Thorndyke shook his head. “No,” he replied. “I have not been able to get a photograph of him.”
“Then you have an exact description of him?”
“No,” was the reply. “I have no description of him at all.”
The Superintendent banged his hat on the table. “Then what the deuce have you got, sir?” he demanded distractedly. “You must have something, you know, if you are going to test these witnesses on the question of identification. You haven’t got a photograph, you haven’t got a description, and you can’t have the man himself because he is at present reposing in a little terra-cotta pot in the form of bone-ash. Now, what have you got?”
Thorndyke regarded the exasperated Superintendent with an inscrutable smile and then glanced at Polton, who had just stolen into the room and was now listening with an expression of such excessive crinkliness that I wrote him down an accomplice on the spot.
“You had better ask Polton,” said Thorndyke. “He is the stage manager on this occasion.”
The Superintendent turned sharply to confront my fellow apprentice, whose eyes thereupon disappeared into a labyrinth of crow’s-feet.
“It’s no use asking me, sir,” said he. “I’m only an accessory before the fact, so to speak. But you’ll know all about it when the ladies arrive—and I rather think I hear ’em coming now.”
In corroboration, light footsteps and feminine voices became audible, apparently ascending our stairs. We hastily seated ourselves while Polton took his station by the door and Thorndyke said to me in a low voice:
“Remember, Gray, no comments of any kind. These witnesses must act without any sort of suggestion from anybody.”