The Stone-Cold Dead in the Market Affair

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Market Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, bears no resemblance to its namesake in San Francisco. It is around three hundred yards long, narrow, shabby, with an atmosphere redolent of gasoline, printer's ink, fish, vegetables and good Welsh beer.

It is bounded on one side by the gray stone outer wall of the old municipal covered market, and on the other by a conglomeration of premises which include a branch of a multiple tailoring firm, the truck bay and editorial entrance of the South Wales Argus, wholesale fruit, vegetable and fish merchants, and a store specializing in workmen's clothing.

There are two taverns in the street's three-hundred-yard length. The man in the shabby fawn trenchcoat visited each in turn.

He was a small, slim man about thirty years of age. His face was pasty, with high cheekbones accentuated by the sunken flesh below. His hair was a thick thatch that looked like bleached hay. His curiously pale green eyes, set close to a button nose, held an expression of abject fright.

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