The Red Room, by William Le Queux. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ THE RED ROOM, BY WILLIAM LE QUEUX. CHAPTER ONE. THREE INQUISITIVE MEN. The fifteenth of January, 1907, fell on a Tuesday. I have good cause to remember it. In this narrative of startling fact there is little that concerns myself. It is mostly of the doings of others--strange doings though they were, and stranger still, perhaps, that I should be their chronicler. On that Tuesday morning, just after eleven o'clock, I was busy taking down the engine of one of the cars at my garage in the High Road, Chiswick. Dick, one of my men, had had trouble with the "forty-eight" while bringing home two young gentlemen from Oxford on the previous night, and I was trying to locate the fault. Suddenly, as I looked up, I saw standing at my side a man who lived a few doors from me in Bath Road, Bedford Park--a man who was a mystery. He greeted me pleasantly, standing with his hands thrust into the pockets of his shabby black overcoat, while, returning his salutation, I straightened myself, wondering what had brought him there, and whether he wished to hire a car. I had known him by sight for a couple of years or more as he passed up and down before my house, but we had not often spoken. Truth to tell, his movements seemed rather erratic and his shabbiness very marked, yet at times he appeared quite spruce and smart, and his absences were so frequent that my wife and I had grown to regard him with considerable suspicion. In the suburbs of London one doesn't mix easily with one's neighbours. "Can I speak to you privately, Mr. Holford?" he asked, with a slight hesitancy and a glance at my chauffeur Dick, who at that moment had his hand in the gear-box. "Certainly," I said. "Will you step into my office?" And I led the way through the long garage to my private room beyond, through the glass windows of which I could see all the work in progress. My visitor was, I judged, about fifty, or perhaps fifty-five, an anxious, slight, intellectual-looking man, with hair and moustache turning grey, a pair of keen, dark, troubled eyes, a protruding, well-shaven chin, an aquiline face, sniffing dimly the uncertain future, a complexion somewhat sallow, yet a sinewy, athletic person whose vocation I had on many occasions tried to guess in vain. Sometimes he dressed quite smartly in clothes undoubtedly cut by a West-End tailor. At others, he slouched along shabby and apparently hard up, as he now was.