A Coachman Who Does Not Remember
There remained the coachman.
A four-wheeled cab, a growler, had been observed by three separate witnesses standing for a period of approximately twenty minutes at the corner of Brunswick Street on the evening of the twenty-ninth, between about half-past seven and ten minutes to eight. The witnesses were: a boy selling hot chestnuts in Bloomsbury Square, a manservant who had been sent out by his mistress to post a letter in the pillar-box at the end of the street, and a governess returning from the reading-room of the British Museum to her lodging-house in Argyle Square. None of the three had taken any particular note of the cab or of its driver, because a cab standing at a corner at half-past seven in the evening is one of the ordinary furnitures of London; but all three, when pressed by Wren to exert themselves, had been able to say that the cab had a yellow mark on the near-side panel — possibly a scratch, possibly a stain — and that the horse had been a bay with white stockings on the off hind.
It was enough of a description to work with. The cab-proprietors in the district were not very numerous. A constable of the division, a good-natured young man called Partridge whom Wren had found a use for in previous cases, was sent to enquire of each in turn. He returned on the Saturday morning with the name of a Mr. Feniman, whose yard was in Cromer Street behind the foundling