"Then just telephone to your people there, and tell them to tell him, if he comes in asking for you, to come along and seek you here," said the chief. "I'm afraid I can't spare either you or Mr. Allerdyke, for your joint information'll be wanted presently for these warrants, and when we've got them I want you to go with me—both of you—to the Pompadour."
"You're going to search?" asked Allerdyke when Appleyard had gone to the telephone. "You think you may find something—there?"
"There's enough evidence to justify a search," answered the chief. "Naturally we want to know all we can. But I should say that if she's mixed up with a gang, and if they've got those jewels through her—as seems uncommonly likely—she'll have been ready for a start at any minute, and the probability is we'll find nothing to help us. The great thing, of course, will be to get hold of the woman herself. It's a most unfortunate thing that Albert Gaffney was stopped from following that cab, last night—I've no opinion, Mr. Allerdyke, of your amateur detective as a rule, but from Mr. Appleyard's account of him, this one seems to have done very well. If we only knew where those two went—"
Appleyard presently came back from the telephone with a face alive with fresh news.
"Albert Gaffney's at the warehouse now," he announced. "I've just had a word with him. He found the taxi-cab driver an hour ago, and he got the information he wanted. And I'm afraid it's—nothing!"
"What is it, anyhow?" asked the chief, with a smile. "Perhaps Albert
Gaffney doesn't know its value."
"The man drove them, all four, to the corner of Whitechapel Church," said
Appleyard. "There he set them down, and there he left them. That's all."
"Well, that's something, anyway," remarked the chief. "It carries the thing on another stage. Now we'll leave that and attend to our own business."
The Pompadour Private Hotel, like most establishments of its class in Bayswater, was a place of peace and of comparative solitude during the greater part of the day. It was busy enough up to ten o'clock in the morning, and it began to be busy enough again by six o'clock in the evening, but from ten to six more than two-thirds of its denizens were not to be found within its walls. The business man had gone to the City; the professional women had departed to their offices; nothing of humanity but a few elderly widows and spinsters, and an old gentleman or two were left in the various rooms. Everything, therefore, was quiet enough when the chief, accompanied by Chettle, drove up, entered the hall, and asked to see the manager and manageress. As for Allerdyke and Appleyard, who naturally felt considerable dislike to appearing on this particular scene of operations, they were a few hundred yards away, walking about just within the confines of Kensington Gardens, and waiting with more or less patience until the police officials came to them with news of the result of the search.
The manageress of the hotel, a smart lady who wore dignified black gowns all day long—stuff in the morning, and silk at night as if she were a barrister, gradually advancing in grandeur—gazed at the two callers with some suspicion as she ushered them into a private room at the back of her office. The chief, an irreproachably attired man, might have been an army gentleman, she thought; an instinctive wonder rose in her mind as to whether he was not some elderly man of standing who, accompanied by his valet, desired to arrange about a suite of rooms. But his first words gave her an unpleasant shock—she felt for all the world as if somebody had suddenly turned a shower of ice-cold water on her.