“Somebody ought to go for a policeman,” suggested Desrolles.
“I will,” said Chicot.
He was the only person present in a condition to leave the house, and before anyone could question his right to leave it he was gone.
They waited outside that awful chamber for a quarter of an hour, but no policemen came, nor did Jack Chicot return.
“I begin to think he has made a bolt of it,” said Desrolles. “That looks rather bad.”
“Didn’t I tell you he’d done it?” screamed the landlady. “I know he’d got to hate her. I’ve seen it in his looks—and she has told me as much, and cried over it, poor thing, when she’d taken a glass or two more than was good for her. And you let him go, like a coward as you was.”
“My good Mrs. Evitt, you are getting abusive. I was not sent into the world to arrest possible criminals. I am not a detective.”
“But I’m a ruined woman!” cried the outraged householder. “Who’s to occupy my lodgings in future, I should like to know? The house’ll get the name of being haunted. Here’s Mrs. Rawber even, that has been with me close upon five year, will be wanting to go.”
“I’ve had a turn,” assented the tragic lady, “and I don’t feel that I can lie down in my bed again downstairs. I’m afraid I may have to look for other apartments.”
“There,” whimpered Mrs. Evitt, “didn’t I tell you I was a ruined woman?”
Desrolles had gone into the front room, and was standing at an open window watching for a policeman.
One of those guardians of the public peace came strolling along the pavement presently, with as placid an air as if he had been an inhabitant of Arcadia, to whom Desrolles shouted, “Come up here, there’s been murder.”
The public guardian wheeled himself stiffly round and approached the street door. He did not take the word murder in its positive sense, but in its local significance, which meant a row, culminating in a few bruises and a black eye or two. That actual murder had been done, and that a dead woman was lying in the house, never entered his mind. He opened the door and came upstairs with slow, creaking footsteps, as if he had been making a ceremonious visit.
“What’s the row?” he asked curtly, when he came to the first-floor landing, and saw the two women standing there, Mrs. Evitt wrapped in a waterproof, Mrs. Rawber in a yellow cotton dressing-gown of antiquated fashion, both with scared faces, and sparse dishevelled hair.
Mr. Desrolles was the coolest of the trio, but even his countenance had a ghastly look in the light of the guttering candle which Jack Chicot had set down on the little table outside the bedroom door.
They told him, breathlessly, what had happened.
“Is she dead?” he asked.
“Go in and look” said Mrs., Evitt. “I dared not go a-nigh her.”
The policeman went in, lantern in hand, a monument of stolid calm, amidst the terror of the scene. Little need to ask if she were dead. That awful face upon the pillow, those glazed eves with their wide stare of horror, that gaping wound in the full white throat, from which the lifeblood had poured in a crimson stream across the white counterpane, until it made a dark pool beside the bed, all told their own tale.
“She must have been dead for an hour or more,” said the policeman, touching the marble hand.
La Chicot’s hand and arm were flung above her head, as if she had known what was coming, and had tried to clutch the bell-pull behind her. The other hand was tightly clenched as in the last convulsion.
“There’ll have to be an inquest,” said the policeman, after he had examined the window, and looked out to see if the room was easily accessible from without. “Somebody had better go for a doctor. I’ll go myself. There’s a surgeon at the corner of the next street. Who is she, and how did it happen?”
Mrs. Evitt, in a torrent of words, told him all she knew, and all she suspected. It was La Chicot’s husband that had done it, she was sure.
“Why?” asked the policeman.
“Who else should it be? It couldn’t be burglars. You saw yourself that the window was fastened inside. She’d no valuables to tempt anyone. Light come light go was her motto, poor thing. Her money went as fast as it came, and if it wasn’t him as did it, why haven’t he come back?”
The policeman asked what she meant by this, whereupon Desrolles told him of Mr. Chicot’s disappearance.
“I must say that it looks fishy,” concluded the second-floor lodger. “I don’t want to breathe a word against a man I like, but it looks fishy. He went out twenty minutes ago to fetch a policeman, and he hasn’t come back yet.”
“No, nor never will,” said Mrs. Rawber, who was sitting on the stairs shivering, afraid to go back to her bedroom.
That ground-floor bedroom of hers was a dismal place at the best of times, overshadowed by the wall of the yard, and made dark and damp by a protruding cistern, but how would it seem with their wide stare of horror, that gaping wound in the full white throat, from which the lifeblood had poured in a crimson stream across the white counterpane, until it made a dark pool beside the bed, all told their own tale.
“Do you know what time it was when the husband gave the alarm?” asked the policeman.
“Not more than twenty minutes ago.”
“Any of you got a watch?”
Desrolles shrugged his shoulders. Mrs. Evitt murmured something about her poor husband’s watch which had been a good one in its time, till one of the hands broke short off and the works went wrong. Mrs. Rawber had a clock on her bedroom mantelpiece, and had noticed the time when that awful cry awoke her, scared as she was. It was ten minutes after three.
“And now it
