smoker and after losing his billet drifted to Rotherhithe, where he could indulge in his vice. She tried to keep him respectable, and allowed him ten shillings a week to live on. But he sank lower and lower, so she saw very little of him. All she knew was that she sent the ten shilling postal order regularly every Friday so that Baldwin might get it on Saturday. He never visited her and he never wrote to her, but lived more or less like a hermit in Mother Slaig’s boarding-house, and went out every night to smoke opium in some den kept by a Chinaman called Chin-Chow. Miss Grison sobbed bitterly when she gave her evidence and insisted that her brother owed his degradation to the enmity of people.”
“What sort of people?”
“She didn’t particularize. He was weak rather than bad, she insisted, and when he lost his situation, he lost heart also. At all events he devoted himself to the black smoke, and lived in the Rotherhithe slum, until he was found dead by the old hag who keeps the house.”
“Did Miss Grison’s evidence throw any light on the crime?”