“First I knew of it was from my boy Ted. You see, it was like this. Ted’s very sweet on Ivy, and a nice girl she is, too. None of your fly-away misses, but a nice steady girl what’ll make her way in the world. Ted brought her to my place for dinner, then they spends the afternoon at the pictures, and comes back for supper. About half-past nine or maybe quarter to ten Ivy says it’s time she was getting home, and she and Ted goes out together. I was thinking Ted was a long time a-seeing of her home, since it was a shocking night, and they weren’t likely to dawdle on the way, when in he comes white as a sheet, and all of a tremble. ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘Ivy’s father’s been murdered.’
“Well, I thought the boy had gone off his head. ‘Murdered?’ I says. ‘Why, what do you mean? Who’d want to murder Jim Tovey, I’d like to know?’ Then after a bit I manages to get the whole story out of him. It seems that when he and Ivy got to Lisson Grove, Jim Tovey was out. He’d been called to St. Martha’s to identify an accident case. He stayed there for a bit, when suddenly the door bell rings. Mrs. Tovey answers it, and in comes a policeman, with a message that Mrs. Tovey and Ivy were wanted at St. Martha’s at once. Mrs. Tovey goes upstairs to put her things on, and Ivy goes with her. Then the policeman asks Ted if he’s a friend of the family, and when he says he is, tells him that poor Jim has just been murdered in this very street, not a couple of hundred yards from where we’re sitting now.”
Mr. Ludgrove nodded. “A most extraordinary affair altogether,” he commented.
“Ah, you may well call it extraordinary,” agreed Mr. Copperdock significantly, “there’s more in it than meets the eye, that’s what I says. Well, as soon as I hears this I thinks of those two poor women, and off I goes to St. Martha’s to see if I could be of any use. There I finds a police inspector who asks me who I was. When he hears I was Jim Tovey’s oldest friend he tells me all about it. It seems that a policeman who had his eye on the lads coming out of the Express Train—they’re a rough crowd, as you know—saw a man fall down and then heard a lot of hollering. Thinking there was a scrap he went over and found Jim Tovey on the ground with a lot of fellows standing round him. It didn’t take him long to find out that Jim was dead, but nobody seemed to know how it happened. There was a crowd on the pavement outside the pub, and it was a foggy sort of night that you couldn’t see very clearly in.”
“I know,” put in Mr. Ludgrove. “I was out about that time myself. I always go for a walk after supper, rain or fine; it’s the only chance of exercise I get.”
“Yes, I know you do,” agreed Mr. Copperdock. “I often wonder you don’t catch your death of cold. Well, the policeman calls up the ambulance, and they gets poor Jim round to St. Martha’s. There they very soon finds out what’s the matter. There’s a great long knife, in shape rather like a butcher’s skewer, but without a handle, sticking into him. And the point’s right through his heart.”
Mr. Copperdock paused dramatically. There was no doubt that he was thoroughly enjoying himself, and Mr. Ludgrove was far too good a listener to interrupt him.
“I took Mrs. Tovey and Ivy home,” he continued, “and the Inspector told me he’d come and have a chat with me later. It was past midnight when he turned up, and then of course he wanted to know all about poor Jim, and whether I knew of anybody who had a grudge against him. He couldn’t have come to a better man, for I know a lot about Jim Tovey that I don’t suppose he ever told anybody else. You’ve heard of the Express Train gang, I suppose?”
Mr. Ludgrove nodded. “It consists, I believe, of a number of young men who frequent the racecourses, and who meet in the evenings at the Express Train,” he replied.
“They were the fellows outside the pub when poor old Jim was murdered,” continued Mr. Copperdock significantly. “Now the police, who know a lot more than most people give them credit for, know all about that gang. They’d had every man jack of them rounded up before the Inspector came to see me and put them through it. As the Inspector said, if Jim Tovey had been beaten up with bits of iron pipe, or something like that, he could have understood it. But the knife trick didn’t sound like the gang, somehow. None of them had the guts for deliberate murder like that, and there seemed no reason why they should have set upon Jim Tovey. He’d nothing to do with racing, and he wasn’t likely to be carrying a lot of money about with him.”