"No, I can't put a name to him," said the lieutenant after a long scrutiny which he did not relax. "And yet there is a look about him that seems vaguely familiar. That, though, is not quite the word for it. I mean that I believe that I have seen him before."
"What about the French window in the reading room at the Club?" suggested Mr. Mallory. "Does that help your memory?"
"Of course!" came the quick rejoinder. "It is the chap who called for Chermside the other morning and walked away with him along the Parade. A cockney visitor, I should judge by his clothes. And, by Jove, I expect he's the man who is missing from the Plume Hotel. The club steward knew him by sight as staying there."
A frosty gleam shone in the old diplomatist's eyes. "You are probably correct in the latter surmise," he said. "But in any case we are in agreement as to his being Chermside's acquaintance. That was what I wanted to get from you."
"Not a very reputable acquaintance, I should imagine," said the great manufacturer, looking thoughtfully down at the bedraggled tawdriness of the dead man's attire. "If our young friend from India hadn't been vouched for by Travers Nugent, I should have put this poor creature down as a dun or a money-lender's tout. His features are distinctly Hebraic. I wonder how he got himself drowned in that shallow pool. A drop too much, eh, and a stumble in the dark?"
But Reggie Beauchamp, regardless of his immaculate flannels, had plunged knee-deep into the mire. His sailor's eye, used to note every detail, had perceived something that had escaped the two shore-going gentlemen with sight impaired by years of office work.
"He wasn't drowned!" he exclaimed, and then, moderating his voice so that it should not reach the maid-servants on the deserted picnic ground, he added: "His throat has been cut from ear to ear. By Jove——"
But Reggie pulled himself up all short, and had no more to say. He had remembered the cry, weird and long-drawn, which Enid and he had heard from their cosy retreat at the marsh-side two nights ago. And he had remembered something else of even graver and more personal import—a reminiscence of the prowl in the dusk which he discreetly forbore from disclosing till he should have had an opportunity for consulting his fair partner in that escapade.