The sharp-featured little man sitting at the table, after taking down a summary of all I knew regarding my poor friend, explained how the discovery had been made. The body was quite cold when found, and the deep wound between the shoulders showed most conclusively that he had fallen by the hand of an assassin. I was then shown the body, and looked upon the face of poor Charlie, the “outsider,” for the last time.
“He had no money upon him,” I told Bianchi. “Indeed, before leaving me he had remarked that he was almost without a soldo.”
“Yes. It is that very fact which puzzles us. The motive of the crime was evidently not robbery.”
In the days that succeeded the police made most searching inquiries, but discovered nothing. My only regret—and it was indeed a deep one—was that I had lost the letter he had given me with injunctions to open it after his death. Did he fear assassination? I wondered. Did that letter give any clue to the assassin?
But the precious document, whatever it might be, was now irretrievably lost, and the death of “Mr. Charles Whitaker, late of the Stock Exchange,” as the papers put it, remained one of the many murder-mysteries of the city of Florence.
Months had gone by—months of constant travel and loneliness, grief and despair.
I was in my room at the Hotel Bonne Femme in Turin, having a wash after a dusty run with the “forty,” when the waiter announced Mr. Bianchi, and the sharp-featured, black-haired little man, recently promoted from Florence to watch the Anarchists in Milan.
“I am very glad, Signor Ewart, that I have been able to catch you here; you are such a bird of passage, you know,” he said in Italian. “But in searching the house of a thief in Florence the other day our men found this letter, addressed to you;” and he produced from his pocket the missive that Charlie had on that hot night entrusted to my care.
I broke the black seal and read it eagerly. Its contents held me speechless in amazement.