The Complete Works of Arthur Morrison (Illustrated). Arthur Morrison

haven’t.”

      “Then I sha’n’t tell you; you don’t deserve it. Think, and don’t mention the subject again till you have at least one guess to make. The thing stares you in the face; you see it, you remember it, and yet you won’t see it. I won’t encourage your slovenliness of thought, my boy, by telling you what you can know for yourself if you like. Good-by—I’m off now. There’s a case in hand I can’t neglect.”

      “Don’t you propose to go further into this, then?”

      Hewitt shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not a policeman,” he said. “The case is in very good hands. Of course, if anybody comes to me to do it as a matter of business, I’ll take it up. It’s very interesting, but I can’t neglect my regular work for it. Naturally, I shall keep my eyes open and my memory in order. Sometimes these things come into the hands by themselves, as it were; in that case, of course, I am a loyal citizen, and ready to help the law. Au revoir.”

      I am a busy man myself, and thought little more of Hewitt’s conundrum for some time; indeed, when I did think, I saw no way to the answer. A week after the inquest I took a holiday (I had written my nightly leaders regularly every day for the past five years), and saw no more of Hewitt for six weeks. After my return, with still a few days of leave to run, one evening we together turned into Luzatti’s, off Coventry Street, for dinner.

      “I have been here several times lately,” Hewitt said; “they feed you very well. No, not that table”—he seized my arm as I turned to an unoccupied corner—“I fancy it’s draughty.” He led the way to a longer table where a dark, lithe, and (as well as could be seen) tall young man already sat, and took chairs opposite him.

      We had scarcely seated ourselves before Hewitt broke into a torrent of conversation on the subject of bicycling. As our previous conversation had been of a literary sort, and as I had never known Hewitt at any other time to show the slightest interest in bicycling, this rather surprised me. I had, however, such a general outsider’s grasp of the subject as is usual in a journalist-of-all-work, and managed to keep the talk going from my side. As we went on I could see the face of the young man opposite brighten with interest. He was a rather fine-looking fellow, with a dark, though very clear skin, but had a hard, angry look of eye, a prominence of cheek-bone, and a squareness of jaw that gave him a rather uninviting aspect. As Hewitt rattled on, however, our neighbor’s expression became one of pleasant interest merely.

      “Of course,” Hewitt said, “we’ve a number of very capital men just now, but I believe a deal in the forgotten riders of five, ten, and fifteen years back. Osmond, I believe, was better than any man riding now, and I think it would puzzle some of them to beat Furnivall as he was, at his best. But poor old Cortis—really, I believe he was as good as anybody. Nobody ever beat Cortis—except—let me see—I think somebody beat Cortis once—who was it now? I can’t remember.”

      “Liles,” said the young man opposite, looking up quickly.

      “Ah, yes—Liles it was; Charley Liles. Wasn’t it a championship?”

      “Mile championship, 1880; Cortis won the other three, though.”

      “Yes, so he did. I saw Cortis when he first broke the old 2.46 mile record.” And straightway Hewitt plunged into a whirl of talk of bicycles, tricycles, records, racing cyclists, Hillier, and Synyer and Noel Whiting, Taylerson and Appleyard—talk wherein the young man opposite bore an animated share, while I was left in the cold.

      Our new friend, it seems, had himself been a prominent racing bicyclist a few years back, and was presently, at Hewitt’s request, exhibiting a neat gold medal that hung at his watch-guard. That was won, he explained, in the old tall bicycle days, the days of bad tracks, when every racing cyclist carried cinder scars on his face from numerous accidents. He pointed to a blue mark on his forehead, which, he told us, was a track scar, and described a bad fall that had cost him two teeth, and broken others. The gaps among his teeth were plain to see as he smiled.

      Presently the waiter brought dessert, and the young man opposite took an apple. Nut-crackers and a fruit-knife lay on our side of the stand, and Hewitt turned the stand to offer him the knife.

      “No, thanks,” he said; “I only polish a good apple, never peel it. It’s a mistake, except with thick-skinned foreign ones.”

      And he began to munch the apple as only a boy or a healthy athlete can. Presently he turned his head to order coffee. The waiter’s back was turned, and he had to be called twice. To my unutterable amazement Hewitt reached swiftly across the table, snatched the half-eaten apple from the young man’s plate and pocketed it, gazing immediately, with an abstracted air, at a painted Cupid on the ceiling.

      Our neighbor turned again, looked doubtfully at his plate and the table-cloth about it, and then shot a keen glance in the direction of Hewitt. He said nothing, however, but took his coffee and his bill, deliberately drank the former, gazing quietly at Hewitt as he did it, paid the latter, and left.

      Immediately Hewitt was on his feet and, taking an umbrella, which stood near, followed. Just as he reached the door he met our late neighbor, who had turned suddenly back.

      “Your umbrella, I think?” Hewitt asked, offering it.

      “Yes, thanks.” But the man’s eye had more than its former hardness, and his jaw muscles tightened as I looked. He turned and went. Hewitt came back to me. “Pay the bill,” he said, “and go back to your rooms; I will come on later. I must follow this man—it’s the Foggatt case.” As he went out I heard a cab rattle away, and immediately after it another.

      I paid the bill and went home. It was ten o’clock before Hewitt turned up, calling in at his office below on his way up to me.

      “Mr. Sidney Mason,” he said, “is the gentleman the police will be wanting to-morrow, I expect, for the Foggatt murder. He is as smart a man as I remember ever meeting, and has done me rather neatly twice this evening.”

      “You mean the man we sat opposite at Luzatti’s, of course?”

      “Yes, I got his name, of course, from the reverse of that gold medal he was good enough to show me. But I fear he has bilked me over the address. He suspected me, that was plain, and left his umbrella by way of experiment to see if I were watching him sharply enough to notice the circumstance, and to avail myself of it to follow him. I was hasty and fell into the trap. He cabbed it away from Luzatti’s, and I cabbed it after him. He has led me a pretty dance up and down London to-night, and two cabbies have made quite a stroke of business out of us. In the end he entered a house of which, of course, I have taken the address, but I expect he doesn’t live there. He is too smart a man to lead me to his den; but the police can certainly find something of him at the house he went in at—and, I expect, left by the back way. By the way, you never guessed that simple little puzzle as to how I found that this was a murder, did you? You see it now, of course?”

      “Something to do with that apple you stole, I suppose?”

      “Something to do with it? I should think so, you worthy innocent. Just ring your bell; we’ll borrow Mrs. Clayton’s sewing-machine oil again. On the night we broke into Foggatt’s room you saw the nutshells and the bitten remains of an apple on the sideboard, and you remembered it; and yet you couldn’t see that in that piece of apple possibly lay an important piece of evidence. Of course I never expected you to have arrived at any conclusion, as I had, because I had ten minutes in which to examine that apple, and to do what I did with it. But, at least, you should have seen the possibility of evidence in it.

      “First, now, the apple was white. A bitten apple, as you must have observed, turns of a reddish brown color if left to stand long. Different kinds of apples brown with different rapidities, and the browning always begins at the core. This is one of the twenty thousand tiny things that few people take the trouble to notice, but which it is useful for a man in my position to know. A russet will brown quite quickly. The apple on the sideboard was, as near as I could tell, a Newtown pippin or other apple of