Spargo shook his head again.
“He’s not there, Breton,” he said. “He’s gone!”
Breton stared at the journalist as if he had just announced that he had seen Mr. Septimus Elphick riding down Fleet Street on a dromedary. He seized Spargo’s elbow.
“Come on!” he said. “I have a key to Mr. Elphick’s door, so that I can go in and out as I like. I’ll soon show you whether he’s gone or not.”
Spargo followed the young barrister down the corridor.
“All the same,” he said meditatively as Breton fitted a key to the latch, “he’s not there, Breton. He’s—off!”
“Good heavens, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!” exclaimed Breton, opening the door and walking into the lobby. “Off! Where on earth should he be off to, when he’s made an appointment with you for eleven, and—Hullo!”
He had opened the door of the room in which Spargo had met Elphick and Miss Baylis the night before, and was walking in when he pulled himself up on the threshold with a sharp exclamation.
“Good God!” he cried. “What—what’s all this?”
Spargo quietly looked over Breton’s shoulder. It needed but one quick glance to show him that much had happened in that quiet room since he had quitted it the night before. There stood the easy-chair in which he had left Elphick; there, close by it, but pushed aside, as if by a hurried hand, was the little table with its spirit case, its syphon, its glass, in which stale liquid still stood; there was the novel, turned face downwards; there, upon the novel, was Elphick’s pipe. But the rest of the room was in dire confusion. The drawers of a bureau had been pulled open and never put back; papers of all descriptions, old legal-looking documents, old letters, littered the centre-table and the floor; in one corner of the room a black japanned box had been opened, its contents strewn about, and the lid left yawning. And in the grate, and all over the fender there were masses of burned and charred paper; it was only too evident that the occupant of the chambers, wherever he might have disappeared to, had spent some time before his disappearance in destroying a considerable heap of documents and papers, and in such haste that he had not troubled to put matters straight before he went.