Page:Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.djvu/398

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists shelled off the glass. He knelt down and found that it was possible to get a view of the interior of the office, and as he peered through he gave a low exclamation. When he made way for his subordinate to look in his turn, the constable was with some difficulty able to distinguish the figure of a man lying prone upon the floor.

It was an easy task for the burly policeman to force open the office door. A single push of his shoulder wrenched it from its fastenings, and as it flew back the socket of the lock fell with a splash into a great pool of blood that had accumulated against the threshold, flowing from the place where Hunter was lying on his back, his arms extended and his head nearly severed from his body. On the floor, close to his right hand, was an open razor. An overturned chair lay on the floor by the side of the table where he usually worked, the table itself being littered with papers and drenched with blood.

During the next few days Crass resumed the role he had played when Hunter was ill during the summer, taking charge of the work and generally doing his best to fill the dead man's place, although—as he confided to certain of his cronies in the bar of the 'Cricketer's'—he had no intention of allowing Rushton to drive him to do the same as Hunter had done. One of his first jobs, on the morning after the discovery of the body, was to go with Mr Rushton to look over a house where some work was to be done for which an estimate had to be given. It was the estimate that Hunter had been trying to make out the previous evening in the office, for they found that the papers on his table were covered with figures and writing relating to this work. These papers justified the subsequent verdict of the coroner's jury that Hunter committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity, for they were covered with a lot of meaningless scribbling, the words having no intelligible connection with each other. There was one sum he had evidently tried to do repeatedly but which came wrong in a different way every time. The fact that he had the razor in his possession seemed to point to his having premeditated the act, but this was accounted for at the inquest by the evidence of the last person who saw him alive, a hairdresser, who stated that Hunter had left the razor with him to be sharpened a few days previously and that he had called for it on the evening of the tragedy. He had ground the razor for Mr Hunter several times before. 386