Within appeared a covering of coarse sacking. He pulled this away
with a careless hand, and beneath the beam of his electric torch
showed the pale and dreadful features of a dead man--of a man, the
center of whose forehead showed the small round hole where a bullet
had entered in; of a man whose still-recognizable features were those
of the photograph on the mantel-piece of the room downstairs, the
photograph that was signed:
"Devotedly yours,
Charley Wright."
For a long time Robert Dunn stood, looking down in silence at that
dead face which was hardly more still, more rigid than his own.
He shivered, for he felt very cold. It was as though the coldness
of the death in whose presence he stood had laid its chilly hand on
him also.
At last he stirred and looked about him with a bewildered air, then
carefully and with a reverent hand, he put back the sackcloth covering.
"So I've found you, Charley," he whispered. "Found you at last."
He replaced the lid, leaving everything as it had been when he
entered the attic, and stood for a time, trying to collect his
thoughts which the shock of this dreadful discovery had so
disordered, and to decide what to do next.
"But, then, that's simple," he thought. "I must go straight to the
police and bring them here. They said they wanted proof; they said
I had nothing to go on but bare suspicion.
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