“Why, sir, he wrote that he’d jist remembered about some papers as he’d left behind the wainscot in his old den, and that he’d get the key and drop in at the old Clarges Street house on the way ’ome. Said he’d arrive in England either yesterday afternoon or this one, sir; but whichever it was, he’d wire me from Dover before he took the train. And he never done it, sir—my Gawd! he never done it in this world!”
“Good God!” Narkom flung out the words in a sort of panic, his lips twitching, his whole body shaking, his face like the face of a dead man.
“He never done it, I tell you!” pursued Dollops in an absolute tremble of fright. “I haven’t never had a blessed line; and now this here awful thing has happened. And if he done what he said he was a-goin’ to do—if he come to town and went to that house——”
If he said more, the clanging of a bell drowned it completely. Narkom had turned to his desk and was hammering furiously upon the call gong. A scurry of flying feet came up the outer passage, the door opened in a flash, and the porter was there. And behind him Lennard, the chauffeur, who guessed from that excited summons that there would be a call for him.
“The limousine—as quick as you can get her round!” said Narkom in the sharp staccato of excitement. “To the scene of the explosion in Clarges Street first, and if the bodies of the victims have been removed, then to the mortuary without an instant’s delay.”
He dashed into the inner room, grabbed his hat and coat down from the hook where they were hanging, and dashed back again like a man in a panic.
“Come on!” he said, beckoning to Dollops as he flung open the door and ran out into the passage. “If they’ve ‘done him in’—him!—if they’ve ‘got him’ after all——Come on! come on!”
Dollops “came on” with a rush; and two minutes later the red limousine swung out into the roadway and took the distance between Scotland Yard and Clarges Street at a mile-a-minute clip.
Arrival at the scene of the disaster elicited the fact that the remains—literally “remains,” since they had been well-nigh blown to fragments—had, indeed, been removed to the mortuary; so thither Narkom and Dollops followed them, their fears being in no wise lightened by learning that the bodies were undeniably those of men. As the features of both victims were beyond any possibility of recognition, identification could, of course, be arrived at only through bodily marks; and Dollops’s close association with Cleek rendered him particularly capable of speaking with authority regarding those of his master. It was, therefore, a source of unspeakable delight to both Narkom and himself, when, after close and minute examination of the remains, he was able to say, positively, “Sir, whatever’s become of him, praise God, neither of these here two dead men is him, bless his heart!”