“Come on!” he said shortly.  “I’ll show you.”

Driscoll murmured a word or two to the newly-arrived constable, and then turned to the porter.

“How came you to find him, then?” he asked

The porter jerked his head at the door which they were leaving.

“I heard that door slam,” he replied, irritably, as if the fact which he mentioned caused him offence.  “I know I did!  So I got up to look around.  Then—­well, I saw that!”

He raised a hand, pointing down the lane.  The three men followed his outstretched finger.  And Spargo then saw a man’s foot, booted, grey-socked, protruding from an entry on the left hand.

“Sticking out there, just as you see it now,” said the porter.  “I ain’t touched it.  And so—­”

He paused and made a grimace as if at the memory of some unpleasant thing.  Driscoll nodded comprehendingly.

“And so you went along and looked?” he suggested.  “Just so—­just to see who it belonged to, as it might be.”

“Just to see—­what there was to see,” agreed the porter.  “Then I saw there was blood.  And then—­well, I made up the lane to tell one of you chaps.”

“Best thing you could have done,” said Driscoll.  “Well, now then—­”

The little procession came to a halt at the entry.  The entry was a cold and formal thing of itself; not a nice place to lie dead in, having glazed white tiles for its walls and concrete for its flooring; something about its appearance in that grey morning air suggested to Spargo the idea of a mortuary.  And that the man whose foot projected over the step was dead he had no doubt:  the limpness of his pose certified to it.

For a moment none of the four men moved or spoke.  The two policemen unconsciously stuck their thumbs in their belts and made play with their fingers; the porter rubbed his chin thoughtfully—­Spargo remembered afterwards the rasping sound of this action; he himself put his hands in his pockets and began to jingle his money and his keys.  Each man had his own thoughts as he contemplated the piece of human wreckage which lay before him.

“You’ll notice,” suddenly observed Driscoll, speaking in a hushed voice, “You’ll notice that he’s lying there in a queer way—­same as if—­as if he’d been put there.  Sort of propped up against that wall, at first, and had slid down, like.”

Spargo was taking in all the details with a professional eye.  He saw at his feet the body of an elderly man; the face was turned away from him, crushed in against the glaze of the wall, but he judged the man to be elderly because of grey hair and whitening whisker; it was clothed in a good, well-made suit of grey check cloth—­tweed—­and the boots were good:  so, too, was the linen cuff which projected from the sleeve that hung so limply.  One leg was half doubled under the body; the other was stretched straight out across the threshold; the trunk was twisted to the wall.  Over the white glaze of the tiles against which it and the shoulder towards which it had sunk were crushed there were gouts and stains of blood.  And Driscoll, taking a hand out of his belt, pointed a finger at them.