“It’s a pity,” observed Dick, deeply disappointed. “A first-class sensation of this sort don’t occur every day. Why, it’s worth four columns if a line.”
“Be patient,” Patterson urged. “You shall have an opportunity of publishing it before long, and I’ll see that you are a long way ahead of your contemporaries.”
“Don’t let the news agencies have a word. They always try and get in front of us,” said Cleugh, whose particular antagonists were the Central News and the Press Association, which possess facilities for the collection of news and its transmission by wire to the various newspapers that form one of the most marvellous organisations in unknown London.
“Leave it to me,” said the inspector. “As soon as it’s wise to let the public know anything I’ll give you permission to publish. The Comet shall be first in the field with it.”
“Very well,” answered Dick, satisfied with Patterson’s answer. That officer had been prominent a few years before in the investigations relative to those mysterious assassinations of women in Whitechapel, and was very friendly with “the Comet man,” as Cleugh was termed in the journal which he represented.
Many were the suggestions we put forth as to how the bodies of the victims could have thus been changed, but no theory we could advance seemed likely to have any foundation in fact.
The mystery was certainly one of the strangest that had ever puzzled the crime investigators of London. The cause of its discovery was a most remarkable incident, and at every turn as the investigation proceeded mystery seemed to follow upon mystery, until the whole affair presented so many curious features that a solution of the problem seemed utterly impossible.
I bent beside the body of the woman who, reclining in the armchair with one arm fallen by her side, presented the appearance of one asleep. Her presence there was a profound enigma. A thought, however, occurred to me at that moment. The dining-table below had been laid for three. Perhaps she was the third person.
For the greater part of an hour we remained in that house of grim shadows discussing the various phases of the astounding affair, until at last, about eleven, we all left, two constables in uniform being stationed within. So secretly had this search been carried out that the neighbours, though, perhaps, puzzled by Patterson’s inquiries, entertained no suspicion of any tragic occurrence. In Kensington Road all the shops facing Upper Phillimore Place were closed save the tobacconist’s and the frequent public-houses, the foot passengers were few, and at that hour the stream of taxis with homeward-bound theatre-goers had not yet commenced. Market garden carts from Hounslow or Feltham, piled high with vegetables, rumbled slowly past on their journey to Covent Garden, and a few empty motor-buses rattled along towards Hyde Park, but beyond all was quiet, for that great artery of Western London goes early to rest.
At the police-station we took leave of Patterson and Boyd, and entering a motor-bus at Kensington Church, arrived at our chambers shortly before midnight.