ut a gruesome fact!

III

HOW I REGAINED IT

My ghastly duty was performed; I had identified the dreadful thing,
which less than an hour before had been a strikingly beautiful woman,
as my mysterious visitor. The police were palpably disappointed at the
sparsity of my knowledge respecting her. In fact, had it not chanced
that Detective Sergeant Durham was in the station, I think they would
have doubted the accuracy of my story.

As a man of some experience in such matters, I fully recognized its
improbability, but beyond relating the circumstances leading up to my
possession of the pigtail and the events which had ensued, I could do
no more in the matter. The weird relic had not been found on the dead
woman, nor in the cab.

Now the unsavoury business was finished, and I walked along Bow Street,
racking my mind for the master-key to this mystery in which I was become
enmeshed. How I longed to rush off to Harley's rooms in Chancery Lane
and to tell him the whole story! But my friend was a thousand miles
away--and I had to see the thing out alone.

That the pigtail was some sacred relic stolen from a Chinese temple and
sought for by its fanatical custodians was a theory which persistently
intruded itself. But I could find no place in that hypothesis for the
beautiful Jewess; and that she was intimately concerned I did not doubt.
A cool survey of the facts rendered it fairly evident that it was she
and none other who had stolen the pigtail from my rooms. Some third
party--possibly the "yellow man" of whom she had spoken--had in turn
stolen it from her, strangling her in the process.

The police theory of the murder (and I was prepared to accept it) was
that the assassin had been crouching in hiding behind or beside the
cab--or even within the dark interior. He had leaped in and attacked the
woman at the moment that the taxi-man had started his engine; if already
inside, the deed had proven even easier. Then, during some block in the
traffic, he had slipped out unseen, leaving the body of the victim to be
discovered when the cab pulled up at the hotel.

I knew of only one place in London where I might hope to obtain useful
information, and for that place I was making now. It was Malay Jack's,
whence I had been bound on the previous night when my strange meeting
with the seaman who then possessed the pigtail had led to a change of
plan. The scum of the Asiatic population always come at one time or
another