Читать книгу A King by Night онлайн

76 страница из 100

"You haven't been to bed all night."

"I've been sitting up—studying," he said flippantly. "By the way, I wonder if the doctor's call was a fake, too."

He got on the telephone to Dr. Eversham and learnt, as he had expected, that the summons he had received was from a mythical patient.

"I don't know what the object was," said the doctor's voice, "but I gather from your tone that something happened. Did you have a visitor?"

"We certainly had a visitor," said Selby grimly. "With any kind of luck he would have been a dead visitor. But he took advantage of the darkness and heaved a chair at me, and got away before I could get one good shot."

"May I come round this evening? I should like to hear about this," said the doctor. "I have a theory, which may be too fantastic to consider, but it is a theory."

Throughout that morning, Selby Lowe pursued his inquiries in the neighbourhood. A policeman had seen a small closed car stop at the corner of the street, and a tall man in a long coat alight and walk rapidly along Curzon Street. Presently the car moved on and turned into a mews, a series of garages rented by people in the neighbourhood. The officer's duty took him along in leisurely pursuit, and, glancing down the mews, he thought he saw a man climb over a wall and, springing into the car, drive off. He wasn't sure whether his eyes had played a trick, and he hesitated to give an alarm. Corroboration of this story came from the house next to Selby's. That morning a servant had found a long mackintosh coat in the yard. It was practically new, and bore on the tab the name of a store which supplied such garments by the thousand.