“She had a nerve, yes,” the Superintendent admitted. “But, you see, it was necessary. She must have known that the absence of the passport would strike Williams as suspicious, and it was necessary for her to remove that suspicion. She couldn’t very well get a bag of that kind stolen without informing the police, so she had to inform them. She would see how easily Williams could check her statement, as indeed he did. No, I don’t see how she could have avoided coming to us. It was an obvious precaution.”
“I quite agree with all you say,” French returned, “but it argues a cool customer for all that; not only, so to speak, putting her head into the lion’s mouth, but at the same time calling his attention to it’s being there. Anyway, I’ve got to find her, and I wish you’d let me have details about her. I’ve got some from the Olympic people, but I want to pick up everything I can.”
The Superintendent telephoned to some one to “send up Sergeant McAfee,” and when a tall, cadaverous man entered, he introduced him as the man who had dealt with the business in question.
“Sergeant McAfee has just been transferred to us from Liverpool,” he explained. “Sit down, McAfee. Inspector French wants to know some details about that woman who lost her handbag coming off the Olympic some seven weeks ago. I think you handled the thing. Do you remember a Mrs. Root of Pittsburg?”
“I mind her rightly, sir,” the man answered in what French believed was a Belfast accent. “But it wasn’t coming off the Olympic she lost it. It was later on that same day, though it was on the quays right enough.”
“Tell us all you can about it.”
The Sergeant pulled out his notebook. “I have it in me other book,” he announced. “If ye’ll excuse me, I’ll get it.”
In a moment he returned, sat down, and turning over the dog’s-eared pages of a well-worn book, began as if reciting evidence in court:
“On the 24th November last at about 3.00 p.m., I was passing through the crowd on the outer quays when I heard a woman cry out. ‘Thief, thief,’ she shouted, and she ran up and caught me by the arm. She was middling tall and thinnish, her face pale and her hair dark. She spoke in an American voice, and seemed upset or excited. She said to me, breathless like, ‘Say, officer,’ she said, ‘I’ve just had my despatch case stolen.’ I asked her where, and how, and what was in it. She said right there where we were standing, and not three seconds before. She was carrying it in her hand, and it was snatched out of it. She turned round and saw a man juke away in the crowd. She shouted and made after him, but he was away before she could get near. I asked her what the case was like, and she said a small square brown morocco leather one with gold fittings. I went and told the two men on duty close by, and we kept a watch on the exits, but we never saw a sign of it.” Sergeant McAfee shook his head gloomily as he concluded. “She hadn’t any call to be carrying a gold fitted case in that crowd anyway.”
“That’s a fact, Sergeant,” the Superintendent agreed. “And you never came on any trace of it?”