“Before you embarked upon these robberies, Mrs. Morrice, you had to obtain possession of the two keys and get duplicates made. That was rather a difficult matter, wasn’t it?”
Not so very difficult, he learned. Mr. Morrice was a very careless man in some respects, and he was so confident nobody but himself and Richard was acquainted with the mechanism of the safe, that he was incautious in small details. He frequently left his key lying about in his room when he went up to the City. Richard was not quite so careless, but occasionally he did the same. The moment Mrs. Morrice—ever on the watch—got hold of them, Sir George was ’phoned for to come to the house, and the rest was easy.
“And now tell me about those finger-prints of the man ‘Tubby’ Thomas who was in Dartmoor at the time the robberies were committed. What was the motive of that, and how were they obtained?”
The answer to this question involved a longer explanation. It was done, as Lane had rightly suspected, as a mere act of devilment, for the purpose of making a fool for the moment of any agent of the law who might be called in by Mr. Morrice. It had succeeded temporarily in making a fool of the astute detective himself.
The modus operandi was as follows: Young Archie Brookes, to call him by his assumed name, had provided her with a pair of surgical rubber gloves upon which a copy of the expert robber’s finger-prints had been impressed.
How were they obtained? Sir George, who took a great interest in the science of identifying latent finger-prints, had procured those of the notorious “Tubby,” with whom he had maintained some sort of association before his conviction, and had very cleverly reproduced them upon the thin rubber gloves.
“It would appear, then, that your pretended relative by marriage was the friend of crooks; were you aware of this, Mrs. Morrice?”
“By certain things that he let drop now and then, I had no doubt that the man was engaged in every kind of villainy and wrong-doing,” was Mrs. Morrice’s answer.
“And now tell me a little about Miss Buckley’s attitude towards him when she found out his real character. You say she was in love with him; did she break off all relations with him, and forbid him the house?”
“It was the dearest wish of her heart to do so,” replied the unhappy woman. “For my sake she forbore, as she feared that if she angered him it might make things worse for me. And, besides, her place was a useful meeting ground when it might have been too risky for him to come to Deanery Street, in such things as handing over money, for instance.”