“It would do!” he muttered to himself; “but not here. The thing might be fished up again. Even if it could be made to appear suicide, there’d be the chance of an identification and connection with me. More than chance—a dead, damnable certainty.
“That would be damnable! I should have to appear at a coroner’s quest to explain.
“Bah! what use in speculating? Explanation, under the circumstances, would be simply condemnation.
“Impossible! The thing can’t be done here!
“But it can be done,” he continued; “and in this canal, too. It has been done, no doubt, many a time. Yes, silent sluggard! if you could but speak, you might tell of many a plunge made into your sluggish waves, alike by the living and the dead!
“You will suit for my purpose; but not here. I know the place, the very place—by the Park Road bridge.
“And the time, too—late at night. Some dark night, when the spruce tradesmen of Wellington Road have gone home to the bosom of their families.
“Why not this very night?” he asked himself, stepping nervously out from the laurustinus, and glaring at the moon, whose thin crescent flickered feebly through cumulus clouds. “Yonder farthing dip will be burnt out within the hour, and if that sky don’t deceive me, we’ll have a night dark as doom. A fog, too, by heavens!” he added, raising himself on tiptoe, and making survey of the horizon to the east. “Yes! there’s no mistake about that dun cloud coming up from the Isle of Dogs, with the colour of the Thames mud upon it.
“Why not to-night?” he again asked himself, as if by the question to strengthen him in his terrible resolve. “The thing can’t wait. A day may spoil everything. If it is to be done, the sooner the better. It must be done!
“Yes, yes; there’s fog coming over that sky, if I know aught of London weather. It will be on before midnight God grant it may stay till the morning!”