nt.

Bunning made no answer. He was looking round. There were three doors
into that room; he glanced at each, shaking his head after each glance.

"We'd best get the police, at once, Mr. Brent," he said. "The police
station's just at the back--there's a way down to it from outside this
parlour. I'll run down now. You, sir----"

"I'll stop here," answered Brent. "But get a doctor, will you? I want to
know----"

"Dr. Wellesley, the police-surgeon, is next door," replied Brent. "The
police'll get him. But he's beyond all doctors, Mr. Brent!
Instantaneous--that! I know!"

He hurried out of the room, and Brent, left alone with the dead man,
looked at him once again wonderingly. Cousins though they were, he and
Wallingford knew little of each other: their acquaintance, such as it
was, had not been deep enough to establish any particular affection
between them. But since Wallingford's election as Mayor of
Hathelsborough Brent, by profession a journalist in London, had twice
spent a week-end with him in the old town, and had learnt something of
his plans for a reform of certain matters connected with the
administration of its affairs. They had discussed these things on the
occasion of his last visit, and now, as he stood by the dead man, Brent
remembered certain words which Wallingford had spoken.

"There are things that I can do," Wallingford had said, with some
confidence. And then he had added, with a cynical laugh, "But there are
other things that--why, it would be, literally, as much as my life's
worth to even try to undermine them!"

That was now four months since, but Brent remembered. And as he stood
there, waiting for help which would be useless, he began to wonder if
Wallingford, eager for reform, had attempted anything likely to bring
him into personal danger. Certainly, from all that Brent knew of him, he
was the sort of man who, having set himself to a task, would let nothing
stop him in accomplishing it; he was the sort of man too, Brent thought,
who had a genius for making enemies: such men always have. But murder?
Cold-blooded, deliberate, apparently well-planned murder! Yet there it
was, before him. The Mayor of Hathelsborough had walked up into that
room, sacred to his official uses and suggestive in its atmosphere and
furniture of his great dignity, and had settled down to his desk, only
to be assassinated by some enemy who had taken good care to perform his
crime with swiftness and thoroughness.

T