"A trip to Tormouth should throw some light on it," he thought. "If it can be shown that he is actually in love—again—already——" and as he so thought, the cab ran out of St. James's Street into Pall Mall.
"Look! quick! There—in that cab!" hissed a man at that moment to a girl with whom he was lurking in a doorway deep under the shadow of an awning near the corner. "Look!"
"That's him!"
"Sure? Look well!"
"The very man!"
"Well, of all the fatalities!"
The cab dashed out of sight, and the man—Chief Inspector Winter—clapped his hand to his forehead in a spasm of sheer distraction and dismay. The woman with him was the murdered actress's cook, Bertha Seward, the same whom Inspector Clarke had one morning seen in earnest talk with Janoc under the pawnbroker's sign in St. Martin's Lane.
Winter walked away from her, looking on the ground, seeking his lost wits there. Then suddenly he turned and overtook her again.
"And you swear to me, Miss Seward," he said gravely, "that that very man was with your mistress in her flat on the evening of the murder?"
"I would know him anywhere," answered the slight girl, looking up into his face with her oblique Chinese eyes that were always half shut as if shy of light. "I thought to myself at the time what a queer, perky person he was, and what working eyes the little man had, and I wondered who he could be. That's the very man in that cab, I'm positive."