A woman shrieked three times, horribly; and the pushing, heaving queue froze suddenly to immobility.

In the white clear light of the naked electric in the roof, the man's body, left alone by the instinctive withdrawal of the others, lay revealed in every detail. And rising slantwise from the gray tweed of his coat was a little silver thing that winked wickedly in the baleful light.

It was the handle of a dagger.

Almost before the cry of "Police!" had gone up, the constable had come from his job of pacification at the other end of the queue. At the first of the woman's shrieks he had turned. No one shrieked like that except when faced by sudden death. Now he stood looking for a moment at the picture, bent over the man, turned his head gently to the light, released it, and said to the man at the guichet:

"Phone for the ambulance and the police."

He turned his rather shocked gaze on the queue.

"Any one here know the gentleman?"

But no one claimed acquaintance with the still thing on the floor.

Behind the man there had been a prosperous suburban couple. The woman was moaning continuously and without expression, "Oh, let's go home, Jimmy! Oh, let's go home!" On the opposite side of the guichet stood the fat woman, arrested by this sudden horror, grasping her ticket in her black cotton gloves but making no effort to secure a seat now that the way lay open to her. Down the waiting line behind, the news went like fire in stubble — a man had been murdered! and the crowd in the sloping vestibule began to mill suddenly in hopeless confusion as some tried to get away from the thing that had spoiled all thought of entertainment, and some tried to push forward to see, and some indignant ones fought to keep the place they had stood so many hours for.

"Oh, let's go home, Jimmy! Oh, let's go home!"

Jimmy spoke for the first time. "I don't think we can, old girl, until the police decide whether they want us or not."

The constable heard him and said, "You're quite right there. You can't go. You first six will stay where you are — and you, missus," he added to the fat woman. "The rest come on." And he waved them on as he would wave the traffic past a broken-down car.

Jimmy's wife broke into hysterical sobbing, and the fat woman expostulated. She had come to see the show and didn't know anything about the man. The four People behind the suburban couple were equally reluctant to be mixed up in a thing they knew nothing about, with results that no one could foresee. They too protested their ignorance.

"Maybe," said the policeman, "but you'll have to explain all that at the station. There's nothing to be scared of," he added for their comfort, and rather unconvincingly in the circumstances.

So the queue came on. The doorkeeper brought a green curtain from somewhere and covered up the body. The automatic clink and rattle of coin began again and went on, indifferent as rain. The doorkeeper, moved from his habitual Jovian abstraction by their plight or by the hope of reward, offered to keep their rightful seats for the seven derelicts. Presently came the ambulance and the police from Gowbridge Police Station. An inspector had a short interview with each of the detained seven, took names and addresses, and dismissed them with a warning to be ready to come up if called upon. Jimmy took his sobbing wife away to a taxi, and the other five straggled soberly into the seats over which the door-keeper was brooding, just as the curtain rose on the evening performance of Didn't You Know?

2 — Inspector Grant

Superintendent Barker applied a carefully manicured forefinger to the ivory bell-push on the under side of his table, and kept it there until a minion appeared.

"Tell Inspector Grant that I want to see him," he said to the minion, who was doing his best to look obsequious in the great man's presence, but was frustrated in his good intention by an incipient embonpoint which compelled him to lean back a little in order to preserve his balance, and by the angle of his nose which was the apotheosis of impudence. Bitterly conscious of failure, the minion withdrew to deliver the message and to bury the memory of his confusion among the unsympathetic perfection of files and foolscap from which he had been summoned, and presently Inspector Grant came into the room and greeted his chief cheerily as one man to another. And his chief's face brightened unconsciously in his presence.

If Grant had an asset beyond the usual ones of devotion to duty and a good supply of brains and courage, it was that the last thing he looked like was a police officer. He was of medium height and slight in build, and he was — now, if I say dapper, of course you will immediately think of something like a tailor's dummy, something perfected out of all individuality, and Grant is most certainly not that; but if you can visualize a dapperness that is not of the tailor's dummy type, then that is Grant. Barker had for years striven unsuccessfully to emulate his subordinate's chic; he succeeded merely in looking too carefully dressed. He lacked the flair for things sartorial as he lacked flair in most things. He was a plodder. But that was the worst that could be said about him. And when he started plodding after some one, that some one usually wished he had never been born.

He regarded his subordinate now with an admiration untinged with any resentment, appreciated his son-of-the-morning atmosphere — he himself had been awake most of the night with sciatica — and came to business.

"Gowbridge are very sick," he said. "In fact, Gow Street went so far as to insinuate that it was a conspiracy."

"Oh? Some one been pulling their legs?"

"No, but last night's affair is the fifth big thing in their district in the last three days, and they're fed up.