He handed me the latchkey and I thanked him warmly from my heart, for I felt sure that the suggestion was made, not for any use that I should be to him, but for my own peace of mind.  I had hardly finished speaking when a quick step on the paved walk caught my ear.

“Here is Jervis,” said Thorndyke.  “We will let him know that there is a locum tenens ready to step into his shoes when he wants to be off.”  He flashed the lantern across the path, and a few moments later his junior stepped up briskly with a bundle of newspapers tucked under his arm.

It struck me that Jervis looked at me a little queerly when he recognised me in the dim light; also that he was a trifle constrained in his manner, as if my presence were an embarrassment.  He listened to Thorndyke’s announcement of our newly made arrangement without much enthusiasm and with none of his customary facetious comments.  And again I noticed a quick glance at me, half curious, half uneasy, and wholly puzzling to me.

“That’s all right,” he said when Thorndyke had explained the situation.  “I daresay you’ll find Berkeley as useful as me, and, in any case, he’ll be better here than staying on with Barnard.”  He spoke with unwonted gravity, and there was in his tone a solicitude for me that attracted my notice and that of Thorndyke as well, for the latter looked at him curiously, though he made no comment.  After a short silence, however, he asked:  “And what news does my learned brother bring?  There is a mighty shouting among the outer barbarians, and I see a bundle of newspapers under my learned friend’s arm.  Has anything in particular happened?”

Jervis looked more uncomfortable than ever.  “Well—­yes,” he replied hesitatingly, “something has happened—­there!  It’s no use beating about the bush; Berkeley may as well learn it from me as from those yelling devils outside.”  He took a couple of papers from his bundle and silently handed one to me and the other to Thorndyke.

Jervis’s ominous manner, naturally enough, alarmed me not a little.  I opened the paper with a nameless dread.  But whatever my vague fears, they fell far short of the occasion; and when I saw those yells from without crystallised into scare headlines and flaming capitals I turned for a moment sick and dizzy with fear.

The paragraph was only a short one, and I read it through in less than a minute: 

“THE MISSING FINGER

“DRAMATIC DISCOVERY AT WOODFORD.

“The mystery that has surrounded the remains of a mutilated human body, portions of which have been found in various places in Kent and Essex, has received a partial and very sinister solution.  The police have, all along, suspected that these remains were those of a Mr. John Bellingham who disappeared under circumstances of some suspicion about two years ago.  There is now no doubt upon the subject, for the finger which was missing from the hand that was found at Sidcup has been discovered at the bottom of a disused well together with a ring, which has been identified as one habitually worn by Mr. John Bellingham.