He came to a pause presently, and, fumbling in his long coat, produced a cigarette case and a box of matches.
"I wonder if I really dare," he muttered, this time speaking in English slightly flavored with a foreign accent. "Surely no one can see me; surely I shall be safe in this well of a place. If only I could manage without matches."
But there has been no way yet invented of lighting tobacco without matches. As the match flared out the stranger's face was picked out clean and clear against the velvet background of the night. As if in full enjoyment of his tobacco, the man threw his head back and filled his lungs with the fragrant smoke. He had not yet dropped the match, so that its rays caught full the upturned face. So clearly did the face stand out that the whole action might have been conceived with the idea of giving the watchers a perfect view of it.
"What do you make of that?" Jack whispered excitedly. "Don't ask me to say, because I know the man as well as I know my own father. The point is, do you know him?"
"I should say that everybody in London does," Rigby responded, "seeing that the face has been glaring down on London for the past two months. Yonder man is Nostalgo and none other."
"No mistake about that," Jack said. "In that strange, weird light, what an awful face it is! And yet there is something about it, too, some half-pathetic suggestion that almost removes one's feelings of repulsion."
"I have noticed that, too," Rigby said. "But why did you not tell me that our mysterious friend was practically a hunchback?"
"But he wasn't," Jack protested. "I am absolutely certain that the man I found apparently dead close to Panton Square three nights ago was as straight and well set up as you or I. Why, I helped to put him in the ambulance; I saw his body laid out in the mortuary at Shannon Street police station. I am prepared to swear that that man was without a physical blemish, and I am quite sure that Inspector Bates will bear me out in this. And yet that man down there smoking his cigarette is as misshapen as Richard III."
As to this point there was no question. The man below was pacing quietly up and down the forecourt in the full enjoyment of his cigarette, and little heeding the curious watchers overhead. It was easy to see that, so far as physical development was concerned, he had been but ill-favored by fortune. One leg was considerably longer than the other, causing the fellow to shuffle along with a sideways motion not unlike that of a crab.
"Unless that fellow is a bold contortionist, we have evidently two Nostalgos to deal with," Rigby said thoughtfully. "And yet it seems impossible there can be two faces like that in the world. One thing is pretty certain--the supposed dead body you conveyed to Shannon Street police station the other night must have been very much alive. If we could only get away from here to follow him."