“There is only one fact that is peculiar,” said the smart Frenchwoman. “You know I have been looking after him pretty closely lately. Well, whenever he goes out, though he appears to wander about quite aimlessly, he invariably contrives his walk so that it takes him through Lembridge Square. He never misses.”
“Does he always go the same side of the Square?” I asked.
She replied in the affirmative, and I decided to have a look round the Square for myself at once.
That same afternoon found me on the scene of Blind Heinrich’s daily walk. The Square itself varied little from hundreds of others in London: it showed every evidence of dreary respectability common to half the squares in London. Two things, however, attracted my notice.
In the ground-floor window of one house was a big brass cage containing a grey parrot, which was insistently emitting the hideous noises common to the parrot tribe. In a similar window about a dozen houses away was a case containing some old-fashioned wax flowers beneath a glass dome, evidently a survival from the ornamental style peculiar to the early Victorian epoch to which, indeed, the whole dreary Square seemed to belong.
There was nothing to offer a lucid explanation of why Blind Heinrich should choose such a path for his daily ramble. There were dozens of other far more attractive promenades within easy walking distance. Yet here, unless my instinct entirely misled me, was the solution to our riddle.
Day after day I followed the old fellow’s route. I even went so far as to shadow Heinrich himself more than once and verified Madame Gabrielle’s observation. No matter which way he started out, he never failed, on either the outward or homeward journey, to pass along that particular side of the Square. Yet he never spoke to anyone, and I was morally certain that no signal was ever made to him from any of the houses.
On the fourth day I noticed a slight fact. The ring on the top of the parrot’s cage was tied with a big bow of yellow ribbon. Three days later it was altered to dark blue. On the eighth day it had returned to yellow again.
Why these changes? Were they signals?
That night enemy aircraft crossed the south-east coast, but their attempts to reach London were defeated by the terrific fire of the anti-aircraft guns and by a swift concentration of our fighting aeroplanes, which broke up several successive squadrons, and sent the raiders hurrying home again.