“Yes, I know it!” I asserted. “I’ve been in that shop. Oh! so he’s there, is he?”
“That’s where we’re to look for him, anyway,” he replied. “But whether we do find him there, or, if we do, under what conditions it’ll be, that I don’t know. However, we’re carrying out his instructions, and here’s the corner of the street.”
I knew that corner well enough, and the street, too. It was there that I had shadowed White Whiskers and the Newcastle solicitor, and thence that I had retreated after my passage-at-arms with Bickerdale. Presently we stood before the side door of Bickerdale’s shop, the door which presumably led to his house at the rear. There was no light visible through the transom over the door, none in the shop window, none in the windows over the shop. And when the plain-clothes man, in response to the inspector’s order, rang the bell and knocked in addition, no reply came.
It was not until we had knocked and rung three times, each more loudly and urgently, that we heard sounds inside the door. They were the sounds of somebody cautiously drawing back a bolt and turning a key. But no light showed through keyhole or letter-box, or the glass in the transom, and the inspector gave his man a whispered instruction.
“Turn your lamp full on whoever opens the door!” he said. “And get a foot over the threshold.”
I held my breath as the door was opened. It moved back; the plain-clothes man’s light from a bull’s-eye lantern flashed on a frightened, inquiring face looking round the edge of the door.
Weech!
I could have laughed aloud as Weech turned and fled, for he let out a squeal at the sight of us, and bolted for all the world like a frightened rabbit. And, of course, he left the door wide open, and we were at once on his heels, and after him down the passage. He swept aside a curtain, flung open a door behind it, and burst into a well-lighted parlour or living-room with a sharp cry of warning.
“Police!”
I got a full view of the men in that room in one quick glance from between the two policemen as they walked in. There was a table in its centre, an oblong table; at our end of it, with his back to us, sat Parslewe, calmly smoking a cigar; at the other, morose, perplexed, defiant, sat Bickerdale. And behind Bickerdale, leaning against a dresser or sideboard, stood Pawley!