I accordingly made a mental note and the perambulation continued.

“You observe that Jeffrey used a gas-stove, instead of a coal fire, no doubt to economize work, but perhaps for other reasons.  Presumably he cooked by gas, too; let us see.”

We wandered into the little cupboard-like kitchen and glanced round.  A ring-burner on a shelf, a kettle, a frying-pan and a few pieces of crockery were its sole appointments.  Apparently the porter was correct in his statement as to Jeffrey’s habits.

Returning to the sitting-room, Thorndyke resumed his inspection, pulling out the table drawers, peering inquisitively into cupboards and bestowing a passing glance on each of the comparatively few objects that the comfortless room contained.

“I have never seen a more characterless apartment,” was his final comment.  “There is nothing that seems to suggest any kind of habitual activity on the part of the occupant.  Let us look at the bedroom.”

We passed through into the chamber of tragic memories, and, when Thorndyke had lit the gas, we stood awhile looking about us in silence.  It was a bare, comfortless room, dirty, neglected and squalid.  The bed appeared not to have been remade since the catastrophe, for an indentation still marked the place where the corpse had lain, and even a slight powdering of ash could still be seen on the shabby counterpane.  It looked to me a typical opium-smoker’s bedroom.

“Well,” Thorndyke remarked at length, “there is character enough here—­of a kind.  Jeffrey Blackmore would seem to have been a man of few needs.  One could hardly imagine a bedroom in which less attention seemed to have been given to the comfort of the occupant.”

He looked about him keenly and continued:  “The syringe and the rest of the lethal appliances and material have been taken away, I see.  Probably the analyst did not return them.  But there are the opium-pipe and the jar and the ash-bowl, and I presume those are the clothes that the undertakers removed from the body.  Shall we look them over?”

He took up the clothes which lay, roughly folded, on a chair and held them up, garment by garment.

“These are evidently the trousers,” he remarked, spreading them out on the bed.  “Here is a little white spot on the middle of the thigh which looks like a patch of small crystals from a drop of the solution.  Just light the lamp, Jervis, and let us examine it with a lens.”

I lit the lamp, and when we had examined the spot minutely and identified it as a mass of minute crystals, Thorndyke asked: 

“What do you make of those creases?  You see there is one on each leg.”

“It looks as if the trousers had been turned up.  But if they have been they must have been turned up about seven inches.  Poor Jeffrey couldn’t have had much regard for appearances, for they would have been right above his socks.  But perhaps the creases were made in undressing the body.”