ll the Fitzwilliam Place household could testify
to the many and bitter quarrels which had arisen between father and son
over the latter's gambling or racing debts. Many people asserted that
Brooks would sooner have left his money to charitable institutions than
seen it squandered upon the brightest stars that adorned the music-hall
stage.

"The case came up for hearing early in the autumn. In the meanwhile
Percival Brooks had given up his racecourse associates, settled down in
the Fitzwilliam Place mansion, and conducted his father's business,
without a manager, but with all the energy and forethought which he had
previously devoted to more unworthy causes.

"Murray had elected not to stay on in the old house; no doubt
associations were of too painful and recent a nature; he was boarding
with the family of a Mr. Wilson Hibbert, who was the late Patrick
Wethered's, the murdered lawyer's, partner. They were quiet, homely
people, who lived in a very pokey little house in Kilkenny Street, and
poor Murray must, in spite of his grief, have felt very bitterly the
change from his luxurious quarters in his father's mansion to his
present tiny room and homely meals.

"Percival Brooks, who was now drawing an income of over a hundred
thousand a year, was very severely criticised for adhering so strictly
to the letter of his father's will, and only paying his brother that
paltry L300 a year, which was very literally but the crumbs off his own
magnificent dinner table.

"The issue of that contested will case was therefore awaited with eager
interest. In the meanwhile the police, who had at first seemed fairly
loquacious on the subject of the murder of Mr. Patrick Wethered,
suddenly became strangely reticent, and by their very reticence aroused
a certain amount of uneasiness in the public mind, until one day the
_Irish Times_ published the following extraordinary, enigmatic
paragraph:

"'We hear on authority which cannot be questioned, that certain
extraordinary developments are expected in connection with the brutal
murder of our distinguished townsman Mr. Wethered; the police, in fact,
are vainly trying to keep it secret that they hold a clue which is as
important as it is sensational, and that they only await the impending
issue of a well-known litigation in the probate court to effect an
arrest.'

"The Dublin public flocked to the court to hear the arguments in the
great will case. I myself journeyed down to Dublin. As so