Alix Stothert, the mysterious manager of the Metropolitan Secret Agency, lived in the house with the bronze face, on the top floor, and so did his partner, the woman known as Madame Camille Lenoir.
They were a sinister couple, of whom nobody seemed to know anything, and the police, when questioned concerning them, as they had been on more than one occasion, refused to make any statement. That the police looked upon them with no favorable eye was generally admitted by those in a position to know, and the inference naturally drawn was that Scotland Yard was jealous of the Metropolitan Secret Agency’s extraordinary success in making discoveries which led to the arrest of criminals while the police failed to obtain even clues.
They lived a strange life, apparently, for the door leading into the suite of rooms which they occupied was always kept locked—it had two Yale locks—and no servants or other helpers were ever admitted.
The sitting-room, “living-room” would have been a better name for it, had three telephones, and a metaphone which connected with their office on the first floor. It had also a tape-machine, and in Stothert’s bedroom was a speaking tube which went down to the back entrance of the house and was so arranged that Stothert could be spoken to from a blind alley off the narrow little street. On to this blind alley the door opened.
Stothert and Camille Lenoir were alone in their living room about ten o’clock one night during the first week of August, when the speaking tube whistled shrilly in the room adjoining. At once the man got up and went into the bedroom to find out who wanted him. For only a few seconds he listened. Then he spoke one word, pushed the whistle in again, and rejoined his partner.
“They are hot on the trail of Jessica,” he said calmly, as he seated himself again, and readjusted the eye-shade which he had taken off when he went into the next room. “I believe in the end they will prove her undoing, and Stapleton’s.”
“Shall you warn her?” the woman asked anxiously.
“Certainly not. It is no concern of ours.”
“How do you mean—no concern of ours?”
“In the circumstances. Had she treated us differently——”