As he hastened into the long, gloomy alley, Harry Bullfinch heard the distinctive sound of trotting horses making fast on cobblestones. Peering forward into the frosty fog, he saw what he thought was the back of a goods carriage reach a bright gaslight at the far end of the passage. The driver didn’t stop; instead, he reined his two dandy dapple-grey horses left around the corner, then jeered them into a fast trot once more. Bullfinch, still a fit man, started running and made it to the same gaslight in no more than five seconds.

Harry Bullfinch was sure he had seen something fall from the right side of the carriage before it had turned out of the back alley. Looking around, he spotted a package lying against a gate in a dark doorway, away from the light. He picked it up, and being the good, honest man that he was, he dashed after the carriage as fast as he could, calling out to the driver as he did so.

Alas, his noble effort was doomed to fail. For even though the carriage had been forced to stop at the junction with the Strand, it was now slipping into the busy Christmas traffic and smartly trotting towards Charing Cross. Bullfinch reached the pavement of the Strand just in time to see the ghostly outline of the carriage and the dapple-grey pair disappear into the fog as it rounded Charing Cross.

Harry Bullfinch went to stand under a nearby gaslight. He looked inquisitively at the brown parcel as he turned it over in his big, rough hands. It was a cube-shaped parcel, about nine or ten inches in size. Whatever it contained was light in weight and rattled only slightly when gently shaken. It was wrapped in simple but strong brown paper and tied up securely with a somewhat dirty length of thick string. There appeared to be no writing or mark of any kind that would help him return the contents to its owner. A nearby clock on a shop told him it was now almost 3.40 p.m. on this December afternoon. There was no time for him to think what to do with the parcel. Shrugging his shoulders in resignation, Harry Bullfinch tucked it under his arm and rushed once more towards the shortcut for Waterloo Bridge. If he ran all the way over the river to Waterloo Junction, he reckoned he could still catch the four o’clock train to Winchester.