It was on the day the report of this new outrage reached England that T. B. Smith located Poltavo.
* * * * * * *
There languished in a prosaic prison cell at Brixton Gaol a Monsieur Torquet, who was admittedly a victim of police persecution. That much T. B. himself was prepared to admit.
Monsieur Torquet was suspected not of a crime against any particular section of society, but indeed of being accessory to a crime against humanity; and T. B. was prepared to run a tilt at the very Habeas Corpus Act rather than release his grip upon the stranger with the straggling beard who had so heavily insured the Taglan Castle before she started out on her adventurous voyage.
This Monsieur Torquet, brooding in the loneliness of his cell at Brixton, had very nearly reached the limits of his patience; the silence and the indifference had crushed what little spirit there was in him.
For two months he had lain without trial, in a cell which had a table on which were pen, paper, and ink. He had not in all that time touched the one or the other, but on the day that the Atlantic liner came across the Maria Braganza he sat at the table and wrote a brief note to the governor of the prison. Within an hour T. B. Smith was ushered into the cell, and remained with the man for some time. Then he came out, and sent for a shorthand clerk, and together they returned.
For four hours the three men worked, one questioning and translating, one answering at first sullenly and with periodic outbursts of temper, and later eagerly, volubly—and all this time the clerk wrote and wrote, until one note-book was exhausted and he sent out for another.
It was late in the evening when he said:
"And that, monsieur, is all."
"All?" T. B.'s eyebrows rose. "All? But you have not explained the whereabouts of Lolo?"