The Ponson case

by Freeman Wills Crofts

‘Then drive me there,’ said Tanner, entering the vehicle.

The district they reached was a miserable, decaying part of town. The streets were narrow—mere lanes, and the buildings high and unusually drab and grimy even for a London backwater. The houses had been good at one time, but the place had now degenerated into a slum. ‘What in the name of wonder,’ thought Tanner, as he stood looking round at the depressing prospect, ‘could have brought Sir William here?’

He paid off his driver and began to investigate his surroundings. He was at a cross-roads, the broader street being labelled Dunlop Street, the other Pate’s Lane. In Dunlop Street were a few shops—a bar at the corner, a tobacconist’s, a grocer’s—all small, mean, and dirty. Pate’s Lane appeared entirely given up to tenement houses.

Tanner felt utterly at a loss. He could form no conception of Sir William’s possible objective. Nor could he envisage any line of inquiry which might lead him to his goal. He seemed to be up against a blank wall, through which he could see no means of penetrating.

He wondered if a former servant or mill worker might not live in the neighbourhood, with whom the manufacturer might have had business. But if so, and if by some incredible chance Tanner were to hit on the person in question, he felt he would be no further on, and that all knowledge of Sir William’s visit would almost certainly be concealed.

However, he would learn nothing by standing in the street, and he walked to the bar at the nearest corner and entered.

The landlord was a big, red-faced man with a bluff manner. Tanner, after ordering some ale, engaged him in conversation, deftly pumping him. But he learned nothing. The man had not seen Sir William, nor did the manufacturer’s name convey anything to him.

Tanner tried each of the other three corner shops of the cross-roads, but again without result. Then, thinking that small tobacconists and news-agents sometimes act as mediums between persons who do not wish their connection to be known, he called at all the shops of these kinds in the immediate neighbourhood. Again he was disappointed, as he was also when he visited the pawnbroker’s. By this time it was getting late, and he turned his steps homeward, intending to return on the next morning and begin a house-to-house visitation in the vicinity of the cross streets.

As he walked down the road towards Gower Street, he noticed three buildings which he thought looked more the kind of place for a rendezvous than any he had yet seen. Two were shabby and rather squalid looking restaurants, the third a building slightly larger and more pretentious than its neighbours. In faded letters it bore the legend ‘Judd’s Family & Commercial Hotel’. Tanner decided that, before beginning on the houses of Pate’s Lane, he would try these three.

Next morning he drew blank in the first of the restaurants. A visit to the second was equally fruitless. But when he reached the hotel he had a stroke of luck.