"Thank you—no, I didn't get in until seven o'clock or so," answered
Allerdyke. "So I'd a quiet evening."
"No news, I suppose?" asked Fullaway, going vigorously forward with his breakfast. "Heard nothing from the police authorities?"
"Nothing," replied Allerdyke. "I suppose they're doing things in their own way, as usual."
"Just so," assented Fullaway. "Well, it's an odd thing to me that nobody comes forward to make some sort of a shot at that reward! Most extraordinary that the man of the Eastbourne Terrace affair should have been able to get clean away without anybody in London having seen him—or at any rate that the people who must have seen him are unable to connect him with the murder of that woman. Extraordinary!"
"It's all extraordinary," said Allerdyke. He took up a newspaper which Fullaway had thrown down and began to talk of some subject that caught his eye, until Fullaway rose, pleaded business, and went off to his rooms upstairs. When he had gone Allerdyke reconsidered matters. So Fullaway had been out the night before, had he—dining out, and at a theatre? Then, of course, it would be quite midnight before he got in. Therefore, presumably, he did not know that his secretary was about his rooms—and entering and leaving another suite close by. No—Fullaway knew nothing—that seemed certain.
The remembrance of what he had seen sent Allerdyke, as soon as he had breakfasted, to the hall of the hotel, and to the register of guests. There was no one at the register at that moment, and he turned the pages at his leisure until he came to what he wanted. And there it was—in plain black and white—
NUMBER 53. MR. JOHN VAN KOON. NEW YORK CITY, U.S.A.
CHAPTER XXI
THE YOUNG MAN WHO LED PUGS
Allerdyke, with a gesture peculiar to him, thrust his hands in the pockets of his trousers, strolled away from the desk on which the register lay open, and going over to the hall door stood there a while, staring out on the tide of life that rolled by, and listening to the subdued rattle of the traffic in its ceaseless traverse of the Strand. And as he stood in this apparently idle and purposeless lounging attitude, he thought—thought of a certain birthday of his, a good thirty years before, whereon a kind, elderly aunt had made him a present of a box of puzzles. There were all sorts of puzzles in that box—things that you had to put together, things that had to be arranged, things that had to be adjusted. But there was one in particular which had taken his youthful fancy, and had at the same time tried his youthful temper—a shallow tray wherein were a vast quantity of all sorts and sizes of bits of wood, gaily coloured. There were quite a hundred of those bits, and you had to fit them one into the other. When, after much trying of temper, much exercise of patience, you had accomplished the task, there was a beautiful bit of mosaic work, a picture, a harmonious whole, lovely to look upon, something worthy of the admiring approbation of uncles and aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers. But—the doing of it!