Did you notice if he wore a ring?

A. Yes! I did. When he was handing me the half-sovereign, I saw he had a diamond ring on the forefinger of his right hand.

Q. He did not say why he was on the St Kilda Road at such an hour?

A. No! He did not.

Clement Rankin was then ordered to stand down, and the coroner then summed up in an address of half an hour’s duration. There was, he pointed out, no doubt that the death of the deceased had resulted not from natural causes, but from the effects of poisoning. Only slight evidence had been obtained up to the present time regarding the circumstances of the case, but the only person who could be accused of committing the crime, was the unknown man who entered the cab with the deceased on Friday morning at the corner of the Scotch Church, near the Burke and Wills monument. It had been proved that the deceased, when he entered the cab, was, to all appearances, in good health, though in a state of intoxication, and the fact that he was found by the cabman Royston, after the man in the light coat had left the cab, with a handkerchief, saturated with chloroform, tied over his mouth, would seem to show that he had died through the inhalation of chloroform, which had been deliberately administered. All the obtainable evidence in the case was circumstantial, but, nevertheless, showed conclusively, that a crime had been committed. Therefore as the circumstances of the case pointed to one conclusion, the jury could not do otherwise than frame a verdict in accordance with that conclusion.

The jury retired at four o’clock, and after an absence of a quarter of an hour, returned with the following verdict: ‘That the deceased, whose name there was no evidence to show, died on the 27th day of July, from the effects of poison, namely, chloroform, feloniously administered by some person unknown; and the jury, on their oaths, say that the said unknown person feloniously, wilfully, and maliciously did murder the said deceased.’

CHAPTER THREE

ONE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD

V.R.

MURDER

£ 100 REWARD

‘Whereas, on Friday, the 27th day of July, the body of a man, name unknown, was found in a hansom cab. and, whereas, at an inquest held at St Kilda, on the 30th day of July, a verdict of wilful murder, against some person unknown, was brought in by the jury. The deceased is of medium height, with a dark complexion, dark hair, clean shaved, has a mole on the left temple, and was dressed in evening dress. Notice is hereby given that a reward of £100 will be paid by the Government for such information as will lead to the conviction of the murderer, who is presumed to be a man who entered the hansom cab with the deceased at the corner of Collins and Russell streets, on the morning of the 27th day of July.’

CHAPTER FOUR

MR GORBY MAKES A START

‘Well,’ said Mr Gorby, addressing his reflection in the looking glass, ‘I’ve been finding out things these last twenty years, but this is a puzzler and no mistake.’

Mr Gorby was shaving, and as was his usual custom conversed with his reflection. Being a detective, and of an extremely reticent disposition, he never talked outside about his business, or made a confidant of anyone. When he did want to unbosom himself, he retired to his bedroom and talked to his reflection in the mirror. This mode of proceeding was a safe one, and, moreover, relieved his overburdened mind of anything he wished to speak about yet wanted to keep secret. The barber of Midas, when he found out what was under the royal crown of his master, fretted and chafed over his secret, until he stole one morning to the reeds by the river, and whispered ‘Midas has asses ears.’ In the like manner Mr Gorby felt a necessity at times to let out his secret thoughts in talk, and as he did not care about chattering to the air, he made his mirror the confidant of his ideas, and liked to see his own jolly red face nodding gravely at him out of the shining glass, like a mandarin. If that cheap little looking glass which Mr Gorby stared at every morning could only have spoken, what revelations there would have been of Melbourne secrets and Melbourne morals. But then, luckily for some people we do not live in fairy land, and however sympathetic Mr Gorby found his mirror, it revealed nothing. This morning the detective was unusually animated in his talk with the looking glass, and at times a puzzled expression passed over his face. The hansom cab murder had been put into his hands in order to clear up the mystery connected therewith, and he was trying to think of how to make a beginning.

‘Hang it,’ he said thoughtfully strapping his razor, ‘a thing with an end must have a start, and if I don’t get the start, how am I to get the end?’

As the mirror did not answer this question, Mr Gorby lathered his face, and started shaving in a somewhat mechanical fashion, for his thoughts were with the case and ran on in this manner:—

‘Here’s a man—well, say a gentleman—who gets drunk, and, therefore, don’t know what he’s up to. Another gent who is on the square comes up and sings out for a cab for him—first he says he don’t know him, and then he shows plainly he does—he walks away in a temper, changes his mind, comes back and gets into the cab, after telling the cabby to drive down to St Kilda. Then he polishes the drunk one off with chloroform, gets out of the cab, jumps into another, and after getting out at Powlett Street, vanishes—that’s the riddle I’ve got to find out, and I don’t think the Sphinx ever had a harder one. There are three things to be discovered—First, Who is the dead man? Second, What was he killed for? And Third, Who did it?

‘Once I get hold of the first, the other two won’t be very hard to find out, for one can tell pretty well from a man’s life whether it’s to anyone’s interest that he should be got off the hook. The man who murdered that chap must have had some strong motive, and I must find out what that motive was. Love? No, it wasn’t that—men in love don’t go to such lengths in real life—they do in novels and plays, but I’ve never seen it occurring in my experience. Robbery? No, there was plenty of money in his pocket. Revenge? Now, really it might be that—it’s a kind of thing that carries on most people further than they want to go. There was no violence used, for his clothes weren’t torn, so he must have been taken sudden, and before he knew what the other chap was up to. By the way, I don’t think I examined his clothes sufficiently, there might be something about them to give a clue, at any rate it’s worth looking after, so I’ll start with his clothes.’

So Mr Gorby after he had finished dressing and had had his breakfast, walked quickly to the police station, where he asked for the clothes of the deceased to be shown to him.