âmust have been killed on the spot.â
Mitchell had taken an electric torch from his pocket. With it in his hand he knelt down by the body.
âA woman,â he said. âYoung, too, poor thing.â And then the next moment: âGood God,â he said below his breath. âFerris, Ferris.â
Ferris turned abruptly, startled.
âSir!â he said.
âShe was alive,â Mitchell half whispered, moved beyond his wont. âIâll swear she was... just for a moment.... I saw her look at me... as if she wanted... something she wanted to say... then she was gone.â
âAre you sure, sir?â Ferris asked, more than a little incredulously. âAfter a fall like that... it must have killed her on the spot... going over that embankment at sixty miles an hour... and if it didnât, then the fire would have, for it was all round her.â
âI saw her look at me,â Mitchell repeated, his voice not quite steady now, for though his profession had habituated him to scenes of terror and of grief, yet something in that momentary dying look had touched him to the quick, had seemed to convey to him some message he was but half conscious of. âYoung, too,â he said again.
âWhat I canât make out,â observed Jacks, âis how it happened â a perfectly good straight road, night quite clear, no sign of any obstruction anywhere. Of course the steering might have gone wrong.â
âBear looking into,â agreed Mitchell.
A voice from above asked what had happened, and then a man came scrambling down the steep embankment side. Mitchell became the brisk executive. The newcomer described himself as the landlord of a small public house, the George and Dragon, on the road just the other side of the bridge. His establishment did not boast a phone, but there was a call box close by. Mitchell sent Jacks to report to headquarters, to ask for more help, to summon the nearest doctor, to warn the railway people that the line was blocked, for the debris of the car, and part of the railing from the bridge it had carried down with it, lay right across the line. The landlord of the George and Dragon, who gave his name as Ashton, was set to work, too, while Mitchell and Ferris made as careful an examination as was possible of the half-burnt wreckage. But it was Ashton who called their attention to the smashed fragments of a bottle in what once had been the dicky of the car.
âWhisky, if you ask me,â he said. âThereâs been whisky there all right â what about that?â
âBear looking into,â agreed Mitchell, âwhisky explains a lot, and maybe it explains this, too â and maybe it donât.â
âThereâs the poor creatureâs hat,â Ferris remarked, pointing to it, where it lay, oddly uninjured, flaunting as it were its gay and fashionable self against the background of dark tragedy.
Somehow or another it had rolled to one side and had escaped both the fire and the effects of the fall.
They found a handbag, too. It was badly burned, but within were two different sets of visiting cards, comparatively slightly damaged. One set bore the name of Mrs John Pentland Curtis and an address in Chelsea, the other was inscribed, âMiss Jo Franklandâ, with the same address, and at the bottom the legend, Daily Announcer .
âOne of the Announcer staff perhaps,â Mitchell commented. âLooks as if Curtis were her married name and Jo Frankland her own name she used in journalism still. Curtis â John Pentland Curtis,â he repeated thoughtfully, âseem to know the name somehow.â
âAmateur middle heavyweight champion two years ago,â said Ferris, who was something of a boxer himself. âBeat Porter of the City force in the final, fined five pounds last year for being drunk and assaulting one of our men, but apologized handsome after, and gave another tenner to our man, so