“But I understood that the charge was one of fraud,” I said. “I intended to go to the trial, but I was called to Italy.”
“The charge of fraud was made in order not to alarm his accomplice,” replied the stranger.
“How do you know that?” I inquired.
“Well”—he hesitated—“that came out at the trial. There were full accounts of it in the Paris Matin.”
“I don’t care for reading Assize Court horrors,” I replied, still puzzled regarding my strange companion’s intimate knowledge concerning the man whose dramatic and sudden arrest had, on that memorable afternoon, so startled me.
“When I saw your face just now,” he said, “I recognized you as being at the Grand Hotel with Bell. Do you know,” he laughed, “you were such a close friend of the accused that you were suspected of being a member of the dangerous association! Indeed, you very narrowly escaped arrest on suspicion. It was only because the reception clerk in the hotel knew you well, and vouched for your respectability and that Biddulph was your real name. Yet, for a full week, you were watched closely by the sûreté.”
“And I was all unconscious of it!” I cried, realizing how narrowly I had escaped a very unpleasant time. “How do you know all this?” I asked.
But the Frenchman with the gold glasses and the big amethyst ring upon his finger merely laughed, and refused to satisfy me.
From him, however, I learned that the depredations of the formidable gang had been unequalled in the annals of crime. Many of the greatest jewel robberies in the European capitals in recent years had, it was now proved, been effected by them, as well as the theft of the Marchioness of Mottisfont’s jewels at Victoria Station, which were valued at eighteen thousand pounds, and were never recovered; the breaking open of the safe of Levi & Andrews, the well-known diamond-merchants of Hatton Garden, and the theft of a whole vanload of furs before a shop in New Bond Street, all of which are, no doubt, fresh within the memory of the reader of the daily newspapers.