Mr. Ludgrove, who knew his friend’s methods of expression, was careful not to interrupt, and after a short pause the tobacconist resumed his relation. “First I knew of it was from my boy Ted. You see, it was like this. Ted’s very sweet on Ivy, and a nice girl she is, too. None of your fly-away misses, but a nice steady girl what’ll make her way in the world. Ted brought her to my place for dinner, then they spends the afternoon at the pictures, and comes back for supper. About half-past nine or maybe quarter to ten Ivy says it’s time she was getting home, and she and Ted goes out together. I was thinking Ted was a long time a-seeing of her home, since it was a shocking night, and they weren’t likely to dawdle on the way, when in he comes white as a sheet, and all of a tremble. ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘Ivy’s father’s been murdered.’ “Well, I thought the boy had gone off his head. ‘Murdered?’ I says. ‘Why, what do you mean? Who’d want to murder Jim Tovey, I’d like to know?’ Then after a bit I manages to get the whole story out of him. It seems that when he and Ivy got to Lisson Grove, Jim Tovey was out. He’d been called to St. Martha’s to identify an accident case. He stayed there for a bit, when suddenly the door bell rings. Mrs. Tovey answers it, and in comes a policeman, with a message that Mrs. Tovey and Ivy were wanted at St. Martha’s at once. Mrs. Tovey goes upstairs to put her things on, and Ivy goes with her. Then the policeman asks Ted if he’s a friend of the family, and when he says he is, tells him that poor Jim has just been murdered in this very street, not a couple of hundred yards from where we’re sitting now.” Mr. Ludgrove nodded. “A most extraordinary affair altogether,” he commented. “Ah, you may well call it extraordinary,” agreed Mr. Copperdock significantly, “there’s more in it than meets the eye, that’s what I says. Well, as soon as I hears this I thinks of those two poor women, and off I goes to St. Martha’s to see if I could be of any use. There I finds a police inspector who asks me who I was. When he hears I was Jim Tovey’s oldest friend he tells me all about it. It seems that a policeman who had his eye on the lads coming out of the Express Train—they’re a rough crowd, as you know—saw a man fall down and then heard a lot of hollering. Thinking there was a scrap he went over and found Jim Tovey on the ground with a lot of fellows standing round him. It didn’t take him long to find out that Jim was dead, but nobody seemed to know how it happened. There was a crowd on the pavement outside the pub, and it was a foggy sort of night that you couldn’t see very clearly in.” “I know,” put in Mr. Ludgrove. “I was out about that time myself. I always go for a walk after supper, rain or fine; it’s the only chance of exercise I get.”