GEORGE TWIDDEL.”
“From this I conclude that Dr Twiddel is on the festive side of forty,” he reflected; “there are elements of mystery and a general atmosphere of alcohol about it, but that’s all, I’m afraid.”
He put it back in the drawer, but the bill he slipped into his pocket.
“And now,” thought he, “it is time I made the first move.”
After waiting for a minute or two to make sure that everything was quiet, he gently stepped out into a little linoleum-carpeted hall. On the right hand was the front door, on the left two others that must, he thought, open into rooms on the back. He chose the nearer at a venture, and entered boldly. It was quite dark. He closed the door again softly, struck a match, and looked round the room. It seemed to be Dr Twiddel’s dining- and sitting-room.
“Pipes, photographs, well-sat-in chairs,” he observed, “and a window.”
He pulled aside the blind and looked out into the darkness of a strip of back-garden. For a minute he listened intently, but no sound came from the house. Then he threw up the sash and scrambled out. It was quite dark by this time: he was enclosed between two rows of vague, black houses, with bright windows here and there, and chimney-cans faintly cutting their uncouth designs among a few pale London stars. The space between was filled with the two lines of little gardens and the ranks of walls, and in the middle the black chasm of a railway cutting.
A frightened cat bolted before him as he hurried down to the foot of the strip, but that was all the life he saw. He looked over the wall right into the deep crevasse. A little way off, on the one hand, hung a cluster of signal-lights, and the shining rails reflected them all along to [pg 117] the mouth of a tunnel on the other. Turning his head this way and that, there was nothing to be seen anywhere else but garden wall after garden wall.
“It’s a choice between a hurdle-race through these gardens, a cat-walk along this wall, and a descent into the cutting,” he reflected. “The walls look devilish high and the cutting devilish deep. Hang me if I know which road to take.”
While he was still debating this somewhat perplexing question, he felt the ground begin to quiver under him. Through the hum of London there gradually arose a louder roar, and in a minute the head-lights of an engine flashed out of the tunnel. One after another a string of bright carriages followed it, each more slowly than the carriage in front, till the whole train was at a standstill below him with the red signal-lamp against it.