“I don’t know,” he answered dubiously. “She’s got a mind of her own, I can tell you. She’s a regular little spit-fire.”
The red-faced man laughed.
“Well, Jim,” he said. “You ought to know how to manage women, surely. Did my scheme work well?”
“Excellently. She got your ‘wire,’ and went to Earl’s Court at once. I followed and after a little persuasion she fell into the trap. While she was unconscious, I took the latch-key, and at half-past two let myself and old Erich into the house in Pembridge Gardens.”
“Well—did he find anything?”
“Yes. Griffin has taken photographic copies of the burnt papers, before giving them back into Farquhar’s hands, and from his copies of various early manuscripts of Ezekiel and Deuteronomy it’s quite plain that he is making a very careful and complete study.”
“It seems, then, that Griffin’s intention, is to discover the cipher for himself, and leave the ugly little Doctor out in the cold,” Sir Felix remarked with a snap. “But, Jim, this business is ours and nobody else’s. We must crush anybody and everybody, who attempts in any way to decipher that secret record. When the Dane brought it to me at the Ritz, in Paris, I laughed at the idea. Treasure-hunting was never in my line. But,” he added with a smile, “I took care to have a complete copy of his precious document made before I gave it back to him the next morning, and it is now in the safe over yonder. Like to see it?”
Jim Jannaway, the man who had on the previous night represented himself to be “Captain Wetherton,” the friend of Frank Farquhar, expressed eagerness to see it. Therefore the financier rose, and with the gold master-key upon his watch-chain, opened the heavy steel door, and handed his visitor a typed document bound in a dark green cover—a complete copy of the manuscript which Doctor Diamond had partly burned in that obscure hotel at the Gare du Nord.
The context of the half intelligible sentences was there—the context which Professor Griffin was longing to obtain. And moreover, as the man turned over the pages, reading swiftly, he came across a geometrical figure—a plan marked with numbers and corresponding explanations.
“Who made the discovery?” asked Jim Jannaway, late of His Majesty’s Army and now gambler, card-sharper, and swell-mobsman.