“Trust your vermin press to get hold of the wrong end of the stick!” he cried, with fierce amusement; “it only remains to be seen whether they succeed in putting your precious police on the wrong tack too. Really, it’s almost worth being at the bottom of a popular mystery to watch the smartest men in this country making fools of themselves!” “May I see?” asked Pocket; he had winced at more than one of these remarks. “Certainly,” replied Baumgartner; “here’s the journalistic wonder of the age, and there you are in its most important column. I brought it up for you to see.” The boy bit his lips as he read. His deed had been promoted to leaded type and the highest rank in headlines. It appeared, in the first place, that no arrest had yet been made; but it was confidently asserted (by the omniscient butt of Teutonic sallies) that the police, wisely guided by the hint in yesterday’s issue (which Pocket had not seen), were already in possession of a most important clue. In subsequent paragraphs of pregnant brevity the real homicide was informed that his fatal act could only be the work of a totally different and equally definite hand. Pocket gathered that there had been a certain commonplace tragedy, in a street called Holland Walk, in the previous month of March. A licensed messenger named Charlton had been found shot under circumstances so plainly indicative of suicide that a coroner’s jury had actually returned a verdict to that effect. There appeared, however, to have been an element of doubt in the case. This the scribe of the leaded type sought to remove by begging the question from beginning to end. It had not been a case of suicide at all, he declared, but as wilful a murder as the one in Hyde Park, to which it bore a close and sinister resemblance. Both victims had been shot through the heart in the early hours of the morning; both belonged to one neighbourhood, and to the same dilapidated fringe of the community. A pothouse acquaintanceship was alleged between them; but the suggestion was that the link lay a good deal deeper than that, and that the two dead men were known to the police, who were busy searching for a third party of equal notoriety in connection with both murders. “But we know he had nothing to do with the second one,” said the boy, looking up at last. “It wasn’t a murder, either; neither was the first, according to the coroner’s jury, who surely ought to know.” “One would have thought so,” said Baumgartner, with his sardonic smile; “but the yellow pressman knows better still, apparently.” “Do you suppose there’s a word of truth in what he says? I don’t mean about Charlton or—or poor Holdaway,” said Pocket, wincing over his victim’s name, which he had just gleaned from the paper. “But do you think the police are really after anybody?” “I don’t know,” said Baumgartner. “What does it matter?” “It would matter a great deal if they arrested somebody for what I did!”