“I thought you might wish to see the photograph.”
“Very much,” Nick nodded. “I’ll fix the face in my mind, though the print is too small to be of much value. The writing may prove useful, however.”
“I had another reason for dropping in to show them to you.”
“What is that?”
“Jenks wrote me that Mortimer Deland is probably in this country, if not in New York City.”
“On what does he base that belief?”
“First, on the fact that there has been a complete cessation of Deland’s knavish work abroad for more than six months. That is a very long and unusual period for him to be idle. Scarce a month has gone by for six or eight years Nick in which he has not committed a crime of some kind, easily identified as his because of their peculiarly original and crafty character. There is no mistaking his work.”
“And the other reason?” questioned Nick.
“Because, though it was not suspected at the time, it now is known that Deland fled from Vienna about six months ago and went to England. He is known to have been in London with a notorious English crook and adventuress named Fannie Coyle, and that they bought passage for Boston more than four months ago. Boston would be poor picking for a man of Mortimer Deland’s knavish aspirations, and it’s long odds that he was heading for New York, or one of the big Western cities. Be that as it may, Nick, his whereabouts now is unknown.”
“Fannie Coyle still is missing from England, I infer?”