“We want to follow her silently, Sir George, silently as the shadow follows the man,” he had said grandiloquently, “and then we shall come upon the two, and I trust upon their booty also.” Sir George in his turn had impressed Mr. Bates’s wishes upon his household, and if it had not been for Loveday’s message, dispatched early in the evening to young Holt, not a soul outside the house would have known of Stephanie’s disappearance.
Loveday was stirring early the next morning, and the eight o’clock train for Wreford numbered her among its passengers. Before starting, she dispatched a telegram to her chief in Lynch Court. It read rather oddly, as follows:—
“Cracker fired. Am just starting for Wreford. Will wire to you from there. L. B.”
Oddly though it might read, Mr. Dyer did not need to refer to his cipher book to interpret it. “Cracker fired” was the easily remembered equivalent for “clue found” in the detective phraseology of the office.
“Well, she has been quick enough about it this time!” he soliquised as he speculated in his own mind over what the purport of the next telegram might be.
Half an hour later there came to him a constable from Scotland Yard to tell him of Stephanie’s disappearance and the conjectures that were rife on the matter, and he then, not unnaturally, read Loveday’s telegram by the light of this information, and concluded that the clue in her hands related to the discovery of Stephanie’s whereabouts as well as to that of her guilt.
A telegram received a little later on, however, was to turn this theory upside down. It was, like the former one, worded in the enigmatic language current in the Lynch Court establishment, but as it was a lengthier and more intricate message, it sent Mr. Dyer at once to his cipher book.
“Wonderful! She has cut them all out this time!” was Mr. Dyer’s exclamation as he read and interpreted the final word.
In another ten minutes he had given over his office to the charge of his head clerk for the day, and was rattling along the streets in a hansom in the direction of Bishopsgate Station.
There he was lucky enough to catch a train just starting for Wreford.
“The event of the day,” he muttered, as he settled himself comfortably in a corner seat, “will be the return journey when she tells me, bit by bit, how she has worked it all out.”
It was not until close upon three o’clock in the afternoon that he arrived at the old-fashioned market town of Wreford. It chanced to be cattle-market day, and the station was crowded with drovers and farmers. Outside the station Loveday was waiting for him, as she had told him in her telegram that she would, in a four-wheeler.
“It’s all right,” she said to him as he got in; “he can’t get away, even if he had an idea that we were after him. Two of the local police are waiting outside the house door with a warrant for his arrest, signed by a magistrate. I did not, however, see why the Lynch Court office should not have the credit of the thing, and so telegraphed to you to conduct the arrest.”
They drove through the High Street to the outskirts of the town, where the shops became intermixed with private houses let out in offices. The cab pulled up outside one of these, and two policemen in plain clothes came forward, and touched their hats to Mr. Dyer.
“He’s in there now, sir, doing his office work,” said one of the men pointing to a door, just within the entrance, on which was printed in black letters, “The United Kingdom Cabdrivers’ Beneficent Association.” “I hear however, that this is the last time he will be found there, as a week ago he gave notice to leave.”
As the man finished speaking, a man, evidently of the cab-driving fraternity, came up the steps. He stared curiously at the little group just within the entrance, and then chinking his money in his hand, passed on to the office as if to pay his subscription.
“Will you be good enough to tell Mr. Emmett in there,” said Mr. Dyer, addressing the man, “that a gentleman outside wishes to speak with him.”
The man nodded and passed into the office. As the door opened, it disclosed to view an old gentleman seated at a desk apparently writing receipts for money. A little in his rear at his right hand, sat a young and decidedly good-looking man, at a table on which were placed various little piles of silver and pence. The getup of this young man was gentleman-like, and his manner was affable and pleasant as he responded, with a nod and a smile, to the cabdriver’s message.
“I shan’t be a minute,” he said to his colleague at the other desk, as he rose and crossed the room towards the door.
But once outside that door it was closed firmly behind him, and he found himself in the centre of three stalwart individuals, one of whom informed him that he held in his hand a warrant for the arrest of Harry Emmett on the charge of complicity in the Craigen Court robbery, and that he had “better come along quietly, for resistance would be useless.”
Emmett seemed convinced of the latter fact. He grew deadly white for a moment, then recovered himself.
“Will someone have the kindness to fetch my hat and coat,” he said in a lofty manner. “I don’t see why I should be made to catch my death of cold because some other people have seen fit to make asses of themselves.”
His hat and coat were fetched, and he was handed into the cab between the
