“Is that all you know, my good lad?” Mason inquired quickly, giving him another shilling.
“Yus. That’s all I knows, sir,” he replied.
While speaking, the detective had kept his eye upon the booking-hall, and swiftly returned to it, only, however, to find that the woman was not there.
The descending lift was full, the lattice gates were closed and it had just started down when he peered within.
In the lift was Mrs Saxton, who, with a smile of triumph, disappeared from his view.
Mason, in a sorry and chastened frame of mind, took the next lift, which, as always happens under such circumstances, was unusually long in arriving. To him, it seemed an eternity.
He got down to the platform, in time to see the tail of a departing train. Mrs Saxton had not waited in the booking-hall in vain. She had two minutes’ start of him, and he might hunt London over before he would again find her.
Only one thing was certain: Mrs Saxton was certainly a very clever woman, who, no doubt, had prepared that very clever ruse of the arrival of the letter, well-knowing that the messenger must draw off the detective’s attention, and thus give her time to slip away.
That same evening James Farloe, who had been chatting in the Lobby of the House of Commons with a couple of Members of the Opposition, was suddenly called aside by Sir Archibald Turtrell, Member for North Canterbury, who, in a low, mysterious whisper, asked:
“Look here, Farloe, is this rumour true?”