edge of the embankment, with their smashed foreheads, and lanterns hanging from their teeth.
The testimony of eight witnesses was to be had about the tragedy, on this night of December 18th when the murder was committed. Nobody had particularly noticed the victim; he travelled alone, and in the boat he had sat in a corner of the lounge with this hat pulled over his eyes, speaking to none of them. Sir John Landervorne, on his way to Paris to see his old friend M. Henri Bencolin, had asked this mysterious person what time the Blue Arrow arrived there, but he received only a shrug. Mr. Septimus Depping, another Englishman, had asked him for a match; the stranger merely muttered, “Je ne parle pas anglais.” Miss Brunhilde Mertz, militant feminist, clubwoman, and tourist from the United States of America, had tried to engage him in conversation about the inestimable advantages of prohibition (as she did with everybody), and had been highly incensed when he merely turned his back.
On the Blue Arrow, he went into a compartment by himself and pulled the door closed. He had not changed the blue night-lamps; those who passed in the corridor could see his back as he sat staring out of the window. The guard had got his ticket from his skinny outthrust hand while his back was turned. Even during the examination of passports before they boarded the train, although Miss Brunhilde Mertz had earnestly tried to look over his shoulder, nothing was seen. Then there was a dispute in the customs shed, because Miss Mertz shrilly refused to open her trunk (“Do you think I’m going to let that nosey man look at my underwear?”) until, after she had shrieked “No key! No key!” in ever increasing volume, with the idea that the louder she yelled in English the more easily would she be understood, the weary inspector merely sighed and passed her.
