The Middle of Things | Page 4

without leaving some trace? How--"
At this point Viner's musings and questionings were suddenly and
rudely interrupted. Unconsciously he had walked back close to his own
Square, but on the opposite side to that by which he had left it,
approaching it by one of the numerous long terraces which run out of
the main road in the Westbourne Grove district--when his musings

were rudely interrupted. Between this terrace and Markendale Square
was a narrow passage, little frequented save by residents, or by such
folk familiar enough with the neighbourhood to know that it afforded a
shortcut. Viner was about to turn into this passage, a dark affair set
between high walls, when a young man darted hurriedly out of it, half
collided with him, uttered a hasty word of apology, ran across the road
and disappeared round the nearest corner. But just there stood a
street-lamp, and in its glare Viner caught sight of the hurrying young
man's face. And when the retreating footsteps had grown faint, Viner
still stood staring in the direction in which they had gone.
"That's strange!" he muttered. "I've seen that chap somewhere--I know
him. Now, who is he? And what made him in such a deuce of a hurry?"
It was very quiet at that point. There seemed to be nobody about.
Behind him, far down the long, wide terrace, he heard slow, measured
steps--that, of course, was a policeman on his beat. But beyond the
subdued murmur of the traffic in the Bayswater Road in one direction
and in Bishop's Road, Viner heard nothing but those measured steps.
And after listening to them for a minute, he turned into the passage out
of which the young man had just rushed so unceremoniously.
There was just one lamp in that passage--an old-fashioned affair, fixed
against the wall, halfway down. It threw but little light on its
surroundings. Those surroundings were ordinary enough. The passage
itself was about thirty yards in length. It was inclosed on each-side by
old brick walls, so old that the brick had grown black with age and
smoke. These walls were some fifteen feet in height; here and there
they were pierced by doors--the doors of the yards at the rear of the big
houses on either side. The doors were set flush with the walls--Viner,
who often walked through that passage at night, and who had
something of a whimsical fancy, had thought more than once that after
nightfall the doors looked as if they had never been opened, never shut.
There was an air of queer, cloistral or prisonlike security in their very
look. They were all shut now, as he paced down the passage, as lonely
a place at that hour as you could find in all London. It was queer, he
reflected, that he scarcely ever remembered meeting anybody in that

passage.
And then he suddenly paused, pulling himself up with a strange
consciousness that at last he was to meet something. Beneath the feeble
light of the one lamp Viner saw a man. Not a man walking, or standing
still, or leaning against the wall, but lying full length across the flagged
pavement, motionless--so motionless that at the end of the first moment
of surprise, Viner felt sure that he was in the presence of death. And
then he stole nearer, listening, and looked down, and drawing his
match-box from his pocket added the flash of a match to the poor rays
from above. Then he saw white linen, and a bloodstain slowly
spreading over its glossy surface.
CHAPTER II
NUMBER SEVEN IN THE SQUARE
Before the sputter of the match had died out, Viner had recognized the
man who lay dead at his feet. He was a man about whom he had
recently felt some curiosity, a man who, a few weeks before, had come
to live in a house close to his own, in company with an elderly lady and
a pretty girl; Viner and Miss Penkridge had often seen all three in and
about Markendale Square, and had wondered who they were. The man
looked as if he had seen things in life--a big, burly, bearded man of
apparently sixty years of age, hard, bronzed; something about him
suggested sun and wind as they are met with in the far-off places.
Usually he was seen in loose, comfortable, semi-nautical suits of blue
serge; there was a roll in his walk that suggested the sea. But here, as he
lay before Viner, he was in evening dress, with a light overcoat thrown
over it; the overcoat was unbuttoned and the shirt-front exposed. And
on it that sickening crimson stain widened and widened as Viner
watched.
Here, without doubt, was murder, and Viner's thoughts immediately
turned to two things--one the hurrying young man whose face