In a few minutes the two men were by her side.
They stood in silence contemplating the conflagration, then Kathleen remembered.
“The book, the book!” she cried.
“It’s inside my shirt,” said the shameless Angel.
CHAPTER XIII
CONNOR TAKES A HAND
It is an axiom at Scotland Yard, “Beware of an audience.” Enemies of our police system advance many and curious reasons for this bashfulness. In particular they place a sinister interpretation upon the desire of the police to carry out their work without fuss and without ostentation, for the police have an embarrassing system of midnight arrests. Unless you advertise the fact, or unless your case is of sufficient importance to merit notice in the evening newspapers, there is no reason why your disappearance from society should excite comment, or why the excuse, put forward for your absence from your accustomed haunts, that you have gone abroad should not be accepted without question.
Interviewing his wise chief, Angel received some excellent advice.
“If you’ve got to arrest him, do it quietly. If, as you suggest, he barricades himself in his house, or takes refuge in his patent vault, leave him alone. We want no fuss, and we want no newspaper sensations. If you can square up the Reale business without arresting him, by all means do so. We shall probably get him in—er—what do you call it, Angel?—oh, yes, ‘the ordinary way of business.’”
“Very good, sir,” said Angel, nothing loth to carry out the plan.
“From what I know of this class of man,” the Assistant-Commissioner went on, fingering his grizzled mustache, “he will do nothing. He will go about his daily life as though nothing had happened; you will find him in his office this morning, and if you went to arrest him you’d be shot dead. No, if you take my advice you’ll leave him severely alone for the present. He won’t run away.”