“Does the lad good to be left in charge of the shop for a bit,” was his father’s justification for his morning talk with his friend the herbalist. And Mr. Ludgrove, whose trade was never very brisk in the mornings, always seemed glad to see him.
Thus, on the Monday following Mr. Tovey’s adventure it was to Mr. Ludgrove that Sam Copperdock hastened to unbosom himself. He was simply bursting with news, and he watched impatiently until the unlocking of Mr. Ludgrove’s shop door indicated that that gentleman was ready to receive visitors. Then he bustled across the road and into the shop. “Are you there, Ludgrove?” he called out.
“Come in, come in, Mr. Copperdock,” replied a welcoming voice from behind the curtain, and the tobacconist, with an air of supreme importance, passed into the inner room.
The room was half-parlour, half-laboratory. One side of it was entirely occupied by a long bench, upon which stood a variety of scientific instruments. At the other side, placed round a cheerful fire, were two comfortable armchairs, in one of which sat the herbalist himself. With a hospitable gesture he motioned Mr. Copperdock towards the other, but the tobacconist was too excited to perceive the invitation.
“I say, have you heard the news about poor Jim Tovey?” he exclaimed, without preliminary.
“My dear sir, I read my paper pretty thoroughly every morning, as you know,” replied Mr. Ludgrove with a glance at the sheet which lay on the table by his side.
But Sam Copperdock merely snorted impatiently. “Newspaper!” he exclaimed, “why, the newspapers don’t know nothing about it! I tell you I’ve been up three parts of the night over this affair.”
“Indeed? Then you probably know all the details,” replied the herbalist. “If you can spare the time, I should be very interested if you would sit down and tell me all about it.”
This was exactly what Mr. Copperdock had meant to do. He sank heavily into the chair with a portentous sigh. “Terrible thing, terrible,” he began, shaking his head. “I’ve known Jim Tovey ever since he first took that shop in Lisson Grove, and to think that a thing like this should happen to him! And his poor daughter Ivy spent the best part of the evening at my place, too.”
Mr. Ludgrove, who knew his friend’s methods of expression, was careful not to interrupt, and after a short pause the tobacconist resumed his relation.
“First I knew of it was from my boy Ted. You see, it was like this. Ted’s very sweet on Ivy, and a nice girl she is, too. None of your flyaway misses, but a nice steady girl what’ll make her way in the world. Ted brought her to my place for dinner, then they spends the afternoon at the pictures, and comes back for supper. About half-past nine or maybe quarter to ten Ivy says it’s time she was getting home, and she and Ted goes out together. I was thinking Ted was a long time a-seeing of her home, since it was a shocking night, and they weren’t likely to dawdle on the way, when in he comes white as a sheet, and all of a tremble. ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘Ivy’s father’s been murdered.’
“Well, I thought the boy had gone off his head. ‘Murdered?’ I says. ‘Why, what do you mean? Who’d want to murder Jim Tovey, I’d like to know?’ Then after a bit I manages to get the whole story out of him. It seems that when he and Ivy got to Lisson Grove, Jim Tovey was out. He’d been called to St. Martha’s to identify an accident case. He stayed there for a bit, when suddenly the door bell rings. Mrs. Tovey answers it, and in comes a policeman, with a message that Mrs. Tovey and Ivy were wanted at St. Martha’s at once. Mrs. Tovey goes upstairs to put her things on, and Ivy goes with her. Then the policeman asks Ted if he’s a friend of the family, and when he says he is, tells him that poor Jim has just been murdered in this very street, not a couple of hundred yards from where we’re sitting now.”
Mr. Ludgrove nodded. “A most extraordinary affair altogether,” he commented.
“Ah, you may well call it extraordinary,” agreed Mr. Copperdock significantly, “there’s more in it than meets the eye, that’s what I says. Well, as soon as I hears this I thinks of those two poor women, and off I goes to St. Martha’s to see if I could be of any use. There I finds a police inspector who asks me who I was. When he hears I was Jim Tovey’s oldest friend he tells me all about it. It seems that a policeman who had his eye on the lads coming out of the Express Train—they’re a rough crowd, as you know—saw a man fall down and then heard a lot of hollering. Thinking there was a scrap he went over and found Jim Tovey on the ground with a lot of fellows standing round him. It didn’t take him long to find out that Jim was dead, but nobody seemed to know how it happened. There was a crowd on the pavement outside the pub, and it was a foggy sort of night that you couldn’t see very clearly in.”
“I know,” put in Mr. Ludgrove. “I was out about that time myself. I always go for a walk after supper, rain or fine; it’s the only chance of exercise I get.”
“Yes, I know you do,” agreed Mr. Copperdock. “I often wonder you don’t catch your death of cold. Well, the policeman calls up the ambulance, and they gets poor Jim round to St. Martha’s.
