He glanced first at the kit-bag, and then turned his head slightly and finished his scrutiny of the yard and street. Freedom lay there in the gloom of London!
He tossed away what he believed was his last chance as the door opened to a crack and then wide. There was no alternative as MacKeenon’s fingers gripped for a second and stronger hold. Chester Fay, alias Edward Letchmere, entered the House of the Two Lions, blindly.
CHAPTER II
SCOTLAND YARD
There is that within the professional criminal’s nature which distrusts the men who carry out the laws. The laws, themselves, may be fair, but man, in the cracksman’s opinion, is a human element who is very liable to overplay his part.
Chester Fay had lain too long on the hard planks at Dartmoor to believe in MacKeenon’s good intentions. The Scot had a reputation for getting results. He was also the very keen tool of brainier men who managed the Criminal Intelligence Division of Scotland Yard.
The romance of all underworld activity on the Continent and in England was bound up in the Yard. Its long arm could reach down a blind alley in Paris and snatch a man to the light of justice. It could lift a fleeing suspect from the deck of a ship at sea. It stopped at nothing!
Fay suspected a well-baited trap of the superior order as he followed MacKeenon through a dim-lighted hallway. He gripped his palms as they waited in the gloom for a door to be unlocked by the servant who had answered the inspector’s knock of four taps and then five.
The room which was suddenly revealed, like the flash of a cinematograph, contained a long mahogany
table running from wall to wall, and a half-score of heavy teakwood chairs which blended into the rich dark finish of the wainscoting. There was little else in the way of furnishings. Fay counted three black tin boxes upon the table. Each box was marked with a code number and the initials C. I. D. His eyes lifted over these boxes and stared at a man who wore a mask which was far too small to hide a jaw so square and masterful. It brought a slight smile of recognition to the cracksman’s lips.
The man in the mask was Sir Richard Colstrom, Chief of the Criminal Investigation Division!