Ronald Devereux’s shooting turns Bundle Brent’s apparent road accident into the second death linked to Seven Dials. As Devereux lies dying, he asks her to carry a message to Jimmy Thesiger, joining the name of the secretive organization to the friend he specifically wants told. The immediate investigation accepts an accidental explanation, but the message and Bundle’s recollection of Gerald Wade’s death give the event a more sinister meaning. The later identification of Jimmy as Devereux’s murderer exposes the gap between the inquest’s verdict and what happened.

The roadside encounter

Bundle Brent is driving along a quiet stretch of road when a man suddenly reels out of a hedge in front of her Hispano. She swerves hard to avoid him, nearly putting the car into a ditch. Looking back, she sees him lying face down and still. Although she has not run over him, she fears that the car struck him as it passed. The man’s apparent drunkenness and the abruptness of the incident leave her initially convinced that she has caused his death.

Bundle returns to him and turns him over. He is young, well dressed, and wears a small toothbrush moustache. She can see no external injury, but he seems either dead or close to it. His eyelids flicker; his brown eyes open partway, and he struggles to speak. Bundle bends down to hear him. He first manages the fragment “Seven Dials... tell...” and, after she asks whom she should tell, forces out the name Jimmy Thesiger. His head falls back and his body goes limp. Bundle is shaken and still believes that she has killed him, yet she immediately tries to act: she considers getting him into the car and taking him to a doctor because he might still be alive.

From apparent accident to shooting

The first explanations do not resolve the contradiction between Bundle’s fear and the man’s condition. Doctor Cassell tells her that the car never touched Devereux: he was shot. The physician also reports that Devereux had muttered that he wanted something told to a friend and had mentioned Seven Dials. He considers the name an unlikely one for a man of Devereux’s class and suggests that his assailant might have come from there, while leaving the matter to the police.

At the police station, Devereux is identified through a card-case as Ronald Devereux, with an address in the Albany. Bundle recognizes the name as Ronny Devereux, a friend of Bill Eversleigh at the Foreign Office and one of the men associated in her memory with Bill and Gerald Wade. That recognition changes the meaning of the encounter. Gerald Wade has already died, and Bundle can still imagine that his death resulted from carelessness or natural causes; Devereux’s shooting, however, makes the possibility of a connected crime harder to dismiss.

The message also has a precise earlier echo. Gerald Wade had mentioned Seven Dials in the unfinished letter he wrote to his sister on the night before his death. Bundle had found the name familiar when Devereux spoke it, but only afterward understands the connection. His final instruction adds Jimmy Thesiger to this chain: Devereux does not merely name Seven Dials but insists that Jimmy be told. The fragment is not a complete explanation of the organization or the shooting, yet it gives Bundle a concrete link between the dying man, the earlier letter, and the people around the two deaths.

Investigation and public verdict

The doctor takes Bundle to the police, where an inspector records her statement carefully. The local police sergeant offers a casual theory: boys practising with firearms may have fired at birds without considering who was beyond the hedge. That suggestion treats the shooting as a stray accident, rather than as an attack deliberately aimed at Devereux. It also sits uneasily beside the victim’s dying effort to pass on a message naming both Seven Dials and Jimmy Thesiger.

At the inquest, Bundle gives evidence, as does the doctor; evidence is also heard about rifle practice in the neighbourhood. The proceedings produce a verdict of death by misadventure. The ruling supplies an official conclusion, but it does not resolve the personal clue Devereux managed to leave behind. The difference matters: the formal account makes the fatal shot an accident, whereas the larger investigation eventually establishes that Devereux was murdered.

Meaning within the mystery

Devereux’s death is staged for the reader first as a possible collision, then clarified as a shooting, and finally entangled with the Seven Dials investigation through his last words. Each change revises Bundle’s understanding: she moves from believing herself responsible, to learning that an unknown assailant shot him, to recognizing that the victim was connected to Gerald Wade and had deliberately named Jimmy Thesiger. The scene’s roadside urgency gives the clue its force; Devereux has little strength left, and the name he struggles to deliver becomes the event’s surviving evidence.

The public verdict of misadventure temporarily places the death in the category of an accident, but the eventual revelation identifies Jimmy Thesiger as the murderer, who killed Devereux to silence him. Devereux’s message therefore functions both as a lead and as an accusation whose significance is not immediately understood. His death binds the investigation’s separate threads: Gerald Wade’s suspicious end, the secret activity surrounding Seven Dials, and Jimmy’s concealed criminal identity. The contrast between an apparently ordinary country-road mishap and a deliberate killing makes the failure of the first explanation central to the event’s role in the mystery.