“That is precisely what I had hoped to do, my friend, but you perceive he is no fool to be trapped into that. We should have had some excuse for arresting him if he had done a thing of that sort, some charge to prefer against him, whereas, as matters stand, there’s not one we can bring forward that holds good in law or that we could prove if our lives depended upon it. You see now, I hope, Mr. Narkom, why you have seen nothing of him lately?”
“No—why?”
“You have not used the red limousine, and he has been lying low ready to follow that, just as I suspected he would. If he couldn’t trace where Cleek goes to meet the red limousine, clearly then the plan to be adopted must be to follow the red limousine and see where it goes to meet Cleek, and then to follow that much-wanted individual when he parts from you and makes his way home. That is the thing the fellow is after. To find out where I live and to ‘get’ me some night out there. But, my friend, ‘turn about is fair play’ the world over, and having had his inning at hunting me, I’m going in for mine at hunting him. I’ll get him; I’ll trap him into something for which he can be turned over to the law—make no mistake about that.”
“My hat! What do you mean to do?”
“First and foremost, make my getaway out of the present little corner,” he replied, “and then rely upon your assistance in finding out where the beggar is located. We’re not done with him even for to-day. He will follow—either he or Serpice: perhaps both—the instant Lennard starts off with us.”
“You are going back with us in the limousine, then?”
“Yes—part of the way. Drive on, Lennard, until you can spot a plain-clothes man, then give him the signal to follow us. At the first station on the Tube or the Underground, pull up sharp and let me out. You, Mr. Narkom, alight with me and stand guard at the station entrance while I go down to the train. If either Waldemar or an Apache makes an attempt to follow, arrest him on the spot, on any charge you care to trump up—it doesn’t matter so that it holds him until my train goes—and as soon as it has gone, call up your plain-clothes man, point out Serpice to him, and tell him to follow and to stick to the fellow until he meets Waldemar, if it takes a week to accomplish it, and then to shadow his precious countship and find out where he lives. Tell him for me that there’s a ten-pound note in it for him the moment he can tell me where Waldemar is located; and to stick to his man until he runs him down. Now, then, hop in, Mr. Narkom, and let’s be off. The other chap will follow, be assured. All right, Lennard. Let her go!”
Lennard ‘let her go’ forthwith, and a quarter of an hour later saw the programme carried out in every particular, only that it was not Waldemar who made an attempt to follow when the limousine halted at the Tube station and Cleek jumped out and ran in (the count was far too shrewd for that); it was a rough-looking Frenchman who had just previously hopped out of a closed carriage driven by a fellow countryman, only to be nabbed at the station doorway by Narkom, and turned over to the nearest constable on the charge of pocket picking.
The charge, however, was so manifestly groundless that half a dozen persons stepped forward and entered protest; but the superintendent was so pig-headed that by the time he could be brought to reason, and the man was again at liberty to take his ticket and go down in the lift to the train, the platform was empty, the train gone, and Cleek already on his way.
A swift, short flight under the earth’s surface carried him to another station in quite another part of London; a swift, short walk thence landed him at his temporary lodgings in town, and four o’clock found him exchanging his workaday clothes for the regulation creased trousers and creaseless coat of masculine calling costume, and getting ready to spend the rest of the day with her.