THE SHADOW OF THE GOAT
John Dickson Carr
I
It was a thoughtful room, and tobacco smoke clung round the edges of the lamp. The two men who sat there were thoughtful, but that was not the only point of similarity between them. They had the same worried look of persons too much interested in other men’s affairs. Sir John Landervorne had once come from that vague section of London known as Whitehall, and he had been possibly the only man in the city who might have given police orders to Scotland Yard. If M. Henri Bencolin was only one of France’s eighty-six prefects of police, he was not the least important of them.
Fog had made London medieval again, a place of towers and footsteps and dim figures. It blurred the windows of the room in Fontain Court, the backwater of Fleet Street where the barristers sometimes walk in their ghostly wigs, swinging canes like swords. In the room the two men, sitting opposite each other with white shirt fronts bulging exactly alike, smoked similar cigars—Bencolin with his black beard, Landervorne’s beard gray as the cigar ash. It gave one a weird feeling: picture of a detective at thirty, then a picture of him at sixty. Their eyes were somber.
“If you tell me your story,” said Sir John, “you will have to tell it to Billy Garrick, because these are his rooms, and he will be in presently. But it will be safe; he was there last night too.”
. . .
