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word used. Wickedness...
    Something rather special in wickedness, he thought, if the priest who knew about it was followed and clubbed to death.

The Pale Horse
    II
    There was nothing to be learned from the other three lodgers in the house. Two of them, a bank clerk and an elderly man who worked in a shoe shop had been there for some years. The third was a girl of twenty-two who had come there recently and had a job in a nearby department store. All three of them barely knew Mrs Davis by sight.
    The woman who had reported having seen Father Gorman in the street that evening had no useful information to give. She was a Catholic who attended St Dominic's and she knew Father Gorman by sight. She had seen him turn out of Benthall Street and go into Tony's Place about ten minutes to eight. That was all. Mr Osborne, the proprietor of the chemist's shop on the corner of Barton Street, had a better contribution to make.
    He was a small, middle-aged man, with a bald domed head, a round ingenuous face, and glasses.
    “Good evening, Chief Inspector. Come behind, will you?” He held up the flap of an old-fashioned counter. Lejeune passed behind and through a dispensing alcove where a young man in a white overall was making up bottles of medicine with the swiftness of a professional conjurer, and so through an archway into a tiny room with a couple of easy chairs, a table, and a desk. Mr Osborne pulled the curtain of the archway behind him in a secretive manner and sat down in one chair, motioning to Lejeune to take the other. He leaned forward, his eyes glinting in pleasurable excitement.
    “It just happens that I may be able to assist you. It wasn't a busy evening - nothing much to do, the weather being unfavourable. My young lady was behind the counter. We keep open until eight on Thursday always. The fog was coming on and there weren't many people about. I'd gone to the door to look at the weather, thinking to myself that the fog was coming up fast. The weather forecast had said it would. I stood there for a bit - nothing going on inside that my young lady couldn't deal with - face creams and bath salts and all that. Then I saw Father Gorman coming along on the other side of the street. I know him quite well by sight, of course. A shocking thing, this murder, attacking a man so well thought of as he is. 'There's Father Gorman,' I said to myself. He was going in the direction of West Street, it's the next turn on the left before the railway, as you know. A little way behind him there was another man. It wouldn't have entered my head to notice or think anything of that, but quite suddenly this second man came to a stop - quite abruptly, just when he was level with my door. I wondered why he'd stopped - and then I noticed that Father Gorman, a little way ahead, was slowing down. He didn't quite stop. It was as though he was thinking of something so hard that he almost forgot he was walking. Then he started on again, and this other man started to walk, too - rather fast. I thought - inasmuch as I thought at all, that perhaps it was someone who knew Father Gorman and wanted to catch him up and speak to him.”
    “But in actual fact he could simply have been following him?”
    “That's what I'm sure he was doing now - not that I thought anything of it at the time. What with the fog coming up, I lost sight of them both almost at once.”
    “Can you describe this man at all?”
    Lejeune's voice was not confident. He was prepared for the usual nondescript characteristics. But Mr Osborne was made of different mettle from Tony of Tony's Place.
    “Well, yes, I think so,” he said with complacency. “He was a tall man -”
    “Tall? How tall?”
    “Well - five eleven to six feet, at least, I'd say. Though he might have seemed taller than he was because he was very thin. Sloping shoulders he had, and a definite Adam's apple. Grew his hair rather long under his Homburg. A great beak of a nose. Very noticeable. Naturally I couldn't say as to