"I thought so," I said softly.
He glanced at me with his keen blue eyes, and the light of the lamp shining on his face showed up its square dogged lines of strength and purpose. It was a fine face—the face of a man without weakness and without fear.
"It's nearly twelve months ago now," he continued, "that we first began to realize at headquarters that there was something queer going on. There's always a certain amount of spying in every country—the sort of quiet, semi-official kind that doesn't do any one a ha'porth of practical harm. Now and then, of course, somebody gets dropped on, and there's a fuss in the papers, but nobody really bothers much about it. This was different, however. Two or three times things happened that did matter very much indeed. They were the sort of things that showed us pretty plainly we were up against something entirely new—some kind of organized affair that had nothing on earth to do with the usual casual spying.
"Well, I made up my mind to get to the bottom of it. Casement, who is nominally the head of our department, gave me an absolutely free hand, and I set to work in my own way quite independently of the police. It was six months before I got hold of a clue. Then some designs—some valuable battleship designs—disappeared from Devonport Dockyard. It was a queer case, but there were one or two things about it which made me pretty sure it was the work of the same gang, and that for the time, at all events, they were somewhere in the neighbourhood.
"I needn't bother you now with all the details of how I actually ran them to earth. It wasn't an easy job. They weren't the sort of people who left any spare bits of evidence lying around, and by the time I found out where they were living it was just too late." He turned to me. "Otherwise, Mr. Lyndon, I think we might possibly have had the pleasure of meeting earlier."
A sudden forgotten recollection of my first interview with McMurtrie flashed vividly into my mind.
"By Jove!" I exclaimed. "What a fool I am! I knew I'd heard your name somewhere before."
Latimer nodded. "Yes," he said. "I daresay I had begun to arouse a certain amount of interest in the household by the time you arrived." He paused. "By the way, I am still quite in the dark as to how you actually got in with them. Had they managed to send you a message into the prison?"
"No," I said. "I'm equally in the dark as to how you've found out who I am, but you seem to know so much already, you may as well have the truth. It was chance; just pure chance and a bicycle. I hadn't the remotest notion who lived in the house. I was trying to steal some food."
Latimer nodded again. "It was a chance that a man like McMurtrie wasn't likely to waste. I don't know yet how you're paying him for his help, but I should imagine it's a fairly stiff price. However, we'll come back to that afterwards.