Chapter Fourteen.
Held by the Enemy.
“That can hardly be correct—because there are proofs,” remarked the tall, fair, quick-eyed man, who sat in the cold, official-looking room at Bow Street Police Station at half-past three o’clock that same morning.
Jack Sainsbury was standing in defiance before the table, while, in the room, stood the two plain-clothes men who had effected his arrest.
The fair-haired man at the table was Inspector Tennant, of the Special Department at New Scotland Yard, an official whose duty since the outbreak of war was to make inquiry into the thousand-and-one cases of espionage which the public reported weekly to that much-harassed department. Tennant, who had graduated, as all others had graduated, from the rank of police-constable on the streets of London, was a reliable officer as far as patriotism and a sense of duty went. But it was impossible for a man born in a labourer’s cottage on the south side of Dartmoor, and educated at the village school, to possess such a highly trained brain as that possessed by say certain commissaires of the Paris Sûreté.
Thomas Tennant, a highly popular man as far as the staff at “the Yard” went, and trusted implicitly by his superiors from the Assistant-Commissioner downwards, worked with an iron sense of the red-taped duty for which he received his salary.
“I’m sorry,” said Tennant, looking at the young man; “but all these denials will not, I fear, help you in the least. As I warned you, they are being taken down in writing, and may be used in evidence against you,” and he indicated a clerk writing shorthand at a side-table.
Jack Sainsbury grew furious.
“I don’t care a brass button what evidence you can give against me,” he cried. “I only know that my conscience is perfectly clear. I have tried, since the war, to help my friend Dr Jerome Jerrold of Wimpole Street, to inquire into spies and espionage. We acted together, and Jerrold reported much that was unknown to Whitehall. He—”
“Doctor Jerrold is the gentleman who committed suicide—if my memory serves me correctly,” interrupted the police official, speaking very quietly.