Sybil had been a silent but interested audience, but now she asserted her views.
“I’m sure Mr. Martin wouldn’t ask us to do anything that was absurd, mother,” she said; “and if he wishes us to be ready to leave at a second’s notice, I think we should do as he asks. It is in connection with the key?” She turned her grave eyes on Dick.
“Yes,” he said, “and something else. As I say, I’m only groping for the moment. Certain facts are definitely established in my mind beyond question. But there are others which have got to be worked out.”
He asked Mrs. Lansdown if she had heard of Stalletti, but she shook her head.
“Do you know Mr. Cody?” he asked, and she thought hard for a long time.
“No, I don’t think I do,” she replied.
XIII
A few minutes later Dick took his leave, and walked down towards Bedford Square. Once or twice he looked back. On the opposite side of the road a man was keeping pace with him about twenty yards to his rear. Immediately behind him was another saunterer. At the corner of Bedford Square a taxicab was waiting, and the driver hailed him urgently. But Dick ignored the invitation. He was taking no risks tonight. The two men he might deal with, but trouble awaiting him in a strange taxicab might be more difficult to overcome.
Presently he saw a taxi coming towards him, and, stopping the driver, got in and was driven to the Station Hotel. Through the glass at the back of the car he saw another taxi following him. When he paid off his own at the entrance of the hotel, he observed, out of the corner of his eye, the second taxi pull up some distance away and two men get out. Dick booked a room, gave the cloakroom ticket to a porter, and slipped through the side entrance which opens directly on to the station platform. A train was on the move as he emerged, and, sprinting along, he pulled open a carriage door and jumped in.
For all he knew, he might be in the Scottish express, whose first stop would be in the early hours of the morning somewhere in the neighbourhood of Crewe. But, fortunately for him, the train was a local one, and at Willesden he was able to alight and pay his fare to the ticket-collector. Diving down to the electric station, he arrived on the Embankment an hour after he had left the Lansdowns’ flat.
Two hundred yards from the station is a grim building, approached under a covered arch, and this was Dick’s destination. The constable on duty at the door recognized him.
“Inspector Sneed is upstairs if you want him, Mr. Martin,” he said.
“I want nobody else,” said Dick, and went up the stone stairs two at a time.
Sneed was in his chair, an uninspiring man. The chief commissioner once said of him that he combined the imagination of a schoolgirl with the physical initiative of a bedridden octogenarian.
He sat as usual in a big armchair behind his large desk; a fire burned on the tiled hearth; a dead cigar was between his teeth, and he was nodding. He was at Scotland Yard at this hour because he had not had sufficient energy to rise from his chair and go home at seven o’clock. This happened on an average five nights a week.
He opened his eyes and surveyed the newcomer without any particular favour.
“I’m very busy,” he murmured. “Can’t give you more than a minute.”
Dick sat down at the opposite side of the table and grinned.
“Ask Morpheus to put you down on your feet, and listen to this.”
And then he began to talk, and almost at the first sentence the chief inspector’s eyes opened wide. Before Dick Martin had been talking for ten minutes there was not a man in New Scotland Yard more wide awake than this stout, bald, thief-taker.
“You’ve got this out of a storybook,” he accused, when Dick paused for breath. “You’re passing across the latest mystery story by the celebrated Mr. Doyle.”
And then Dick went on with his narrative, and at the end Sneed pressed a bell. After a long time his sergeant came into the room.
“Sergeant,” said Sneed, “I want one man at the front and one man at the back of 107 Coram Street. I want your best shadow to follow Mr. Martin from tomorrow, and that man must sleep at Mr. Martin’s flat every night. Got that?”
The officer was jotting down his instructions in a notebook.
“Tomorrow morning get through to the Chief Constable of Sussex, and tell him I want to raid Gallows Cottage, Gallows Hill, at eleven-fifteen pip-emma. I’ll bring my own men and he can have a couple of his handy to see fair play. That’s about the lot, sergeant.”
When he had gone, Sneed rose with a groan from his chair.
“I suppose I had better be getting along. I’ll walk back with you to your flat.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Dick ungraciously. “To be seen out with you is like wearing my name and licence. I’ll get back into the flat—don’t worry.”
“Wait a bit. Before you go—the fellow who attacked you in the drive at Gallows Cottage was a naked man, you say?”
“Nearly naked.”
“Stalletti,” mused the inspector. “I wonder if he’s been up to his old tricks. I got him three months for that.”
“What were his old tricks?” demanded Slick.
Sneed was lighting his cigar with slow, noisy puffs.
“Rearranging the human race,” he said.
“A little thing like that?” said Dick sardonically.
“Just that.” Sneed inspected the ragged end of his cigar with disfavour. “Got that weed from a man who ought to know better than try to poison the metropolitan constabulary,” he said. “Yes, that was Stalletti’s kink. His theory was that, if you took a baby of two or three years old, and brought it up wild, same as you’d bring up any
