“There’s nothing much to tell,” he said. “For a week I’ve been getting acquainted with the Frogs. I guessed that it was unlikely that the bulk of them would be unknown to one another, and I just froze on to the first I found. Met him in a Deptford lodging-house. Then I heard there was a hurry-up call for a big job to-day and joined. The Frogs knew that the real attack might be somewhere else, and on the way to Scotland Yard I heard that a party had been told off to watch for Litnov at Wandsworth.”
“Did you see any of the big men?”
Broad shook his head.
“They looked all alike, but undoubtedly there were two or three section leaders in charge. There was never any question of rescuing. They were out to kill. They knew that Litnov had told all that he knew, and he was doomed—they got him, I suppose?”
“Yes—they got him!” said Dick, and then: “What is your interest in the Frogs?”
“Purely adventitious,” replied the other lazily. “I’m a rich man with a whole lot of time on my hands, and I have a big interest in criminology. A few years ago I heard about the Frogs, and they seized on my imagination. Since then I’ve been trailing them.”
His gaze did not waver under Dick Gordon’s scrutiny.
“Now will you tell me,” said Dick quietly, “how you became a rich man? In the latter days of the war you arrived in this country on a cattle-boat—with about twenty dollars in your pocket. You told Elk you had arrived by that method, and you spoke the truth. I’ve been almost as much interested in you as you have been in the Frogs,” he said with a half-smile, “and I have been putting through a few inquiries. You came to England 1917 and deserted your ship. In May, 1917, you negotiated for the hire of an old tumbledown shack near Eastleigh, Hampshire. There you lived, patching up this crazy cottage and living, so far as I can discover, on the few dollars you brought from the ship. Then suddenly you disappeared, and were next seen in Paris on Christmas Eve of that year. You were conspicuous in rescuing a family that had been buried in a house bombed in an air raid, and your name was taken by the police with the idea of giving you some reward. The French police report is that you were ‘very poorly dressed’—they thought you might be a deserter from the American Army. Yet in February you were staying at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, with plenty of money and an extensive wardrobe!”
Joshua Broad sat through the recital unmoved, except for the ghost of a smile which showed at the corner of his unshaven mouth.
“Surely, Captain, Monte Carlo is the place where a man would have money?”