"For God's sake, Mr. Brent, don't touch him!" he exclaimed. "Let him be, sir, till the police----" He paused, staring round the gloomy, oak-panelled room from the walls of which the portraits of various dignitaries looked down. "Who on earth can have done it?" he muttered. "It's--it's not three-quarters of an hour since he came up here!" "Alone?" asked Brent. "Alone, sir! And I'll take my solemn oath that nobody was here, waiting for him. I'd been in this room myself, not five minutes before he came," said Dunning. "It was empty of course." Brent disregarded the caretaker's admonition and laid a finger on the dead man's forehead. But Bunning pointed to a dark stain, still spreading, on the back of the Mayor's coat--a well-worn garment of grey tweed. "Look there, sir," he whispered. "He's been run through the body from behind--right through the heart!--as he sat in his chair. Murder!" "Who should murder him?" demanded Brent. Bunning made no answer. He was looking round. There were three doors into that room; he glanced at each, shaking his head after each glance. "We'd best get the police, at once, Mr. Brent," he said. "The police station's just at the back--there's a way down to it from outside this parlour. I'll run down now. You, sir----" "I'll stop here," answered Brent. "But get a doctor, will you? I want to know----" "Dr. Wellesley, the police-surgeon, is next door," replied Brent. "The police'll get him. But he's beyond all doctors, Mr. Brent! Instantaneous--that! I know!" He hurried out of the room, and Brent, left alone with the dead man, looked at him once again wonderingly. Cousins though they were, he and Wallingford knew little of each other: their acquaintance, such as it was, had not been deep enough to establish any particular affection between them. But since Wallingford's election as Mayor of Hathelsborough Brent, by profession a journalist in London, had twice spent a week-end with him in the old town, and had learnt something of his plans for a reform of certain matters connected with the administration of its affairs. They had discussed these things on the occasion of his last visit, and now, as he stood by the dead man, Brent remembered certain words which Wallingford had spoken. "There are things that I can do," Wallingford had said, with some confidence. And then he had added, with a cynical laugh, "But there are other things that--why, it would be, literally, as much as my life's worth to even try to undermine them!"