"I ought to," Fielden said drily. "Goodness knows, his firm had enough of my money. But go on."
"Well, I pumped Rickerby. I don't mind telling you that I went to the Post Club on purpose. He has been pretty hard hit. He believes he has been the victim of a swindle, and he is right, though it was no part of my policy at the time to tell him so. He can't very well refuse to take big bets, even when he feels there is something underhand going on. Only a short time ago he was hit for some thousands of pounds by one of the gang, and, moreover, had to pay the money."
"This sounds very interesting," Fielden said, "but what has it to do with our present adventure?"
"Oh, I am coming to that," Phillips went on quietly. "You see, these bets are always made in the same way. One of the conspirators, who is actually a member of the Post Club, strolls into the smoking-room some five or six minutes before—well, we'll say before the three o'clock race. He hangs about till the horses are about finishing and then, in the most casual way in the world, makes a bet. Now, mind you, this bet is booked before the race is finished, as a careful comparison of the time shows. Yet the horse has won, and the man in the smoking-room of the Post Club knows it before the judge has given his decision."
"Impossible," Fielden exclaimed.
"I know it seems impossible, and twenty years ago you would have said the telephone was impossible, and people would have scouted the idea of wireless telegraphy. But they both came, like the phonograph and other wonders."
"Oh, that's all very well," Fielden smiled. "But you are not going to ask me to believe that this thing is done by thought-reading or anything of that sort? You won't tell me that this famous member of the Post Club is a clairvoyant who sees the race finished while it is being run? Because, if that were the case, the favoured person would have no need of a syndicate to help him; he would do it all by himself."
"I am not suggesting anything of the kind," Phillips said. "There's nothing occult about the business. The thing is capable of explanation, and I am in a position to give it, except for the finishing touches, which make this dodge almost a work of genius. I know who is at the bottom of it, I know who is working it, and I know how the information is conveyed to within a few feet of the tape machines in the Post Club. But how that information is filtered to the man inside is the thing that beats me at present. But so much I have found out. In the very next office to the smoking-room of the Post Club is a firm who call themselves Jolly & Co. Now Jolly & Co. only took their office last September or October. There is not the slightest sign of any business being done there, because I have been in the office myself. Taken in conjunction with what I have told you, it must strike you as an odd thing that this mysterious Jolly & Co. shut up the office and went abroad last year after the flat-racing was over. Probably Jolly & Co. went off to make a bit in the Riviera, or Egypt, or some other fashionable resort where fools and money congregate. It is an odd thing that during the January meeting at Mirst Park Jolly & Co. should turn up again and resume operations in Covent Garden. Now I called to see Mr. Jolly. He had left his office, but I guessed that before I called, or I shouldn't have ventured. The first thing I saw was a telephone with an unusually long flex to it. I don't quite understand why this flex is so long, but I can make a shrewd guess. It cost me an hour or two and plenty of hard thinking to get farther in my investigations, but I found late in the evening that Jolly & Co.'s telephone was a private wire leading from Covent Garden to his residence at Mirst Park. Now do you begin to understand?"
Fielden shook his head.
"It begins to smell suspicious," he said. "I am bound to confess it looks very like a deep-laid conspiracy. But I must confess myself too dense to follow it."