An inspector put him aside.

“Nobody’s been in?” he asked of one of the constables.

“No, sir.”

“Then you, Brackley, come with us; you, Smith, keep the gate.  There’s a squad on its way.”

The two inspectors and the constable passed down the alley and entered the house.  They mounted the wide carved staircase.

“This don’t look as if he’d been out much lately,” one of the inspectors muttered as he kicked aside a litter of dead leaves and paper that lay outside Oleron’s door.  “I don’t think we need knock—­break a pane, Brackley.”

The door had two glazed panels; there was a sound of shattered glass; and Brackley put his hand through the hole his elbow had made and drew back the latch.

“Faugh!"... choked one of the inspectors as they entered.  “Let some light and air in, quick.  It stinks like a hearse—­”

The assembly out in the square saw the red blinds go up and the windows of the old house flung open.

“That’s better,” said one of the inspectors, putting his head out of a window and drawing a deep breath....  “That seems to be the bedroom in there; will you go in, Simms, while I go over the rest?...”

They had drawn up the bedroom blind also, and the waxy-white, emaciated man on the bed had made a blinker of his hand against the torturing flood of brightness.  Nor could he believe that his hearing was not playing tricks with him, for there were two policemen in his room, bending over him and asking where “she” was.  He shook his head.

“This woman Bengough... goes by the name of Miss Elsie Bengough... d’ye hear?  Where is she?...  No good, Brackley; get him up; be careful with him; I’ll just shove my head out of the window, I think....”

The other inspector had been through Oleron’s study and had found nothing, and was now in the kitchen, kicking aside an ankle-deep mass of vegetable refuse that cumbered the floor.  The kitchen window had no blind, and was over-shadowed by the blank end of the house across the alley.  The kitchen appeared to be empty.

But the inspector, kicking aside the dead flowers, noticed that a shuffling track that was not of his making had been swept to a cupboard in the corner.  In the upper part of the door of the cupboard was a square panel that looked as if it slid on runners.  The door itself was closed.

The inspector advanced, put out his hand to the little knob, and slid the hatch along its groove.

Then he took an involuntary step back again.

Framed in the aperture, and falling forward a little before it jammed again in its frame, was something that resembled a large lumpy pudding, done up in a pudding-bag of faded browny red frieze.

“Ah!” said the inspector.

To close the hatch again he would have had to thrust that pudding back with his hand; and somehow he did not quite like the idea of touching it.  Instead, he turned the handle of the cupboard itself.  There was weight behind it, so much weight that, after opening the door three or four inches and peering inside, he had to put his shoulder to it in order to close it again.  In closing it he left sticking out, a few inches from the floor, a triangle of black and white check skirt.