Looking down quickly, he saw the young girl of whom he had caught a glimpse a few minutes before.

He started.

She looked up at him, and, still with the same look of stereotyped horror on her thin, white face, whispered, in a hoarse voice, as she pointed to the boarded-up shop-door with a shaking forefinger: 

“You daren’t go in there, do you?  There’s a dead man in there!”

CHAPTER VII.

A QUESTIONABLE GUIDE.

Max started violently at the girl’s voice.

“A dead man?  In there?  How do you know?”

In a hoarse voice the girl answered: 

“How do I know?  The best way possible. I saw it done!”

There was an awful silence.  Max was so deeply impressed by the girl’s words, her looks, her manner, by the gloom of the cold, dark passage, by the desolate appearance of the two deserted buildings before which they stood, that his first impulse was an overpowering desire to run away.  Acting upon it he even took a couple of rapid steps in the direction of the street he had left, passing the girl and getting clear of the uncanny boarded-up front of the shop.

A moan from the girl made him stop and look around at her.  Emboldened by this, she came close to him again and whispered: 

“You’re a man; you ought to have more pluck than I’ve got.  It’s two days since it happened—­”

“Two days!” muttered Max, remembering that it was two days ago that he had surprised Dudley with his blood-stained hands.

“And for those two days I’ve been outside here waiting for somebody to come because I daren’t go inside by myself.  Two days!  Two days!” she repeated, her teeth chattering.

Max looked at her with mixed feelings of doubt, pity and astonishment.  It was too dark in the ill-lighted passage for him to see all the details of her appearance.  She was young, quite young; so much was certain.  She looked white and pinched and miserably cold.  Her dress was respectable, very plain, and bore marks of her climbing and crawling over the timber on the wharf.

“Won’t you go in with me?” she asked again, more eagerly, more tremulously than before.  “I can show you the road—­round at the back.  You will have a little climbing to do, but you won’t mind that.”

“But what do you want me to do if I do get inside?” said Max.  “It’s the police you ought to send for, if a man has died in there.  Go to the police station and give information.”

The girl shook her head.

“I can’t do that,” she whispered.  Then, after a shuddering pause, she came a step nearer and said, in a lower whisper than ever:  “He didn’t die—­of his own accord.  He was murdered.”

Max grew hot, and cold.  He heartily wished he had never come.

“All the more reason,” he went on in a blustering voice, “why you should inform the police.  You had better lose no time about it.”