“They’re after him,” I thought. “They are very optimistic people.”
Figgis’s flat was under the roof, and there was no light burning. Half the Auxiliaries left the lorries, filed up the steps, and a great banging began at the door. The sound echoed down the streets. Then a light appeared at the top of the house, the window opened, and a woman in a nightgown leaned out. I thought it was Mrs. Figgis; but it turned out to be Mrs. Coneray, president of the Woman’s Franchise League. The knocking never ceased, the figure above disappeared, and presently the door opened, and the Auxiliaries were swallowed up in the dark of the passage.
There followed a long wait in the cold.
Suddenly a man at my side leapt round like a cat spotting a mouse. Everybody waked up. “A man ran across the road just then,” he called out. “At the mouth of Molesworth Street. I swear he did.”
One or two Auxiliaries mooched backwards and forwards across the road with their rifles under their arms. One of these, with his rifle at the ready, went as far as the corner of Molesworth Street; but he came back saying there was nothing to see. There was another wait, which was shortened by a small chatty individual who came up to our lorry and began to talk to me through the wire netting. He chatted like an old acquaintance.
“We took Desmond Fitzgerald,” he said, in the pleasantest fashion. “A bad house that.”
“Is it?” I answered.
“Figgis was there lately,” he went on.
“So I am told. I never saw him.”
“Why are you there?”