Page:The Viaduct Murder (1926).pdf/148

Of the former occupation, indeed, there were few signs. A scratch had been made now and again in the plaster of the walls, giving a name in initials⁠—a tourist's trick, but rescued from vulgarity by the circumstances of its origin, and by the addition of a few Christian symbols⁠—a Cross several times, and once the IHS monogram. Just where the light of the little window fell strongest, a few lines of pious doggerel had been scrawled, difficult to read in their crabbed seventeenth-century handwriting. A sconce for a candle, nailed into the wall, was the only solid monument left of these distant memories.

The eye was more immediately challenged by the evidences of a recent visitor's presence. One expected a rude pallet of straw; a simpler resting-place had been contrived with three cushions obviously looted from the club lounge. There was a candle-end stuck in an empty claret-bottle, and two candles in reserve. There were numerous cigarette-ends thrown carelessly on and around the dust-heap at the corner; all these were of a common and undistinctive brand. There was a rather crumpled copy of Friday's Daily Mail, probably derived from the same source as the cushions. There was a tin of boot-polish and a brush, as if the stranger had been careful about his appearance even in these singular surroundings. These relics Reeves quickly reviewed with absorbed interest, and then turned to Gordon in despair.

"All these traces," he said, "and not one that you could call a clue. If the man has escaped us,