Page:Fletcher - The Mortover Grange Affair.pdf/17

 overcoat protruded a quantity of papers, written as well as printed.

"All over with him, I suppose, doctor?" asked the sergeant in a hushed voice. "Gone, eh!"

The doctor nodded, and rising from his knees pointed to the dead man's head. "Whoever attacked him must have done so most savagely!" he answered. "He's been struck down from behind by some heavy weapon with something of an edge, a sharp edge on it. Dead!—oh, yes, dead enough!"

"Instantaneous affair, doctor?" asked the sergeant. "Just so! Well, I don't see any weapon about. That poker, now—Lord no, that wouldn't kill a mouse. Carried his weapon off, I should say. But when did it happen? We shall have to get Miss Tandy to give us some information"

Just then, Miss Tandy's voice was heard in the hall; she was directing somebody to the parlour. A police-inspector came in; a police-surgeon with him. And following them was a little, inconspicuous, unassuming man in plain clothes, who might have been a grocer, a draper, or an oil-and-colour merchant, but whom the other men knew as Detective-Sergeant Wedgwood, of the Criminal Investigation