IN a snarling, twisting heap the three men rolled into the gutter. The half-dozen spectators, who quickly grew into forty or fifty, lifted no finger to help. They seemed, with that curious lack of initiative which so often seizes London crowds, to regard the fight as an abstract spectacle in which it would be impertinent to interfere.
Quex, overmatched and fighting with dynamic energy, wasted no breath in appeals for aid. He jabbed his elbow under one man’s jaw and tore away a thumb that was pressing relentlessly on his eyeball. With a quick twist he became for a moment uppermost in the tangle. He had struggled to his knees before they again pulled him down, and, snapping like a wild dog, he felt his teeth meet in one man’s hand.
A wolfish ejaculation of pain punctuated the grunts of the struggle, and a kick that would have smashed an ordinary man’s ribs caught him in the chest. He went numb and sick and the vigour of his resistance relaxed. Someone in the crowd gave an involuntary cry as a knife flickered in the dim lamplight. He shut his eyes in helpless anticipation of the blow he could not avert.
‘Where is it?’ demanded a voice. ‘It’s your last chance—quick.’
He opened his eyes and laughed defiantly. ‘I’ll see you burn first,’ he said with an oath. ‘You’ll swing for this—’
‘Here’s the police,’ said a sharp voice from the crowd, and Quex felt the weight that was pressing him to the ground relax. His two assailants had pushed their way through the crowd and the quick sound of their footsteps was dying away in the distance ere a big constable had reached the prostrate man.
‘What’s all this?’ he asked.
Quex sat up slowly and tried mechanically to brush the mud from his light coat. Someone picked up his battered hat and passed it to him. He accepted the officer’s helping hand and rose dizzily to his feet.
‘It’s all right, constable,’ he said quietly. ‘Just a little joke of some friends of mine. They were having a game.’
‘Game!’ It was the shrill voice of a woman in the crowd. ‘They were going to murder. I see a knife. If the pleece ’adn’t come—’
‘That’s right,’ interpolated half a dozen other voices.
The constable wheeled swiftly. He had observed the ruffled evening dress under Quex’s overcoat and he was puzzled. He jerked a note-book out of his breast pocket.
‘Queer thing it looks to me,’ he commented. ‘If you say it was a lark, I can’t do anything. However, I’d better have your name and address, and you and you.’ He indicated the woman who had spoken and another person. ‘Now, sir.’
Quex frowned. He stooped forward as though to brush his coat, in reality to hide his hesitation. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘John Blake, Hotel Splendid, will find me. Good-night, officer.’ He strode abruptly away.
But it was not to the Hotel Splendid that he made his way. Once clear of the throng he hailed a taxi and gave an address at. Balham. He let himself in with a latch-key and went up to the sitting room of the furnished apartments he rented on the second floor. There he stretched himself in an armchair and felt himself tenderly.
‘A close thing, John, my boy,’ he said aloud. ‘I oughta have carried a gatt. I didn’t think they’d be so close on to me. Never mind—they didn’t get it.’
He put his fingers casually in his waistcoat pocket and an epithet sprang from his lips as they came away empty. With furious haste he searched the rest of his pockets knowing all the time that it was hopeless.
‘Gone!’ he swore. ‘Those blighters have done it!’
His lips compressed in a wicked straight line. Going through to the adjoining bedroom he pulled a suit-case from under the bed and rummaged till he found an automatic. Pressing it open he slipped in a clip of cartridges and flung the weapon on the bed while he proceeded to change out of his stained evening dress.
John Quex could be an ugly man when he was roused.
Garton, divisional detective inspector of the 13th division, was looked upon at headquarters as a coming man. He had some of the qualities with which the traditional detective is endowed, and more than that he had a complete understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the machinery of the Criminal Investigation Department. Where other men succeeded by dour determination and a steady remorseless sifting of facts, he had a genius for swiftly discarding non-essentials and putting through an investigation at a gallop. A hard, tenacious man, who would not swerve a hair’s breadth from what he conceived his duty, he yet had a natural geniality which made him not disliked even among those whose sphere of operations was liable to be curtailed by his activities.
Being a business man it was his habit to drop office affairs punctually at six each evening unless there were special reasons for staying on. Between nine and ten he would drop in again on the off-chance of anything having arisen that needed immediate attention. So it was that he hit with little loss of time on the matter of the pearl.
He had been to the local variety show and in an interval strolled casually over to the station. In the uniformed inspectors’ room he nodded genially to the senior man on duty.
‘Nothing doing my way?’ he observed.
The other shook his head. ‘Nothing doing, Mr Garton. Bit of a row down near the Green Dragon.’ He closed a heavy folio book in which he had been writing and came over to the counter. ‘Funny thing rather. Couple of roughs tried to lay out a man in evening dress—a real rough house until the man on the beat turned up. Two of ’em did a bolt leaving the third on the ground. He told our man it was a joke. All the same he’d been pretty badly beaten up, and the people in the crowd said they’d tried to knife him.’ He moved to his desk and took out something which he passed to Garton. ‘After he’d gone someone found this on the ground. If it’s the real thing it’s worth something, but I guess it’s a fake.’
The detective examined the object with curiosity and an alert light leapt into his face.
‘Say, Greig, this is a pearl all right, all right. Send it round to the jeweller’s on the corner for me, will you, to make sure. I’d like someone to go and rake out a couple of my men—Hewitt and Blackson will do. Where’s the constable who first got on to this?’
‘On his beat. I’ll have him fetched. You on to something?’
Garton smashed his hand down on the counter. ‘If I’m any guesser that pearl is worth something running into thousands. I smell something in this, Greig. I really do.’
For a while things began to stir at the police-station. Garton hustled himself and his subordinates with cold enthusiasm. A hurried telephone call to the Hotel Splendid made certain that no guest named Blake was there and the local jeweller confirmed the genuineness of the pearl while diffidently hesitating to express a value. Garton had little use for intuitions and deductions while he was ‘getting organised’.
In two hundred police-stations tape machines ticked out a report and inquiries. Men pored over the files of ‘Informations’ for any description of a missing pearl. Persons who had witnessed the fight near the Green Dragon were sought out and gave the usual vague and conflicting descriptions of the men concerned.
At half an hour before midnight Hewitt, Garton’s right-hand sergeant, stretched his arms above his head and yawned wearily. ‘It’s a dead trail,’ he observed. ‘Can’t see that we can do anything more tonight, sir. It isn’t as if we were sure a robbery had been committed. For all we know there may be some quite natural explanation of the whole thing.’
Garton looked up from the ‘Special Release Notices’ he was studying. ‘Sure thing you’re getting tired,’ he said a trifle acidly. ‘Now I’m just getting interested. I couldn’t rest with this on my mind. I want to know. Let’s go take a walk. That’ll freshen you up.’
Hewitt reached stiffly for his hat and coat. ‘I’m no slacker, sir,’ he retorted. ‘All the same, I’d like to know what we are looking for.’
‘Why,’ said Garton with simplicity, ‘for the man who dropped the pearl, of course.’
It was one thing to hunt John Quex; it was another to be hunted by him. He was barely forty and looked less; yet for the school in which he had graduated that was a ripe old age. There were few of his fraternity left. Sudden death in one form or another had cut the majority of them off. Some few had had their lives prolonged by long terms in penitentiaries; some like Quex had had the foresight to drop out of New York. On the whole, the career of a gunman in New York is not conducive to longevity.
Many years and much experience had passed over Quex’s head since the days when he had been a champion among the ‘strong arms’ of the East Side. He had long learnt that patience and subtlety in crime were of more avail that the fiercest and quickest revolver fusillade. Yet he retained still some of the old instinct for battle.
His way led citywards. Suburban passengers on the electric car never dreamed that the neatly dressed man, quietly absorbed in an evening paper, was bound upon a murder quest. Why should they? He had neither the low forehead nor the big jaw of the desperado. A man less likely to make trouble never travelled from Balham.
At Blackfriars he changed for the Underground and when at last he emerged at Aldgate Station both hands were plunged deeply in his overcoat pockets and he walked alertly. His eyes dodged to and fro among the foot passengers, as a man who is determined not to be taken unawares.
Half a dozen times he twisted in and out of mean streets bordering the Commercial Road and at last came to a pause before a shabby three-storeyed house. It was noticeable that he used his left hand to knock and ring in a peculiar combination. His right hand was still deep in his pocket.
The door swung back creakily and an unshaven man in jersey and belted trousers peered at the visitor doubtfully for an instant.
‘Hello, Dick,’ said Quex amiably. ‘How’d she go?’
‘It’s you, is it? Come along in. There’s a little faro school upstairs. Y’ know the way?’
Quex waited as the other shut the door. ‘Seen anything of Big Mike tonight?’ he asked.
Dick twisted the stub of an anaemic cigarette with his tongue. ‘Sure. ’E’s bin ’ere some time. Come in with Jimmie Alford.’
Quex clicked his tongue against his cheek and followed the door-keeper up to the first floor to a room thick with tobacco smoke. At the top of a long table a squint-eyed man in shirt sleeves presided at a faro ‘lay-out’. His eyes flickered momentarily to the newcomer and he nodded dispassionately. Then he turned a fresh card. No one else was interested enough in the visitor to raise a head.
Quex was smiling as he moved towards the table. He touched a stockily built man who was sitting by the operator on the shoulder.
‘Well, Mike,’ he said in a hard metallic voice. ‘I’ve come after you, you see.’
The man he addressed swerved round, fists clenched, and his chair toppled over with a crash. Quex had taken two paces backwards and his pistol showed in his hand. He was still smiling.
‘Didn’t expect me, didn’t you?’ he went on. ‘Keep where you are, you lumbering stiff, or I’ll bump you off just now. And you, Jimmie Alford, don’t you move. I was an easy mark an hour or two ago, wasn’t I? I fell for you, didn’t I?’
There was something more than consternation in the faces of the two men to whom he spoke. Mike was a picture of surprise. His mouth gaped and his bleary eyes watched the muzzle of the weapon as though fascinated.
The keeper of the gambling house recovered his wits first. ‘Here, that don’t go here, Jack,’ he remonstrated. ‘Put that gun away. If you’ve got any difference with these gents you settle it somewhere else.’
‘Don’t you bat in on this, Soapy,’ advised Quex sharply. ‘I’m talking to my old partners there.’ His eyes were glowing though his speech was soft enough. ‘Now Mike, what about it?’
Mike made no answer. Like Quex he had been reared in a school where resource was everything. The why or how of Quex’s appearance had little immediate concern for him. The gas, for reasons which every gambling house keeper will appreciate, was close to the dealer’s hand. Mike’s arm scarcely seemed to move and in an instant the place was in blackness. Almost in the same movement he dropped forward on hands and knees like a runner at a starting point.
Two vivid splashes of flame split the blackness and there was a cry from the panic-stricken punters. They were used to fists, to heavy tongued belts—even to knives on occasion—but gun-play was carrying a dispute too far. Mike leapt towards the flashes like a panther, a wicked sheath-knife in his hand. He struck viciously at emptiness and cautiously flattened himself out again. The tense breathing, the hurried shuffling of men’s feet ceased.
Uncertain whether his adversary might still be waiting in the darkness with weapon poised, Mike lay still, every muscle tense. Heavy footsteps at last sounded on the stairs and someone within the room scraped a match. The gas flared up and Mike rose to his feet. Soapy dropped the match from between his fingers.
‘Can you beat that?’ he said helplessly. ‘Can you beat it?’
At the table Alford was leaning forward, his hand pressed to his left shoulder. The groan he had repressed while there was a danger of a recurrence of the firing now broke from his lips.
‘He got me, Mike,’ he said. ‘The dog got me.’
They were the only three left in the room. Without the formality of a knock the door was thrust open. A huge figure seemed to fill the room and behind loomed the form of a uniformed constable.
Soapy tried to smile ingratiatingly. ‘It’s all right, Mr O’Reilly,’ he said with suave huskiness. ‘There ain’t nothin’ wrong.’
O’Reilly had been too long a detective in the East End to waste words. ‘So you say,’ he agreed. ‘That’s why those other blokes ran out. Who’s been doing the shooting up?’ His eyes rested on the faro box. ‘Anyway, we’ll take you along. We’d been wondering where you’d pitched your faro joint for a long time, Soapy.’
There are lucky detectives as there are lucky generals, and Garton was usually kissed by the imp of fortune in any campaign he undertook. If his luck was analysed, however—a matter in which critics never took trouble—it would usually be found to have a background of brains and work. He had reflected that whether the men concerned in the affray were honest men or crooks there might be some significance in the proximity of the Green Dragon. So it was that with the reluctant Hewitt by his side he happened into the saloon of that hostelry ten minutes before closing time and leaning on the counter put the usual question to his aide.
‘Mine’s a Scotch,’ said Hewitt.
‘Why, here’s Phyllis,’ said Garton. He winked at the girl behind the bar. ‘How are you, my dear? Do you still love me or have you trampled on another heart? Let’s have two Scotches, Phyllis.’
The girl behind the bar giggled. ‘Go on with you.’
‘She gives me the boot,’ lamented Garton. ‘Hewitt, my life is ruined.’ He caught her hand as she placed the drinks in front of him. ‘Phyllis, did you ever have your fortune told?’ He traced a line on her palm with his finger. ‘Now listen. There’s a fair man and a dark man—’
She tried to wrench her hand away. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she protested. ‘It’ll be closing time in a minute and you’ll have to go without your drinks.’
‘Never mind the drinks,’ persisted the inspector. ‘If you don’t believe I can read fortunes I’ll prove it to you. Take tonight. At about nine o’clock there were two men here—or was it three?’ He appeared to study the palm intently. ‘I can’t quite make it out. Anyway one of ’em was a particular pal of yours—a man in the jewellery line.’ He was no longer watching her hand but her face. She had changed colour and suddenly wrenched her hand free.
‘It’s all nonsense,’ she declared stiffly. ‘And anyway it’s closing time.’
‘All right, Phyllis, we’re going,’ said Garton lightly. He lifted his hat. ‘Good-night, my dear. See you again soon.’
Outside Hewitt shrugged his shoulders grimly. ‘For a family man, sir, if I may say so, you made the going there,’ he commented. ‘I don’t quite get the idea.’
‘I’d hate to be without you sometimes,’ said Garton evasively. ‘Why, Hewitt, didn’t you see the ring that girl was wearing? Look here, I’m afraid it’s too late after all to push our luck tonight but bright and early tomorrow morning I want that girl’s name, the post-mark of all the letters she gets, and the names and addresses on all the letters she sends out. Get me. You can handle it yourself or put young Wren on it if you like, but it’s got to be done.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Hewitt formally.
By what means Garton’s instructions were carried out he never knew nor did he trouble to inquire. It was wisest to take for granted that they were lawful. Anyway Hewitt had produced from somewhere a list of two letters which had gone out and of one that had been received. The out-going letters had been addressed—one to ‘John Quex, Esq., 5 Spanish Grove, Balham’, the other to ‘Mrs Boswell, 33 Hodson’s Lane, Leytonstone’.
‘Girl’s name’s Boswell’ observed Hewitt. ‘There was only one letter for her by the first post. I left Wren there to pick up anything else.’
‘John Quex!’ repeated Garton thoughtfully. ‘Know the name, Hewitt? I don’t.’
‘No, sir. There was a play or something with a name like it once.’
‘If I’m right he should be a useful man to know more about. In this kind of case, Hewitt, where there’s nothing tangible to go on, we can only jump to conclusions and be thankful for any fact that they lead us to. We’ll have a man go down to Spanish Grove and I’ll come along later myself if things seem all right.’
There is always a certain amount of routine work that has to be dealt with by a divisional chief of detectives whatever major investigation he has in hand, and for an hour Garton put the pearl case out of his mind. Though the report of the wounded man found at an East End gambling house, whose companions told a cock and bull story of an accident, came under his official notice, he failed to connect it with the pearl ease. What interested him more was a special communication from headquarters.
‘The pearl you have sent on for expert examination corresponds to the description of one stolen by a trick from the establishment of a M. Rouget at Amsterdam three weeks ago, of which no report had hitherto been received. It is valued at £5,000. It was sent to an hotel in charge of an assistant to be viewed by a man calling himself Alfred Rockerbilt, who posed as an American millionaire. The assistant was stunned, gagged and left in a bedroom while his assailants decamped. Amsterdam authorities believed assistant’s story a bogus one and have him under arrest. No descriptions of supposed robbers to hand yet. Have cabled for further particulars.’
Garton chuckled softly to himself. ‘That puts that point in order. I think I can begin to see something like daylight.’ He poked his head into the adjoining room used by his staff. ‘Say, one of you boys cut down to the Green Dragon. There’s a barmaid there named Boswell. I want her brought up here right away.’
It was an unwilling and somewhat frightened girl who presently entered Garton’s dingy little office. She looked startled as she beheld in the divisional chief the man who, on the previous evening, she had thought to be a slightly fresh business man. His cold keen face was stern as he nodded towards a chair.
‘Sit down, my girl. You didn’t expect to see me again so soon.’
She gingerly took the edge of the chair. Her fingers fluttered nervously. ‘No—no, sir.’
‘Now don’t get frightened. There’s nothing at all to be alarmed about. I just want to ask you one or two questions. You know a gentleman named Mr Quex, don’t you?’
‘No, sir,’ Her voice was bolder now though her eyes avoided his.
‘You don’t, eh? Then how was it you sent him a letter this morning? Come, my girl, don’t play with me.’
She shrugged her shoulders a little impudently. Her self-possession was coming back to her. ‘Very well. If you knew, what did you ask me for?’
‘I know a great deal. You’ll be wise if you believe me. He gave you that diamond ring you’re wearing, didn’t he?’
His manner dissipated any vague idea the girl might have formed of defying him. ‘Yes, sir,’ she agreed.
‘I see. Now how long ago was it that you first met him?’
‘About four months. He came into the saloon and—’
‘He’s told you what he is?’
‘Oh, yes. Besides, you know. You said so last night. He’s a jewel merchant and he’s going to marry me when—in a month or two.’
‘H’m. Had you arranged to meet him yesterday?’
She shook her head. ‘No. He’s away from home a lot and he drops in at the Dragon sometimes when he gets back.’
‘You’ve got a photograph of him, of course?’
She hesitated. His fingers drummed impatiently on his desk. ‘I—I’m not sure—that is, I believe I have,’ she admitted unwillingly.
‘Ah, good. Now Miss Boswell, I’ll send someone with you and you’ll let us have it.’ He crossed over and dropped a hand gently on her shoulder. ‘And see here, there’s no reason for you to worry. If this man’s what I think you’ve had a narrow escape. That’ll do for now. I’ll have another talk some other time.’
‘So Mr Quex is a jewel merchant, eh?’ he muttered aloud as she went out. ‘Well, jewel merchants may fall in love with pretty barmaids and they may give ’em diamond rings that cost £200 if they cost a penny, but—’ He ran a hand through his thick black hair. ‘However, we’ll wait till we see that photograph.’
Twenty minutes later he was surveying with elation the portrait in profile of a handsome man with iron-grey hair and a firm jaw. He carried it triumphantly to the outer office and laid it in front of Hewitt.
‘Have I got to send that up to the Criminal Record Office or can you tell me who that is?’
Hewitt made a prolonged, steady scrutiny of the photograph. His memory had been trained to recall faces over long years. ‘Why,’ he said slowly, ‘it reminds me uncommonly of that chap—it’s five years since I saw him and I forget his right moniker—Slim Jack, isn’t it?’
‘If you say so,’ grinned Garton. ‘Only the name he’s known by in respectable circles nowadays is—Mr John Quex. Now, Hewitt, we’ve got to get busy. You’ll have to go down to the Yard.’
The simplicity with which the hatchety-faced detective hero of fiction is apt to lay the guilty person by the heels once he has been identified is quite a different thing to the care with which the most humdrum Scotland Yard man makes sure of his prey before springing a trap. Garton wanted not only Quex but his confederates. The methods by which they were to be disclosed involved a certain degree of co-operative work familiar to every detective bureau in the world but no special mental brilliance. He sent another man down to Balham to aid in keeping an eye on the main quarry, and Hewitt boarded a car for Scotland Yard.
There, in the Criminal Record Office, was a dossier that told all available facts, gained over many years in many quarters of the world, of Quex’s activities. It was embellished by full and side face photographs and the key number to his finger-prints. In that record now lay the germ of the investigation, for upon it were based inquiries by word of mouth, by telephone, by letter. It would have been wonderful if among the hundred closely organised detectives of London, Quex and his associates had entirely escaped notice.
Then it was that a telephone call from Hewitt had sent Garton on a flying visit to Brixton Prison where three prisoners remanded that morning in connection with an East End gambling house case were due to arrive. Somewhere in the prison he spent two active hours—hours that would have caused John Quex considerable uneasiness if he had known of them.
But John Quex for all his experience did not know. He was sitting in bed a mile or two away smoking a cigarette and reading the morning paper. He wasn’t sure whether he had killed a man overnight but he hoped he had. He had all the philosophy of the veteran professional. Today was a new day. He had taught Mike Alford that he was a man not to be interfered with with impunity. If he had failed and they still held up the pearl he could still show them that he was a live wire.
So he read the paper placidly, his conscience easy, his nerves unwrung. It was midday and a savoury smell of cooking from below heralded breakfast. He slipped languidly out of bed, strolled to the window and raised the blind. His eyebrows contracted as he peered out.
‘Hell!’ he muttered viciously.
Yet the casual observer would have noticed nothing to warrant the expletive. It was an ordinary suburban street like thousands of other streets in London—that was why Quex had pitched his tent there. A baker’s cart was ambling along the roadway, and a maid was cleaning the steps of one of the houses opposite. At an oblique angle to Quex some distance away on the far pavement two men were talking. These it was who interested the crook.
He drew back, his brow furrowed, and hurriedly began to dress. If those two idlers were really detectives—and he had small doubt of it—someone at the gambling house must—as he would have put it—have ‘squealed’. Possibly he had after all killed Mike or Alford. There was that much satisfaction in the situation anyway.
As he adjusted his tie a sound caught his ear—a sound so trivial that at any other time with senses less alert he would have failed to hear it. He dropped into a chair, and placing something in his lap picked up the discarded newspaper.
He raised his eyes in mild astonishment as the door was pushed swiftly open. One hand grasped the thing under the paper.
‘Well,’ he demanded irritably. ‘Who are you? What do you mean by bursting in on a man like this?’ And then his tone suddenly changed. ‘Ah, keep off, will you.’ The newspaper dropped and an automatic flew to a level.
Neither Garton nor Hewitt were novices in this kind of thing. They knew the type of man with whom they had to deal and wasted no time in parley. They had spread out to either side as they entered and it was with the recognition that they meant business that Quex’s opening bluff had changed to defiance.
Garton stood stock still. The muzzle of the pistol was near enough to him to make sudden death a certainty should the crook’s finger compress on the trigger. He was as brave as most men but he was not foolish. Besides, their tactics had carried Hewitt out of the line of fire.
Quex became aware of the sergeant’s rush just half a second too late. He swerved in his chair and the pistol exploded harmlessly as Hewitt’s muscular arms sought his throat. He was borne backwards and as he fell someone kicked the pistol out of his hand.
Three minutes later he was on his feet again with handcuffs encircling his wrists and Garton was dusting the knees of his trousers.
‘You’ve got no sense, Jack,’ complained Hewitt peevishly. ‘You might have killed someone with that gun of yours.’
Quex grinned. Now that it was all over he was without malice. ‘You guys would have stood a fat chance if I’d known you were after me earlier. I’d like to know what I’m pinched for anyway?’
‘You will be charged with the attempted murder of a man named Alford,’ said Garton.
‘That all? I hoped I had croaked one of those ginks.’
‘Also,’ went on the inspector, ‘there is an application from the Dutch police for your extradition for stealing a pearl.’
‘No!’ Quex’s jaw dropped. ‘I suppose Alford snitched on that too. Did he say that Mike and he have got that pearl laid up?’
Garton’s face never changed. ‘No,’ he declared. ‘It wouldn’t be likely, would it? But what’s the use of all this talk? You know anything you say may be used as evidence against you.’
‘I reckon I can’t do myself much more harm. If that little snipe can uncork so can I. Listen here.’
Over dinner that night with a colleague of the C.I.D. Garton talked with pardonable triumph. ‘If some of those writer chaps put this in a yarn it mightn’t sound much,’ he confessed, ‘but believe me, it’s the longest shot I ever pulled off. You should have seen Jack’s face when I told him that he had lost the pearl in the rough and tumble and that his pals hadn’t had it at all.
‘Of course it was a bad start when at first we couldn’t tell where the thing had come from. I’d have bet my next six month’s salary that the thing had been stolen but it looked like a dead end, especially as none of the descriptions we got of the three men who had been fighting corresponded. It was one of those off-chance ideas that took Hewitt and me to the Green Dragon where I surmised that one or the other of the men concerned might have been during the evening. When I noticed that the barmaid was wearing a ring that must have been worth a couple of hundred, I began to think things. That the pearl should have been picked up at hand and that she should have such costly trinkets and that neither of the events should be connected was too much of a coincidence to swallow.
‘Still I didn’t know and I didn’t want to commit myself till I was dead sure that a robbery had taken place somewhere. She was a pretty girl and I played with her a bit on a theory I manufactured for the occasion. It was clear that she had a lover who could afford expensive presents—and I managed to get his name and address without her knowing. You don’t want to ask me how I did it.
‘From then on things were like clockwork. In the morning came the news of this Dutch robbery which put me on safer ground. I dug a photograph out of the girl and of course recognised Slim Jack. It began to look like a clean-up. A little inquiry showed that he had been seen about with Big Mike and Jim Alford, and that the three of ’em were absent from London when the Amsterdam affair was pulled off. I don’t need to tell you that that was no evidence against ’em in a court of law, but as a moral certainty it was good enough for us.
‘Then it seems Mike and Jimmie were collared in a gambling joint where somebody had shot the little man up. That didn’t need a Sherlock, did it? It was as plain as paint that there’d been a quarrel over the pearl. The other two knew that Jack was mushy on the barmaid and hung about to get a chance at him. They had a rough and tumble in the roadway and were interrupted. None of ’em was too anxious to stop and answer questions, and Jack, who spilled the pearl in the gutter somehow, thought the others had it. That was how he came to invite himself to a little shooting party—see!
‘Of course I was on to Mike like a bird. Both he and Alford were sore with Jack but they were cautious. They didn’t tell me very much that I didn’t already know and I wasn’t too sure that the Dutch police would be able to send over witnesses to identify them. But I had got an idea.
‘When we went to get Jack we didn’t take any chances with the rough stuff. He was ready to eat out of my hand by the time we’d got the handcuffs on. I flashed the extradition charge on him suddenly and he fell for it. He didn’t know that we had the pearl and he dropped into the error of thinking his pals had talked. When a crook like that gets in that frame of mind practically everything is over.
‘He told me how the job was pulled off on the other side and that the three made a getaway in different directions. To avoid risks in case they were suspected the pearl was posted to Jack’s address. He had some idea of taking it over to the States to get rid of it; the others wanted to sell it here. They didn’t trust him too much. Well, it seems he told them that he’d got the thing and he was going to do as he darned well pleased. I suppose they thought that to leave it to him would make their chances of getting a bit mighty small in the end. That started the whole thing.’
‘A good case, old man,’ commented his friend.
‘I believe you,’ said Garton.
THE END