Introducing The Toff Read Online Free

– and it was the mud which made the Toff frown suddenly. For it was wet.
    In five minutes the Toff had learned enough to make the owner of the shoe a central figure in the mystery. In the ditch alongside the road ran a sluggish stream of water, more mud than anything else. And there were deeply-set footprints, fitting the shoe to a T at one place, and blurred out of recognition in another, while on the thorns of the hedge the Toff found a wisp or two of finely woven cloth.
    The Toff fitted the clues in quickly. The girl had been travelling in the wrecked car, he reckoned, and had managed to get out of it before the smash. But her bid for safety had failed; almost certainly she had been in the Daimler, hidden from sight by those drawn curtains. No wonder he had been blinded to make sure that he saw nothing inside!
    The Toff’s eyes were very hard as he turned away, stuffing the shoe into his coat pocket. He decided to waste no more time there, and he slipped quickly into the car. The quicker the police knew of the hold-up the better, but it was possible that the shoe would help the Toff to find a short cut to the murderers, and he looked on the shoe as his own special clue.

 
3:   THE PUG IS VISITED
    The Toff might not have had the true citizen’s regard for the police, but he treated that body of men with a measure of respect which they rarely appreciated. For instance, he spoke over the telephone from an A.A. box half a mile from the wrecked Packard to one, Chief Inspector McNab, of Scotland Yard, who was no bosom friend of the Toff’s. He told McNab just where a man had been killed near the London-Chelmsford road, and he promised McNab he would make sure that no one interfered with the wreckage until the police arrived.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was certainly murder – gun-play, Mac.’
    It took McNab, a burly, square-jawed Scot, exactly forty-four minutes to reach the scene of the crime, accompanied by three equally grim-visaged plain-clothes men. McNab found the Packard and the murdered man just as he had been told. But he did not see the Toff, although the Toff saw him. It was the kind of thing that savoured of black magic, but in point of fact it was easy.
    The Toff simply ran his car to a convenient lane off the main road after telephoning the police, and then perched himself on a five-barred gate near the Packard, smoking many cigarettes and persuading occasional motorists that he had had a smash, and that they would have to go back for a bit, making a long detour, unless they cared to wait for the breakdown gang. None of them waited.
    Thanks to the moon, he saw the police car coming. McNab, whom he knew well, was easily recognizable. Then the Toff slipped off the gate, hurried across the field to his bus, and started for London.
    He did not expect things to happen quickly, and he was quite prepared to await developments. Yet the affair loomed prominently in his thoughts, especially because of the hush-hush attitude taken up by the police.
    For when the Toff read the morning paper over the breakfast table, the murder had no front-page headlines, although it undoubtedly deserved them from a journalistic point of view. When he eventually found the report, there was nothing to suggest that there had been anything more unusual than a road smash. No mention was made at all of the gunshot wounds in the forehead and the chest.
    “Funnier and funnier,’ thought the Toff, and then read the only useful piece of news in the paragraph. The dead man’s name was Goldman – Paul Goldman – and he had recently returned to England after a long sojourn in Turkey.
    ‘I could have guessed most of that myself,’ murmured the Toff, as he got up from the table. ‘I wonder what McNab will have to say about it?’
    McNab telephoned him early, and asked him to go round to the Yard after he had given evidence against Lopez the Killer. When the Toff arrived he found the Chief-Inspector almost fussy, which was merely a device to