Why not Great Bradley, he thought, after a while? Again he would be serving two purposes. He would be leading the police to the Secret House, and he would have the mansion of mystery and all its resources as a refuge in case anything went wrong at the last moment. He could, in the worst extremity, explain that he was collecting the money on behalf of Farrington.
Yes, Great Bradley and the wild stretch of down on the south of the town was the place. He made his arrangements accordingly.
CHAPTER XVIII
It was three days after the exchange of letters that Count Poltavo, in the rough tweeds of a country gentleman—a garb which hardly suited his figure or presence—strolled carelessly across the downs, making his way to their highest point, a great rolling slope, from the crest of which a man could see half a dozen miles in every direction.
The sky was overcast and a chill wind blew; it was such a day upon which he might be certain no pleasure-seekers would be abroad. To his left, half hidden in the furthermost shelter of the downs, veiled as it was for ever under a haze of blue grey smoke, lay Great Bradley, with its chimneys and its busy industrial life. To his right he caught a glimpse of the square ugly façade of the Secret House, half hidden by the encircling trees. To its right was a chimney stack from which a lazy feather of smoke was drifting. Behind him the old engine house of the deserted mines, and to the right of that the pretty little cottage from which a week before Lady Constance Dex had so mysteriously disappeared, and which in consequence had been an object of pilgrimage for the whole countryside.
But Lady Constance Dex's disappearance had become a nine days' wonder. There were many explanations offered for her unexpected absence. The police of the country were hunting systematically and leisurely, and only T. B. and those in his immediate confidence were satisfied that the missing woman was less than two miles away from the scene of her disappearance.
Count Poltavo had armed himself with a pair of field-glasses, and now he carefully scrutinized all the roads which led to the downs. A motor-car, absurdly diminutive from the distance, came spinning along the winding white road two miles away. He watched it as it mounted the one hill and descended the other, and kept his glasses on it until it vanished in a cloud of dust on the London road. Then he saw what he sought. Coming across the downs a mile away was the bent figure of a man who stopped now and again to look about, as though uncertain as to the direction he should take. Poltavo, lying flat upon the ground, his glasses fixed upon the man, waited, watching the slow progress with lazy interest.