“Yes, and a very pleasant country it is for one of my interests,” said Mr. Ludgrove. “I have secured several very interesting specimens, and I hope to find others to-morrow.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the landlord. “Flowers and that aren’t much in my line. I’ve got a bit of garden, but it’s mostly vegetables. Pity the rain came on like it did.”
“Oh, I don’t mind the rain,” replied Mr. Ludgrove. “Walking about the country as I do, I am compelled to take the weather as it comes. I can only get away from London during the week-ends.”
“I see you come from London by what you wrote in the book,” said the landlord slowly. “It’s Praed Street you lives in, isn’t it?”
Mr. Ludgrove smiled. The eagerness in the landlord’s voice was very transparent. “Won’t you sit down and have a drink with me?” he said. “Yes, I live in Praed Street. Perhaps you saw in the paper that we had some very unusual happenings there a few weeks ago.”
“I did, sir, and it was seeing you came from there made me think of them,” replied the landlord. He went back to the bar and got the drinks, which he brought to the fire. It immediately appeared that his interest in crime, as reported in the newspapers, was at least as keen as that of the late Mr. Tovey. But never before had it been his fortune to meet one who had personally known the victims of two unsolved murders.
“It’s a queer thing,” he said, “but a couple of days or so before this Mr. Tovey was murdered, I was polishing the glasses behind the bar in this very room, when I looked out of the window and sees a sailor, big chap he was, walking past. I didn’t rightly catch sight of his face, but he was carrying a bag and going towards London. Looked as if he was on the tramp, I thought. I never thought about it again till I sees the police advertising for this sailor chap, then, of course, I tells the constable at the Police Station up the village. I never heard whether they traced him or not.”
“You didn’t notice if he had a black beard or a scar?” suggested Mr. Ludgrove mildly.
“No, I didn’t see his face,” replied the landlord, with an air of a man brushing aside an irrelevant detail. “But that’s just like the police. You give ’em a bit of valuable information, and they hardly ever says thank you for it.”
The landlord, warming to his work, and finding Mr. Ludgrove an excellent listener, developed theory after theory, each more far-fetched than the last. It was not until the clock pointed to closing time, that he rose from his chair with evident reluctance. “You mark my words, there’s more in it than meets the eye,” he said darkly, as he leant over the table, “as my old dad, what kept this house afore I did, used to say, if there’s anything you can’t rightly understand, there’s bound to be a woman in it. Look at the things what you sees in the papers every week. How do you know that these two poor chaps as were killed wasn’t both running after the same woman? And if she was married couldn’t ’er ’usband tell you something about why they was murdered? You think it over, sir, when you gets back to London.”