One did not need to be a doctor to see that a heart attack had swiftly
and suddenly struck him down.

Now that I knew the worst I acted with decision. I dragged the body by
the shoulders into the room until it lay in the centre of the carpet.
Then I locked the door.

The foreboding of evil that had cast its black shadow over my thoughts
from the moment I crossed the threshold of this sinister hotel came over
me strongly again. Indeed, my position was, to say the least, scarcely
enviable. Here was I, a British officer with British papers of identity,
about to be discovered in a German hotel, into which I had introduced
myself under false pretences, at dead of night alone with the corpse of
a German or Austrian (for such the dead man apparently was)!

It was undoubtedly a most awkward fix.

I listened.

Everything in the hotel was silent as the grave.

I turned from my gloomy forebodings to look again at the stranger. In
his crisp black hair and slightly protuberant cheekbones I traced again
the hint of Jewish ancestry I had remarked before. Now that the man's
eyes--his big, thoughtful eyes that had stared at me out of the darkness
of the corridor--were closed, he looked far less foreign than before: in
fact he might almost have passed as an Englishman.

He was a young man--about my own age, I judged--(I shall be twenty-eight