The last of the snow was gurgling itself away into the black drain-traps, and the face of the town was smeared like a sweep’s under a dreary drizzle, when Mr Shapter, and I, and a certain hard-faced gentleman, with a habit of rubbing his jaw grittily under reflection, came down to the grimy little tenement in Old Paradise Street. At the door, the hard-faced gentleman, motioning us to one side and bending to the keyhole, gave a call like an itinerant potman’s. The commendable ruse proving successful, brought, after the briefest interview, an old remembered step shuffling along the passage. The key turned and the chain ran gratingly, and, following the unbaring, a filthy claw, grasping a jug, was protruded through the aperture revealed. Quick and soft as the swoop of an owl, the hard-faced man’s fingers closed on the boney wrist, and the jug dropped to the pavement with a crash. And straightway, like a hooked fish’s, the nose and flexuous mouth of old Mother Carey came wobbling and gasping to the light of day. The screech of fear and fury, which she struggled on the instant to omit, sticking in her throat, the detective took quick advantage of that momentary paralysis. “Come along now,” he said. “I’m the law, do you understand? and you’re wanted on a charge of murder. You’d best let me in, and hear what I’ve got to say.” As with the jug on one side of the door, so, on the other, down went Mother Carey. She tumbled in a heap, rending away from the clutch on her wrist, and appeared to lie in the hall moaning. Very swiftly and neatly then, using a tool he had taken from his pocket, the detective, nearly closing the door first, ran the chain along its socket within, and made himself master of the filthy stronghold. Once entered, he beckoned to us, and stooping to the collapsed figure a moment, rose to his height again. “All right, gentlemen,” he said. “She’s all right. Shut that door please--now my good people” (this to the inevitable congregation gathering outside), “this ain’t an inquest, you know. Come clear away, clear away.” He stepped across the whispering bundle on the boards, drew us in, and closed the door on the little breathless group of faces. “Now,” he said, “if you’ll please to go and make a light somewheres, will you, sir, so as we can see ourselves speak? Better take the back for privacy.” We went as directed, and found a reasty little kitchen, black with grease and soot, its walls flaking, its floor vermin-riddled, its long cold grate one refuse-bin of garbage. There was a tattered curtain pinned across the window, and this we unfastened to let in the daylight. It seemed to awaken immemorial odours in its entrance. The squalor of the place took on a festering sickness.