Mr. Cazalette carried his camera and the tobacco-box outside the shed
in which the dead man's body lay and began to be busy. A gardener's
potting-table stood against the wall; on this, backed by a black
cloth which he had brought from the house, he set up the box and
prepared to photograph it. It was evident that he attached great
importance to what he was doing.
"I shall take two or three negatives of this, Middlebrook," he
observed, consequentially. "I'm an expert in photography, and I've got
an enlarging apparatus in my room. Before the day's out, I shall show
you something."
Personally, I had seen no more in the inner lid of the tobacco-box
than the inspector seemed to have seen--a few lines and scratches,
probably caused by thumb or finger-nail--and I left Mr. Cazalette to
his self-imposed labours and rejoined the doctors and the police who
were discussing the next thing to be done. That Quick had been
murdered there was no doubt; there would have to be an inquest, of
course, and for that purpose his body would have to be removed to the
nearest inn, a house on the cross-roads just beyond Ravensdene Court;
search would have to be set up at once for suspicious characters, and
Noah Quick, of Devonport, would have to be communicated with.
All this the police took in hand, and I saw that Mr. Raven was
heartily relieved when he heard that the dead man would be removed
from his premises and that the inquest would not be held there. Ever
since I had first broken the news to him, he had been upset and
nervous: I could see that he was one of those men who dislike fuss and
publicity. He looked at me with a sort of commiseration when the
police questioned me closely about my knowledge of Salter Quick's
movements on the previous day, and especially about his visit to the
Mariner's Joy.
"Yet," said I, finishing my account of that episode, "it is very
evident that the man was not murdered for the sake of robbery, seeing
that his money and his watch were found on him untouched."
The inspector shook his head.
"I'm not so sure," he remarked. "There's one thing that's certain--the
man's clothes had been searched. Look here!"
He turned to Quick's garments, which had been removed, preparatory to
laying out the body in decent array for interment, and picked up the
waistcoat. Within the right side, made in the lining, there was a
pocket, secured by a stout button. That pocket had been turned inside
out; so, too, had a pocket in the left hip of the trousers,
corresponding to that on the right in which Quick had carried the
revolver that he had shown to us at the inn. The waistcoat was a
thick, quilted affair--its lining, here and there, had been ripped
open by a knife. And the lining of the man's hat had been torn out,
too, and thrust roughly into place again: clearly, whoever killed him
had searched for something.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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