I tapped at the Seraph's door and told him I had disposed of the police without uttering a single falsehood. It was almost the last time I was able to make that boast. We gave our friends ten minutes'

start, and I then set out in search of nurse and doctor. Joyce looked shockingly ill when I left, but her breathing was peaceful.

Occasionally she moved or moaned in her sleep; as I turned at the door for a last look, the Seraph was rearranging her pillow and smoothing the hair back from her face.

I had to walk into the Strand to find a taxi. Outside the Vaudeville I met my brother and his wife, and was bidden to sup with them at the Savoy. I refused for many reasons, the first being that a man who starts a career of crime at the age of forty-two must not for very decency be seen eating in company with a judge of the High Court. My meeting did good in giving me the idea of establishing a succession of _alibis_. When I had made the necessary arrangements with Maybury-Reynardson and the nurse, I looked in once more at the Club.

Culling, Gartside and Nigel Rawnsley had the north smoking-room to themselves. They seemed to be discussing some plan of campaign, and the rescue of Sylvia was its object. Perhaps I should not say "discussing": Nigel was holding forth in a way that made me think he must have been a Grand Inquisitor in some previous incarnation. The ruthlessness of a Torquemada was directed by Napoleonic statecraft and brought down to date by the terrorism of a brow-beating counsel. The combination was highly impressive; his own contribution consisted in an exquisite choice of epithets.

"Talk to the Chief," I heard him say in summary of his plan of campaign. "Get him to arrange for Merivale, J., to try the case, and you'll find the woman Millington will exhibit surprising celerity in imparting whatever information she may have gathered in respect of the whereabouts of Mavis and Sylvia and the Jefferson boy."

"King's Evidence, d'you mean?" asked Gartside. "Not she!"

"Inconceivably less ornate than that. I agree with you that she might withhold her consent. It is therefore more expedient to coax her into the confessional without implicating her fellow conspirators. If you were being tried by Merivale and saw seven years' penal servitude stretching in pleasing prospect before you, you'd want to start the day on terms of reasonable amity with your judge. If you knew Merivale's daughter was engaged to marry a man whose sister had been spirited away, would you not strive to acquire merit in the eyes of your judge's family by saying where the sister could be found? It is approximately equivalent to a year's reduction of sentence."

Paddy Culling scratched his head thoughtfully with a paper knife.

"If Miss Davenant's afther hiding herself in one of the coops where the other little chicken's stored away...." he began.

"She's not," Nigel interrupted decisively. "The risk's too considerable; she wouldn't want to betray herself and her hostages at the same moment. She's in London...."

"Is she?" asked Gartside.

"She was to-day at lunch-time, because her doctor called at the house.

Of course, the police in their infinite sagacity must needs start searching at the wrong end and afford her opportunities of escape."

"Out of London if she wanted to," persisted Gartside.

"Not by train," said Nigel. "Every station's watched...."

"By car."

"By airship, equally. The woman's seriously ill; you'd kill her."

Paddy Culling looked at his friend a little enviously.

"You know a lot about the inside of that house," he said.

"By the simple expedient of the sovereign in season to the kitchen-maid, who, like the rest of her class, was unquestionably loyal, but more unquestionably impecunious. The woman Davenant's in London, and they'll find her in three days. Where she is, I can't tell you. I may know more when I've seen the officers' reports to-morrow morning. Sylvia I'll undertake to find within a week. The woman Millington will give her away, and if she doesn't, the woman Davenant will have to."

"When you've caught her," said Culling quietly.

"Not even when you've caught her," said Gartside with greater knowledge. "I know the breed. It's pedigree stock."

Nigel lit a cigarette with ostentatious elaboration.

"Even pedigree stock has its less spirited moments," he said. "For example, when it's seriously ill. I fancy I could make the woman Davenant tell me all I wanted in three minutes."

The tone was extraordinarily sinister. I seemed to realise in a flash why Sylvia, with a woman's quicker, deeper insight, kept the speaker at a distance.... However, I had come to the Club to establish an _alibi_, not to reflect on the character of Sylvia's admirers. And I wanted to get back to Adelphi Terrace as soon as my purpose was effected.

"I was sorry to run away in the middle of your story, Paddy," I said.

"I'd promised to meet a man, and I was rather late as it was. You'd got as far as the disposal of Mrs. Millington's body in the common mortuary and the arrest of a poor, mean printer's devil. What happened then? Was any one else caught?"

Paddy looked at me almost with affection, his eyes alight with oratorical fire.

"It's yourself should have been there to see it," he began, grasping my arm with one hand and making his points with the other. "The polis and red coats was there, and the newspaper men in their thousands, and the gravediggers in their tens of thousands...."

CHAPTER XI

THE AMATEUR DETECTIVE

"My mind ... rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.... I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world ... the only unofficial consulting detective.... I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection.... I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist's opinion. I claim no credit in such cases. My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward."--SIR A. CONAN DOYLE: "The Sign of Four."

Premonitions--so far as my gross person is concerned--are a matter of digestion, nerves and liver. If I woke up on the morning after Joyce's flight to Adelphi Terrace with a dull sense of impending disaster, I ascribe it to the fact that I had passed a more than ordinarily hideous night. Unlike the Seraph, who never went to bed, I had sufficient philosophy to turn in when the doctor had left and the nurse was comfortably established. It had been made clear to me that I could do no manner of good by staying up and getting in people's way....

I started in my own room, but quickly took refuge in the library. If there are two sounds I cannot endure, one is that of a crying child, and the other of a woman--or man for that matter--moaning in pain.

Even in the library I could hear Joyce suffering. Maybury-Reynardson had told us she was all right, and there is no point in calling in experts if you are going to disbelieve them. But I do not want to experience another night of the same kind.

And in the morning the papers were calculated to heighten the horror of the worst premonitions I could experience. I opened the _Times_, noted in passing that Gartside had fulfilled popular expectation by being appointed to the Governorship of Bombay, and turned to the account of the Clerkenwell raid. Culling was right in saying Mrs.

Millington's had been the only arrest of importance; but he had left the battlefield at the end of the fighting, and had not waited to see the conquerors march into the citadel.

I felt myself growing chilled and old as I read of the discoveries in the printing office. Mrs. Millington would stand charged with incitement to crime and public threat of abduction; serious enough, if you will, but her debt was discharged as soon as she had paid the penalty for a single article in a single paper. Her threats were embryonic, not yet materialised. Joyce stood to bear the burden of the three abductions carried out to date....

I am no criminologist, and can offer neither explanation nor theory of the mental amblyopia that leads criminals to leave one weak link, one soft brick, one bent girder, to ruin a triumph of design and construction. They always do--men and women, veterans and tiros--and Joyce was no exception. When the police broke open the safe in her editorial office, the first document they found was the half sheet of Chester Square notepaper that the journalists agreed to christen "The Time Table."

It was written in Joyce's hand, and her writing could be identified by a short-sighted illiterate at ten yards' distance. I have forgotten the dates by this time, and can only guess at them approximately; words and names have been added in full where Joyce put only initials.

This was the famous Time Table:--

500, Chester Square, S.W.

May 8. Rejection of W. (women's) S. (suffrage) Amendment.

May 9. M.R. (Mavis Rawnsley) letter R. (Rawnsley).

June 17. P.--(private) M. (members') Day. [This was ruled through.]

June 16. R.'s (Rawnsley's) Time Table.

June 17. P. (Paul) J. (Jefferson) Letters R. and J. (Rawnsley and Jefferson).

June 30. R. (Rawnsley) to decide re A.S. (Autumn Session).

July 2. R. (Rawnsley) in H. (House). No A.S. (Autumn Session).

July 9. S. (Sylvia) R. (Roden). Letters R. (Rawnsley) & R.

(Roden).