One of those guardians of the public peace came strolling along the pavement presently, with as placid an air as if he had been an inhabitant of Arcadia, to whom Desrolles shouted, ‘Come up here, there’s been murder.’ The public guardian wheeled himself stiffly round and approached the street door. He did not take the word murder in its positive sense, but in its local significance, which meant a row, culminating in a few bruises and a black eye or two. That actual murder had been done, and that a dead woman was lying in the house, never entered his mind. He opened the door and came upstairs with slow, creaking footsteps, as if he had been making a ceremonious visit. ‘What’s the row?’ he asked curtly, when he came to the first floor landing, and saw the two women standing there, Mrs. Evitt wrapped in a waterproof, Mrs. Rawber in a yellow cotton dressing-gown of antiquated fashion, both with scared faces and sparse, dishevelled hair. Mr. Desrolles was the coolest of the trio, but even his countenance had a ghastly look in the light of the guttering candle which Jack Chicot had set down on the little table outside the bedroom door. They told him breathlessly what had happened. ‘Is she dead?’ he asked. ‘Go in and look,’ said Mrs. Evitt. ‘I dared not go a-nigh her.’ The policeman went in, lantern in hand, a monument of stolid calm, amidst the terror of the scene. Little need to ask if she were dead. That awful face upon the pillow, those glazed eyes with their wide stare of horror, that gaping wound in the full white throat, from which the life-blood had poured in a crimson stream across the white counterpane, until it made a dark pool beside the bed, all told their own tale. ‘She must have been dead for an hour or more,’ said the policeman, touching the marble hand. La Chicot’s hand and arm were flung above her head, as if she had known what was coming, and had tried to clutch the bell-pull behind her. The other hand was tightly clenched as in the last convulsion. ‘There’ll have to be an inquest,’ said the policeman, after he had examined the window, and looked out to see if the room was easily accessible from without. ‘Somebody had better go for a doctor. I’ll go myself. There’s a surgeon at the corner of the next street. Who is she, and how did it happen?’ Mrs. Evitt, in a torrent of words, told him all she knew, and all she suspected. It was La Chicot’s husband that had done it, she was sure. ‘Why?’ asked the policeman. ‘Who else should it be? It couldn’t be burglars. You saw yourself that the window was fastened inside. She’d no valuables to tempt any one. Light come light go was her motto, poor thing. Her money went as fast as it came, and if it wasn’t him as did it, why haven’t he come back?’ The policeman asked what she meant by this, whereupon Desrolles told him of Mr. Chicot’s disappearance.