Mr. Dowker was a long lean man of a drab colour. His hair was thin, of a neutral tint, his eyes a watery blue, and his somewhat large mouth drawn down at the corners betokened a lachrymose nature. He wore greyish clothes always a little threadbare, and large thick-soled boots chosen rather for utility than beauty. His head-gear consisted of a sad-coloured soft hat pulled well over his eyes, from under which his scanty hair hung in a depressing manner. In fact he had a somewhat sketchy appearance, as if he had been outlined and waited to be filled up with colour, but this stage of development which would have turned him into a thing of beauty, was never arrived at, and his general appearance was dismal in the extreme. He wore a beard, that is several tufts of straggly hair were planted in patches over his face but did not seem to flourish. He never smiled and frequently sighed, so that his manners as well as his appearance were not calculated to inculcate cheerful thoughts. But notwithstanding this unprepossessing exterior, there was no cleverer man in London, and the most dexterous criminal would rather have had any other detective after him than this apparently unpromising thief-catcher. The outward resemblance of a man is not invariably the index of his mind, and the Puritan physiognomy of Mr. Dowker was a very serviceable mask to the acuteness and brilliancy of his intellect. Consequently, when the Piccadilly Puzzle case promised to be such a difficult one to unravel, it was placed in the hands of Mr. Dowker and the whole affair left entirely to him. Dowker was pleased at this tribute to his cleverness, and sighed in an approving manner as he rapidly reviewed all the evidence which had come under the eyes of the police. In the first place it would be necessary to discover the name of the deceased, and then by finding out the manner of her life, the motive of the crime might be discovered, pointing to the criminal. The clothing was not marked in any way, but on examining the hat, Dowker found from a ticket on the inside that it had been purchased at the shop of Madame Rêne in Regent Street; so, wrapping up the hat in paper, he betook himself to the establishment of that lady, as the first step in the chain of evidence which he hoped to complete by the discovery of the assassin. Madame Rêne's establishment was one of the smartest in London, and was well-known to the feminine world, who were accustomed to pay the exorbitant sums demanded there for goods which could have been bought much cheaper elsewhere, but then they would not have been stamped with Madame Rêne's approval, and that omission was to declare that the article was unfashionable. Madame Rêne's trade-mark being thus indispensable, ladies never ventured to go anywhere else if they could possibly manage it, and Madame Rêne flourished greatly.