Again Mr. Mann interrupted.
“You mean the police?”
Constable Wiseman shook his head.
“Oh, no,” he said; “they’ve been looking for her for years; long before Mr. Minute was killed.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“Well, several people,” said the constable slowly. “I happen to know that Mr. Cole wanted to find out where she was. But then he didn’t start searching until weeks after she disappeared. It is very rum,” mused Constable Wiseman, “the way Mr. Cole went about it. He didn’t come straight to us and ask our assistance, but he had a lot of private detectives nosing round Eastbourne; one of ’em happened to be a cousin of my wife’s. So we got to know about it. Cole spent a lot of money trying to trace her, and so did Mr. Minute.”
Saul Arthur Mann saw a faint gleam of daylight.
“Mr. Minute, too?” he asked. “Was he working with Mr. Cole?”
“So far as I can find out, they were both working independent of the other—Mr. Cole and Mr. Minute,” explained Mr. Wiseman. “It is what I call a mystery within a mystery, and it has never been properly cleared up. I thought something was coming out about it at the trial, but you know what a mess the lawyers made of it.”
It was Constable Wiseman’s firm conviction that Frank Merrill had escaped through the incompetence of the crown authorities, and there were moments in his domestic circle when he was bitter and even insubordinate on the subject.
“You still think Mr. Merrill was guilty?” asked Saul Arthur Mann as he took his leave of the other.
“I am as sure of it as I am that I am standing here,” said the constable, not without a certain pride in the consistency of his view. “Didn’t I go into the room? Wasn’t he there with the deceased? Wasn’t his revolver found? Hadn’t there been some jiggery-pokery with his books in London?”
Saul Arthur Mann smiled.
“There are some of us who think differently, Constable,” he said, shaking hands with the implacable officer of the law.
He brought back to London a few new facts to be added to his record of Sergeant Crawley, alias Smith, and on these he went painstakingly to work.
As has been already explained, Saul Arthur Mann had a particularly useful relationship with Scotland Yard, and fortunately, about that time, he was on the most excellent terms with official police headquarters, for he had been able to assist them in running to earth one of the most powerful blackmailing gangs that had ever operated in Europe. His files had been drawn upon to such good purpose that the police had secured convictions against the seventeen members of the gang who were in England.
He sought an interview with the chief commissioner, and that same night, accompanied by a small army of detectives, he made a systematic search of Silvers Rents. The house into which Jasper Cole had been seen to enter was again raided, and again without result. The house was empty save for one room, a big room which was simply furnished with a truckle-bed, a table, a chair, a lamp, and a strip of carpet. There were four rooms—two upstairs, which were never used, and two on the ground floor.
At the end of a passage was a kitchen, which also was empty, save for a length of bamboo ladder. From the kitchen a bolted door led on to a tiny square of yard which was separated by three walls from yards of similar dimensions to left and right and to the back of the premises. At the back of Silvers Rents was Royston Court, which was another cul-de-sac, running parallel with Silvers Rents.
Mr. Mann returned to the house, and again searched the upstairs rooms, looking particularly for a trapdoor, for the bamboo ladder suggested some such exit. This time, however, he completely failed. Jasper Cole, he found, had made only one visit to the house since John Minute’s death.
It is a curious fact, as showing the localizing of interest, that Silvers Rents knew nothing of what had occurred almost at its doors, and, though it had at its fingertips all the gossip of the docks and the Thames Iron Works, it was profoundly ignorant of what was common property in Royston Court. It is even more remarkable that Saul Arthur Mann, with his squadron of detectives, should have confined their investigations to Silvers Rents.
The investigator was baffled and disappointed, but by the oddest of chances he was to pick up yet another thread of the Minute mystery, a thread which, however, was to lead him into an ever-deeper maze than that which he had already and so unsuccessfully attempted to penetrate.
Three days after his search of Silvers Rents, business took Mr. Mann to Camden Town. To be exact, he had gone at the request of the police to Holloway Jail to see a prisoner who had turned state’s evidence on a matter in which the police and Mr. Mann were equally interested. Very foolishly he had dismissed his taxi, and when he emerged from the doors there was no conveyance in sight. He decided, rather than take the trams which would have carried him to King’s Cross, to walk, and, since he hated main roads, he had taken a shortcut, which, as he knew, would lead him into the Hampstead Road.
Thus he found himself in Flowerton Road, a thoroughfare of respectable detached houses occupied by the superior industrial type. He was striding along, swinging his umbrella and humming, as was his wont, an unmusical rendering of a popular tune, when his attention was attracted to a sight which took his breath away and brought him to a halt.
It was half past five, and dull, but his eyesight was
