Determined not to be put off, I told the driver to go first to Belgrave Street. The number of the Thorolds’ house was, I remembered, a hundred and two. By the time we got there it was past midnight. The house bore no sign of being occupied. I was about to ring, when a friendly constable with a bull’s-eye lantern prevented me.
“It’s empty, sir,” he said; “has been for months and months, in fact as long as I can remember.”
“But surely there is a caretaker,” I exclaimed.
“Oh, there’s a caretaker, a very old man,” he answered with a grin. “But you won’t get him to come down at this time of night. He’s a character, he is.”
There had been nothing in the newspapers that day, but, on the morning after, the bomb burst.
AMAZING STORY
WELL-KNOWN FAMILY VANISH
BUTLER’S BODY IN THE LAKE
Those headlines, in what news-editors call “war type,” met my eyes as I unfolded the paper.
I was in bed, and my breakfast on the tray beside me grew cold while I devoured the three columns of close-set print describing everything that had occurred from the moment of Sir Charles’ disappearance until the paper had gone to press.
I caught my breath as I came to my own name. My appearance was described in detail, names of my relatives were given, and a brief outline of my father’s brilliant career—for he had been a great soldier—and then all my movements during the past two days were summarised.
I had last been seen, the account ran, dining at the Stag’s Head Hotel with a gentleman, a stranger, whom nobody seemed to know anything about. He had come to the Stag’s Head on the evening of Monday, April 1, engaged a bedroom and a sitting-room in the name of Davies, and he had left on the night of Wednesday, April 3. He had intended, according to the newspaper, to sleep at the Stag’s Head that night, but between ten and eleven o’clock he had changed his mind, packed his suit-case, paid his bill, and left. Where he had come from, none knew; where he had gone, or why, none knew. How he had spent his time from his arrival until his departure, nobody had been able to discover.