The two, followed by a murmuring chorus, ascended the stairs.
"Stand back, please," rapped the physician tartly, turning upon their following. "Will someone send for the police and ring up Scotland Yard? This is not a peep-show."
Abashed, the curious ones fell back, and Simons and Rohscheimer went upstairs alone. Most of the people employed in those offices left sharp at six, but a little group of belated workers from an upper floor were nervously peeping in at an open door bearing the words:
Douglas Graham
They stood aside for the doctor, who entered briskly, Rohscheimer at his heels, and closed the door behind him. A chilly and indefinable something pervaded the atmosphere of Moorgate Place a something that floats, like a marsh mist, about the scene of a foul deed.
The outer office was in darkness, as was that opening off it on the left; but out from the inner sanctum poured a flood of light.
Douglas Graham's private office was similar to the private offices of a million other business men, but on this occasion it differed in one dread particular.
Stretched upon the fur rug before the American desk lay a heavily built figure, face downward. It was that of a fashionably dressed man, one who had been portly, no longer young, but who had received a murderous thrust behind the left shoulder-blade, and whose life had ebbed in the grim red stream that stained the fur beneath him.
With a sharp glance about him, the doctor bent, turned the body and made a rapid examination. He stood up almost immediately, shrugging slightly.
"Dead!"