“That is impossible!” said Michael stoutly, and T. B. Smith laughed.
“The thing to have done was not to have recognized her and to have kept her under observation, pursuing your enquiries in the usual way.”
“If you can suggest any method by which I could have prevented her from recognizing me and recognizing the fact that I recognized her I will admit that I was wrong,” and T. B. Smith agreed.
“You may be right,” he said; “anyway, look after yourself.”
Michael promptly forgot his chief’s advice and spent his evening making a solitary reconnaissance of Crime Street. Crime Street does not appear upon any plan of London, but if you will look at any large survey of the Hampstead district, you will find in a somewhat irregular tangle of buildings within a stone’s throw of the Heath, a curious oval which is conspicuous on the plan, not only by its own symmetry but by the graceful lines of the thoroughfares which radiate therefrom.
This is Amberscombe Gardens. The centre of the oval is occupied by four houses, Numbers Two, Four, Six and Eight; the northern side of the gardens by five houses, Numbers One, Three, Five, Seven and Nine.
Into Amberscombe Gardens from the north run three roads, the first of which (opening into the oval between Numbers One and Three) being called The Approach; the second, dividing Numbers Five and Seven, called Bethburn Avenue; the third between Numbers Seven and Nine, Coleburn Avenue. On the south side of the oval the arrangement of the streets is very similar. Originally, the central space had been occupied by nine houses but these had been pulled down by the proprietors of the remaining four and a private garden, common to all four houses, had been laid out by the owners of these properties. So that on the southern side of the central oval, there were no buildings, but a wall bisected at regular intervals by plain garden doors which form such a common feature of London suburban residences.
In reality, the roadway to the north and south of the plot is all Amberscombe Gardens, but the oval which curves round to the north was, at the period this story covers, known to the police as “Crime Street,” and in this description the nine houses on both sides of the northern curve were involved.
Number One, the most modest of all the buildings, was in the occupation of Dr. Philip Garon, an American practitioner who made frequent visits across the Atlantic and invariably returned to deposit a very handsome surplus in the local branch of the London and Western Counties Bank. Dr. Garon was successful as a result of the sublime assurance of all oceangoing passengers, that the notice, conspicuously displayed in the smoking-room warning passengers not to play cards with strangers, did not apply to them.
Number Three, a pretty house smothered in clematis in the proper season of the year, with its white window sashes and its sober red front, was the town house of Mr. Cunningham, who, apparently, had no initial and no Christian name. He was known to his intimate friends as Mush, the derivation of which is a little obscure. Mr. Cunningham described himself as independent, which meant no more than that he was independent of the ordinary necessities of making an honest living. In a sense, he was by far the best known of the Colony, for Mush had served two terms of penal servitude, one in an English and one in a French prison. He had the reputation of being able to cut holes in steel safes with a greater rapidity than any other gentleman in his profession, and it is said, probably with truth, that he had improved upon the oxy-hydrogen jet and had introduced a new element which shortened the work by half.
The tenant of Number Five was a gentleman, benign of countenance and very good to the poor. He was called the Bishop by friends and foes alike. His real name was Brown and he had been concerned in more bank swindles than any of the other colonists, though he had only one conviction to his discredit and that a comparative flea-bite of nine months’ hard labour.
The owner of Number Seven was described as “Mr. Colling Jacques, Civil Engineer,” in the local directories. The official police “Who’s Who” noted that he was a wonderful pistol shot, and recorded, in parenthesis, that on the occasion of his arrest in connection with the smashing of the Bank of Holland, no weapon was found upon him. It was also added that there was no conviction against him in England, though he, too, had seen the inside of a French prison.
Number Nine was pointed out to sightseers, with a certain amount of local pride by the guide, as the home of Millet the forger, who had received on one occasion a fifteen years’ sentence, but had been released after serving two years, an act of grace on the part of the authorities which earned for him a certain unpopularity with his peers and was held to be not unconnected with the subsequent arrest of a few of his former associates, the suggestion being that Mr. Millet had turned King’s evidence.
At Number Two, on the “oval” side of the street, lived H. Mulberry, a respectable and methodical man, who went to his little office in Chancery Lane every morning of his life by the 9:15 and returned to his home at exactly 5:30 p.m. year in and year out. Mulberry was a begging letter writer on a magnificent scale. He had a wonderful literary style which seldom failed to extract the necessary emolument which he sought.
Number Four, a much larger house, indeed the second largest in Crime Street, was the habitat of “Señor Gregori, a teacher of languages.” Unfortunately for him, he had in the course of his thrilling career taught other things than the liquid tongue
