Winter chuckled. “Don’t come that on me, Labar. Trying to establish an alibi in case things go wrong, are you? Going to get all the little fish and let the big one slip through the net? Same old story about Larry. Well, it doesn’t go down with me. You’ve got to get Larry. See if you can’t get him for the Gertstein job, hook him up for the ‘Maid’s Retreat’ trouble. Only get him.”
“I’m going to get him, sir,” returned the inspector, with an inflection in his voice that caused Winter to glance at him shrewdly through his spectacles. “I’ve just a little personal feeling in this matter, and I’m going through with it.”
Winter was looking idly at the ceiling. “Nice girl that Miss Noelson, they tell me,” he said absently. “Doesn’t always do to mix sentiment up with our business, though, Labar.”
A slight tinge of colour crept under the tinge of Labar’s tan. He wondered how the other had got to learn of something that he felt was a secret rigorously locked in his own breast. Perhaps the Chief was only guessing. “I don’t know much about the young lady,” he returned. “She’s a nice girl, as you say. But you can rely that nothing will interfere with my duty.”
The thin relic of a smile still loitered about the Chief Constable’s lips as he nodded. “Don’t mind an old hand giving you a hint, do you? There’s another thing. When does Myson get back from his holidays?”
Myson was a detective inspector who had not yet reached divisional rank, who was the senior of the C.I.D. men in Labar’s division. Labar consulted a pad.
“Ought to be back in a week’s time,” he said. “He offered to come back when this thing broke, but I didn’t think it was worth while bothering him.”
“He’s got a pretty sound idea of how things are in your division I take it?”
“I think so.”
“Right. Wire him to come back at once. He’ll have to take charge of all matters here. After this you’ll play a lone hand on this job. You’ll want your mind free of everything else if you’re going to play the game out with Larry.”
The divisional inspector looked a little doubtfully at his chief. “I hope you don’t think that—”
“That you can’t run the division, and handle this case too. I do think so. I don’t want you to fall between two stools. You want your mind free for this business now it’s got so far. You’re still the divisional inspector here, but Myson will act until you want to take the reins. Go and find where Larry’s hideout is and it won’t matter whether you are away a week or a month.”
“That certainly ought to make it simpler,” said Labar, and with a curt and not unfriendly nod the Chief Constable was gone.
Labar drew up the copy for a double crown poster headed with the sinister big black letters affected by the police for bills of this kind—“Wanted.”
Then with such skill in portraiture as he possessed, added to the scientific formula for these matters, he drew a word picture of Billy Bungey, and sent the resulting composition along to the Criminal Record Office with the request that any amendments might be made and a photograph added if possible, before it was sent to the printing department which is one of the subsidiary departments of the Yard.
He dictated a wire to Myson, and began clearing his desk with a mind from which a weight had been lifted. For there was no denying, as Winter had said, that the Larry Hughes business was one that ought to demand his full attention. In the normal way it would have gone to a chief inspector, who would have had no other duties to distract his mind while the case lasted.
That done Labar sat down to study a large scale map of the southeastern corner of England. He had sound reasons for supposing that Hughes was somewhere in that angle formed by Kent and Sussex. The Rolls Royce car in which Penelope Noelson had been abducted, had been traced for many miles along the Hastings road. Larry’s dash to London and to “Maid’s Retreat” convinced the detective that the hiding place wherever it might be was within a hundred miles from London. He explored the map with his forefinger. There were dozens of places along remote roads where concealment might be effective. But Labar washed out a great many of these as improbable. He had already circularised the police forces of the area in which he felt that the fugitives might be located. Larry had been using his car, and a Rolls Royce in a country lane would be even more conspicuous to a village constable, than the same car on one of the main roads. Labar had a list of every Rolls Royce that had been seen about the area he was searching since Larry’s flight. Those of which the numbers had been taken had for the most part been identified, and wiped out. There remained several which might or might not have been Larry’s.
There had been five such cars seen on the Folkestone—Rye road. One constable reported that a shepherd on the Romney Marshes had told him of a big car—which the police officer believed might have been a Rolls Royce—seen twice on a derelict stretch of road leading into the marshland.
Labar bent his mind to this point. It seemed the most promising of all to start from, although it might, as so often happens in these cases where a man is acting more or less on guess work, prove nothing but a mare’s nest. But if a man wanted to keep out of the way what better place of refuge could he find than these same desolate Romney Marshes.
With Myson in charge at Grape Street, other ends of the investigation in London could for the while be left to themselves. Labar decided that with
