East End Lore | 9 Chapters of The Final Witness

Chapter I

The Wrong Crowd

The permission took eleven days and came on the understanding that I was a novelist and not a journalist, which seemed to matter greatly to the man who granted it. I was given an hour. A warder stood outside the door and the door remained open. I was not to discuss the charge. Nobody could tell me what the charge was.

The prisoner stood up when I came in. Fifty, or a hard forty-five, spare across the shoulders in the way of men who have carried weight for a living and then stopped. His left hand was bandaged to the wrist. There was a healed cut across the bridge of his nose, still pink.

"Mr Waldon," I said. "My name is Conrad. I write books."

"They told me a foreign gentleman was coming to ask about the Harpies," said Waldon.

Conrad
"Will you talk to me?"

"I've nothing else on." He sat down on the edge of the bed. "Will you put my name in the book?"

"I don't know yet what the book is," I said.

He seemed satisfied with that, which surprised me. Most men prefer a lie that resolves to a truth that does not.

He said he took work where it was offered and lately that was the docks, casual when there was a ship in, long enough that they knew his face at the stand. He was paid on the Tuesday, the same as everyone. He went to the Three Harpies because it was on his way home and the pie was decent.

"It's not a mystery, sir," said Waldon. "A man wanting his supper."

Conrad
"Tell me what you found when you went in."

Waldon
"Wrong crowd. That's what I noticed and I noticed it first, before anything else. There's a crowd in a house on a payday and it's the same crowd, and I could have named you eight of them without looking up. There wasn't one of them in it."

Conrad
"Who was there?"

He did not answer immediately. A man who is inventing does not pause there. He pauses before he begins.

"Sabini behind the bar," said Waldon. "He'd taken the house on, three or four weeks by then, everybody knew that. Sleeves up like a landlord and not serving. That's a thing you'd notice." He turned his good hand over on his knee. "Old gentleman by the fire with a black dog, and a cat sat up on the seat beside him like it had paid for the seat. Nobody moved it either, and in that house they'd move a man."

"Go on," I said.

Waldon
"Doctor Bell was in it."

I stopped writing. "You know Doctor Bell?"

"I know his face. He's in the papers whenever there's poisoning." He said it as one states a dull fact about a bus route. "And Lister was sitting at the end of the long table, and I'd have said he was too old to be out at that hour. Carbolic. The spray, in the operating theatres. He was in the Illustrated two Christmases back."

"You are certain it was Lister," I said.

Waldon
"I'm certain it was the man out of the Illustrated. Whether the Illustrated was certain is their business."

He looked back at me with a perfectly even face, and I let it go by.

"There were four or five gentlemen I couldn't name," said Waldon. "Good coats, one of them military by the way he stood. A nurse in uniform, sat very straight, no drink in front of her. Dick Gunn, who's local, who fights or did — he was watching the door. And a man in the corner is painting it."

"Painting," I said.

"Sat on a stool with a board on his knee, painting the room. On a Tuesday, with all that in it." Waldon shook his head. "A man paints what he wants to remember, and I'd have said there was nothing in that room worth remembering, if you didn't know what was in it."

The argument, he said, began at the bar, between two of the gentlemen, one either side of the pump.

Waldon
"It started low. That's what was strange. It went on for a long while at the level of two men discussing a bill, and everybody in that room was listening and pretending they weren't. You could feel the room bending towards it."

"Could you hear the words?" I asked.

Waldon
"Some. Not enough to give you."

Conrad
"Try."

"One of them said the report," said Waldon. "Not a report. The report, like there was only one of them in the world."

Conrad
"What report?"

Waldon
"He didn't say, or if he did I lost it. The other one said not here, and then said it again louder, and the first one took hold of his lapel, and that was the end of the low part of it."

Conrad
"Was the word police used?"

Waldon
"It was. By the one being shouted at, and not kindly. I couldn't tell you which way round he meant it."

He described what followed as an ordinary public-house row with unusual people in it — two men in good coats going over into the tables, the military one struck while separating them, a glass gone, the nurse standing up.

Waldon
"It was ordinary, sir. I want you to take that. I stood there with my hands in my pockets wondering if I'd get my pie."

Conrad
"And then?"

Waldon
"Then somebody fired a pistol."

He said it exactly as flatly as he had said everything else.

Conrad
"Where from?"

"I don't know, and I couldn't tell you the quarter of the room, and I'll tell you why," said Waldon. "Indoors it doesn't come from anywhere. It comes from everywhere at once and then your ears are gone and you're a fool for a few seconds. Anyone who tells you he knew where it came from is telling you what he worked out after."

Conrad
"How many shots?"

Waldon
"More than three. I've tried to make it a number and I can't. They weren't at intervals, they came in on top of one another."

"You said intervals," I said.

He looked up. For a quarter of a second there was nothing at all on his face.

"I read the papers," said Waldon. "Some of their fancy words stick."

Conrad
"They do."

I wrote the word down and drew no line under it.

Conrad
"What did you do?"

Waldon
"Got down behind the seat with my arms over my head like a child, and I'll not dress it up. And I prayed."

Conrad
"You are a religious man?"

"No. I'd not have said I was, and I got down on that floor and prayed like a Sunday." He looked at the wall. "You do it in the language they taught you. It doesn't matter what you believe. It comes up out of you in the words they put in when you were small."

Conrad
"What did you pray?"

Waldon
"For it to stop."

Conrad
"For yourself?"

Waldon
"For it to stop."

That was the whole of the answer, and I did not think then that anything was being withheld. I think differently now, and the change is in me and not in what he said.

Conrad
"And then?"

Waldon
"Then the explosion. There's no telling of an explosion. There's the pub, and then there's nothing, and then there's a ward with a green screen round the bed and a man in it asking me my name."

Conrad
"And you gave it."

Waldon
"Victor Waldon."

Nobody had told him what he was charged with. A gentleman had asked him questions for two hours, had written none of it down, and had not come back.

"I'd say that means they haven't decided," said Waldon. "They've a great many dead and one man walking about in the middle of it, and a man walking about is a convenience. I'm not complaining of it. If I'd been them I'd have kept me too."

The warder said ten minutes. I asked him a number of other things and he answered all of them, promptly, without decoration, and without once telling me anything I had not asked for.

At the end I asked whether he wanted anything sent to anybody. He said there was nobody to send to. Then, while I was putting the notebook away, he spoke again.

Waldon
"Have you talked to the gentleman that was outside it?"

Conrad
"Which gentleman?"

"The one they've named. Sir Francis, the old scientist. The papers had him out in the street when it went, and a few weeks in the hospital with his head, and home again now in his own house." He said it in the flat way he had said everything else. "He's the only one they've named."

"I have not spoken to him," I said.

Waldon
"You will, though."

Conrad
"I expect so."

"If he tells you anything," said Waldon, "I'd take it kindly to hear it. I'm not hard to find."

I said that if I learned anything I would come back.

Waldon
"That's all right, then."

I have kept those notes and read them over many times since, and I will set down the only honest thing I have to say about that hour.

I believed him. I believe him still, and nothing that came afterwards has made a liar of him in my eyes.

But he had put every soul in that room exactly where they stood — Sabini behind his bar and not serving, the old man and the cat at the fire, Lister at the end of the long table, Gunn watching the door, the painter on his stool in the corner — and I went back through six pages of my own hand and could not find, anywhere in it, where he had been sitting himself.

He had not refused to tell me. I had not asked.

Continue...

Chapter II

Rutland Gate

The prison took eleven days and three letters. The house took a note on the Monday and an invitation on the Wednesday, and when I arrived there was nobody at the door to search me and nobody to stand outside it while I was in. I have thought since about the fact that I found this reassuring at the time.

It is a tall white house on Rutland Gate with the railings painted and the steps done that morning. I was shown up to a first-floor room at the front with the shutters half to, because the light still troubled him, and in it there was a great deal of paper in very orderly piles, a cabinet of small drawers of the kind a chemist keeps, and an old man in a chair by the window with a rug over his knees in June.

He was seventy-eight. There was a dressing still on the left side of his head, above and behind the ear, and the hair had been shaved back from it and was growing in white. He put out his hand and did not attempt to rise, and apologised for not rising.

"You must forgive the rug," said Sir Francis. "They tell me I am cold and I am not, but they are very firm."

"I am grateful you would see me at all," I said.

"I am glad of the company. I am not permitted to work above two hours and I have been finding the other twelve rather long." He looked at me for a moment longer than a man usually looks. It was not rude. It was the way a surveyor looks at ground. "You are the sea one. Blackwood's. There is a thing of yours running in it now."

Conrad
"There is."

Sir Francis
"I am behind with it. A man ruined by four seconds of his life, and everybody in the story with an opinion on him. I do not know yet whether you mean to let him off."

"Neither do I," I said.

"That is the honest answer and I did not expect it," said Sir Francis. "Sit down, Mr Conrad. You want the Harpies."

I said that I did, and I explained myself as I had explained myself to the Home Office: that I was writing a book, that it was not journalism, that a number of men whose work I had admired were dead or unaccounted for, and that I did not much trust the way such things are settled when they are settled quietly.

"No more do I," said Sir Francis. "Ask."

Conrad
"Why were you in that street?"

"I was going in to the public house to meet an acquaintance." He said it as one gives an address to a cabman.

Conrad
"May I ask his name?"

"You may ask," said Sir Francis, "and I shall tell you that I have given it to the police, with everything else they asked me for, and that they have asked me not to discuss the matter while it is open. I have agreed to that. I would agree to it again. It will all be made public, Mr Conrad, and on that day you will know it as I know it, and I will answer any question you have left."

"That is a long time to ask a man to wait," I said.

Sir Francis
"It is a short time to ask a man to wait for something he intends to print."

I could not do much with that, so I went at it from the side.

"An acquaintance in Limehouse," I said. "It is not the district one associates with Rutland Gate."

"It is not." He seemed to enjoy the question. "I have slept four months on the ground in Damaraland with my head on a saddle, and I am told that at my age this is now called eccentricity rather than travel. It was where he was willing to meet. I do not require a man to come to me. I have never got anything worth having by requiring a man to come to me."

Conrad
"Was it dark?"

Sir Francis
"It was not dark."

Conrad
"And you were in the street."

"I was perhaps a dozen yards short of the door," said Sir Francis, "and the door came out into the street, and then I was lying against the wall opposite with my hat gone. That is all of it. There is a piece missing in the middle and I am told there always is." He touched the dressing with two fingers, absently, the way a man touches a watch pocket. "I have tried to put something in the gap and I will not. A recollection you have had to construct is not a recollection. I have spent a long life telling other men so and I am not going to make an exception for myself because it is interesting."

I wrote that down. He watched me write it without the least concern, and when I had finished he said, "You may quote that one. It is the only thing I have said to you so far that is any use."

We talked for some while about other matters. He asked whether I had gone to sea young and how long I had held a master's certificate, and when I told him, he asked what proportion of men who sat the examination passed it, and was mildly put out that I did not know. He had a habit of turning any answer into a quantity. I found it likeable and I could see how a man might find it otherwise.

Then he said, without any change of tone at all:

Sir Francis
"Have you seen the guilty man?"

"I have seen the man they are holding," I said. "I saw him three weeks ago. It is because of him that I am here — he asked whether I had spoken to you, and I told him I had not, and he said that I would."

Sir Francis was quiet for a moment.

"Did he," said Sir Francis.

Conrad
"What do you mean by guilty?"

"I mean what I was told." He said it without heat, in the manner of a man reading out a figure. "When the police came to me here, twice, and were very good about it, they said that they had a living culprit. That was the phrase. A living culprit, taken up at the scene, with a pistol on him."

"He did not tell me about a pistol," I said.

"No," said Sir Francis. "I should think he did not."

Conrad
"He told me about the pistol shots. He said he could not tell where they came from, and that any man who says he can is telling you what he worked out afterwards."

"That is quite true," said Sir Francis. "It is also the sort of thing a careful man says."

I said nothing to that, and he did not press it, and I have since wondered whether that was courtesy or whether he was waiting for me to arrive somewhere on my own.

"He gives the name Victor Waldon," I said. "He is a dock labourer. He was in the house for his supper. He described the room to me for an hour and he described it well, and I will tell you plainly that I believed him."

"I am sure you did." Sir Francis moved his hand a little on the rug. "Mr Conrad, I want to put a question to you, and I want you to understand before I put it that I am not making an accusation and that I have no theory of any kind. I am too old to have a theory in June about a thing that happened in May."

Conrad
"Ask it."

Sir Francis
"My name was not given out."

I waited.

"It was not in the newspapers," said Sir Francis. "It was kept back, and I did not ask for it to be kept back, and I was rather surprised, and when I enquired I was told it was usual while a matter is open. There is a paragraph in three papers about an old gentleman injured in the street, and that is the whole of my celebrity." He looked at me with perfect mildness. "So. This innocent man in his cell, who was there for his supper, and who has been in a hospital and a prison ever since and has seen nobody.

Sir Francis
"How does he know my name?"

I told him what Waldon had told me: that he read the papers, and that the papers had named the old scientist and had put him out in the street with his head hurt and home again in his own house, and that he was the only one they had named.

Sir Francis heard it out. Then he said, "Then he reads better papers than mine," and offered me tea.

I have set down that exchange exactly as it went, because I am aware of what it looks like on the page and I want it on the page anyway.

I went to Rutland Gate believing the man in the cell. I came away believing the man in the chair. He had answered everything I asked him, he had refused only what he had been instructed to refuse, he had told me so at the time and told me why, and the one thing he declined to invent was the only thing in his account that a liar would have supplied.

One of them is wrong about a thing that can be settled by walking into a newspaper office. It is the smallest possible matter. I could not tell you why I went home and sat for an hour with my coat still on.

There is also this, which I record because I have made a rule of recording it. The old gentleman knew about a pistol that was found on a man, and the man had not mentioned any pistol to me.

He had not concealed it. He had been asked what he saw and what he heard and what he did, and he had answered all three.

Nobody had asked him what he had on him.

Continue...

Chapter III

A Fire Laid in July

They took me a different way the second time.

In May I had been walked up an iron gallery with the doors on my left and the drop on my right and a smell of lime wash over everything. In July the warder turned me at the foot of the stairs and took me along the ground floor and through two gates that he unlocked and locked behind us, and then along a corridor with a floor of boards rather than stone, and there were no doors on it at all until the last one.

He knocked before he opened it.

I have been in a great many rooms. It was a good room. There was a carpet, not a large one and not new, but a carpet. There was a table with a lamp on it and a shelf of books above the table, and I looked at the books because I always look at the books, and they were not prison books. There was a grate with a fire laid in it in July and not lit. There was a chair with arms.

The man I had come to see was sitting in it in his own clothes with his hands loose on the arms, and the bandage was off, and the hand had healed crooked at the third knuckle.

"He's here, sir," said the warder.

"Thank you, Mr Pike," said Waldon.

The warder went out and did not lock the door.

I did not sit down.

"I have two questions," I said, "and I would like them answered before anything else is said between us. The first is the pistol. The second is Sir Francis Galton's name, which was not in any newspaper printed in this country, and which you gave me in this building in May."

He did not appear at all disturbed.

"The gun first, then," said Waldon. "That's the guards talking, that is — they talk over you like you're furniture, and I've had six weeks of it. And I'll tell you the same as I'd tell a magistrate. I never had a gun. I've never owned one, I've never fired one, I wouldn't know which end wants holding. If there was one lying by me on that floor then it came down out of that room with everything else that came down, and it landed where it landed, and I was underneath it."

Conrad
"And the name?"

"Same road, sir. Same road exactly." He said it patiently, the way a man explains a thing he has explained before. "I took a bang on the head and I lost a fortnight and I've been six weeks in a place where two men outside a door will discuss you for an hour and think you're asleep. Half of what I know about that night I know off them. I couldn't tell you now which bits I saw and which bits I heard through a wall, and no more could you, if you'd had my summer."

Conrad
"You told me you read it in a newspaper."

Waldon
"Then I was wrong, and I'm sorry for it. A man wants to give you a straight answer, sir. So he gives you the likeliest one he's got."

It was well done. I want that on the record. It was answered without hurry, it accounted for every fact I had put to him, it conceded the small point in order to hold the large one, and it was delivered by a man sitting in a private room in one of Her Majesty's prisons with a fire laid in it in July.

"Mr Waldon," I said, "I am going to say something and then I am going to leave or not leave, and you may decide which.

Conrad
"In May you told me you were a casual labourer on the sufferance wharves. This morning I was brought to you through two locked gates and along a corridor with one door on it, and the man who brought me knocked before he opened it, and called you sir, and did not lock it after him. You are sitting in your own clothes. You have a carpet. You have a shelf of books that I would be glad to own myself.

Conrad
"You knew, in May, that Sir Francis Galton had been in the street outside the Three Harpies. That is not a thing the newspapers knew. It is a thing the police knew, and Sir Francis knew, and now you and I know, and I do not believe I have to explain to you how short that list is.

Conrad
"A pistol was taken up beside you.

Conrad
"I did not come here in May accusing you of anything, and I have not accused you of anything now, and I did not go from this building to a newspaper office or to the Yard, either of which would have been very easy and one of which would have paid. I came here with a notebook because I wanted to know what happened to some men I admired. And from the first quarter of an hour of the first conversation I have been handled. Not lied to grossly. Handled, carefully, by an expert, and left with a good clear picture and my pocket picked, and I would not have known it at all if an old man in Kensington had not asked me a civil question.

Conrad
"I will tell you the rest of my position and then I will go. I have no intention of repeating one word of this to any person living. Not to the police, not to the papers, not to Sir Francis. It is not my business to hand a man over and I have seen enough of what governments and procedures do with a name to have no appetite for supplying one.

Conrad
"There is a single exception and I will state it plainly. If I come to believe that people are still in danger, I will not keep it.

Conrad
"Now. If you wish to have a truthful conversation between gentlemen, I will sit down and I will stay as long as they let me. If you do not, then I have taken up enough of your morning, and I wish you a good day, sir."

I picked up my hat.

He did not answer for what I judged to be five or six seconds, and I have thought about those seconds a great deal since, because I believe that what was happening in them was arithmetic.

He was not moved. I want to be exact about this, because it would be pleasant to write that I had reached him and it would not be true. He looked at me the way a man looks at a horse he has been offered, and he was not deciding whether to trust me. He was deciding whether I was worth the risk of using.

"Sit down, Mr Conrad," said Waldon.

The voice had changed. It had not become grand. It had simply stopped costing him anything.

Waldon
"You had it in your hand and you put it down. You could have gone to the Yard with the name and the pistol and had a fortnight of being an important man, and you could have gone to the Chronicle and had forty pounds, and instead you came back here and told me to my face what you had and asked me to explain it. In thirty years I have met four men who would do that. I am obliged to revise my opinion of you, and I do not enjoy revising opinions."

"You may begin with the pistol," I said.

"The pistol was mine. I did not fire it." He said both halves in the same tone. "That is all you are getting about the pistol this morning and you will understand why before you leave."

Conrad
"And the room."

Waldon
"Money in a prison does what money does, in a prison or anywhere else. There is nothing mysterious in it and I would rather you were not impressed."

Conrad
"And the name of a man in Kensington."

"Yes," said Waldon. "That is the one that cost me, and I knew it the moment it was out of my mouth, and I have been waiting eight weeks to find out whether you were clever enough to bring it back to me or whether I had got away with it." He almost smiled. "I would rather have got away with it. But it is not the worst outcome."

"You said in May that you read the papers," I said, "and that some of their fancy words stick."

Waldon
"I do read the papers. That part was true. I have always found it best to keep the true part in."

I sat down. I asked him whether he was going to tell me what happened at the Three Harpies.

"Not this morning, and perhaps not at all," said Waldon. "You made me an offer just now and I am going to take one half of it and leave the other. You said you would keep it unless you came to believe that people were still in danger."

Conrad
"I did."

Waldon
"Are children people, Mr Conrad?"

I said that I supposed they were, and I said it stupidly, because I did not yet understand that a question had been put to me.

"Then people are still in danger," said Waldon, "and I have been sat in this room for eight weeks with no way on earth to say so to anybody who would not either laugh at me or arrest me, and this morning a man walked in who will not do either, and who has just told me the exact terms on which he can be relied upon. You have no idea what you have given me. I would not have taken it from a man who wanted to help me."

"You have not told me anything," I said.

Waldon
"No. I am going to tell you one thing, and then you are going to go home and decide whether you can bear the rest of it, and I would be glad if you took a week over it, because if you come back here I do not think either of us gets to be a private person again."

He leaned forward, and the crooked hand came off the arm of the chair.

"My name is not Victor Waldon," said Waldon. "There is no Victor Waldon. I am Adam Worth."

I knew the name. Every man who reads a newspaper for twenty years knows that name.

I did not say anything at all, and he did not appear to expect me to, and after a moment he sat back and told me that Mr Pike would see me out.

I had asked him nothing that morning which I had not asked him in May. I had simply been willing to leave.

Continue...

Chapter IV

Two Sheets of Foolscap

I went back the next day.

"I said a week," said Worth.

Conrad
"You did. And I have had a night, and I found that I was not deciding anything. I was rehearsing. A man who is rehearsing has already decided and is only looking for a way to feel careful about it. I would rather waste six days of your time than six of my own."

Worth
"Sit down."

Mr Pike brought tea, for two, on a tray, and went out and left the door on the latch, and I record that detail because I had by then stopped finding it remarkable, which is itself worth recording.

"I was in Newcastle," said Worth. "You will want to know why and I am not going to tell you, and you may assume it was deserved. In November of last year they put two men into that prison who had been taken at Darlington running from something, and they were put in with me because there was nowhere else, and because nobody who arranges these things has ever once considered who is put next to whom.

Worth
"Two London thieves of the third rank — the sort who are used for work that cannot be given to anybody who would be missed. They had come into money in the spring. They were not clever enough to be quiet about it and they were not clever enough to wonder why the money was so good."

Conrad
"For what?"

"Deliveries. Bodies," said Worth. "Then parts of bodies, which pays better, because it is more particular. They were not the only crew in it and they knew of others. And in the summer the others began to stop being about.

Worth
"Men in that line do stop being about. That is the ordinary run of it. But these two counted. It is the only remarkable thing either of them ever did in their lives. They counted, and the number was wrong, and they came to the conclusion that the trade was consuming the tradesmen, and they ran.

Worth
"I asked them one question. I asked them what they were sent for. What was on the paper.

Worth
"And one of them still had it."

He got up then, and went to the shelf above the table, and took down the second volume of the Gibbon, and opened it, and it had been cut. Two leaves cut out at the fore-edge to make a shallow bed, and the pages closing flat over it.

He put two sheets of paper on the table in front of me.

"You had better read it yourself," said Worth. "I have it by heart, and I have found that saying it aloud in order is not good for me."

I want to describe the thing before I describe what was on it, because I had it in my hands for perhaps twenty minutes and it is the object I have thought about most since.

Two sheets of foolscap, ordinary cheap wove paper, foxed along one edge. Folded twice into quarters and carried folded for a long time, so that the creases had gone soft and furred. A brown thumb-mark near the bottom of the first sheet. A ring where something wet had stood on the second.

It was typewritten, both sheets, one machine, purple ribbon going pale towards the foot of each page. The lowercase l had been used throughout for the figure one. Whoever typed it was competent and unhurried and had corrected nothing, and had set the columns out by counting spaces, and had got them level.

There was no letterhead. There was no address, no date, no signature, no name of any person or house or company, and no place named anywhere on either sheet. There was a number at the head of the first, and that was all.

I have never in my life seen a document so completely stripped of its author, and I have handled ships' papers written by men who did not wish to be found.

I read the two sheets through twice, and then I read the last part of the second one a third time, and then I put them down on the table and squared them, which I did not decide to do.

"Well," said Worth.

"It is written short," I said. "There is not a long word in it. There is not a word in it a child could not read." I heard my own voice do something and I could not prevent it. "Somebody sat down and considered what those two men were able to read, and made it easy for them. He thought about that. He took trouble over it."

"Yes," said Worth.

Conrad
"And the grown ones are measured six ways and the children are not measured at all."

Worth
"That is the part that took me longest. It is not carelessness. He wants a particular man. He does not want a particular child. He wants as many as come."

"The last of it is not about children either," I said. "Not one line of it asks what the child is. Whether it can read, whether it has been washed, whether it has boots, whether it has a name in its collar, whether it is fed. Those are not descriptions of a child, Mr Worth. Those are the marks a child carries when there is somebody at home.

Conrad
"It is a list of ways of finding out whether anyone would come looking."

"That is the whole of it," said Worth. "You have got there quicker than I did, and I had nineteen months and nothing else to do. It is not the work of a monster. Monsters are cheap and there are three in every parish. It is the work of a careful man in a warm room who has worked out which children are not going to be missed, and who has gone about the question properly, and who is right."

There is one more thing and I will set it down because I have been putting it off.

The paper does not say child after the first line, and it does not say he or she.

It says it. Thirteen times, and once its.

He put the sheets back into the Gibbon and put the Gibbon back on the shelf, second from the left, at the height of my eye.

"You may take them, if you like," said Worth.

I thought about it for longer than I am comfortable setting down. Then I said that I would not, because a man found with those two sheets on him does not get to explain how he came by them.

"Correct," said Worth. "I wanted to see how long it took you."

I asked him then why any of it should be his affair, and I asked it badly — in effect, what a professional criminal of thirty years' standing imagined he was doing playing at providence.

He was not offended. He considered it as though it were a fair commercial question, which I have since decided is what it was.

"You want a reason," said Worth, "and any reason of use to you is one that could be used against me, and I have spent my whole life not leaving that sort of thing lying about. You may have the shape of it and not the parts.

Worth
"I came out of the same drawer they are shopping in. Not this city and not this century, but the same drawer. Nobody counted me either. I got out because I was quick, and because I was lucky twice running at a time when I could not afford to be lucky once.

Worth
"And I knew boys in that place who were cleverer than I have ever been. There were two or three with more in them at ten years old than I have had in me since, and I can tell you what became of each of them, and it takes about a sentence each."

"That is not a reason," I said. "That is a wound."

"Yes," said Worth. "I have found the two are frequently confused. Put down that I did it for a wound. It is nearer the mark than anything else you will get out of me."

Conrad
"What did you do?"

Worth
"I came to London in December and began where a man in my line begins, which is to ask. I have a network in this city that I have been thirty years assembling. It has never once failed to tell me who is buying a thing and where the thing is going. I put the question out four different ways over eleven weeks.

Worth
"It told me nothing.

Worth
"Do you understand what that means? Not that the answer was difficult. That there was no answer in it anywhere. Which meant either that the trade was not being run through anybody I could reach, or that it was being run through somebody I could reach who had been given a reason not to speak to me. Both of those tell you the same thing about the size of the man at the other end.

Worth
"And I am going to disappoint you, and I would rather do it plainly. I do not know whether it is a man or a room full of them. The measuring on the first sheet is one sort of mind and the terms on the second are another, and I cannot make them sit together. I do not know whether he was in that public house on the night. And I do not know whether he is alive. The buying stopped in the spring. A trade stops because the man has died. It stops because he has got what he was collecting. It stops because somebody has told him that a question is being asked, and he has folded the whole thing up and moved it three streets, and it will begin again in the autumn under a different arrangement and I shall not hear of it.

Worth
"That is the honest state of it. I have a paper and no name.

Worth
"What I had not got was standing. I am a thief. I cannot go to the Yard, and if I could, a statement from me would be written out by a bored young man and filed and never read again. And I cannot walk about the East End asking after surgeons and deliveries, because the moment I am seen to be asking, the man at the other end knows precisely who is asking, and he stops.

Worth
"So I needed a reason to be everywhere in that quarter, with money, with men, and with nobody wondering why. I needed the East End to belong to me."

"And that is the docks," I said.

Worth
"That is the docks."

He described the rest of it as one describes a merger.

Worth
"Darby Sabini is a serious man and I went to him with a serious proposition, and there is nothing false in it. If the firms stop cutting one another and hold the wharves and the labour together, they have not got a district. They have a hand on the throat of imperial trade. It is the best idea anybody has had in London in twenty years, and it is not mine. It is only that nobody had put it in one room before.

Worth
"He heard me out. He did not haggle and he did not flatter me. I will say this plainly, because you may hear otherwise one day. Sabini keeps his word. He has never promised the same thing to two men. In the whole of that business he is the one party who has behaved exactly as he said he would.

Worth
"He took the north. He went to Birmingham himself and brought back Billy Kimber, which nobody else living could have done. He had Roderick McLean out of confinement, which cost money into the correct pockets and a certificate saying the man had done away with himself. And he put funds and protection round George Gardstein, who is a Lett and an anarchist.

Worth
"I took the rest. A lawyer — a young Indian gentleman named Gandhi, lately out in South Africa, very correct, very poor, and entirely ignorant of what he is holding. I did not want a crooked solicitor. A crooked solicitor is a liability with a practising certificate. I wanted a genuinely honest man who would look the part in a room. He does his work well and he sleeps at night.

Worth
"I took on two Latvians, Helfeld and Lepidus, because there are jobs that want men who cannot be reasoned with, and because I would sooner know where those two are than not.

Worth
"And there is a boy on the docks. Bose. Nineteen or twenty. He came in to handle the lascar crews — there are thousands of Indian seamen off those ships and not one respectable person in London can speak to a single one of them. He carries everything. He knows every face in that firm."

"That is a great deal of trust in a boy," I said.

"It is," said Worth, and went on.

Conrad
"There is one more, and I put him in myself, deliberately, and you are not going to like it.

Conrad
"I have Jack."

I asked him to be plain.

Worth
"I mean the Whitechapel man, and I know that he is, because I went looking for him and I found him and I put him in a room where he had two choices. I did not moralise at him. I offered him more amusement than he has had in ten years, and I told him that the alternative was not a court. He took the first immediately, and thanked me.

Worth
"He is in that firm because I want him where I can see him. Somebody in this city is working to that last paragraph. It wants a man who is not squeamish and who is already practised. If it is him, then he is now under my roof and I shall know before anybody. If it is not, I have lost nothing but sleep."

Conrad
"And if it is?"

"Then I have him," said Worth, "and I do not have to find him twice."

I did afterwards the only thing that was open to me, which was to go and read. I have a reader's ticket at the Museum and I used it for eleven days, and I made two columns.

The first column was children. There is nothing in it. There are children in the newspapers of this country every week — run over, drowned in canals, burnt, run off to sea, a boy of eleven advertised for by a father in Camberwell who wanted him home and said so in four lines. It is the ordinary sorrow of a great city and there is no shape in it whatever. Nothing is missing from those columns. Nothing is even out of place.

The second column was bodies, and there I found things. A dead-house at a workhouse infirmary entered twice in the same month, and the second time the guardians put a man to sleep in it. A churchyard in Kent where a grave was found opened and the coffin light, and the inquest adjourned twice and then not resumed. A porter at a hospital dismissed in September for a matter the paper does not describe. Two paragraphs about the theft of anatomical material from a school of medicine, printed nine days apart, the second correcting the first as to quantity.

None of it makes a case. Together they are a trade of exactly the kind those two sheets describe.

And then, that same evening, I saw what was wrong with me. Every one of those items was in a newspaper. A man with a reader's ticket and a fortnight could have every one of them, and if he had them he could write those two sheets in an afternoon. I had proved nothing except that the document is consistent with the public record, which is the one thing a forgery would also be.

I was rather pleased with that for three days. Then I understood that I had the whole business upside down, and I have not been comfortable since.

The paper does not say to take children. It says to take the children who will not be asked after. It gives five tests for it, and every test is a test of whether there is an adult in the world who would go to a police station. If the work is done as it is written, then the first column is empty because the work was done properly, and the emptiness I spent eleven days establishing is not the absence of the crime. It is the specification being met.

So there is nothing that can confirm this and there is nothing that can refute it. If Worth is telling me the truth, the record is silent by design. If Worth is lying to me, the record is silent because there is nothing to record. The two look precisely the same from a chair in the Reading Room, and they will go on looking the same for as long as I live.

He has set himself against a crime that, done exactly as instructed, cannot be shown to have happened at all. And I have undertaken to say nothing about any of it unless I come to believe that people are still in danger.

I do not know how a man is supposed to come to believe in a thing that leaves no mark.

Continue...

Chapter V

Two Copies

I did not sleep well for about a fortnight, and at the end of it I had a thing which I have since had to call a theory, though it came to me at four in the morning with no evidence at all.

It was this. Nobody wants a body. A body is a nuisance. It is heavy, it is illegal, and it spoils. And the paper did not want a body — it wanted a body fresh, within fourteen hours, unmarked, with the ice kept at the door and not used on the way, and it would take the parts alone if the whole was not sound.

There is only one class of thing in this world which must be got quickly, kept cold, and used at once, and it is not a thing that is wanted for study, because a man who wants to study you does not care whether you have been dead a day or a month.

Somebody wants living pieces. Somebody wants to put a piece of one person into another person.

Once I had that, the measuring made sense to me for the first time, and I could not get rid of it again. I wrote to Rutland Gate on the Monday.

He was better. The dressing was off and there was a seam above the ear, healed and shining, and he had shaved the whole head to match rather than go about half and half, which he said had been his sister's idea and was an improvement.

"You have come with something," said Sir Francis. "You have the face of a man who has come with something. Let us have it before the tea, because tea ruins an argument."

Conrad
"I want to ask you a scientific question. Has it been done? Can a piece of one man be put into another man, and live there? A kidney. A liver. A heart, if you like. Has anybody in the world got that to work?"

Sir Francis did not answer immediately. He looked at me, and I have written already about what it is like to be looked at by that man, and I will only add that the second time is worse, because you know what he is doing.

"No," said Sir Francis.

Conrad
"You are certain."

"I am as certain as a man can be of anything that has not happened. If it had been done, I should know. I should have read it. Half the men who could have done it write to me at Christmas." He put his hand flat on the arm of the chair. "May I ask what has brought you to that? It is not the usual question of a literary gentleman."

"I have been thinking about what a man would want that could not wait," I said. "Something that must be got in the night and used before morning."

Sir Francis
"That is well reasoned and it is not an answer, and I shall not press you. Let me tell you why it cannot be done.

Sir Francis
"There are two walls. The first is plumbing and it is only difficult. To put an organ into a man you must join his vessels to its vessels, and no surgeon living can sew a blood vessel end to end without the blood setting hard in the join within the hour. It will be solved. I should not be surprised to see it solved in ten years by some young man in a hospital in France.

Sir Francis
"The second wall is not like that at all. Take a piece of a man's own skin from his thigh and set it on his arm, and it grows there and you would not know it. Take that same piece of skin from his brother and set it on his arm, and it will look well for eight or nine days and then it dies and lifts away, every time, without exception, and no surgeon has ever been able to say why. And the same happens with blood. You may transfuse a man and save his life, and do it again next week with the same care by the same hand and kill him in twenty minutes.

Sir Francis
"So there is something in a person that knows what is his and knows what is not, and destroys what is not, and it does it without being told and it is never wrong. It is not the wound that fails. The graft takes beautifully and then it is put out.

Sir Francis
"That is the wall, Mr Conrad. And until somebody finds out what that something is, all this is romance."

Conrad
"And nobody has found out."

"Nobody has published," said Sir Francis. "You will notice that I say published, because I am a careful man and not a prophet. But men who make very great discoveries are not, as a rule, able to keep quiet about them. I have known perhaps four in my life who could."

"Then tell me the measuring," I said.

Sir Francis
"What measuring?"

Conrad
"Suppose a man believed he could get round your second wall. Not by understanding it. By going round it. What would he do?"

Sir Francis sat back, and for the first time that morning he looked entirely happy.

Sir Francis
"Ah. Now that is a proper question and I shall enjoy it.

Sir Francis
"He would reason as follows, and I want you to notice that every step of it is respectable. He knows a graft from a man's own body always takes. He knows a graft from a stranger never does. So he supposes there to be a scale between the two — that the something which puts out a stranger's tissue puts it out the more violently the stranger it is. A brother, he would guess, is nearer. A twin nearer still.

Sir Francis
"That is not a foolish guess. I would make it myself. I have spent forty years showing that what a man is, is largely what his people were, and it would be strange indeed if this one thing alone took no notice of blood.

Sir Francis
"So. He cannot have your brother. Your brother is at home and would be missed. What he wants is somebody who is like a brother. And now he has a difficulty, because he cannot see the thing he actually wants. He cannot open a man up in the street and look at what is inside him. He can only see the outside.

Sir Francis
"So he measures the outside and hopes it stands proxy for the inside."

"Height," I said. "Sitting height. The arm from the elbow. The leg from the hip. The head round. The colour of the eye."

"Precisely those," said Sir Francis, without any change of expression whatever, "because those are the measures that run in families. You do not measure a man's weight, because weight is what he has been eating. You measure the frame, because the frame is what he was given." He paused. "It would not work, mind. He would be matching the wrong thing entirely. But it is what a clever man would try, and there is not a foolish step in it."

Conrad
"And children?"

He was quiet for a moment.

Sir Francis
"Yes. That is the ugly part, and I see you have got there too.

Sir Francis
"He would notice, because every surgeon notices, that the young heal where the old do not. And he would go from that to a supposition — that in a child the thing is not yet set. That whatever it is in us which knows its own from a stranger comes on gradually with the years, like the beard, and that in a young child it is not yet properly awake.

Sir Francis
"And if he believed that, the measuring would stop mattering. He would not need a child who resembled anybody. He would want any child at all, and a great many of them, because he would be working blind and losing most of what he tried. He would put no measure on them whatever, and he would pay three times over, and think it cheap."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"How do you know what he pays?" I said.

Sir Francis did not move at all, which is a thing I have noticed that very old men can do and the rest of us cannot.

"That was careless," said Sir Francis.

Conrad
"It was."

"It was careless twice, because I have been careful about it since January and I have just undone the whole of that in one sentence to a man who writes for a living, and because you have not once looked surprised this morning, and I ought to have made something of that an hour ago." He put his hands together on the rug. "I am going to answer you. I would rather answer you than have you go away and construct something.

Sir Francis
"Before I do, I should like to ask you three things, and I would rather have your first answer than your best one.

Sir Francis
"A disease is put out of the world for ever. It has killed a hundred thousand children a year for a hundred years and after this it kills nobody. The price is eleven men, taken without their consent, who did not want to die and were not asked. Do you pay it?"

"No," I said.

Sir Francis
"Why not? You cannot have weighed it, you answered in a second."

"Because a man who will pay eleven will pay twelve," I said, "and because the hundred thousand children are a figure on a page and the eleven men are men, and I have noticed that the figure on the page is always the thing that gets larger."

Sir Francis
"That is a better answer than most bishops give me. Second. You are a sailor. There are eight in a boat and provisions for six."

"I know what happens in the boat," I said. "I have also noticed that the man who explains afterwards why it was necessary is always one of the six."

"Ha," said Sir Francis, and it was a real laugh, and it was over very quickly. "Third, then, and this one is not a trick. Do you want to live for ever?"

I said that I did not.

Sir Francis
"Everyone says that. Say more."

"I have buried people," I said. "I should not care to be the last one left standing about, being interesting. And I do not think a man who has decided he is not going to die can be trusted about anything else afterwards, because everything he does after that is on credit and somebody else pays it."

The room was quiet for a while. He looked out of the window and I had the strong impression of a door being closed somewhere quite far off, very quietly, by a servant.

"No," said Sir Francis at last. "No, I do not think you would be any use to that at all."

Conrad
"Any use to what?"

Sir Francis
"To anybody proposing it. I meant that as a compliment and I withdraw it if it did not sound like one.

Sir Francis
"I will tell you my own position and then we need not go over it again. I have spent my life arguing that the stock of this country can be improved, and I have been called a great many things for it. But every word of that has been about who marries whom, and who is encouraged, and who is helped. It is done with persuasion and with a hundred years and with the consent of the persons concerned, or it is not done.

"To take an unwilling subject — to take a child — to weigh a person out in parts against a table of prices —" and his voice did not rise at all, and that was the only time I have heard him near it, "— is not science. It is not even bad science. It is a butcher with a theory. Whoever this is, if he is anybody, has taken the one thing I have given my life to and made it into a reason to steal children out of the street. I should be glad to see him hanged and I should be glad to be there."

He got up then, and went to the cabinet of small drawers and opened one about halfway down, and came back with two sheets of paper, and put them into my hand rather than on to the table.

"That is what I have," said Sir Francis. "Read it here. I am afraid I mean here."

I read it standing up, by the window, with him watching me from the chair.

It was the paper I had read in a prison cell in July.

I will be as exact as I can, because I have had a good deal of time to be sorry about how exact I was not. It was the same document. The same short flat lines. The same headings and the same order of them. The same running of full stops out to the figures, and the figures themselves, and the five ways of leaving a child where it stood.

Whether it was the same sheets I could not tell you, and I have never been able to, because I did not have the others to set beside it and never shall. The one in my hand had not been folded. There was no thumb-mark on it and no ring where a glass had stood. Beyond that I can say only that when I came to the last four words of the second page I found that I had already known what they were going to be.

I gave it back to him.

"You have seen this before," said Sir Francis.

Conrad
"I have."

I had not meant to say it and I do not believe I could have avoided saying it, because I had read two pages of that document standing at a window without once asking him what a single line of it meant, and there is no honest way to explain that.

Conrad
"Where?"

Sir Francis
"I am not going to tell you that."

Sir Francis
"Mr Conrad. You are a literary gentleman. You do not go into the sort of house where that is passed across a table. Where does a man like you come to see a thing like that?"

Conrad
"I am still not going to tell you."

Sir Francis
"Then tell me what sort of person it was, and I will not press you further."

I thought about that for some time, and what I said in the end was this, and I set it down as I said it.

Conrad
"He is a man of honour."

Sir Francis raised his eyebrows very slightly and said nothing.

"I am aware of how that sounds when I will not give you his name," I said. "I will stand by it. He did not sell that paper to me and he did not use it to buy anything from me. He put it in front of me at some risk to himself and no advantage whatever, because he thought it ought to be known and could not think of another way of making it so. Whatever else the man is, and I am not going to tell you what else he is, he has behaved better over this than anyone else I have met since May, and I gave him my word, and I am keeping it."

"Yes," said Sir Francis. "Yes, I see."

He was quiet for a moment, and then he did something I did not understand at the time, which was to smile.

Sir Francis
"Thank you. That was the answer I wanted and I did not much expect to get it.

Sir Francis
"You may have mine, for what it is worth, and there is nothing gallant in it at all. I came by that paper in the course of an investigation. I have been assisting the police privately since January, in a matter I am not free to describe to you, and it is older than the Harpies and has nothing to do with novels. The document came to me in that work. I kept it. I very likely ought not to have done."

Conrad
"You will not tell me the matter."

"Not today. I gave my word to the officer in charge of it in January and I am not going to be the sort of old man who gives his word and then makes an exception for a novelist whose company he enjoys." He reached for the bell and did not ring it. "But I am going to write this afternoon and ask leave to tell you the whole of it. Not a summary. The whole, from January, with the dates.

Sir Francis
"And I will tell you why I think I shall get it. That matter is going to be published before the year is out, and what is at stake is a few months and not a secret. A man does not usually refuse to tell you in September what he intends to print in December, unless he is enjoying himself.

"There is the other reason as well." He looked at me. "I have just watched you refuse to give me a name when you knew perfectly well that giving it would have opened this house to you entirely. You would not do it, and I could not shift you, and you made a poor argument for the man rather than a clever one, which is what people do when they mean it.

Sir Francis
"I have spent forty years measuring things, Mr Conrad, and I have never yet found a way of measuring that. One has to sit and wait for it to turn up.

Sir Francis
"Come on Thursday. Come in the morning; I am better in the morning and I am worth about half as much after two o'clock."

I walked home. It is a long way from Rutland Gate, and when I got there I did not go in, but stood at the area railings for some minutes like a man who has forgotten his key.

In July a criminal held that paper out to me across a table and told me to take it, and I refused, and I was rather pleased with my reasoning. This morning a Fellow of the Royal Society put it into my hand and asked me to read it standing at his window, and took it back, and I have not one line of it in my own writing.

Both of them have it. That is the fact and I cannot get it to lie flat. One of them has spent seven months and a criminal enterprise trying to find the man who wrote it. The other came by it in a police matter and kept it in a drawer, which is exactly what a man in a police matter would do, and he told me so before I asked him.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. I want that on the page as plainly as the rest.

What I keep returning to is smaller and it is about me. I was asked this morning to give up a name, and I would not, and I was not turned out of the house for it. I was thanked for it, and then given a great deal more than I had come for, and invited back on Thursday for the whole of it with the dates.

I have been paid for keeping a promise, in the coin of another man's confidence, by a gentleman who watched me keep it and decided on the strength of that what I could be trusted with.

I do not say there was anything improper in it. I say only that I stood at those railings some minutes working out whether what happened in that room was honour or whether it was purchase, and I went in to my supper without deciding.

Continue...

Chapter VI

Up Is Where Things Go to Stop

I went on the Thursday, in the morning, and brought nothing and wrote nothing down in that house, and I have set the whole of what follows out afterwards from memory.

He had his answer.

"I have leave," said Sir Francis. "I want you to know exactly how much leave and from whom, because you will hear about it eventually and I had rather you heard it from me sitting down.

Sir Francis
"I wrote on Tuesday to the officer with the case, as I said I would, and I asked plainly. She refused. Not rudely and not slowly — by return, in five lines, in her own hand, and the reasons were good ones and I could not fault a single one of them.

Sir Francis
"So on Wednesday I wrote to Sir Edward Bradford, who has been Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis for some years and whom I have known for rather more of them, and I asked him the same question, and he said yes."

I did not say anything.

"You may look at me like that," said Sir Francis. "I have looked at myself like that since Wednesday afternoon. I have gone over her head, in my own interest, because I wanted to tell a story to a man I like, and I have used forty years of dining with the right people to do it. It was contemptible and I did it in about four minutes.

Sir Francis
"So. You shall have my part of it, and only my part. Anything that is hers you will not get from me, and you will have to go and ask her, and I hope she makes you work for it."

Sir Francis
"It begins in January, in a police station in the east of London, and I am going to have to tell you why I was in it.

Sir Francis
"I have for some years been putting together a series of measurements on Indian subjects — seamen off the ships, and prisoners, and men in the lodging-houses who will sit still for sixpence. I will spare you the object of it, since I do not think you would care for the object of it, and I have noticed that you have very good manners and I do not wish to strain them."

"That is fair," I said.

Sir Francis
"It is not fair, it is only convenient. The point is that a police station is a good place for it. There is light, there is a table, there are people, and the Force has been perfectly obliging to me for thirty years because I once made them a present of a filing system.

Sir Francis
"By eleven at night I had the instruments in the case and I was waiting on a cab that had been sent for twice, and I was sitting in the charge room with my hat on my knees, which is a thing that makes a man invisible in about ten minutes.

Sir Francis
"The night relief was coming on. They were tired and they were bored, and they had a bottle in the cupboard behind the occurrence book which everybody in that building knew about including, I should think, the Commissioner.

Sir Francis
"The day's charge sheet was read out. There was a man drunk in Cable Street. There was a second man drunk in Cable Street, unconnected with the first, which the sergeant said was the only piece of good luck he had had all week. There was a ladder stolen from outside a public house, and a dispute as to whether it had been stolen or borrowed, and a dog.

Sir Francis
"The sergeant said it was the deadest day since the Jubilee. One of the constables said that the highlight of the day had been the gentleman in the corner, meaning me, and the sergeant said that was exactly his point.

Sir Francis
"There was then a certain amount of what I understand is called wit. I was asked whether I could tell a villain by the head. I said not reliably. I was asked whether I would measure the sergeant's head, and I said I should be delighted, and I did, and it is a very large head — twenty-four and a half, which is the ninety-ninth of anything. A constable asked whether that meant the sergeant was clever. I said that it meant the sergeant's hat was expensive. That went better than anything I have said to the Royal Society.

Sir Francis
"Then they came to the day's nonsense, which is apparently a fixed item, and which appears to be the only reason any of them stay in the Force.

Sir Francis
"A young constable had it. There had been an Indian in, that afternoon, wanting to make a statement. Seventeen, or nineteen — the constable said he could not tell, and that they were all the same to him, and the room agreed with him, and I set that down without comment because you will want it and because it is what was said.

Sir Francis
"The boy would not go away. He had insisted on the statement being written and had waited while it was written, and had signed it, and had then declined to leave, on the ground that he had not yet spoken to anybody who mattered. He asked for the chief. He was told there was no chief. He asked for whoever was above the sergeant, and then for whoever was above that man, and he asked it about nine times over the course of two hours, in the same words, standing up.

Sir Francis
"And what he had said was this. That the firms in the East End have stopped fighting one another. That Darby Sabini has brought them together, and that Billy Kimber has come down from Birmingham, and that behind the whole of it is a man he named as Adam Worth."

He said that name in his own drawing room on a Thursday morning in the ordinary course of a sentence, and I sat and listened to the rest of it and did not move.

Sir Francis
"And the boy did not stop there, which was his error, because everything he said afterwards was correct and each correct thing made him less believable than the last.

Sir Francis
"He said they were buying the calling-on stands, so that the men who choose who works that morning are their men. He said they had taken two public houses where the wharf foremen drink and had put the tenancies in other names. He said they were lending money to dockers at the beginning of the week so that the wages were spent before they were earned, and that a man who owes does what he is asked. He said they had got their people into the tally clerks, which is the man who counts what comes off a ship, and that the count is therefore whatever they would like it to be.

Sir Francis
"And then, having said all that, he said that he had seen the Whitechapel murderer, and that the man is alive and is in that firm.

Sir Francis
"And then he said that he was in it himself. That he carries their messages, and handles the lascar crews, and that he was giving the statement because he had understood what the thing was for and would not go on with it.

Sir Francis
"And then he made his offer, which is the part I want you to hold on to. He said he would go back in. He said that they trusted him, and that if the police would work with him he would stay where he was and tell them everything — where the meetings are, who attends, what is moved and when. He asked them to use him. He said it more than once, because at first nobody was listening, and then he said it again when they were.

Sir Francis
"He was nineteen and he had walked into a police station and volunteered to inform, from the inside, on Sabini's people, for nothing, without being asked, and without being offered anything at all."

Sir Francis stopped there for a moment.

Sir Francis
"The room came apart. I want to be honest about that, because I laughed too. It is a preposterous document. Read it aloud in a warm room at eleven at night and it is a boy of nineteen claiming acquaintance with the three most notorious men in England and the fourth most notorious ghost, volunteering himself as an accomplice into the bargain, and then proposing to run the whole investigation for us.

Sir Francis
"The constable's line — and I concede it is a good one — was that the boy had been very careful to spell all the names right, so that we should know exactly who to send the flowers to.

Sir Francis
"And then the sergeant told them how it ended, and he was still telling it as a funny story, and it stopped being one about a third of the way through.

Sir Francis
"They could not get him out. He would not be talked out and he would not be walked out. So two of them took him through to the yard, and the sergeant said that they had massaged his ribs a little, and that he had left in his own time and rather quietly.

Sir Francis
"That is the phrase. I had not heard it before. Everybody else in that room had, because the whole room understood it at once and I understood it about a second and a half later than everybody else, and I have found since that a second and a half is a long time to sit in a chair with your hat on your knees.

Sir Francis
"He was not cuffed for cheek, Mr Conrad. He was taken out and beaten, in a police yard, by two constables, for declining to stop offering to help them."

"I laughed with them," said Sir Francis, "and I am not going to pretend I did not. I laughed at the story. I did not laugh at the yard, and neither did the young constable who had told the rest of it.

Sir Francis
"But I stopped laughing altogether about four minutes later, and it was because of a question I asked which nobody there thought worth answering.

Sir Francis
"I asked what the boy had been like. I did not ask what he said. I asked how he stood. Whether he was excited. Whether he was enjoying it. Whether he embroidered when he was questioned, and whether he wanted anything.

Sir Francis
"Because I have spent forty years in front of people who are telling me things, and there is one reliable difference between a man who is lying and a man who is frightened, and it is not in the words. A liar performs and watches you to see how it is going. A frightened man recites. He has been over it in his head for a week and he wants to get to the end of it without being interrupted.

Sir Francis
"And the constable, who was an honest young idiot and answered without understanding what he was answering, said that the boy had been dull. Those were his words. He said the boy was dull, and would not be hurried, and got annoyed when they made him go back over a part, and did not laugh once, and kept saying it in the same order.

Sir Francis
"And he said something else that finished the matter for me. He said the boy had never once asked what was in it for him. He had asked, nine times, who was going to read it."

Sir Francis
"So I asked to see the statement. It is a page and a half. It is the flattest thing I have ever read. There is not one adjective in the whole of it.

Sir Francis
"Then I asked them what would become of it.

Sir Francis
"And they laughed again — that was the second laugh and it was not the same as the first, and I have thought about the difference between those two laughs more than I have thought about anything else in this business.

Sir Francis
"The first was at a boy. The second was at me, for asking.

Sir Francis
"The sergeant said it would go up. I asked what that meant, and he said it meant it would go up, sir, and one of the others said something about a large building with a great many drawers in it.

Sir Francis
"And then the sergeant said — and he was not being sly, he was explaining the arrangements of the office to an elderly gentleman who had asked — that anything with Sabini's name in it goes up automatically. Those are standing orders. It does not stop in the division at all.

Sir Francis
"I said that seemed thorough.

Sir Francis
"He said that in his experience it was the surest way of never hearing about a thing again, and he seemed to think he was being funny, and the room did too, and I have wondered since whether he was.

Sir Francis
"They would not let me take it away — quite properly, it was signed and it was theirs — but they were entirely willing to let me have a copy, and the young constable made one out in longhand at the desk while I waited, and made two errors in the spelling of the boy's name in eleven lines."

Sir Francis got up and went to the cabinet and came back and put four sheets of ruled foolscap in my hand, in a bad clerical hand in blue-black ink, with the name spelled two ways.

Sir Francis
"That one you may keep. It is a copy of a statement that a man made voluntarily to the police with the express wish that it be known, and I have never been able to see what right anybody has to keep it from anyone.

Sir Francis
"You will find, when you read it, that the boy was right about every single thing that can now be checked."

"I sat with it for eleven days," said Sir Francis. "I did nothing. I should like that in your book if you write one, because it is the truest part of my conduct.

Sir Francis
"Then I sent for Walter Sickert. He paints, chiefly music halls and chiefly at night, and he is the only man of my acquaintance who is genuinely at home in two Londons. He dines in Belgravia on the Tuesday and he is in a public house behind Shoreditch on the Wednesday with people who would not be admitted to the area steps of the house he dined in, and neither set thinks him a visitor.

Sir Francis
"I did not show him the statement. I gave him the substance of it, and the names, and I asked him whether there was anything in it, and I asked him not to ask me why I wanted to know."

"And he did not ask," I said.

"He did not ask, and that is precisely his value and precisely what one has to be careful about. A man who never asks you why is a man who is also not asking somebody else why about you." Sir Francis turned his hand over. "He was three weeks. He came here on the last day of February and had luncheon and told me that it was perfectly true and that he had been slow because he had been trying to find somebody who would say it was not.

Sir Francis
"He had more than the boy had. He had the names of both public houses. He had the arrangement at two of the calling-on stands, with the man's name at one of them. And he said a thing that I have not been able to put down since — that the district is not frightened. That it has simply been informed, the way a parish is informed of a new vicar, and that people have adjusted their habits accordingly and gone on with their week."

Sir Francis
"Now I want you to notice what happened next, because I noticed it at the time and it did not stop me.

Sir Francis
"I took it to Edward Henry. He is at present engaged on the identification of criminals by the ridges of the fingers, which he learned a good deal of in Bengal and some of it in this room, and he is the most rigid man I have ever been fond of. He regards speculation as a form of untidiness.

Sir Francis
"And I did not take him the statement. I mean that I took it, it was in my pocket, and it is not what I put on the table. What I put on the table was Sickert.

Sir Francis
"I said: a gentleman of my acquaintance, whose word I would take in any matter whatever, has spent three weeks on this at my request and says it is true, and here is what he has.

Sir Francis
"Henry attended to that. He attended to it for an hour and a half."

"And the statement?" I asked.

Sir Francis
"He read it afterwards, when he had already decided to be interested, and he said it was a boy's tale and that the Force is given a hundred a year of them.

Sir Francis
"Do you see it, Mr Conrad? That is the same account. The same names, the same public houses, the same arrangement at the stands. A boy of nineteen who was inside it set it out in writing and signed it and offered to go back in, and he was beaten in a yard for it. A painter repeated the identical thing over cold beef in this room, at second hand, having risked nothing whatever, and it became evidence.

Sir Francis
"The difference is not in the information. There is no difference in the information. The difference is that one of them is a gentleman and the other is an Indian boy off the docks, and I used that, quite deliberately, because I knew it would work, and it did work, and it is the only reason any of this ever moved an inch.

Sir Francis
"I am not going to apologise for it, because I should do it again on Monday and an apology I intend to contradict is a piece of theatre. But I should like it written down somewhere by somebody, and you are the first person I have had the opportunity to tell."

Sir Francis
"Henry did not take my word and he did not take Sickert's either, in the end. He went and got his own. He asked a question in the prisons — not about Sabini, he is far too careful for that. He asked, through the ordinary channels, whether there was any new arrangement in the East End as to who is paid what, because that is a dull administrative question and nobody guards a dull administrative question.

Sir Francis
"He had his answer inside a week, from three separate establishments, without any of them understanding what they were telling him. Yes. Since the autumn. Everybody knows. The men inside were perfectly open about it, because to them it is not a secret and never was — it is simply the news.

Sir Francis
"He wrote to me on the eighteenth of March. Four lines. He is not a man who enjoys being wrong and he did not spend any words on it.

Sir Francis
"Do you see the shape of it? Every convict in the south of England knows that the East End has changed hands. A boy of nineteen walked into a police station in January and set the whole of it out, with the methods, in writing, and signed it.

Sir Francis
"And there is not one line about it anywhere in the official mind of this country, except a page and a half in a drawer with a note on the foot of it saying that it is not worth the reader's time."

"Somebody is being paid," I said.

Sir Francis
"That is one explanation and it is Henry's, and he arrived at it very reluctantly and has not been the same man since. The other is that nobody is being paid at all, and it is only that the thing came in on a dull day and was funny, and the sergeant was tired, and the constable told it well in the yard, and it went up because Sabini's name was in it and up is where things go to stop. No corruption anywhere. Nothing but ordinary men doing an ordinary evening's work.

Sir Francis
"I do not know which of those is true. I have come to think it does not much signify, because they produce precisely the same result and neither can be appealed against.

Sir Francis
"What is certain is that we could not give it to the police, because we should be giving it back to the people it had already been given to. So Henry and I sat in this room at the end of March and worked out what two private gentlemen could do about it between them.

Sir Francis
"And that, Mr Conrad, is where the letters begin."

Continue...

Chapter VII

Eleven of Us

"Letters," I said. "What letters?"

"Ah," said Sir Francis. "Yes. I have been talking for two hours and I have left out the only part of the business that is mine.

Sir Francis
"Consider where we were at the end of March. Two elderly gentlemen in a drawing room, with a boy's statement nobody would read, a painter's word that it was true, and a set of prison returns Henry had got by asking the wrong question on purpose. We could not go to the police, because it was the police. We could not go to the newspapers, because the first thing a newspaper does is telephone the police. And we could do nothing ourselves, because I am seventy-eight and Henry is fifty-nine and neither of us can walk from here to the Serpentine without sitting down halfway.

Sir Francis
"Then Henry said the useful thing. He said: they have spent six months collecting people. Why have we spent none?"

Sir Francis
"Before you ask what I told them, I had better tell you what I believe, because it is the same thing and that saved me a great deal of trouble.

Sir Francis
"Mr Conrad, you were at sea twenty years. How much of what this country eats comes over a quay?"

Conrad
"Most of it."

Sir Francis
"All of it that is not grown in a field in England, and we stopped growing enough a very long time ago. Thirty miles of quay between the Tower and Tilbury. And every bit of it is moved by men hired standing in a yard at half past seven in the morning by a foreman, and counted by a clerk with a book. That is the whole mechanism. It is not defended. It has never once been defended, because nobody has ever thought of it as a thing that could be held.

Sir Francis
"Now put it together as that boy put it together in January. The stands are theirs, so the foreman is theirs, so the labour is theirs. The tally clerks are theirs, so the count is whatever they say it is. Money is lent on the Monday against wages not earned until the Saturday, so the men are theirs as well — and none of it has required a single shot to be fired.

Sir Francis
"They have not taken a district, Mr Conrad. They have taken the tap.

Sir Francis
"A firm that can hold those wharves for a fortnight can empty the shops of this city and be thanked for stopping. It can decide which cargoes are delayed, which is the power to ruin any merchant house in England by doing nothing whatever. It can bring anything it pleases into this country and leave no record of it, because the record is the count, and they own the count.

Sir Francis
"And it can be hired. There is not a government in Europe that would not pay very handsomely indeed for a firm able to shut the Port of London for one week in a year of their choosing."

"You cannot go to the Port authorities," I said.

Sir Francis
"I can go to the Port authorities. I can go to the Board of Trade and the Home Office and I am acquainted with men at both, and every one of them will tell me that it is a matter for the police. And it will go to the police. And up is where things go to stop."

Sir Francis
"So. Letters, in the first week of March, and I kept copies, because I keep copies of everything I send.

Sir Francis
"The first to Edmund Du Cane, who ran the convict prisons of this country for twenty-six years. No man living knows more about how the criminal side of England is actually arranged. I asked him one question. Is this credible? He answered by return, at length, and the answer was yes, and he added four names we had not got.

Sir Francis
"The second to Mrs Pankhurst in Manchester. She has sat as a Guardian of the Poor and has been into more of the streets behind those docks than any person I could name. If the men on that river have been bought, their wives know it. And their wives will not say one word of it to me, or to Henry, or to any constable living — and they will say it to her. She also possesses the useful quality of being extremely difficult to remove from a doorway.

Sir Francis
"She wrote back in two lines. One agreed to come. The other was about me, and about a certain book of mine, and I shall not repeat it, because I have not thought of an answer and I have now had six months."

"She knows your work," I said.

Sir Francis
"She knew my work and did not care for it and came anyway, which I take to be the correct order in which to hold those two opinions, and which I am not at all certain I could have managed myself.

Sir Francis
"The third was Lister, and I did not write to him as a surgeon. I wrote to him because he sits in the House of Lords. There is a point in this where somebody will have to stand up in a place the police cannot reach and say the thing out loud and be believed, and there is not a man in England who would be believed faster.

Sir Francis
"The fourth to Barnes, who is a clergyman and a mathematician, a combination I like and do not altogether trust. I wanted both halves of him. The Church is in those parishes and is told things in a vestry that no constable will ever hear. And somebody is going to have to sit down with the tonnage returns of four wharves and find the discrepancy, and it will not be me."

"A suffragist, a clergyman, a retired prison administrator and an old surgeon," I said. "Sir Francis, that was not a force. It was a dinner party."

"It was precisely a dinner party," said Sir Francis, "and you will forgive me for being rather pleased with it.

Sir Francis
"I cannot raise men. I have no men and I should not know what to do with them if I had. What I can raise is sight. Every one of those four could walk into a part of London where the truth is spoken and be given it, where you and I would be given tea and a lie. I did not want an army. I wanted six people who each saw one quarter of a thing, in one room, once."

"You wrote four letters," I said.

"I wrote eight," said Sir Francis, "and you may now have the other half and think what you like of me.

Sir Francis
"The first of all of them was to Charles Booth. He has spent fifteen years counting the poor of this city street by street, and if he had come we should have had in one man what I was trying to assemble out of four. I sent him everything. He read it with great care and answered me with four pages, and the four pages said no.

Sir Francis
"He did not say it was untrue. He was scrupulous about that. He said it was not established, and then he set out precisely what would be required to establish it — how many wharves, observed over what period, by what method of enumeration, with what controls — and he was entirely right, and it would have taken two years and eleven men and a great deal of money.

Sir Francis
"I could not answer him. It is my own argument. He did not get it from me, but he got it from people like me, and I have spent forty years telling the world that a thing you have not measured is a thing you do not know."

"That must have been hard to read," I said.

Sir Francis
"It was the most respectful letter I have ever been refused in and I have not looked at it since March.

Sir Francis
"William Booth of the Salvation Army refused me as well, and gave the one reason that cannot be argued with: that the Army is let into those rooms precisely because everybody knows it is not there for anything else, and that the moment it carries a message for anybody, every door in that district shuts and does not open again in his lifetime. He is right, and it cost him something to be right, and he will never get any credit for it.

Sir Francis
"And Conan Doyle, who was Bell's student and has never pretended otherwise, answered me from Bloemfontein at length and told me that I had made the commonest error there is. He said I had a set of true facts and had drawn a line through them, and that the line was mine and not theirs. He said that a statement from a frightened boy, a painter's gossip and a set of prison returns are three things, not one thing, and that I had joined them because I am a man who joins things. He said I was to write to him again when I had something that could be tested."

"That is not an unfair letter," I said.

"It is the best-argued letter I received and it is wrong," said Sir Francis, "and I have no means whatever of demonstrating that it is wrong, and that has been my position since January and I do not expect it to alter.

Sir Francis
"The eighth was Colonel Baden-Powell, which I tell you only because it shows the state I was in that month better than anything else I could say. I wrote to a man who was at that moment besieged in a town in Africa. I knew perfectly well that he was; one could not buy a newspaper that was about anything else. And I sat down at that table and wrote to him, and posted it, and then sat here for some while considering what sort of man does that.

"He answered in the first week of June, after they got him out. Extremely decent about it. He said that if I were still at it when he came home he should be glad to be told how it had ended." Sir Francis was quiet for a moment. "I have not answered that letter."

Conrad
"I got the last three of them in one afternoon in a hospital in the middle of March, and I had gone there for exactly one of them.

Conrad
"Joseph Bell was down from Edinburgh consulting, and I wanted him more than I wanted anybody on my list. He wrote back and said to come to the ward at four and walk round with him, which I have since understood was itself a sort of examination.

Conrad
"So I went to get Bell. And on the way down the men's side I acquired a soldier.

Conrad
"There was a boy in a bed there, sent home from South Africa with a hole in him, making a considerable nuisance of himself about being sent back. Carton de Wiart. Nineteen or twenty, and his complaint was not that he had been shot but that they would not let him out of the bed.

Conrad
"I talked to him for ten minutes because he was the only interesting object in the ward, and by the end of it I had told him rather more than I intended. He did not ask one question about whether it was true. He asked where, and when.

Conrad
"And then he asked me for four pounds. For a revolver and a quantity of ammunition. He was perfectly matter-of-fact about it, explained that his own had gone back to the regiment along with everything else he owned, and undertook to repay me the moment his people sent his allowance. He then asked whether I had any preference as to the make, on the ground that it was my money.

Conrad
"I gave him five, because four is the sort of figure a young man arrives at by leaving something out."

Sir Francis
"And did he come?"

"He came up on the eighteenth of May. He was the first of them to arrive and he took a room three streets from the house and would not be argued out of it." Sir Francis looked at the rug. "He has not repaid me the five pounds."

Conrad
"Bell I had come for, and Bell is the reason the arrangement is worth anything at all.

Conrad
"We walked the length of two wards and he gave me my quarter of an hour at the end of it, and I put the whole thing to him. He heard it out without interrupting once, which almost nobody does, and then asked me eleven questions, every one of them about something I had said in passing and had not thought important. He never asked whether I believed it. He asked how I came to be in that police station at that hour, which is the best question anybody has put to me about this business, and I include yours.

Conrad
"Then he said he would come. And then he said that we had left out the most useful person in the arrangement, and had not noticed, because we are men.

Conrad
"He said: you will want a nurse. Not for the wounded. A nurse is admitted into any house in any district in England at any hour of the night without a single question, and is then left alone in a room with whoever is ill and whoever is frightened. Half the families on that river have somebody sick in them. People tell a nurse what they would not tell a priest, and they do it while she is doing something else.

Conrad
"He gave me a name. Edith Cavell, trained at the London. He said she was the most literal-minded woman he had ever met, which from Bell was not a criticism. She replied with four questions about precisely what would be expected of her, then agreed, and wrote twice more before May to ask whether there was anything she ought to be reading."

Sir Francis
"Henry found the last two, and they are the only two in the whole arrangement who are there to do anything with their hands.

Sir Francis
"Richard Gunn. A tailor by trade and a boxer by reputation, and he had held an amateur championship of England. Henry called him an honourable ruffian, by which I understood that he would hit a man, but only after telling him that he was about to. He knew every street east of the Tower — and this was Henry's point and it was the good one — and he was not a policeman and never had been, and everybody down there knew it.

Sir Francis
"And a young man named Taylor, who swims.

Sir Francis
"You may laugh. Henry did not; Henry is incapable of it. Those docks at night are walls, and gates, and men upon the gates, and every man on every gate is paid by somebody and we now believe we know by whom. But nobody watches the water. Nobody has ever watched the water, because nobody goes into the river in that part of London if he wishes to go on being a person.

Sir Francis
"Taylor would. Henry got him through the swimming clubs, and what he was asked to do was to look at the river face of four wharves at two in the morning and come back and say what was there."

"And what did you expect him to find?" I asked.

"Nothing whatever," said Sir Francis. "That is rather the object of sending a man. I expected him to come back and tell me there was nothing to see, and I should have been glad of it, and we should have gone on with the count and the tonnage and the arithmetic like sensible people.

Sir Francis
"He went in five times between the middle of April and the second week of May. The first four were nothing.

Sir Francis
"On the fifth he found a man."

"I am going to tell you about that," said Sir Francis, "and I want you to understand exactly what I am doing when I do it.

Sir Francis
"Six days ago you asked me where that paper came from and I would not tell you. I said that I had given my word to the man who put it into my hand. All of that was true and it is true this morning.

Sir Francis
"He has not been seen since the twenty-eighth of May."

Conrad
"Dead?"

Sir Francis
"I do not know. Nobody knows. He is not among the ones they have named, and he is not at his lodging, and he has not drawn his money, and his people in Lancashire have heard nothing since the middle of the month. He is one of the several who are simply not anywhere.

Sir Francis
"So I am about to break a promise to a man who is not able to release me from it. I have considered at some length whether his being gone dissolves it, and I have concluded that it does not, and I am going to do it regardless, and I would rather you had that said plainly than have me put something graceful in its place."

Conrad
"Why tell me at all, then?"

"Because he is not anywhere," said Sir Francis, "and somebody ought to know what he did before the only two people who know are an old man with a bad head and whoever it was that took him.

Sir Francis
"There is a wharf where the old piling was never drawn and still stands in rows under the staging, and things go in among it and do not come out again. The water there is cold the whole year and it does not move. He put his hand on a coat and thought it was a coat.

Sir Francis
"The man had been in the river since about October.

Sir Francis
"Taylor did not leave him. He got him along to the steps, and then he did the thing I should not have had the presence of mind to do at that age or at any other. He went through the pockets before he called anybody, because he had been sent to find out what was going on down there and he was not sure the man would still be there in the morning.

Sir Francis
"And in the breast of the coat there was a tin tobacco box with the lid pressed down. Inside the tin, folded into eighths and quite dry, were two sheets of paper."

I did not say anything for some seconds.

"Yes," said Sir Francis, watching me. "It is what I showed you six days ago. A boy went into the Thames at two in the morning for a set of tonnage figures and came up with that instead, and carried it to Kensington in his coat, and seventeen days later he stopped being anywhere."

"He kept it in a tin," I said.

Sir Francis
"He kept it in a tin. Do you see it? He could not read, or he could barely read. He could not read that paper and he could not throw it away, because he had to be able to put it in front of somebody in order to be paid. So he kept it dry, with his tobacco, in the way you would keep a ticket."

Conrad
"And the body?"

"Reported. Henry saw to it through the proper channel inside the week, and it was recovered, and there was an inquest of a sort, and the finding was what the finding always is." Sir Francis moved his hand on the rug. "The tin did not go with him, and that was wrong, and I have known it was wrong from the hour Taylor put it into my hand. I could tell you that it would have gone up and stopped, and that would be perfectly true. It is not the reason. I kept it because I wanted it."

"Did you tell the others?" I said. "Any of them?"

Sir Francis
"No. And I should like to be exact here, because it is the one part of this where I have nothing to defend.

Sir Francis
"When I wrote those letters in March there was nothing else to tell. There was no paper. And I put the whole of what I had in front of every person I asked, and not one of them came to London on a half of anything.

Sir Francis
"Taylor gave me the tin on the eleventh of May. I had it seventeen days. A thing like that does not go in the post, and — you have heard what happened in January — a checkable story with one impossible item in it is not believed at all, and I was not going to spend eleven people's good opinion on a letter.

Sir Francis
"I was going to put it on the table in front of the whole of them at once, at the house, with everybody in the room. That was rather the point of everybody being in the room."

He looked at the window for some while.

"I have gone over that a good many times since," said Sir Francis, "and I have not yet thought of a better thing that I could have done, and I no longer expect to."

There was a knock, and the servant came in to say that Dr Ferris had arrived and was in the small room.

"That is the head," said Sir Francis. "They come twice a week, they do very little, and they charge a great deal, and my sister has arranged matters so that I cannot get out of it. Forgive me. Thursday week, if you will, and I shall have the copies out and you may read the letters themselves."

I got my hat and thanked him, and he was already reaching for the stick, and the servant had the door, and it was in that small disorder at the end of a long morning that I asked the last thing, standing, half turned, in the manner of a man enquiring about the weather.

"They were all to gather in the last week of May," I said. "Where were you to meet?"

"At the house," said Sir Francis, getting up. "The Three Harpies."

He steadied himself on the arm of the chair and looked round at me, and I believe he was mildly surprised.

"I told you in June that I was going in to meet an acquaintance," said Sir Francis. "I ought to have said acquaintances. There were to be eleven of us."

Continue...

Chapter VIII

Battle for the East End

I came back from Rutland Gate a little after one, and made tea, because there was nobody in the house to make it and because a man who has been talked at for three hours wants five minutes in which nothing is said to him.

Then I went up to the study with the cup in my hand to write the morning down while I had it.

He was sitting at my desk with the lamp lit in the daylight and my notebook open in front of him, and he had found the tobacco.

I did not drop the cup. I record that because for some years afterwards I told the story as though I had.

"Sit down, Mr Conrad," said Worth. "It is your room. I am aware of the difficulty."

Conrad
"How long have you been here?"

"Two hours and a little. Your woman goes out at eleven and the area door has a lock that I should be embarrassed to describe to you." He closed the notebook without marking his place, which I noticed. "I have read about forty pages of that and I make no apology at all. If you had come in at twelve you would have found me by the window doing nothing, and I should have had to be dramatic, and I have never cared for it. I got bored."

Conrad
"You have escaped."

Worth
"I have not escaped. I dislike the word and it is inaccurate. Escape involves a wall.

Worth
"There is a man in that room this afternoon. He is about my height and rather younger, and he is being paid a good deal more than he could earn at liberty, and Mr Pike carries in his dinner and calls him sir. If you were to go there on Monday and ask for Victor Waldon you would be shown to him. Victor Waldon has not been anywhere."

Conrad
"And if they compare him to the man who was brought in in May?"

"Then somebody will have to explain how they came to book a man for eleven weeks without once writing down what he looked like," said Worth, "and I should be interested to read it."

I asked him what he wanted.

Worth
"You have been to Kensington twice. I asked you in July to tell me what you got out of the old man and you said that you would, and I have been sitting in a warm room for eight weeks waiting to be told, and I am not a patient man. I have simply had a great deal of practice at appearing to be one.

Worth
"Sit down. I am going to make you an offer and you will not like the first half of it. I will answer whatever you ask me about the twenty-eighth of May. All of it. I have not told any of it to any person living and I have had four months to arrange it in my head, and I shall not colour it, because I do not need to and because you would catch me.

Worth
"And then you will tell me what he said."

I sat down, and he got out of my chair and took the other one, which was a piece of manners I have thought about since.

"Very well," I said. "Begin with this. The painter was there."

"Sickert." Worth did not look surprised. "Yes. In the corner, on a stool, painting the room. How do you know that?"

Conrad
"You told me. In July, in a cell, when you were a dock labourer."

"So I did." He almost smiled. "Then I shall tell you something that will spoil your afternoon, because it spoiled four months of mine.

Worth
"He is the reason any of it happened.

Worth
"Nobody bought him, so far as I know, and I have looked. He was not paid and I do not believe he was told anything. He simply went about for three weeks in February asking, in rooms which belong to Darby Sabini, whether it was true that Darby Sabini had taken the wharves.

Worth
"That is all it needed. A gentleman in a good coat, with a name people know, going from house to house putting the same question. Within a fortnight Sabini knew there was something, and knew roughly what the something believed, and knew it had money behind it, because that sort of man does not ask those questions for himself."

"He was verifying it," I said. "For a man who could not verify it any other way."

"Yes. And in verifying it he announced it." Worth turned his hand over. "I have not been able to be angry about that. It is the same mistake the old man made in the police station, from the other end. You cannot ask a question in a small world without the world learning what you are asking."

Worth
"Now the house, and this is the part where I want you to understand that I have revised my opinion of Darby Sabini twice, and that the second revision was upward, and that I did not enjoy it.

Worth
"They were not meeting at the Three Harpies. Not at first. They met at the Anchor and Hope, which is the next house but one, and which has a back room with its own stair, and they had used it four or five times by the end of March.

Worth
"Sabini did not raid it. He did not put a man in it and he did not burn it and he did not have anybody followed, and any one of those would have been what I expected and what I would have done.

Worth
"He bought them. Both of them. The Anchor first and the Harpies a week later — the leases through a house agent, in the ordinary way, at a price nobody quarrelled with, and the whole thing took eleven days.

Worth
"Then he closed the Anchor for repairs.

Worth
"There is nowhere else. That is what you must understand about a district like that. Two streets, a certain kind of respectability, a back room with a stair — there is precisely one other house that will do, and it was two hundred yards away and it was his.

Worth
"They walked into it themselves. Nobody drove them. They found the Anchor shut and they went along to the Harpies and they took the upstairs room and they were pleased about it, because it was quieter."

Conrad
"And Sabini?"

"Behind his own bar, in his shirtsleeves, with a cloth, three nights in five." Worth shook his head. "Not in a room above. Not watching from a doorway. Pulling their beer. Nobody looks at a publican. I have spent thirty years making myself invisible and it has cost me a good deal of thought and a certain amount of money, and that man achieved it by rolling his sleeves up."

Worth
"Then we watched, and it was easy, and that ought to have made me uneasy and did not.

Worth
"The old gentleman came four times in May, each time with a different person, and not once with the same one twice. He did the sensible things. But he came in daylight to a public house in Limehouse four times in a month, and a man of that age and that coat in that street is remembered by every child on it.

Worth
"And on the eleventh he made a booking. The upstairs room and the two chambers above, for the night of the twenty-eighth of May, for eleven or twelve. Paid in part. Written in the book in the ordinary way, in the landlord's hand.

Worth
"I have seen that entry. It is in Sabini's own writing, because Sabini took the booking.

Worth
"He told me the same evening, and he was delighted, and so was I. Do you see the position it put us in? We knew where the whole of them would be, and on what night, and how many, in a house that belonged to us, with our own man serving.

Worth
"So we made ready. The week before, our people were in there every evening drinking, because a strange face is remarkable and eleven strange faces are not if there are thirty of you. And we moved the regular custom out — free drink at two other houses, and a shilling here and there, and a word to the foremen that the Harpies was going to be quiet for a while. By the last week of May there was nobody in that place on a payday who had ever drunk in it before."

"I know," I said.

He looked at me for a moment.

"Yes," said Worth. "You do."

Conrad
"Now the night, and here I am going to be less use to you than you want.

Conrad
"The booking was for the twenty-eighth. A great many of them came on the twenty-seventh.

Conrad
"That was the eclipse.

Conrad
"And I want to be exact here, because I have heard it put about since as though they came early in order to watch it in company, and they did nothing of the kind. Most of those people had never set eyes on one another. They had been written to separately by an old man in Kensington, and what they had in common was a letter.

Conrad
"They each moved by a day on their own account, privately, and not one of them had said a word of it to any of the others. They found it out on the night. There was a quarter of an hour of it going round that room — you as well? and you? — and they were all faintly embarrassed about it, and afterwards they were a good deal easier with each other than they had been, which I noticed at the time and did not think about for a moment.

Conrad
"It was going to be the only one most of them would ever see. A clergyman, a nurse, a boxer, a prison man and a surgeon of seventy-three each decided, separately, in a different part of England, that they were not going to miss it. And every one of them shifted by one day. And everything that happened afterwards sits on that."

Worth
"They came in from about six on the twenty-seventh, in ones and twos. Doctor Bell. The old surgeon, Lister, who had to be helped up the step. Mrs Pankhurst, who arrived by herself and looked at the room the way an inspector looks at a kitchen. Du Cane. The clergyman. The soldier — the young one with the hole in him, who had been in the district a week already and had made himself known to everybody. The nurse. Gunn came in at nine and stood by the door and did not sit down once all night.

Worth
"And ours. Kimber down from Birmingham, in a suit that cost more than the house. Gardstein and two of his. McLean, who should not have been anywhere. The lawyer, who did not know what he was in and drank lemonade. Helfeld and Lepidus, who I had told to stay outside and who did not.

Worth
"Jack was there. I want that in your book, whatever else goes in it. He sat at the end of the long table for five hours and was pleasant to a nurse.

Worth
"And there were two I could not place at all, and they cost me the best part of the night.

Worth
"An old man with a black dog, who sat by the fire, and a cat that came in with him and would not be moved. And a small woman with a portfolio who told fortunes with cards at the corner table for anybody who asked, and drank very little, and was the only person in that room who looked at me twice. I have since been told they called her Pixie.

Worth
"And what settled it for me, and what I sat and watched for the better part of an hour, was that his people did not know them either.

Worth
"I saw the clergyman ask the nurse who the old man by the fire was, and the nurse shake her head, and the nurse ask Du Cane, and Du Cane look round the room for somebody worth asking. Nobody greeted either of them. Nobody named them. The soldier went and sat down with the woman for twenty minutes and came away none the wiser, because I asked one of ours to go and sit where he had been sitting.

Worth
"And nobody was put out by them, which is the part I have never got to the bottom of. Both sides spent that evening quietly trying to find out who had brought them in, and neither side had.

Worth
"They were not ours and they were not his, and they walked into a house that had been emptied of strangers on the one night in the year when it mattered."

Conrad
"Where was Galton?"

"He was not there," said Worth. "That is the other thing I have looked at more times than is good for me.

Worth
"He booked the room. He paid a part of it. He had come four times in a month to a house he had no business in, at some risk, to talk to people one at a time. And on the night his eleven guests slept under that roof he was in his own bed in Kensington, and he came down in the morning, and he arrived — this is the piece I cannot put down — he arrived after it went up."

"He was in the street," I said.

Worth
"He was in the street when it went up. I am not telling you he did it. I have no reason of any kind to think so and I have looked hard for one.

Worth
"I am telling you that a man of seventy-eight booked a room for eleven people, did not sleep in the house, and was not in it when it came down, and that is the only sentence in this entire business that I cannot get to lie flat."

Worth
"They stayed the night, all of them, ours and his, under one roof.

Worth
"Nothing happened. That is the thing nobody will believe and it is the truth. There was no quarrel on the twenty-seventh. It was a public house with a great many people in it, and after eleven o'clock or so some of them got on rather well. The soldier and one of Gardstein's argued about Africa for an hour. Somebody sang. The nurse sat with the old surgeon and they talked about a hospital.

Worth
"I went up at two, and I was asleep from about half past. I cannot tell you what any person in that building did between then and the morning. Men went up and down those stairs all night. Anybody who tells you he knows what happened in that house between two and eight o'clock is telling you what he has worked out since.

Worth
"I know one thing about the stairs and it is the worst thing I know.

Worth
"Bose was on the landing.

Worth
"He had been in and out all evening with messages, which was his work, and nobody remarked it. He went up about midnight and he did not come down, and I took it that he was asleep in the passage, which he often was.

Worth
"He was not asleep in the passage. He was waiting for Sabini to go up to bed.

Worth
"I did not know that then. I put it together afterwards out of four things he had said to me in the fortnight before, none of which meant anything on its own and all of which mean one thing now. That boy had carried our messages for six months. He had gone to the police in January and been beaten in a yard for it — I did not learn that until August — and by May he had understood that nobody was coming.

Worth
"So he had decided to do it himself."

Conrad
"I woke to the shooting.

Conrad
"That is the first correction I have to make to whatever you have been told, and it is the one that matters. It did not begin with the eclipse. The eclipse had not happened yet.

Conrad
"They had come down for their breakfast — most of them, ours and his, in the main room, at that hour when a house is at its most ordinary — and they were going to go out afterwards and look at the sky. That was the arrangement. That was what the whole of them had moved their lives by a day for.

Conrad
"Not one of them saw it. I want that written down somewhere. Eleven people changed their plans to be in that road on that morning and there was not a soul in the street when it came.

Conrad
"I do not know who fired first and I never shall, and I was not the only man in that building asking himself the question while it was going on.

Conrad
"When I got the door open it was already pandemonium, and I want that word, because I have tried others and they are all too orderly. It was not two sides. There was no line anywhere in it. There were people running in a narrow house in both directions and most of them did not know what they were running from, and the ones who were shooting could not have told you what they were shooting at.

Conrad
"I got as far as the head of the stairs.

Conrad
"And then it began to get dark.

Conrad
"I had forgotten it entirely. So had everybody else in that house, and I have thought since that this is the only forgivable thing any of us did that morning.

Conrad
"It came on over about two or three minutes. The light went brown — not grey, brown, and thin, like a lamp being turned down by a hand — and the noise in that room changed before anybody understood why. Men stopped in the middle of what they were doing to look at a window.

Conrad
"Somebody down there shouted that it was the smoke. It was not the smoke.

Conrad
"And in the middle of it the birds stopped, over the whole of that district at once, and if you have never heard the river go quiet at eight in the morning I cannot describe it to you and I shall not try.

Conrad
"There were perhaps forty seconds in which almost nothing happened. And then it was very much worse, because a man who is frightened in the dark is a different animal from a man who is frightened in the light, and half of them could not see who was in front of them any longer."

Worth
"I shall give you what I saw in the order I saw it. It is not much and it does not join up.

Worth
"On the turn of the landing, in that brown light, Bose went at Sabini.

Worth
"He came off the wall where he had been standing all morning like part of the wall, and he took him about the chest, and they went into the banister together. It was not a fight as you would put it in a book. They were close in and one of them had the other's wrist and there was a knife somewhere between them, and I could not see whose it was. It lasted about as long as it takes to say this.

Worth
"That was the boy who wrote a statement in January and asked nine times who was going to read it, and in May he had worked out that nobody was.

Worth
"Then the screaming started from below.

Worth
"Not from the main room. From under it. There is a cellar under that house and there was no reason on this earth for a living soul to be in it, and there were people in it and they were screaming. A woman screamed twice and I could not tell you which woman and I have not tried.

Worth
"And the soldier went down.

Worth
"He came through from the main room at a run with that revolver of his that the old man had paid for, and he did not go out of the front door, which was six feet from him and open. He went down the cellar stair towards the screaming. And Lepidus went after him — after him, four or five seconds behind, and I do not know to this day whether he went down to stop him or to help him or for some reason of his own, and Helfeld was on the stair behind Lepidus.

Worth
"I never saw any of the three of them again.

Worth
"And the lawyer — Gandhi, the young Indian gentleman who did not know one thing about what he was in — was standing perfectly still in the middle of that room with his eyes shut while men went round him both ways in the half-dark, saying one word over and over. Two syllables. The same two, again and again. He was not shouting it. I do not know the language and I have not tried to find out what it was, and I have thought about that man more often than about anybody else in that house."

Worth
"And what was I doing, Mr Conrad?

Worth
"I was looking for Jack.

Worth
"I want it in your book in those words. The house was coming apart, and there was screaming under the floor, and a boy of nineteen was on the landing with a knife, and I went along that upstairs passage opening doors, because of every soul in that building there was exactly one who was not going to walk out of it, and I had put him in there myself, and he was mine to deal with.

Worth
"I did not find him. I got four doors along.

Worth
"Then it went up. From below — from the same place the screaming had come from — and about twenty minutes after the light had come back, and I felt the floor go before I heard anything, which I am told is the usual order."

He was quiet for a time.

"Where was the old man in all that?" I said.

"I have no idea," said Worth. "Nobody has. He was not in the house at two in the morning, and he was not in that room at breakfast, and he was not on those stairs, and thirty people in the road will tell you he was standing in it at the moment the front came out, and I have spoken to two of them and they are not lying.

Worth
"Between those two facts there are about nine hours and not one person alive who can account for them, and that is not an accusation, it is arithmetic.

Worth
"There were twenty-odd people in that house. Some are dead and named. Some are dead and not named. A good many are simply not anywhere — not buried, not charged, not at their lodgings, not written to their people.

Worth
"And there are two men in England this afternoon who were at the Three Harpies on the twenty-eighth of May and can still answer a question about it. One of them is sitting in your chair. The other is in Kensington with a hole in his head and a rug over his knees, and you have been to see him twice."

He got up then and went to the window and stood with his back to me, which he had not done once in either of the prison conversations, and when he spoke again he did not turn round.

"I said there was a piece missing," said Worth. "That is what I have told the police, and the doctors, and you, half an hour ago.

Worth
"It is not entirely true. I have some of it. I have wished a great deal that I had not, and I have not given it to one living person, and I am going to give it to you now, and when I have I would be obliged if you did not ask me anything about it."

I said that I would not ask him anything.

"You will," said Worth. "But say it.

Worth
"I came to covered in blood. Not bleeding. Covered. My suit was not a suit any longer, it was strings, and there was a hole in my side that I could have put my hand into and I have the mark of it still.

Worth
"And I was alive. I should like you to sit with that for a moment, because I have sat with it for four months. I was alive, and I was on the stones twenty yards up the road from that building, and I have never been able to give an account of either fact.

Worth
"There was a young man kneeling over me screaming into my face.

Worth
"I could not hear him at first. There was a whistling and under the whistling nothing at all. Then some of it came back, and what he was screaming was this, and I give it to you exactly:

Worth
"I brought you back so that I could kill you with my own hands. Look at what you have done."

"His name is Aleister Crowley," said Worth. "He is about five and twenty. He writes verse that nobody buys and he belongs to one of those societies that fall out with one another in the newspapers.

Worth
"I sent for him in February. When a man sets out to find who in London is buying the dead, he works down through the trade and the schools and the hospitals, and at the bottom of it he arrives at the sort of person who plays at magic, because they are the only others in England with a use for a corpse. So I had him asked to call on me.

Worth
"He would not come. He sent back four lines declining and they were rude, and I remember thinking it was the first honest thing anybody had sent me that month.

Worth
"He was not invited to that house. He was not ours. He was not the old man's — ask him yourself and watch his face when you say the name. Nobody in England put Aleister Crowley in that road on the twenty-eighth of May.

Worth
"And he was in it, on his knees, with my blood on his coat, using my right name.

Worth
"And there is a worse piece of it than that. I have since taken some trouble over that society of his. It is not a large body and it does not advertise, and a determined man with money can find out more about it than its members would care for.

Worth
"The old fellow with the black dog by the fire is in it, or was, or is spoken of in it as a sort of authority. The little woman with the cards is in it. Crowley is in it.

Worth
"Three people. Not one of whom was sent for by me, and not one of whom was sent for by the old man in Kensington, and all three in the same building on the same night, out of a society of that size, in a district none of them has any business in.

Worth
"And there was a fourth."

Conrad
"Another stranger?"

"No," said Worth. "That is the whole of my difficulty. It is not a stranger.

Worth
"I have it from their own side — bought, and I paid a great deal for it and I believe it — that there were four of their people under that roof on the twenty-eighth. Three I have named to you. The fourth was not one of the two who walked in uninvited.

Worth
"So the fourth is one of ours or one of his. Somebody who was written to by Kensington in March, or somebody I hired myself and paid and gave work to. Somebody sitting at that table with a reason for being there that any man in the room could have told you, and a second reason that nobody could.

Worth
"It is one of about twenty people, and I recruited half of them, and I have been down that list every night since the middle of June."

Conrad
"Who do you think it is?"

"If I knew that," said Worth, "I should not be sitting in your study.

Worth
"As to the rest of what he said to me, I am not going to tell you what I think he meant by brought you back. I have one hole in my side, a suit in ribbons, no recollection of crossing twenty yards of road, and no explanation of any kind, and I have decided that I would rather have no explanation than a cheap one."

Conrad
"So I looked at what I had done.

Conrad
"The front of the house was gone and the middle of it was burning, and the floor of the main room was not there any longer. It had come down whole into the cellar, and the cellar was open to the morning, and there was a hell in it. I use the word because I have tried the others for four months and none of them is any better and most of them are worse.

Conrad
"There was a creature in that cellar.

Conrad
"It had been a man and it was the size of two, and the blast had taken it in half across the middle. Its legs were on the far side of that cellar, apart from it, and they were still going — kicking, jerking, the way a killed rabbit does — and the rest of it was not dead either. It was crawling. It was pulling itself along the brick on its arms with nothing below the ribs, and it was doing it slowly, and it was in an amount of pain that I have not got the words for and do not intend to look for them.

Conrad
"And it was sewn.

Conrad
"That is the thing. All over. There was a line right round each shoulder, black and drawn tight, and the skin either side of the line did not match, not in colour and not in kind. The arms were the wrong size for any man and they were joined on. Across the chest and along the upper arms the muscle had been built up in lumps and laid on in strips over what was already there, and stitched down, and stitched carefully — that is the part I cannot put away, that it was neat — muscle put on top of muscle by somebody who was taking his time and doing it properly.

Conrad
"And it was opened by the blast, and what came out of it would not have come out of you or me. There was a great deal too much. It went on being too much.

Conrad
"And I understood, kneeling in that road, what the paper had been for. Not then in any orderly way. It went through me the way cold water does.

Conrad
"There is no patient. There never was a patient."

"And that is the cellar," said Worth. "There was more above it and I saw that too.

Worth
"On the floor of the bar, at the edge where the boards still held, there was a pile of bodies and it was burning. A pile. Stacked, the way you stack anything, one across another, and alight.

Worth
"And there was a woman dragging a second lot towards it.

Worth
"She was not running out of that building, and she was not pulling anybody clear of the fire, which is what a decent person does and what I should have said I would do. She was taking them to it. She was doing it steadily and she was on her third or fourth when I lost sight of her, and she had her sleeves up.

Worth
"I did not know her then. I have since had a very good description of a young woman who goes about burning things for the suffrage, and I am satisfied that it was Mary Richardson, and I have no notion on this earth what she was doing in that house or whose side she was on or whether there were any sides left by then."

Worth
"Crowley was still shouting at me through all of it. And then he stopped.

Worth
"He stopped in the middle of a word, and he took hold of my chin and turned my face to look at him properly, and he looked at me for what I should think was five or six seconds.

Worth
"And he said: You are surprised.

Worth
"And then: This is not your doing, is it.

Worth
"It was not a question and I did not answer it. I had not said one word to him from the beginning and I did not say one then.

Worth
"And he let go of me and sat back on his heels in the road and said the last thing I have from that morning, and he said it quite quietly, and it is the only sentence out of the whole of the twenty-eighth of May that I can give you word for word and swear to.

Worth
"Someone has been dabbling with forces they do not comprehend, Mr Worth. I hope for all our sakes that they perished in the explosion.

Worth
"Then I went out. And then I was in a hospital. And then I was in a cell being called sir."

Worth stayed at the window with his back to me.

"You may ask it now," said Worth. "You have been holding it since the cellar and it is making you unhappy."

Conrad
"What was it?"

Worth
"I do not know. I have no word for it and I have hunted for one, and every word I have found is a word out of a book, and I am not going to use a word out of a book for a thing I looked at in a public road in daylight.

Worth
"And before you offer it to me, I have had the other answer already, from a doctor who was very kind about it. A man with a head wound and a great deal of blood gone will see things that are not in front of him, and see them in detail, and go on being certain of them for the rest of his life. That is a complete answer and I have no way round it and neither have you.

Worth
"I have not made it go away and I have tried. A man does not think about a thing four hundred times and have it stay the same. It stays the same.

Worth
"And a fancy does not answer a question you have been carrying for a year. That is the piece the doctor cannot have.

Worth
"Because I knew what that paper was for. I had known since November and I had it wrong, and so did you, and so would any sensible person in England.

Worth
"Measurements. Six of them, and colouring, and the frame and not the weight. Anybody who reads that reads it one way. He is matching. He has a sick man somewhere in a good house, and he is trying to put a piece of one person into another person and keep them both alive, and he has decided the way to do it is to find somebody near enough to pass. I sat in Newcastle and worked that out and was rather pleased with myself, and I have heard since that it is what a very eminent man would have told you as well.

Worth
"It is wrong.

Worth
"You do not measure for a patient. There is no patient. The measurements are so that the parts will go together — so that the arm will sit on the shoulder and the thing will be of a piece and not a rubbish heap. He was not matching a donor to a man. He was matching them to each other.

Worth
"And that is why the children need no measuring at all, and why he wants any of them and all of them and pays three times over and never asks what they look like.

Worth
"They are not for matching. They are the material."

"You cannot know that," I said.

"No," said Worth. "I saw it."

He came away from the window then and sat down on the arm of the other chair, which is a thing a man does when he has decided to stay another hour.

"Now," said Worth. "One more thing, and then I shall go out the way I came in.

Worth
"You are in Kensington again on Thursday week. When you are there, put something to him for me. Lightly. In the middle of something else, and not as though it came from anybody.

Worth
"Ask him about the house. Not the morning — the house. Who held that lease before Sabini bought it. What the place was before it was a public house. Whether anybody ever told him there was a cellar under—"

And that was as far as he got, because somebody knocked at my front door.

It was not a caller's knock.

Continue...

Chapter IX

The Final Witness

There were five of them on my step.

Four were constables, in uniform, and they had arranged themselves on the pavement in the way men do when they have been told to wait outside and have not been told why. The fifth was a woman of about five and thirty in a plain dark coat, hatted, with her hands at her sides, and she did not introduce herself until I had finished looking at the four behind her.

Mrs Smith
"Mr Conrad. Edith Smith."

I have read since that the newspapers gave her six different titles in the same fortnight and that two of them were invented. The constables called her ma'am. I shall do the same and note that nobody in England had settled the question, which I am told was convenient for a number of people.

I do not know what my face did. I know that there was a man in my study at that moment who had walked out of one of Her Majesty's prisons that morning, and that I had let him in, and given him tobacco, and taken his account down in a notebook, and that every one of those things is an offence with a name.

"Get your coat, please," said Mrs Smith. "I need you at the station and I need you now."

Conrad
"It is nearly five o'clock. I will come in the morning and I will come early."

Mrs Smith
"No."

Conrad
"Mrs Smith —"

"You will come now voluntarily," said Mrs Smith, "or you will come now not voluntarily, and the second way involves those four men and a great deal of writing afterwards, and I would rather have the first. I am not going to pretend there is a third."

She said it without heat and without apology, and I have had cause since to think about how many times a day she must have had to say things in exactly that voice in order to be able to produce it on a doorstep at no notice at all.

The study was empty. The lamp had been turned out. My notebook was closed and squared to the edge of the blotter. The window over the yard was fastened on its catch from the inside, which I record because I have never worked out how, and I looked at it for longer than I could afford to.

I got my coat and went down.

She put me in the carriage and sat opposite and did not speak until we were past the corner.

"I am going to tell you why you are in this carriage," said Mrs Smith, "and then you are going to tell me whether I am mad, and I want you to know before you answer that I have asked eleven people that question in six weeks and that ten of them said yes."

Conrad
"Ask it."

Mrs Smith
"The man in the remand cell who calls himself Victor Waldon is not the man I interviewed in June."

I did not say anything at all.

Mrs Smith
"He is the right height. He is the right age within about five years. He has a bandaged hand and a mark across the bridge of his nose, and he has the same account, word for word, and I mean word for word — I have my notes from June and I put four of the questions to him again last week and he gave me the same answers in the same order with the same pauses in them, and nobody does that, Mr Conrad. Nobody. A man who is telling the truth varies. A man who has learned it does not."

Conrad
"What do the others say?"

"That I have seen him three times in four months and that men change in prison and that I am tired." She looked out of the window. "The medical officer says he has lost weight. The governor says I am mistaken but does not say it unkindly, which is worse. And one of them was good enough to explain to me that women are apt to be certain about faces."

Conrad
"And what do you say?"

Mrs Smith
"I say I sat in a room with a man for two hours in June and asked him about his mother, and he told me a thing about a quarry that had nothing to do with anything, and he laughed at the end of it. And I sat in a room last week with somebody who has been given the quarry and cannot do the laugh."

"Tell me the rest," I said. "You did not come for my opinion on a face. You have four constables outside my house."

"The four constables are so that I could come at all," said Mrs Smith. "If I go to an address by myself and something comes of it, it is a woman going about on her own. If I take four men it is an operation, and it is written in a book, and somebody has to read it."

She was quiet for a moment.

Mrs Smith
"Since the first week of June I have had this case and since the first week of June nobody has wanted to talk to me. Not the division, not the port, not the coroner's officer, not one man from that street. I have knocked on ninety doors in Limehouse and been given tea in about forty of them and told nothing in ninety.

Mrs Smith
"And the people who do want to talk to me tell me things I cannot put in a file.

Mrs Smith
"There is a lighterman who swears that on the morning of the twenty-eighth, before it went up, he watched an English gentleman in a good coat fight eight or nine men in the road at the same time and beat them. With a walking stick. And a pocket handkerchief — he was very definite about the handkerchief and could not tell me what it was for. And then, at the end, with a sword that came out of an umbrella.

Mrs Smith
"He says the gentleman was not hurried. He says — and I have written it down in his own words because I could not think what else to do with it — that it looked like a Chinaman dancing."

Conrad
"And you did not believe him."

Mrs Smith
"I did not believe him and I gave him two shillings and I have thought about him every week since, because he was sober, and he did not ask for the two shillings, and he was frightened of being laughed at before I had said a word.

Mrs Smith
"And then there is a woman who was drunk on the corner, who says that the ground opened under that public house. Not a cellar, Mr Conrad. She means the other thing. She says a gate came open under the floor and there was fire in it and things came up out of it, and she has said it four times now and the fourth was to a clergyman.

Mrs Smith
"So that is my case. A man nobody will speak about, a witness who saw a dancing Chinaman, a witness who saw the mouth of hell, and a prisoner who has been swapped for a man who cannot laugh in the right place."

The carriage turned in through the gate.

"I want you to look at him," said Mrs Smith. "You saw him twice. You are a novelist, you are not a policeman, you have nothing to gain and there is no file with your name on it. If you tell me it is the same man, I shall write that down and I shall take the case to be wrong and I shall go home and sleep."

"I will look at him," I said.

She sat back against the cushion and looked at me for the rest of the way and did not say anything more, and I have thought since that she had already had her answer out of the fact that I had not asked her a single question about whether such a thing was possible.

A sergeant met us inside the door with his hat in his hand.

I did not follow all of it. I heard "half past three" and I heard "the medical man has been and gone" and then I heard her say, very quietly, "say it again."

The prisoner known as Victor Waldon had been found dead in his room at about a quarter past three that afternoon. The prison medical officer had attended. A certificate had been written. Failure of the heart.

Conrad
"Who signed it?"

The sergeant read it off the paper.

"Ferris," said the sergeant. "Dr J. A. Ferris."

I have been in a good many rooms in my life where something has gone wrong, and I have always been able to say afterwards what I did at the moment of it. I cannot say what I did there. I know that I looked at the clock over the charge desk and that it was twenty minutes past six.

Because at about four minutes past one o'clock that afternoon I had been sitting in a first-floor room in Rutland Gate when a servant came in and said that Dr Ferris had arrived and was waiting in the small room. Sir Francis had said that it was the head, and that they came twice a week and did very little and charged a great deal.

I got up and put my hat on and left the house and walked home.

And at a quarter past three, in a prison north of the Euston Road, the same man attended a dead prisoner and wrote a certificate.

There is a reading in which that is possible. I have constructed it since, more than once, at night: the carriage, the hour, the traffic, a short visit, a man who is often hurried. It requires everything to fall out exactly right and it requires Sir Francis to have been finished with in about twenty minutes.

There is another reading, and it has two branches, and I could not see a third then and I cannot now.

Either the man in the small room at Rutland Gate was not Dr Ferris.

Or there was nobody in the small room at all.

The sergeant was still talking. Two chief inspectors had been sent for and were on their way. There were three matters on which they would require an account, and he read those off the paper as well, because he had been given them in writing, which he plainly thought was a strange way to be given anything.

Why a member of the public had been permitted access to a remand prisoner in this investigation, and on whose authority.

Why the prisoner had been accommodated otherwise than in the ordinary way.

Why certain statements taken in the course of the investigation did not appear to have been forwarded.

Mrs Smith heard the three of them out and said thank you and sent him away, and then she stood in the middle of that hall and did a thing I have not forgotten. She counted them off on her fingers. One, two, three. Twice over.

"Do you see it?" said Mrs Smith.

Conrad
"Tell me what you see."

"Three questions and not one of them is about a dead man." She put her hand down. "Nobody in this building is going to ask who killed him. They are going to ask who let you in, and who gave him a carpet, and which papers I have been sitting on. By Monday I shall be the story, Mr Conrad, and a case is never reopened against the officer who had it."

She took me down to see him.

I shall not describe that room. He was on the table with a sheet to the collarbone and somebody had done his hair, which I have thought about a great deal since, because there is no reason on earth to do a dead man's hair unless you are expecting him to be looked at.

He was about the right height. He had a bandaged hand. There was a mark across the bridge of his nose.

He was perhaps forty, with a wide flat face and a great deal of dark hair going grey at one side only, and his hands were the hands of a man who had done outdoor work and had not done any for some while, and I had never seen him before in my life.

Mrs Smith
"Well?"

"No," I said. "This is not the man I sat with. It is not close. It is not a question of weight or of prison or of four months. It is a different person and it is not a near thing."

Mrs Smith
"You will say that again? To another person? In writing?"

Conrad
"To anybody you like. And I will say the rest of it as well, and you had better have it here rather than upstairs. I saw Victor Waldon in that prison twice. I saw him in July and I saw him again in the last week of August, and on both occasions I sat within four feet of him for above an hour.

Conrad
"You are not mistaken, Mrs Smith. You have not been mistaken since the day you first said it."

She did not look pleased. She looked as though something had been lifted off her and something heavier put in its place, which I have since decided is what it feels like to be proved right when you have been alone in it.

Mrs Smith
"How long have you known?"

Conrad
"Since your sergeant said half past three."

"No," said Mrs Smith. "How long have you known there was something wrong with that man?"

I did not answer that, and she did not ask it a second time, and I have written elsewhere that I am not proud of the proportion.

"I shall not be able to use it," said Mrs Smith, "and I want you to hear me say that now rather than find it out."

Then she said, and she said it to the sheet and not to me: "Somebody killed him this afternoon because you went to that prison in July."

I have had six weeks to find an answer to that and I have not found one.

She took me up to her office by the back stair. It is not an office. It is a room with a window on to a lightwell and a table and two chairs and a press, and the press had a padlock on it that she opened with a key she had on her person and not on a board.

She took out a box file, tied, about three inches through, and she looked at it for a moment, and then she opened my coat with her free hand like a woman dressing a child and put it inside against my ribs and did the buttons up over it.

Mrs Smith
"Mrs Smith —"

"In the morning that goes to the chief inspectors," said Mrs Smith. "In the morning it stops existing. I have been four months getting the half of it and half of that came out of divisions that did not know they were giving it to me.

Mrs Smith
"You are a writer and you are not in the job and there is no register anywhere with your name and that file in the same line. If it is in your house it is a thing that can come back. If it is in this press on Monday it is nowhere for ever."

Conrad
"And if they find it with me?"

"Then you had better be better at this than I think you are." She was already at the door. "There is a way out at the back, past the yard, where the cleaners come in. They will be here within the half-hour.

Mrs Smith
"I shall make contact. Not at your house and not by post. Do not come here and do not write to me and do not say my name to anybody, and I include Sir Francis Galton in that, and I am going to leave the reason out because you can supply it yourself."

I asked her one thing at the door, because I could not help it.

Conrad
"Why me?"

"Because you went to see both of them," said Mrs Smith, "and you came away and you did not sell either of them to the newspapers, and this afternoon you told me the truth about a face when it would have been much easier to tell me I was tired.

Mrs Smith
"That is the whole of my reasoning and I am aware of what it is worth. I have not got anything better. I have not got anybody else."

I walked home. It was dark by then and it was raining a little and I had a police file inside my coat, and I went the long way round for no reason that would survive examination.

I sat with it on the table for the better part of an hour and did not untie it.

I want to set down what I was doing in that hour, because I have been over the same ground a great many times since and it has never once come out anywhere.

Worth may have lied to me. He is a professional deceiver of thirty years' standing. He has already lied to me once at length, in a cell, pleasantly, and I did not catch it — it was an old man in Kensington who caught it. Everything I have from him about that morning comes from a man who had a hole in his side and was concussed and who now has a considerable interest in my believing that somebody else is responsible.

And Sir Francis has not lied to me. That is the difficulty. I have gone back through every conversation and I cannot find one statement of his that is untrue. He refused me twice and told me he was refusing me and told me why. He gave me the one answer a liar would have supplied, and declined to fill in the gap in his own memory. He went over a woman's head to talk to me and then told me he had done it and called it contemptible. He gave me his own bad conduct, unasked, three times in two mornings.

Nothing he has said to me is false.

But I sat in his room this afternoon and heard a servant say a name, and four hours later a sergeant read the same name off a death certificate signed in a prison seven miles away, and both of those things cannot be what they appear to be.

He did not lie to me. I have checked it and I will go on checking it.

It is beginning to seem to me that this is not the same thing as being told the truth.

The file is tied with tape and it has a number on the front and no name.

There is a good deal in it. I turned it out on to the table and set the papers in order before I read any of them, because I have learned that much in six weeks, and there are five things in it that matter.

There is a statement taken in the east of London in January from a young man named Kudiram Bose, a page and a half, with a note written across the foot of it in a different hand.

There is a second statement, taken in June, from Sir Francis Galton, witness.

There is the record of an interview with the prisoner Victor Waldon, conducted over two hours, and it is signed at the bottom by the prisoner, and I have his signature in my own notebook for comparison, and I did not compare them for a long while.

There is a letter on Metropolitan Police paper, above a signature I recognised, setting out that the gentleman witness is a person of the highest character who was going in to the house to meet a friend and did not succeed in entering it, and that no further enquiry is required in that quarter.

And there is one more thing, and I did not understand it that night, and I am not certain that I understand it now.

It was a little after ten o'clock. I trimmed the lamp and untied the tape.

Case papers

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