AN UNRIVALLED PREPARATION
For Boots, Shoes, and All Leather
Goods
MANUFACTURED SOLELY BY
FERDINAND LOVETSKI
63 ESSEX ROW
SOHO
After all, the imaginative reporter had not been so far out when he figured those mysterious markings upon the dead man's shirt bosom to read "63 Essex Row," an address where one Ferdinand Lovetski once did manufacture a certain kind of blacking for boots, shoes, etc. Not that they really did stand for that, of course, or that this ingenious person had done anything more than work out as a solution to the riddle of the marks a name and an address that were eventually to come into the case—as they now had done—but in a totally different manner from what the author of the theory intended or supposed.
Of two things Cleek was certain beyond all question of error. First: that the dead man was not Ferdinand Lovetski—not in any way connected with Ferdinand Lovetski to be precise; second: that the markings on the shirt were not made with "Jetanola" or any other kind of blacking; and ingenious as the theory was, he was willing to stake his life that those marks no more stood for 63 Essex Row than they did for 21 Park Lane. For one thing, what would be the sense of smearing them on the dead man's shirt bosom if they merely stood for that? It was all very well for that imaginative reporter to suggest that it was a sign given by the assassin to the whole anarchistical brotherhood that a debt of vengeance had been paid and a traitor punished; but the brotherhood did not need any such sign. If the man were Lovetski it would know of his death without any such silly nonsense as that. It knew the men it "marked," and it knew when those men died, and by whose hand, too; and it did not go about placarding its victims with clues to their identity or signs of whose hands had directed the exterminating blow.