“I can’t say. Miss Grison wouldn’t confess, and as the story wasn’t pertinent to the murder she wasn’t pressed to confess. All she said was that her brother was an opium-smoker and after losing his billet drifted to Rotherhithe, where he could indulge in his vice. She tried to keep him respectable, and allowed him ten shillings a week to live on. But he sank lower and lower, so she saw very little of him. All she knew was that she sent the ten shilling postal order regularly every Friday so that Baldwin might get it on Saturday. He never visited her and he never wrote to her, but lived more or less like a hermit in Mother Slaig’s boarding-house, and went out every night to smoke opium in some den kept by a Chinaman called Chin-Chow. Miss Grison sobbed bitterly when she gave her evidence and insisted that her brother owed his degradation to the enmity of people.” “What sort of people?” “She didn’t particularize. He was weak rather than bad, she insisted, and when he lost his situation, he lost heart also. At all events he devoted himself to the black smoke, and lived in the Rotherhithe slum, until he was found dead by the old hag who keeps the house.” “Did Miss Grison’s evidence throw any light on the crime?” “No. She declared that she did not know of anyone who would have killed the poor devil.” “Was there any evidence on the part of the doctor, or Mother Slaig, or those seamen in the house to show who murdered the man?” asked Fuller. “Not the slightest. The house was open morn, noon and night, and those who lived there came and went at their will without being watched. It’s a rowdy locality and a rowdy house, but Mother Slaig keeps fairly good order as she’s a formidable old hag resembling Vautrin’s aunt in Balzac’s story.” “Madame Nourrisau; I remember,” said Fuller, nodding. “Then I take it that no one in the house heard any struggle, or cry for help?” “No. Besides, as I have told you, death must have been instantaneous. No one, so far as Mother Slaig or others in the house knew, visited Grison on that night, or indeed on any other occasion—so they say—since the man was more or less of a hermit. He went to bed at ten and at the same hour next morning he was found dead with his room all upside down.” “Was anything missed?” “There was nothing to miss,” said Latimer quickly. “I saw the room, which only contained a small bed, a small table and two chairs. The man had but one, suit of ragged clothes, which he concealed under a fairly good overcoat his sister declared she sent to him last Christmas. He was desperately poor and never seemed to do anything but smoke opium.” “What kind of a man was he to look at?”