“Only one, the man. He was in evening dress. Briggs suspected him from the first, but daren’t go against his master’s positive instructions. Briggs, the butler, says the man must have opened the door to his accomplice when he’d been sent off to bed with instructions not to answer any bell or telephone. The other was a beautiful young woman dressed just as she’d come from the Opera herself.”
“Who saw her if Briggs did not?” he demanded.
“They caught her,” Mrs. Kinney returned triumphantly, “and the arrest of her accomplice is expected any minute. They know who he is.”
Anthony Trent put down his untasted coffee.
“That’s interesting,” he commented. “Do they mention his name?”
“I don’t know as they did,” she replied. “I’ll go fetch the paper.”
He read it through with a deeper interest than he had ever taken in printed sheet before. Such was Guestwick’s importance that two columns had been devoted to him.
Mr. Guestwick on returning from the Opera was incensed to find none to let him in his own house. He was compelled to use a latchkey. The house was silent and unlighted. Mr. Guestwick, although a man of courage, felt the safety of his women folk would be better guarded if he called in a passing policeman. In the library they came face to face with crime.
There, standing at the closed safe, her skirt caught as the heavy doors had swung to, was a beautiful woman engaged as they came upon her in trying to tear off the imprisoning garments. Five minutes later and she would have escaped said police sapience.
Finger prints revealed her as a very well-known criminal known to the continental police as “The Countess.” She was one of a high-class gang which operated as a rule on the French and Italian Riviera, and owed its success to the ease with which it could assume the manners and customs of the aristocracy it planned to steal from. “The Countess,” for example, spoke English with a perfection of idiom and inflection that was unequaled by a foreigner. She was believed to come from an old family of Tuscany. Despite a rigid examination by the police she had declined to make any explanation. That, she told them, would be done in court.