A Silent Witness

A Silent Witness
R. Austin Freeman
1914
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING OF THE MYSTERY
THE history upon which I am now embarking abounds in incidents so
amazing that, as I look back on them, a something approaching to
scepticism contends with my vivid recollections and makes me feel
almost apologetic in laying them before the reader. Some of them
indeed are so out of character with the workaday life in which they
happened that they will appear almost incredible; but none is more
fraught with mystery than the experience that befell me on a certain
September night in the last year of my studentship and ushered in the
rest of the astounding sequence.
It was past eleven o'clock when I let myself out of my lodgings at
Gospel Oak; a dark night, cloudy and warm and rather inclined to rain.
But, despite the rather unfavourable aspect of the weather, I turned my
steps away from the town, and walking briskly up the Highgate Road,
presently turned into Millfield Lane. This was my favourite walk and
the pretty winding lane, meandering so pleasantly from Lower
Highgate to the heights of Hampstead, was familiar to me under all its
aspects.
On sweet summer mornings when the cuckoos called from the depths
of Ken Wood, when the path was spangled with golden sunlight, and
saucy squirrels played hide and seek in the shadows under the elms
(though the place was within earshot of Westminster and within sight
of the dome of St. Paul's); on winter days when the Heath wore its
mantle of white and the ring of gliding steel came up from the skaters

on the pond below; on August evenings, when I would come suddenly
on sequestered lovers (to our mutual embarrassment) and hurry by with
ill-feigned unconsciousness. I knew all its phases and loved them all.
Even its name was delightful, carrying the mind back to those more
rustic days when the wits foregathered at the Old Flask Tavern and
John Constable tramped through this very lane with his colour-box
slung over his shoulder.
It was very dark after I had passed the lamp at the entrance to the lane.
Very silent and solitary too. Not a soul was stirring at this hour, for the
last of the lovers had long since gone home and the place was little
frequented even in the daytime. The elms brooded over the road,
shrouding it in shadows of palpable black, and their leaves whispered
secretly in the soft night breeze. But the darkness, the quiet and the
solitude were restful after the long hours of study and the glare of the
printed page, and I strolled on past the ghostly pond and the little
thatched cottage, now wrapped in silence and darkness, with a certain
wistful regret that I must soon look my last on them. For I had now
passed all my examinations but the final "Fellowship," and must soon
be starting my professional career in earnest.
Presently a light rain began to fall. Foreseeing that I should have to
curtail my walk, I stepped forward more briskly, and, passing between
the posts, entered the narrowest and most secluded part of the lane. But
now the rain suddenly increased, and a squall of wind drove it athwart
the path. I drew up in the shelter of one of the tall oak fences by which
the lane is here inclosed, and waited for the shower to pass. And as I
stood with my back to the fence, pensively filling my pipe, I became
for the first time sensible of the utter solitude of the place.
I looked about me and listened. The lane was darker here than
elsewhere; a mere trench between the high fences. I could dimly see the
posts at the entrance and a group of large elms over-shadowing them.
In the other direction, where the lane doubled sharply upon itself, was
absolute, inky blackness, save where a faint glimmer from the wet
ground showed the corner of the fence and a projecting stump or
tree-root jutting out from the corner and looking curiously like a human

foot with the toes pointed upward.
The rain fell steadily with a soft, continuous murmur; the leaves of the
elm-trees whispered together and answered the falling rain. The Scotch
pines above my head stirred in the breeze with a sound like the surge of
the distant sea. The voices of Nature, hushed and solemn, oblivious of
man like the voices of the wilderness; and over all and through all, a
profound, enveloping silence.
I drew up closer to the fence and shivered slightly, for the night was
growing chill. It seemed a little lighter now in the narrow, trench-like
lane; not that the sky was less murky but because the ground was now
flooded with water.