He had reached the
landing, and here, from the head of the stairs, he could see a dull
yellow glow thrown out into the corridor through the glass panel of the
lawyer's door.
An instant's pause, and then, chagrined, the sense of defeat upon him,
he moved forward again as silently as before. He reached the door and
crouched beside it. A murmur of voices came to him from within. Jimmie
Dale's lips parted in grim irony. The game was up, of course, but he was
occupying precisely the same coign of vantage that, according to the
Rat, the Rat had occupied that afternoon, and if the Rat had been able,
undiscovered, to see and hear, then he, Jimmie Dale, could do the same.
The slim, tapering, sensitive fingers closed on the doorknob--a thin ray
of light began to steal through between the door-edge and the jamb--and
grew wider--and the voices, from a confused murmur, became distinct. And
now, through the narrow crack of the slightly opened door, he could see
inside; and he could see that, as he had already realised, he was too
late, very much too late, in time only, as it were, for the post-mortem
of the affair--even the police were already on the spot!
It was a curious scene! A rickety old railing across the middle of the
musty, bare-floored room served to indicate that the space beyond was
the old lawyer's "private" office.
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