This frank expression of opinion re-aroused the indignation of the gentleman on the form.

’There you hare! at it again!  That’s just like you peelers,—­ you’re all the same!  What do you know about me?—­Nuffink!  This gen’leman ain’t got no call to believe me, not as I knows on,—­ it’s all the same to me if ’e do or don’t, but it’s trewth what I’m sayin’, all the same.’

At this point the Inspector re-appeared at the pigeon-hole.  He cut short the flow of eloquence.

‘Now then, not so much noise outside there!’ He addressed me.  ’None of our men have seen anything of the person you’re inquiring for, so far as we’re aware.  But, if you like, I will place a man at your disposal, and he will go round with you, and you will be able to make your own inquiries.’

A capless, wildly excited young ragamuffin came dashing in at the street door.  He gasped out, as clearly as he could for the speed which he had made: 

’There’s been murder done, Mr Pleesman,—­a Harab’s killed a bloke.’

‘Mr Pleesman’ gripped him by the shoulder.

‘What’s that?’

The youngster put up his arm, and ducked his head, instinctively, as if to ward off a blow.

’Leave me alone!  I don’t want none of your ’andling!—­I ain’t done nuffink to you!  I tell you ’e ‘as!’

The Inspector spoke through the pigeon-hole.

‘He has what, my lad?  What do you say has happened?’

’There’s been murder done—­it’s right enough!—­there ’as!—­up at Mrs ’Enderson’s, in Paradise Place,—­a Harab’s been and killed a bloke!’

CHAPTER XLIV

THE MAN WHO WAS MURDERED

The Inspector spoke to me.

’If what the boy says is correct it sounds as if the person whom you are seeking may have had a finger in the pie.’

I was of the same opinion, as, apparently, were Lessingham and Sidney.  Atherton collared the youth by the shoulder which Mr Pleesman had left disengaged.

‘What sort of looking bloke is it who’s been murdered?’

’I dunno!  I ’aven’t seen ’im!  Mrs ’Enderson, she says to me!  “’Gustus Barley,” she says, “a bloke’s been murdered.  That there Harab what I chucked out ’alf a hour ago been and murdered ’im, and left ’im behind up in my back room.  You run as ’ard as you can tear and tell them there dratted pleese what’s so fond of shovin’ their dirty noses into respectable people’s ’ouses.”  So I comes and tells yer.  That’s all I knows about it.’

We went four in the hansom which had been waiting in the street to Mrs Henderson’s in Paradise Place,—­the Inspector and we three.  ‘Mr Pleesman’ and ‘’Gustus Barley’ followed on foot.  The Inspector was explanatory.

‘Mrs Henderson keeps a sort of lodging-house,—­a “Sailors’ Home” she calls it, but no one could call it sweet.  It doesn’t bear the best of characters, and if you asked me what I thought of it, I should say in plain English that it was a disorderly house.’