queal and scamper of
frightened rats bolting to safety behind the wainscot; a mere ripple of
sound, and after it a silence which even the intruders had not breath
enough to break with any spoken word.

With peeling walls and mouldering floor the long, low-ceiled room gaped
out before them, littered with fallen plaster and thick with dust and
cobwebs. On the floor, in the blank space between the two boarded-up
windows, a pair of lighted candles guttered and flared, while behind
them, with arms outstretched, sleeves spiked to the wall--a human
crucifix, with lolling head and bended knees--a dead man hung, and the
light shining upon his distorted face revealed the hideous fact that he
had been strangled to death.

However many his years, they could not have totalled more than five and
thirty at most, and ghastly as he was now, in life he must have been
strikingly handsome: fair of hair and moustache, lean of loin and broad
of shoulder, and with that subtle _something_ about him which mutely
stands sponsor for the thing called birth.

He was clad in a long gray topcoat of fine texture and fashionable
cut--a coat unbuttoned and flung open by the same furious hand which had
rent and torn at the suit of evening clothes he wore beneath.

The waistcoat was wrenched apart and a snapped watch chain dangled from
it, and on the broad expanse of shirt bosom thus exposed there was
rudely smeared in thick black letters--as if a finger had been dipped
for the purpose in blacking or axle grease--a string of mystifying
numerals running thus:

[Illustration: 2 X 4 X 1 X 2]

For a moment the men who had stumbled upon this appalling sight stood
staring at it in horrified silence; then Constable Mellish backed
shudderingly away and voiced the first spoken word.

"The Lord deliver us!" he said in a quaking whisper. "_Not_ the murderer
himself, but the party as he murdered! A gent--a swell--strangled in a
place like this! Gawd help us! what was a man like that a-doing of here?
And besides, the shot was fired out there--on the Common--as you know
yourselves. You heard it, didn't you?"

Nobody answered him. For Narkom and his men this horrifying discovery
possessed more startling, more mystifying, more appalling surprises than
that which lay in the mere finding of the victim of a tragedy where they
had been confident of running to earth the assassin alone. For in that
ghastly dead thing spiked to the crumbling wall they saw again a man w