"I knew the old boy quite well by sight. Didn't you?" asked my friend, Major Keppell, as we stood gossiping together in the doorway of the Hôtel de Paris, high up on the cliff opposite the pier at Cromer.
"Perfectly. His habit was to go down the slope yonder, to the pier each morning at ten, and to remain there till eleven," I said. "I used to watch him every morning. He went as regularly as the clock, wet or fine."
"A bit eccentric, I thought," remarked the Major, standing astride in his rough golfing clothes, and puffing at his briar pipe. "Quite a character for a novel—eh?" and he laughed. "You'll do a book about this strange affair—what?"
I shrugged my shoulders and smiled, as I replied: "Not very likely, I think. Yet the circumstances are, to say the least, extremely curious."
"They are, from all I hear," said my friend. Then, glancing at his wristlet watch, he exclaimed: "By Jove!—nearly seven! I must get in and dress for dinner. See you later."
With this he passed through the swing-doors of the hotel, leaving me standing upon the short sweep of gravel gazing out upon the summer sea, golden in the glorious June sunset.
The Major had spoken the truth. A discovery had been made in Cromer that morning which possessed many remarkable features, and to me, an investigator of crime, it presented an extremely interesting problem—one such as I, Herbert Vidal, had never before heard of.
Briefly related, the facts were as follows. Early in February—four months before—there had arrived in Cromer a queer, wizened, little old man named Vernon Gregory. He was accompanied by his nephew, a rather dandified, overdressed young fellow of twenty-three, named Edward Craig.
Strangers are very few in Cromer in winter, and therefore Mrs. Dean, landlady of Beacon House, on the West Cliff, a few doors west of the Hôtel de Paris, where the asphalted footpath runs along the top of the cliff, was very glad to let the new-comers the first-floor front sitting-room with two bedrooms above.