He opened the door, and Harper stepped into the open air again. He was conscious of the sound of many voices, of the click of cameras, of the hot breath of a crowd surging round him. But in his relief to be free at last of the horrors of the morning he gave them no heed. Pushing his way through, he walked at his best pace to the end of the street. Then he suddenly realized that he was very tired and distinctly hungry. Looking at his watch, he was astonished to find that it was not yet one o’clock. In an hour and a half he had lived an age. From the window, Inspector Mallett, with a quizzical expression on his lips and a slight frown barring his broad forehead, watched him go.

8
RICHARD CRABTREE

Tuesday, November 17th

If the disappearance of Lionel Ballantine had been front-page news in the morning papers, his reappearance as a corpse in an obscure South Kensington house was a sensation of the first magnitude. It occupied the posters of every news-sheet in London, quite excluding such minor matters as a Cabinet crisis, a film star’s divorce and an earthquake in China. From morning till night a throng of morbid sightseers blocked the pavement of Daylesford Gardens, to the disgust of its retired but still surviving inhabitants, and gazed with hungry rapture at the commonplace exterior of No. 27. When they finally returned home they were able to feast their eyes on faithful photographs of the same view. One photographer, more enterprising than the rest, had been able to penetrate to the back, and thence to secure a picture of the window of the actual room where the dead man had been found. His effort was rightly considered to be quite a scoop by his paper, which further assisted its readers by marking the particular window with a cross.