The inspector was showing him into the dining-room, when suddenly he stopped.
“Good Lord!” he said.
Jack could only wonder what had startled him.
“Do you mind waiting here?”
For the first time since Jack had known the police officer, Parr was embarrassed.
“I must first tell an old aunt of mine who is staying here who you are,” he said. “She’s not used to visitors. I’m a widower, you know, and my aunt keeps house for me.”
He entered the dining-room hurriedly, closing the door behind him, and Jack felt something of his host’s embarrassment.
A minute, two minutes passed. He heard a hurried movement in the room, and Parr opened the door.
“Come in, sir.” His red face was even a deeper red. “Sit you down, and please forgive me for keeping you waiting.”
The room in which he found himself was well and tastefully furnished. Jack was annoyed with himself for expecting anything else.
Mr. Parr’s aunt was a faded lady with an absent manner, and she seemed to cause Mr. Parr a considerable amount of anxiety. He scarcely took his eyes from her as she moved about the room, and she hardly spoke before he jumped in to interrupt her, always politely, but always very definitely.
The inspector’s supper was set upon a tray; he had just about finished when Jack had knocked at the door.
“I hope you’ll excuse our untidiness, Mr.—er—”
“Beardmore,” said Jack.
“She’ll never remember it,” murmured the inspector.
“I can’t keep the place as mother kept it,” she said.
“Of course not, of course not, auntie,” said Mr. Parr hurriedly. “A little absent,” he murmured. “Now what did you want to know, Mr. Beardmore?”
Jack laughingly excused himself for his call.
“The Crimson Circle is such a complicated business that I suspect every new agent to be the central figure,” he said. “Do you think that the arrest of Brabazon is going to help us?”
“I don’t know,” replied Parr slowly. “There is just a chance that Brabazon will be a very big help indeed. By the way, I’ve put one of my own men to look after him, and I have given instructions that the jailer is not to go into the cell under any circumstances.”
“You’re thinking of Sibly, the sailor, who was poisoned?”
Parr nodded.
“Don’t you think, Mr. Beardmore, that that was one of the greatest mysteries of all the mysterious Crimson Circle murders?”
He asked this question very soberly, but there was a little glint in his eye which Jack did not fail to notice.
“You’re laughing. Why? I think it was mysterious, don’t you?”
“Very,” said the inspector. “In some respects, and the poisoning of Sibly will, to my mind, be a much more important factor in the eventual capture of the Crimson Circle than is the arrest of our friend Brabazon.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about crime and criminals,” said his aunt fretfully; “really, John, you are very trying. It may have suited mother—”
“Yes, of course, auntie; I’m sorry,” said Parr hurriedly, and when she had left the room, Jack Beardmore’s curiosity got the better of his discretion.
“Mother seems to have been rather a paragon,” he smiled, and wondered if he had made a faux pas.
The answering laugh reassured him.
“Yes, rather a paragon; she is not staying with us just now.”
“Is she your mother, Mr. Parr?”
“No, my grandmother,” said Mr. Parr, and Jack looked at him in astonishment.
XXVIII
A Shot in the Night
The inspector must have been nearly fifty, and he made a rapid calculation as to the age of this wonderful grandmother who took an interest in crime, and kept the house tidy.
“She must be a wonderful old lady,” he said, “and I suppose she’d even be interested in the Crimson Circle.”
“Interested!” Mr. Parr laughed. “If mother was on the track of that gang with the same authority as I have, they would be high and dry in Cannon Street police station tonight. As it is,” he paused, “they are not.”
All the time they were talking Jack was puzzling his head as to why, in spite of its order, the room gave him an impression of untidiness. But he was not left to his own thoughts for very long, for Mr. Parr was in an unusually communicative mood. He even went so far as to tell Jack some of the unpleasant things said to him by the Commissioner.
“Naturally police headquarters are rather rattled by the continuance of these crimes,” he said. “We haven’t had anything like this for fifty years. In fact, I don’t think since the Ripper murders there has been such an orgy of destruction. It may interest you, too, Mr. Beardmore, to know that the Crimson Circle, whoever he is, is the first real organising criminal we have had to deal with for nearly fifty years. Criminal organisations are loose affairs, and as they depend for their safety upon that sense of honour which every thief is supposed to possess, but which I have never met with, the game doesn’t last very long. The Crimson Circle, however, is a man who obviously trusts nobody. He cannot be betrayed because nobody is in a position to betray him. Even the minor members of the gang cannot betray one another, because it is just as clear to me that they do not know one another by name or by sight.”
He went on to discuss interestingly cases in which he had been concerned, and it was nearly half-past eleven when Jack rose with a further apology.
“I’ll take you to the front door; your car is here, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Jack. “I came by taxi.”
“H’m,” said the inspector. “I thought I saw a car drawn up in front of the door. We are not a motorcar owning neighbourhood; probably it is a doctor’s machine.”
He opened the door, and, as he had said, a black car was drawn up at the kerb.
“I seem to have seen that before,” said the inspector,
