"Then she started from Paddington that morning. My business will be to find out who she was, and the motive of her journey."
"And do you think there is a possibility of tracing her in London, without a shred of evidence—except the photograph of a dead face?" exclaimed Wyllard. "To my mind it seems like looking in a brook for a bubble that broke there a week ago."
"As a west countryman you should remember how otter-hounds hunt the bead on the water," answered Distin. "With a photograph, the police ought to be able to trace that girl—even in the wilderness of London."
"But if she were a foreigner, and only passed through London?" suggested Wyllard.
"Even then she would leave her bead, like the otter. She could not get a night's shelter without some one knowing of her coming and going. Unless she slept in the lowest form of lodging-house—a place through which the herd of strange faces are always passing—the probabilities are in favour of her face being remembered."
"Judging by the neatness of her clothes and the refinement of her features, she must have been the last person likely to set foot in a common lodging-house," said Heathcote. "But there was no money found upon her; neither purse nor papers of any kind."
"That fact is to me almost conclusive," said Distin.
"Upon what point?"
"It convinces me that she was made away with."
"Indeed!" exclaimed Wyllard, much surprised. "The thing never occurred to me in that light."
"Naturally, my dear friend. You have not devoted twenty years of your life to the study of the criminal mind," answered the lawyer easily. "Don't you see that the first thought of a man who made up his mind to throw a girl out of a train—unless he did the act in a blind fury which gave him no time for thought of any kind—his first precaution, I say, would be to see that there was no evidence of her identity upon her, more especially where the victim was a stranger in the land, as this poor thing was? The identification of the victim is often half-way towards the identification of the murderer. But if the dead can be buried unrecognised—a nameless unknown waif, in whose fate no private individual is interested—why, after the funeral the murderer may take his ease and be merry, assured that he will hear no more of the matter. Public interest in a mysterious crime of that kind soon dies out."
"And you think that this poor girl was the victim of a crime?" asked the Coroner, surprised to find his own idea shared by the great authority.
