Rayner, a shrewd, clever watcher himself, was up to every ruse in the science of keeping observation and remaining unseen. Yet he also failed to discover any one.
Therefore, one morning I left Carlos Place in a taxi and drove to King's Cross Station, where I alighted, paid the man, and went on to the main line departure platform. Thence I passed across to the arrival platform, so as to evade any pursuer, though no one had followed me to my knowledge, and then I drove down to Brentford.
Though still weak, I that afternoon accompanied the dainty little invalid down to Bournemouth, where I saw her comfortably installed with a very worthy family—a retired excise officer and his wife and daughter, living at Boscombe—and, after a night at the Bath Hotel, I returned to London to resume my investigations.
Through three days following I felt very unwell and unable to go out, the journey to Bournemouth having rather upset me in my weak state. Indeed, it was not before another week that one afternoon I alighted from a taxi at Holborn Circus and strolled leisurely down Hatton Garden in search of the watchmaker's Lola had indicated.
I found it with but little difficulty, about half-way down on the left-hand side.
A stranger passing along Hatton Garden, that dreary, rather mean street, leading from busy Holborn away to the poverty-stricken district of Saffron Hill, with its poor Italian denizens and its Italian church, would never dream that it contained all the chief wholesale dealers in precious stones in London. In that one street, hidden away in the safes of the various dealers, Jew and Gentile, are gems and pearls worth millions.
The houses are sombre, grimed, and old-fashioned, and there is an air of middle-class respectability about them which disguises from the stranger the real character of their contents. The very passers-by are for the most part shabby, though, now and then, one may see a well-dressed man enter or leave one of the houses let out in floors to the diamond dealers.
It is a street of experts, of men who pay thousands of pounds for a single stone, and who regard the little paper packets of glittering diamonds as the ordinary person would regard packets of seed-peas.
Many a shabby man with shiny coat, and rather down at heel, passing up the street, carries in his pocket, in a well-worn leathern wallet, diamonds, rubies or emeralds worth the proverbial king's ransom.
On that autumn afternoon the sun was shining brightly as I passed the house where "Gregory Vernon's" office was situated. Seldom, indeed, does the sun shine in Hatton Garden or in Saffron Hill, but when it does it brings gladness to the hearts of those sons and daughters of the sunny Italy, who are wearing out their lives in the vicinity. To them, born and bred in the fertile land where August is indeed the Lion Month, the sun is their very life. Alas! it comes to them so very seldom, but when it does, the women and children go forth into the streets bare-headed to enjoy the "bella giornata."