“The blackmailer,” Peter Ruff said, “is a criminal.”
“He is a scoundrel!” Sir Richard assented.
“He is not fit to live,” Peter Ruff repeated.
“He contaminates the world with every breath he draws!” Sir Richard assented.
“Perhaps,” Peter Ruff said, “you had better give me his address, and the name he goes under.”
“He lives at a boarding-house in Russell Street, Bloomsbury,” Sir Richard said. “It is Mrs. Bognor’s boarding-house. She calls it, I believe, the ‘American Home from Home.’ The number is 17.”
“A boarding-house,” Peter Ruff repeated, thoughtfully. “Makes it a little hard to get at him privately, doesn’t it?”
“Fling him a bait and he will come to you,” Sir Richard answered. “He is an adventurer pure and simple, though perhaps you wouldn’t believe it to look at him now. He has grown fat on the money he has wrung from me.”
“You had better leave the matter in my hands for a few days,” Peter Ruff said. “I will have a talk with this gentleman and see whether he is really so unmanageable. If he is, there is, of course, only one way, and for that way, Sir Richard, you would have to pay a little high.”
“If I were to hear to-morrow,” Sir Richard said quietly, “that Teddy Jones was dead, I would give five thousand pounds to the man who brought me the information!”