“Some down-and-out!” replied the latter, dusting his knees. “There was a letter in his pocket addressed to the coroner. The usual thing. Walking the streets all day, no money, decided to end it all. And everything removed that could betray his identity. Seeing that he used strychnine he might be a colleague of mine come to grief. Somehow, for all his rags, he doesn’t quite look like a tramp!” He bent forward into the car again and sniffed audibly. “It’s funny,” he said. “There’s a curious odour in the car I can’t quite place. It certainly isn’t strychnine.” Okewood, who had been scanning the body very closely, had already detected the curious penetrating odour that yet hung about the interior of the cabriolet, something sweet, yet faintly chemical withal. But now heavy footsteps echoed from under the archway. “It’s George back,” said Fink, looking up. “He nipped across to the police station.” George, who was one of the mechanics, bareheaded, his hair shining with wet, was accompanied by a well-set-up young man with a trim blond moustache, who wore a black bowler hat and a heavy overcoat. He had about him that curious air, a mixture of extreme self-reliance and rigorous reserve, which marks the plain-clothes man in every land. “Good-evening, O’Malley!” said Okewood as the young detective came face to face with him. The newcomer stared sharply at the speaker. “God bless my soul!” he exclaimed. “If it isn’t Major Desmond Okewood! Are you on this job, too, Major? They told me you had retired!” “So I have, O’Malley!” Desmond replied. “No more Secret Service for me! I heard that you had gone back to the C.I.D. after you were demobbed from the Intelligence. I’ve only blundered into this by accident. I’ve just come up from Essex in my car. This is where I garage it when I’m in town . . .” O’Malley plucked open the door of the Lancia and began to examine the dead man. The detective asked a few questions of the doctor, read and took charge of the letter found in the pocket of the deceased, and made some notes in a black book. Then he beckoned to Desmond. “Anything funny struck you about this chap, Major?” he asked in an undertone. Desmond looked at O’Malley questioningly. “Why do you ask that?” he said. “Because,” O’Malley replied, “for a tramp who has walked the streets all day, it doesn’t strike me that his trousers are very muddy. His boots are dirty, and the bottoms of his trousers are wet. But they’re not _splashed_. Look at mine after walking only across from the station!” He showed a spray of mud stains above the turn-up of his blue serge trousers. “And see here!” he added. He bent down and undid the dead man’s overcoat. Beneath it jacket and waistcoat were open and the unbuttoned shirt showed a glimpse of clean white skin. “That’s not the skin of a tramp!” the detective declared. Again Desmond Okewood gave the young man one of his enigmatic looks. Then he turned to the doctor.