An hour later he was in the slow train for Plymouth, and that night, the night of Wednesday, he was back in London.
At midnight he passed the house in Hertford Road, Bayswater. It was in darkness, but was evidently a place where apartments were let, quite a respectable house of the usual Bayswater type.
He slept at the Great Western Hotel at Paddington, without even a clean collar, be it said, and just before eleven o’clock next day he stood looking idly into a shop window in Westbourne Grove, at the corner of Hertford Road, pretending not to be interested in any passer-by.
At about a minute before eleven the mysterious Mr. Martin, smartly-dressed and walking jauntily, turned the corner behind Falconer, and passing up Hertford Road, rang at the door of the house which the young wireless engineer had examined on the previous night.
In a few seconds the door was opened by a maid, and Mr. Martin disappeared within.
A girl of about eighteen, who looked like a dressmaker from one of the several establishments in “The Grove,” was the only person in the road at the moment. Geoffrey noticed her. She was rather poorly-dressed, and seemed to be searching for some house, the description of which she did not recognise.
Gaining the corner of Westbourne Grove, she was met by a quietly-dressed, middle-aged man, to whom she spoke a few words hurriedly. The man replied, apparently telling her something. Then with a smile they parted, the girl going in the direction of Queen’s Road, and the man, who seemed to be an idler, calmly filling his pipe and lighting it as he stood at the junction of the two thoroughfares.
Geoffrey saw all this, but it did not strike him as in any way peculiar. In London many men meet girls at the corners of streets, speak a few words to them, and then pass on. There was nothing really unusual about the girl’s action.
Falconer’s chief concern at the moment was not to be recognised by the man who had, no doubt, watched him when coming over from Paris, where he had been on business for his company—the man who had taken alarm on seeing him down at Poldhu. For over an hour carefully he watched the door of that house in Hertford Road, taking every precaution that he was not observed from the windows. If anything sinister was in progress, then, no doubt, somebody would look forth to see that all was clear and that there was no watcher.
Half an hour after noon the door suddenly opened, when the mysterious Martin emerged, and passing out of the gate, turned back in the direction where Falconer was watching.