[Gutenberg 41001] • The Red Room

Three Inquisitive Men. The fifteenth of January, 1907, fell on a Tuesday. I have good cause to remember it. In this narrative of startling fact there is little that concerns myself. It is mostly of the doings of others—strange doings though they were, and stranger still, perhaps, that I should be their chronicler. On that Tuesday morning, just after eleven o’clock, I was busy taking down the engine of one of the cars at my garage in the High Road, Chiswick. Dick, one of my men, had had trouble with the “forty-eight” while bringing home two young gentlemen from Oxford on the previous night, and I was trying to locate the fault. Suddenly, as I looked up, I saw standing at my side a man who lived a few doors from me in Bath Road, Bedford Park—a man who was a mystery