“I am going down to Marylebone Police Court, to see those people brought up before the ‘Beak,’” he remarked. “What people?” I queried. “What people!” he exclaimed, in the greatest excitement. “You don’t mean to say that you have not studied the Lisson Grove Mystery?” I had to confess that my knowledge on that subject was of the most superficial character. “One of the most interesting cases that has cropped up in recent years,” he said, with an indescribable look of reproach. “Perhaps. I did not study it in the papers because I preferred to hear _you_ tell me all about it,” I said. “Oh, if that’s it,” he replied, as he settled himself down in his corner like a great bird after the rain, “then you showed more sense than lady journalists usually possess. I can, of course, give you a far clearer account than the newspapers have done; as for the police—well! I never saw such a muddle as they are making of this case.” “I daresay it is a peculiarly difficult one,” I retorted, for I am ever a champion of that hard-working department. “H’m!” he said, “so, so—it is a tragedy in a prologue and three acts. I am going down this afternoon to see the curtain fall for the third time on what, if I mistake not, will prove a good burlesque; but it all began dramatically enough. It was last Saturday, 21st November, that two boys, playing in the little spinney just outside Wembley Park Station, came across three large parcels done up in American cloth. “With the curiosity natural to their age, they at once proceeded to undo these parcels, and what they found so upset the little beggars that they ran howling through the spinney and the polo ground, straight as a dart to Wembley Park Station. Half frantic with excitement, they told their tale to one of the porters off duty, who walked back to the spinney with them. The three parcels, in point of fact, contained the remains of a dismembered human body. The porter sent one of the boys for the local police, and the remains were duly conveyed to the mortuary, where they were kept for identification. “Three days later—that is to say, on Tuesday, 24th November—Miss Amelia Dyke, residing at Lisson Grove Crescent, returned from Edinburgh, where she had spent three or four days with a friend. She drove up from St. Pancras in a cab, and carried her small box up herself to the door of the flat, at which she knocked loudly and repeatedly—so loudly and so persistently, in fact, that the inhabitants of the neighbouring flats came out on to their respective landings to see what the noise was about.