“We must get back to London somehow,” Harry said decisively. “Every moment we remain here increases our peril. They have our photographs at the Prefecture, remember, and here the police are pretty quick at making an arrest. We’re wanted, even now, for the Boulevard Magenta affair. A pity the Doctor hit the poor old chap so hard, wasn’t it?”
“A thousand pities. But the Doctor was always erratic—always in fear of too much noise being made. He knocked the old fellow down when there was really no necessity: a towel twisted around his mouth would have been quite as effectual, and the affair would not have assumed so ugly a phase as it afterwards did. No; you’re quite right, Harry, old chap; Paris is no place for us nowadays.”
“Ah!” Kinder sighed regretfully. “And yet we’ve had jolly good times here, haven’t we? And we’ve brought off some big things once or twice, until Latour and his cadaverous crowd became jealous of us, and gave us away that morning at the St. Lazare station, just when Roddy was working the confidence of those two American women. By Jove! we all had a narrow escape, and had to fly.”
“I remember. Two agents pounced upon me, but I managed to give them the slip and get away that night to Amiens. A good job for us,” the younger man added, “that Latour won’t have a chance to betray his friends for another fifteen years.”
“What! has he been lagged?” asked the horsey man as he bit the end off a cigar.
“Yes, for a nasty affair down at Marseilles. He was opening a banker’s safe—that was his speciality, you know—and he blundered.”
“Then I’m not sorry for him,” Kinder declared, crossing the room and looking out of the window into the busy thoroughfare below.
It was noon, on a bright May day, and the traffic over the granite setts in the Rue Lafayette was deafening, the huge steam trams snorting and clanging as they ascended the hill to the Gare du Nord.
Guy Bourne was endeavouring to solve a very serious financial difficulty. The three shabbily-furnished rooms in which they were was a small apartment which Roddy Redmayne, alias “The Mute,” alias Ward, alias Scott-Martin, and alias a dozen other names beside, had taken for a month, and were, truth to tell, the temporary headquarters of “The Mute’s” clever and daring gang of international thieves, who moved from city to city plying their profession.
They had been unlucky—as they were sometimes. Harry Kinder had succeeded in getting some jewellery two days before, only to discover to his chagrin that the diamonds were paste. He had seen them in a bad light, otherwise, expert that he was, he would never have touched them. He always left pearls religiously alone. There were far too many imitations, he declared. For three weeks the men had done themselves well in Paris, and spent a considerable amount in ingratiating themselves with certain English and American visitors who were there for the season. Kinder and Bourne worked the big hotels—the Grand, the Continental, and the Chatham, generally frequenting the American bar at the latter place each afternoon about four o’clock, on the keen lookout for English pigeons to pluck. This season, however, ill-luck seemed to constantly follow them, with the result that they had spent their money all to no purpose, and now found themselves with a large hotel bill, and without the wherewithal to discharge it.