“Mr Rodwell,” said Trustram, addressing him, as the two detectives were searching him for firearms: “You thought you were very clever. You betrayed me once, but I took very good care that all the information I gave you afterwards should be such as you would work for England’s advantage, and not for yours. In one case last week, when your masters acted upon my information, we were able to bag six of your submarines in the Straits of Dover within forty-eight hours. So you see my game was a double one,” he added, with a smile of satisfaction.
Rodwell was so nonplussed at thus being caught red-handed, that he could utter no reply. All his bluff and defiance had left him, and he stood white, inert, with a look of abject shame and terror upon his changed countenance.
As for the woman, she gave vent to a torrent of bitter vituperation. But nobody noticed her; she had, like poor old Tom Small and his son, been simply tools of that unscrupulous and clever master-spy in whose stirring patriotism all England was believing, but who had at last fallen into the trap which Charles Trustram had so cunningly prepared for him—a trap in which the confirmation of his traitorous act had actually been made by the enemy’s unseen wireless rays.
Sir Houston said little, except to remark that no doubt Lewin Rodwell’s arrest would put a new complexion upon the case against John Sainsbury, and result, he hoped, in breaking up the activity of the enemy in our midst.
Of much that followed the public are already aware.
The newspapers, however, merely reported that Mr Lewin Rodwell, who had been a most popular speaker at recruiting meetings, who had been a well-known city financier, and a power in the social and political world of London, had died suddenly in a motor-car in the Brixton Road. The Censor, however, suppressed the facts that he had been in the custody of two officers of the Special Department of New Scotland Yard when the tragic occurrence happened, and that he had succeeded in swallowing a tabloid that he had carried concealed in his handkerchief in case of necessity, while being conveyed to Brixton Prison on a charge of espionage.
The public knew, of course, that an unnamed woman was under arrest for acts of war-treason and, later, that she had been sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. They also knew that Jack Sainsbury had been mysteriously and suddenly released by a Home Office order, after having been tried and convicted by court-martial; but the true story of the evil machinations of Ludwig Heitzman, alias Lewin Rodwell, and how he had succeeded in bringing such indisputable evidence against an innocent man, is here revealed for the first time in the foregoing pages.
On the evening of Lewin Rodwell’s well-deserved, but cowardly end—the evening of the day of his arrest—Sir Boyle Huntley disappeared from London to the Continent, and was never again seen.
On that same night, too, at ten o’clock, there was a little assembly in Sir Houston Bird’s consulting-room in Cavendish Square. Jack and his fiancée were standing happily reunited and arm in arm, while Charles Trustram and Sir Houston were also present. It was then that Trustram decided to hand over the note which poor Dr Jerrold had left for his friend on the fatal night before he took his own life.
Jack broke the seals, and slowly taking out the brief letter, read it, his lips contracting as he realised its contents. Then he handed it from one to the other until they had all read it.