The Strand Magazine, Vol. 07, Issue 41, May, 1894: An Illustrated MonthlyVarious
General
The Strand Magazine, Vol. 07, Issue 41, May, 1894: An Illustrated Monthly
Various
English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
The man himself was not altogether prepossessing. Fat as he was,
he had a way of carrying his head forward on his extended neck and
gazing widely about with a pair of the roundest and most prominent
eyes I remember to have ever seen, except in a fish. On the whole, his
appearance was rather vulgar, rather arrogant, and rather suspicious,
without any very pronounced quality of any sort. But certainly he
was not pretty. In the end, however, he was found shot dead in his
sitting-room.
It was in this way: Hewitt and I had dined together at my club, and
late in the evening had returned to my rooms to smoke and discuss
whatever came uppermost. I had made a bargain that day with two
speculative odd lots at a book sale, each of which contained a hidden
prize. We sat talking and turning over these books while time went
unperceived, when suddenly we were startled by a loud report. Clearly
it was in the building. We listened for a moment, but heard nothing
else, and then Hewitt expressed his opinion that the report was that
of a gunshot. Gunshots in residential chambers are not common things,
wherefore I got up and went to the landing, looking up the stairs and
down.
At the top of the next flight I saw Mrs. Clayton, the housekeeper. She
appeared to be frightened, and told me that the report came from Mr.
Foggatt's room. She thought he might have had an accident with the
pistol that usually lay on his mantelpiece. We went upstairs with her,
and she knocked at Mr. Foggatt's door.
There was no reply. Through the ventilating fanlight over the door
it could be seen that there were lights within, a sign, Mrs. Clayton
maintained, that Mr. Foggatt was not out. We knocked again, much more
loudly, and called, but still ineffectually. The door was locked,
and an application of the housekeeper's key proved that the tenant's
key had been left in the lock inside. Mrs. Clayton's conviction that
"something had happened" became distressing, and in the end Hewitt
prised open the door with a small poker.
[Illustration: "SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED."]
Something _had_ happened. In the sitting-room Mr. Foggatt sat with his
head bowed over the table, quiet and still. The head was ill to look
at, and by it lay a large revolver, of the full sized Army pattern.
Mrs. Clayton ran back toward the landing with faint screams.
"Run, Brett," said Hewitt; "a doctor and a policeman!"
I bounced down the stairs half a flight at a time. "First," I thought,
"a doctor. He may not be dead." I could think of no doctor in the
immediate neighbourhood, but ran up the street away from the Strand, as
being the more likely direction for the doctor, although less so for
the policeman. It took me a good five minutes to find the medico, after
being led astray by a red lamp at a private hotel, and another five to
get back, with a policeman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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