“I hear there’s been an accident to that gentleman I came in with last night?” he said.  “Is it anything serious?  Your ostler says—­”

“These gentlemen have just come about it, sir,” answered the landlady.  She glanced at Mitchington.  “Perhaps you’ll tell—­” she began.

“Was he a friend of yours, sir?” asked Mitchington.  “A personal friend?”

“Never saw him in my life before last night!” replied the tall man.  “We just chanced to meet in the train coming down from London, got talking, and discovered we were both coming to the same place—­Wrychester.  So—­we came to this house together.  No—­no friend of mine—­not even an acquaintance—­previous, of course, to last night.  Is—­is it anything serious?”

“He’s dead, sir,” replied Mitchington.  “And now we want to know who he is.”

“God bless my soul!  Dead?  You don’t say so!” exclaimed Mr. Dellingham.  “Dear, dear!  Well, I can’t help you—­don’t know him from Adam.  Pleasant, well-informed man—­seemed to have travelled a great deal in foreign countries.  I can tell you this much, though,” he went on, as if a sudden recollection had come to him; “I gathered that he’d only just arrived in England—­in fact, now I come to think of it, he said as much.  Made some remark in the train about the pleasantness of the English landscape, don’t you know?—­I got an idea that he’d recently come from some country where trees and hedges and green fields aren’t much in evidence.  But—­if you want to know who he is, officer, why don’t you search him?  He’s sure to have papers, cards, and so on about him.”

“We have searched him,” answered Mitchington.  “There isn’t a paper, a letter, or even a visiting card on him.”

Mr. Dellingham looked at the landlady.

“Bless me!” he said.  “Remarkable!  But he’d a suit-case, or something of the sort—­something light—­which he carried up from the railway station himself.  Perhaps in that—­”

“I should like to see whatever he had,” said Mitchington.  “We’d better examine his room, Mrs. Partingley.”

Bryce presently followed the landlady and the inspector upstairs—­Mr. Dellingham followed him.  All four went into a bedroom which looked out on Monday Market.  And there, on a side-table, lay a small leather suit-case, one which could easily be carried, with its upper half thrown open and back against the wall behind.

The landlady, Mr. Dellingham and Bryce stood silently by while the inspector examined the contents of this the only piece of luggage in the room.  There was very little to see—­what toilet articles the visitor brought were spread out on the dressing-table—­brushes, combs, a case of razors, and the like.  And Mitchington nodded side-wise at them as he began to take the articles out of the suit-case.