"Good heavens, no. I don't even know his name nor his appearance."
"How could I have seen him? I am exploring the neighbourhood, and generally start on my travels in the morning early and return late. This man arrived at five, went to bed at nine, and as I didn't come back till ten o'clock I didn't see him on that night; next morning he was dead."
"No," said Roger, with a shudder, "I don't care for such 'wormy circumstance.'"
"Wormy circumstance is good," remarked Fanks, approvingly. "Keats, I think. Yes, I thought so. I see you don't care for horrors. You are not of the Poe-Baudelaire school of grave-digging, corpse-craving poesy."
"Hardly! I don't believe in going to the gutter for inspiration."
"Ah! now you are thinking of MM. Zola and Gondrecourt, my friend; but, dear me, how one thing does lead to another. We are discussing literature instead of murder. Let us return to our first loves. Why didn't you attend the inquest?"
"An all-sufficient reason, indeed," remarked Mr. Fanks, drily, making digs at his book with the pencil. "I wonder you weren't called as a witness."
"No necessity. I know nothing of the affair."
Mr. Fanks twirled his vicious little pencil in his fingers, closed his secretive little book with a snap, and replaced them both in his pocket with a sigh.
"You are a most unsatisfactory medicine, my dear Roger. You have done nothing to cure my detective fever."
"Am I so bad as that? Come now, I'll tell you one thing: I slept in the room next to that of the dead man."
"If you walked twenty miles during the day, Fanks, you would have been too tired to listen for the sounds of a possible murder."
"Yes, yes, of course. What a pity we can't look twenty-four hours ahead of things; it would save such a lot of trouble."
"And prevent such a lot of murders. If such prophetic power were given to humanity, I'm afraid your occupation would be gone."
"Othello's remark! yes, of course; but I'm sorry you slept so soundly on that night, as some one might have been in the dead man's room."
"Why do you think so?" asked Roger, quickly.
"Because the door was slightly ajar," replied Fanks, sagaciously; "a nervous man would not have slept with his door like that. You're sure you heard nothing?"