Chapter Nine.
Rumours in London.
Some few days had elapsed, and the Monkton mystery remained in the same deep obscurity. The inquest had been resumed, and an “open verdict” was returned by the jury. But nothing as yet had been published in the Press. All that the public knew was by an obscure paragraph which stated that the Colonial Secretary had been suffering from ill-health, and, having been ordered complete rest by his doctor, he had gone abroad.
The body of the dead man had not been identified. There was nothing to prove conclusively the cause of death, so the matter was left in the hands of the police for investigation.
Some little progress had been made in the direction of Bolinski. Luigi, the proprietor of the restaurant in Soho, had been taken to the Boundary Road in St. John’s Wood, and had waited for the mysterious foreigner to come out of the house.
When he appeared, limping along with that peculiar gait of his, Luigi unhesitatingly declared that he was the man who had dined on the eventful night with the missing Mr Monkton. He could have identified him anyway by his features and figure, but the dragging walk left no room for doubt. Luigi, like Wingate, had noticed it at once.
A few facts about him were established. He was either a bachelor or a widower, as the only other occupants of the house were a married couple, also foreigners, who looked after the establishment. Inquiries in the neighbourhood proved that he spent about half the week there, going up to business every morning.
They tracked him to his office in the city, a couple of rooms on the second floor of a big block of recently erected buildings in the vicinity of Liverpool Street Station. His staff was small, consisting of a young clerk of about eighteen, and a woman of about thirty-five, by her appearance a Jewess of foreign, probably Polish, nationality.