Parr met Derrick Yale’s eyes, and Derrick smiled faintly. “I was loafing along the edge of the pavement looking for cigarette ends, and thinking of nothing except where I could get a bit of food and a night’s lodging. It was beginning to rain, too, and it looked as though I was going to have another night on the streets, when I heard a voice say, almost in my ear, ‘Jump in.’ I looked round. A motor-car was standing by the side of the roadway. I couldn’t believe my ears. Presently the man in the car said ‘Jump in. It’s you I mean!’ and he mentioned my name. We drove along for a while without his saying anything, and I noticed that he kept clear of all the streets where the big lights were. “After a bit he stopped the car, and began to tell me who I was. I can assure you I was surprised. He knew the whole of my history. He even knew about Harry Hobbs--I was tried for that killing and acquitted--and then he asked me if I’d like to earn a hundred pounds. I told him I would, and he said there was an old gentleman in the country who had done him a lot of harm, and he wanted him ‘outed.’ I didn’t want to take the job on for some time, but he gave me such a lot of talk about how he could get me hung for Hobbs’s murder, and how it was safe, and he’d give me a bicycle to get away on, and at last I agreed. “He picked me up by arrangement a week later in Steyne Square. Then he gave me all the final particulars. I got down to Beardmore’s place soon after it was dark, and hid in the wood. He told me Mr. Beardmore generally walked through the wood every morning, and that I was to make myself comfortable for the night. I hadn’t been in the wood an hour when I had a fright. I heard somebody moving. I think it must have been a game-keeper. He was a big fellow, and I only just got a glimpse of him. “And I think that’s about all, gentlemen, except that the next morning the old fellow came in the wood and I shot him. I don’t remember much about it, for I was drunk at the time, having taken a bottle of whisky into the wood with me. But I was sober enough to get on to the bicycle, and I rode off. And I should have got away altogether, if it hadn’t been for the booze.” “And that is all?” asked Parr, when the confession had been read over and the man had affixed a rough cross. “That’s all, guv’nor,” said the sailor. “And you don’t know who it was who employed you?” “Not the faintest idea,” said the other cheerfully. “There’s one thing about him, though, I could tell you,” he said after a pause. “He kept using a word that I’ve never heard before. I’m not highly educated, but I’ve noticed that some men have favourite words. We had an old skipper who always used the word ‘morbid’.” “What was the word?” asked Parr. The man scratched his head. “I’ll remember it and let you know,” he said, and they left him to his meditations, which were few, and probably not unpleasant.