THE MYSTERY OF MASON’S ARMS

by Anthony Parsons

The amateur in crime is often a man of brains and education. He starts with a clean sheet and is unsuspected. He knows police methods, the latest scientific aids to detection, etc.

Planning a Trap.

THE assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard’s C.I.D. sat back wearily in his chair. He had begun to realise some little time ago that nothing more was likely to come out of this present conference than from the four which had already preceded it. For two hours past his Big Five had aired their separate views and argued their particular convictions, but from all the welter of talk and argument nothing concrete had emerged. Not one single idea upon which a new line of attack might be built.

Even Sexton Blake—that prince of private investigators—appeared to have nothing helpful to suggest.

Blake, an old friend of the department, had been specially co-opted to the meeting. He sat on the A.C.‘s right at the head of the table, and directly opposite him sat that Beau Brummel of the Yard, Superintendent Claudius Venner. Next the sooper was Inspector Grey, and next Grey was Chief Inspector Wilmington, who had handled the Sloane Gardens job. On Blake’s left were the three others of the Big Five—Raikes, Carmichael and Wilson. And over the entire conference hung an atmosphere of gloom and despondency.

The truth was that the Yard were up against it. Both Press and public were screaming for action—and there was no action. On the table lay the typed dossiers of six of the latest large-scale robberies that for months past had been hitting the headlines. Two of them had taken place in the country and four in town—and the six together involved the loss of jewels and furs to the value of over £100,000.

The A.C.‘s aim in calling this present conference had been to try to find some common factor that would at least afford them a line to start work on. It was impossible to believe that the thefts were isolated incidents—they were too big and too well planned for that. But whereas in any series of crimes committed by the same person or the same gang it is easy for the experienced men of the Yard to discern the same hand and the same characteristics in execution—each of these big robberies was entirely different both in method and in execution.

In short, there was no common factor. And because of that the Yard was completely stumped. The only discernible similarity was that each job was brilliantly planned, and carried out with such masterly skill that from none of them had the police been able to collect even as much as a single dab. They could find nothing whatever to go on.

“Well,” said Venner obstinately when at last the A.C. showed signs of applying the closure to the meeting. “I’m still convinced that we’ve got a master mind at work, sir. A master mind to do the planning, and a trained gang to carry out the actual jobs. Nothing else makes sense, that I can see.”

“And you, Blake?” the A.C. asked the private detective.

The Baker Street expert was silent for a moment. He, of course, had not had the advantage of the others of going over the scene of action at the time. He had seen nothing whatever of the crimes, so that his knowledge of the various affairs was entirely technical.

“But,” he said, having explained that difficulty, “for what it’s worth, Sir Edward, my own impression is that all these robberies are the work of amateurs.”

“Amateurs?” cried Venner incredulously. He glanced round the faces of his companions and laughed. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen their workmanship, Blake,” he said. “Why, Raffles himself couldn’t have done cleaner jobs.”

“But Raffles, if you remember, was also an amateur,” Blake reminded him dryly.

“I dare say he was, but you know what I mean,” Venner retorted. “Apart from which, where do you think these amateurs of yours would get rid of the stuff? A few might manage it, I suppose, here and there—Black Market, dishonest traders and the like. But, by and large, Blake, you know as well as I do that getting rid of the proceeds of a big jewellery theft is a thundering sight harder than stealing the stuff.”

“I do know,” agreed the detective. “And, for that reason I’m inclined to think that a clever fence is the brains and centre of this particular racket—but with this difference, That instead of employing profesional thieves he is using amateurs.”

“Why?” demanded Venner bluntly. “Why should be take that risk? Why would he employ bungling amateurs when there are plenty of expert professionals to be had for the paying? What craftsman would elect to work with blunt tools when he has sharp ones under his hand?”

“But these tools would not be blunt, Venner,” the private detective pointed out calmly. “Things have changed since the war, as you may have noticed. Open your paper any day of the week and what do you find? The amateur criminal of yesterday was generally a poor down-and-out who had been driven to crime through sheer necessity—but that is not so to-day. To-day, Venner, as your papers will show you, you will find people who a few years back you would never have dreamt of as potential criminals, all taking to the job like ducks to water. Officers of the Army and Navy, solicitors, accountants, men in big business positions, clergy, members of old county families—they’re the people who are taking to crime to-day—”

“Because under present-day conditions theirs is the necessity,” muttered the A.C.

“Yes—well, I don’t know about that,” the sooper argued. “And I don’t see what it has to do with the problem that’s facing us now.”

“It has this, sooper,” Blake explained, “It was intended to bring home to your consideration the fact that the amateur criminal of to-day is not, by a long chalk, the amateur criminal of yesterday. The amateur of to-day is more often than not a man of brains and education. He knows all about you people, how you work, the latest scientific aids to detection, and all the rest of it. He comes into the game armed at all points. He’s read a lot and he’s seen a lot. He’s a doughty opponent even for the brains of the Yard—and don’t forget that he starts with a good name, a solid social background and a clean sheet.”

“I grant you the clean sheet,” shrugged Venner.

“And that alone is an inestimable advantage,” nodded Blake. “There’s no one so difficult to catch as the ‘first-timer.’ You have no record of him. You don’t know him from Adam. In fact, by the time you do catch up with him he’s probably a ‘fifty-timer’—”

“And, consequently, gets off on probation!” growled the A.C. cynically.

“Exactly,” smiled Blake. “But in support of my amateur theory, gentlemen, here’s another point,” he went on. “The leopard can’t change his spots any more than the old hand can change its cunning. If these series of robberies had been carried out by expert thieves, I maintain that long before this you would have recognised some of the characteristics of those experts’ methods. You couldn’t have failed to, could you? And the fact that you haven’t, merely strengthens my conviction that the actual operators are all amateurs. You don’t know their work when you see it. You can’t, for the simple reason that you have no records of it.”

And when no one spoke:

“You, for example, chief inspector,” he went on with a glance, at Wilmington. “Show you a rifled safe, and in ten minutes you’ll be able to tell us who did the job. You’ll have recognised that particular thief’s work as plainly as though he had written his signature on the job.”

“M’m!” put in Raikes from beside him. “I’m beginning to think you’ve got something there, Blake, because it would explain another point about these robberies that has baffled us. As you know, whenever a big job is pulled, news of it soon comes over the grapevine. And it’s not often that our stool-pigeons miss picking up some detail or other. But in this case they’ve heard nothing. Not a word. And according to my information, that’s something which has disturbed the ‘regulars’ almost as much as it has ourselves. They’ve a hunch they’re being pushed out of business—in fact, I had that not so long ago in so many words from Flash Frankie!”

“Yes, but that could have been a blind,” growled Venner obstinately.

“Not from Flash Frankie, sooper,” Raikes smiled. “He hasn’t that much brain.” He glanced at the A.C., who had been listening intently. “I’m not sure, sir,” he said, “but that it mightn’t be worth our while to go further into this amateur theory.”

The A.C. rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

“I think so myself,” he conceded at last, “But how? That word ‘amateur’ could cover every living soul in the country who hasn’t actually been through our hands!”

“Oh, I don’t fancy the field is quite as wide as that, Sir Edward,” put in Blake. “My own feeling is that we could whittle it down to one particular class.”

“What class?” Venner asked suspiciously.

“Well, if any one fact sticks out from my reading of those dossiers,” said Blake, “it’s surely the fact that these people never make a mistake. At least, they don’t appear to have done so up to now.”

“No. But that’s because of the master mind behind the planning!” cried the sooper triumphantly. “That’s got nothing to do with your amateurs. That’s been my contention all along: we’re up against a master mind and a cursedly well-trained team of operators.”

“I don’t doubt that for one moment,” agreed the private detective. “But I would remind you that brainy amateurs would be far more easily trained than the common run of roughnecks in the underworld, And since you’ve failed to recognise the trade marks of any of the known criminals, that’s what he must have done, isn’t it?”

“Hear, hear!” supported Raikes, smiling benignly when Venner glared at him. “And the amateurs would be a darned sight safer to train, too, if you ask me—particularly if one happened to slip and we nailed him for questioning,” he went on cheerfully. “We’ve got the old hand by the shorts before we start—and he knows it. We’ve got his record and know all about him. But with one of your brand-new amateurs, especially if he happened to be a man of position, we’d have to go mighty carefully. And that’s something that he would know, and therefore find it fifty times easier to counter us.”

“And that’s true, too,” murmured the A.C.

“Well, no brand-new amateur ever had me by the shorts’!” boasted Venner violently.

“Except that these fellows seem to have you that way now, sooper,” smiled Blake.

“But I don’t agree that they are amateurs,” Venner came back at him obstinately. “That’s the whole of my contention—they’re not amateurs.”

“Well, consider this for a moment, then,” Blake suggested. “As I said just now—and as you agreed—these robberies have one and all gone without the slightest hitch. Each of them has gone like clockwork—”

“Planning!” shrugged the sooper. “Just as I said—the master mind at work.”

“All right,” said Blake, “though I don’t much care for your use of the phrase ‘master mind’—there isn’t such a thing. Let’s call it the controlling mind. I agree that some controlling mind is obviously behind the planning, but even before a controlling mind can plan it has got to be in possession of all the relevant and vital facts. Now, it’s unreasonable to suppose that even our controlling mind can be on sufficiently good terms with all these various people to have enabled him to wander around their houses prior to pulling the job, and in the course of conversation to worm from them all their secrets. He may have a wide circle of acquaintances, but not, I think, as wide as all this!”—tapping the six dossiers on the table.

The A.C. sat suddenly straighter in his chair.

“I’m beginning to understand your line now, Blake,” he said, and the snap in his voice was too marked to be overlooked. “You’re thinking in terms of the ‘Mayfair Playboys’ again, aren’t you?”

The private detective nodded.

“Something of that, yes,” he admitted. “Take, for example, this case of the Marchioness of Redland’s diamonds, She had the genuine necklace for big occasions, and an exact copy of it which she wore on minor occasions—and no one outside her immediate family was aware of the fact. Her family is comprised of three daughters, the youngest of whom is a this year’s debutante. All right. On the night of the robbery she wore the genuine necklace to a dinner at the American Embassy, leaving the copy in its case, together with the rest of her jewels, in her bedroom safe.

“Now, then,” said Blake, “along come the thieves, enter the bedroom window via a ladder while the staff are at supper and the three daughters out at a dance, open the safe, which was of the ‘salmon tin’ variety, and make a clean sweep of everything in it—barring only the case containing the copy of the famous necklace! And that they leave behind. Not only that, mark you, but they don’t even bother to open it to see what is inside! They’re not even interested enough to do that. They clean up jewels to the value of £10,000 and walk out, leaving that one particular case unopened. Well, why?”

“Obviously they knew in advance that only the copies were there,” shrugged Raikes, “They knew before they started out.”

“Yet no one outside the marchioness and her daughters was even aware of the existence of the copy,” reminded Blake.

“Servants!” snorted the sooper.

But Blake shook his head.

“The marchioness, in her evidence, says not—according to your own report,” he pointed out quickly. “And I think you can believe that. I know the marchioness, and, believe me, she can keep her own secrets. There isn’t even the lady’s’ maid so beloved of detective fiction writers. But the’re are, you will recall, three daughters—the youngest of whom is a this-year’s deb!”

“And they—or she—talked, you mean?” asked the A.C.

“I don’t think there’s a doubt of it, Sir Edward. We all know what debs are, and the pace they maintain in their first year ‘out.’ Parties every night—two and three some nights—rushing here and rushing there, dancing and dining with every eligible and ineligible young man in sight. Well, how easy for a man such as we have in mind to tap such a girl. Or maybe two or three of them, at different times, each after his own particular bit of information to add the sum total—and all without arousing the slightest suspicion in the girl’s mind. The same routine could be followed with older women—even with wives—and they would neither remark it at the time nor remember it afterwards.”

The A.C. nodded his understanding. And now there was a faint flush visible upon his sallow cheeks.

“And you think these same men are doing the actual robberies?”

“I see no reason why they shouldn’t be,” shrugged Sexton Blake. “After all, who would be better equipped for the job? They have courage, you know; and to live the kind of life they aim to live they must have money. My own idea is that you will find this gang—if it is a gang—recruited from among the penurious younger sons of cadet branches of well-known families. Young men who haven’t the money to enjoy the full social whirl but are content to hang around on the fringes, doing their stuff and earning their meals by being always on tap for society functions where young men may be in short supply. They are generally quite charming people—they have to be, because that is their sole asset and their sole passport to the houses of the great. And always there is the chance—however remote—of making a wealthy marriage. Another thing is this: most of them will have served in the war, the great majority as officers, and they will be used to taking risks. Maybe even like taking risks.”

The A.C. nodded again.

“You’re certainly building up a theory now, Blake,” he said thoughtfully. “And it’s a fact that every one of these robberies has taken place at the house of someone in Society, or, at least, on the fringe of it. And such men as you describe would be equally welcome in either sphere, I suppose.”

“In this year of grace—with the Queen’s first court and the coronation, and so forth—they would simply be lapped up,” smiled Blake. “And with every house in Mayfair, Kensington, and places west throwing parties and dances, with proud mommas wearing every jewel they possess and their debutante daughter draped in the family pearls, and what have you, and with crowds of young people making nightly whoopee until dawn—what a chance for our enterprising controlling mind to step in and make a magnificent cleanup all round!”

“Are you trying to frighten me?” grinned the A.C., now thoroughly pleased with the picture Blake presented.

“No, sir!” laughed Blake. “But I’ll bet I’m right, all the same.”

“Then what do you suggest we do about it?”

“Keep watch, Sir Edward. And when the next robbery occurs, bear in mind what I have said.”

Sir Edward folded up the dossiers and rose. His mind was made up.

“I’m going to do more than that, Blake,” he said. “When the next occurs, I’m going to have you in on it from the start, always assuming that you’re agreeable? What do you say?”

Sexton Blake thought for several minutes before he replied.

“Very well,” he said at last. “I should like that, Sir Edward. And it occurs to me that I might put out some ground bait in the meantime. I have a certain young lady who assists me at times—a young lady who in her own right has the entree everywhere and is much sought after by the younger set. I think that—”

“You mean Lady Emily Westomholme?” interrupted Venner, who had a notorious weakness for that extremely charming young lady.

“The Lady Emily Westomholme,” nodded Sexton Blake.

Venner chuckled. Quite suddenly all his ill humour was gone. With Sexton Blake at work and the Lady Emily around, he had little doubt but that the problem would be solved somehow. And if in the solving of it Superintendent Claudius Venner could not catch some of the rain of kudos upon his own noble shoulders—well, it would be the first time in their long association that he had failed to do so?

“That’s right, Blake,” he enthused. “It’ll be putting the cat among the pigeons with a vengeance, once the Lady Emily starts operations. And if by chance she should happen to be on the spot when the next robbery is pulled off—right in the house, I mean—”

“You want jam on it, sooper!” was all Blake said to that.

Yet even as he spoke, he thought that with a spot of intelligent anticipation of coming events, even that might not be beyond the bounds of possibility. At any rate, before he left the Yard, he had rung Emily at her home and asked her to meet him at the Baker Street residence in half an hour’s time.

And that, when presently he returned there himself, was where he found her. She was sitting elegantly upon the arm of his favourite chair, with a beaming Tinker in close attendance.

“Sexton Blake!” cried Emily on the instant, springing up to give him both her hands. “It can’t he true that you want me again, after all this time?”

Her eyes were alight with something that was more than eagerness at the prospect of being employed again. Something that caused Tinker to give his inevitable snort—though the private detective, in his usual blind way where women were concerned, saw nothing.

“I’m glad you could come, Emily,” he said in his cool, detached manner. “Although I’m afraid, if I’m wrong in my theory, that you’re going to have rather a boring time of it.”

She shook her head, her eyes searching his face—as if any work for him could ever be boring. She waited a moment or two, hoping that he would say that he liked her new hair style, or her suit, or even herself. But when he said nothing, merely stood smiling down at her, she released his hands and became instantly practical.

“What’s the job, my friend?”

Blake stepped over to the hearth and she walked beside him, her head on a level with his shoulder, her long, slinky length moving with the ease and grace of perfect poise and health.

Emily Westomholme, scion of an old and famous family, looked exactly what she was—a thoroughbred. And she was a beauty, too—with her vivid, widely spaced eyes, her delicately chiselled nose, and her firm, generous mouth. Ex-Wren, she had met Blake some few years before, since then he had called her in upon several occasions where a case demanded feminine assistance. And although she was wealthy in her own right, with an assured place in Society, she yet preferred the life of adventure and thrills with which her acquaintance with Blake afforded her. To her, he was the greatest detective on earth, and the cleverest man she had ever known. He represented everything that she herself would have liked to be had Nature created her a man instead of a woman. She loved his utter imperturbability in the face of success and failure alike. His thoughtful silences were to her more eloquent than the most impassioned rhetoric of lesser men.

And he did not even see her! She knew that. To him she was just another cog in the wheel.

She asked him again what was the job,

“Well, it isn’t a job—at the moment, at any rate—as much as a watching brief,” he said. And went on to explain why he had been called into conference by the Assistant Commissioner and all that had transpired at that conference.

“So that’s what’s beating ‘em, is it?” Tinker asked at the end of it all. “I wondered what they could be wanting you for when there’s nothing broken just recently. Do you reckon old Venner’s right—about the Master Mind stuff, I mean?”

“Well, I think there must be a controlling mind somewhere,” Blake agreed, “And I’m equally sure that whoever he is, he’s not appearing personally in the affair. I should say myself that he’s lying low somewhere, and that these young men report to him from time to time.”

“Then if we could follow those,” suggested Emily, “and watch where they went to—”

“But you wouldn’t know which to follow,” Tinker reminded her. “You don’t know who they are.”

“No, I know,” retorted Emily. “But if I followed several of them—a whole lot of them—and found that even two or three were going frequently to the same address—”

“Yes, you might get a line in that way,” Blake conceded, “but it would be precious slow work, I’m afraid. I think myself that it would be better, Emily, if you attended every dance and function that’s going on and just kept your eyes and ears open.”

“Listening and looking for—what, my friend?”

“That’s the rub,” smiled Blake. “I don’t know, But I think if you single out the hostesses owning the most jewellery and furs, and then watched for any young man or men who appeared to be making a dead set at the daughters, or even the lady herself, I think if we had a collection of all their names it might be something to start work on. I’m thinking this way,” he went on when she would have interrupted him,. “If we had such a list of what you might call suspects, it would be interesting to check up with previous victims as to which—if any—had been around their own places either at the time of, or prior to, the theft of their stuff.”

“Yes,” said Emily. “And also follow all the men on that list and hope for a slip some time?”

“Quite!” acknowledged Blake, “If you passed such suspects to us, Tinker and I could watch them for a while. I think it’s about time they pulled another job soon—somewhere.”

They talked it over for an hour or more, and finally Emily went off to survey the social scene and decide where first she would start her fishing.

A week later, as she confessed to Blake; she was jest about half dead from los nights and lack of sleep. But she kept on at it, and from time to time supplied Blake with a fresh list of her appointments so that he could keep tabs on her movements.

And then—it was nearly three weeks later—the Unknown struck again.

Blake’s first intimation came over the telephone from Scotland Yard. It was close on two o’clock in the morning, and Tinker ran down in his dressing-gown to take the call.

“Venner here, Tinker!” came the sooper’s triumphant voice. “Where’s Blake?”

“In bed,” said Tinker. “Why?”

“Get him out then!” cried the sooper, obviously in high fettle. “Get him out and dressed and into a car—there’s been another robbery, Tinker. But this time somebody’s slipped and given us our chance. It isn’t only robbery, this time—it’s murder!”

“Where?” snapped Tinker.

“Lord Rune’s place in Stanhope Gate! Get a move on, now, and I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay!”

Tinker clapped down the receiver and flew upstairs. He found Blake already out of bed and starting to dress.

“Is it it?” he asked, the instant Tinker appeared.

“Robbery—and murder as well!” Tinker cried. “At Lord Rune’s place, Stanhope Gate, Venner’ll meet us there.”

“Get dressed then!”

Blake finished his own dressing and ran downstairs. From behind a vase on the mantelpiece he took Emily’s card and ran his eye swiftly down the list of her engagements.

“Any hope?” Tinker asked, as he bustled in, pulling on his jacket as he came.

“Yes, she’s there!” grinned Blake triumphantly. “So that’s the first gift from Lady Luck to us. Come on!”

Blank.

VENNER had been wrong in describing the house as “Lord Rune’s place.” It was not. It was one of the famous houses, like Londonderry House nearby, that could be hired for private parties. So much Blake discovered before he entered the building.

The rest came later.

Venner met them in the hall.

“Nasty business, this,” he greeted them. “Better come up first and have a look at the body.”

“Do you know who it is?” Blake asked.

“Yes, He’s Aubrey Bramer—son of Colonel the Honourable Gerald Bramer, D.S.O. recently deceased. This way!”

He led them across the hall and up the magnificent staircase into a room that at first glance looked like a fur coat shop. There appeared to be literally hundreds of them hanging on “shoulders” all round the walls. There was a constable in the room standing by a woman who looked to he a maid of some kind and whose face was the colour of wet chalk. Even as Blake saw her, she sank down half-fainting into a chair.

Then he saw the body on the floor, with a man he recognised as a police surgeon standing beside it.

“Dead?” he asked perfunctorily.

“As a doornail,” said the doctor. “Shot through the heart with what I imagine to have been a .45 automatic. I haven’t moved him.”

Blake knelt down and turned the body on to its back.

“Good gad—what’s that?” goggled the sooper, staring at the obviously false moustache that was hanging half-loose from the dead man’s upper lip.

“I understand they ware having a play or something down below, sir, when it happened,” volunteered the constable from behind them. “I guess that’s part of his make-up.”

“Oh!”

Blake glanced at the still reddening patch on the man’s shirt-front. He was in full evening dress, white tie and tails—and there was no doubt at all but that he had been shot clean through the heart with a heavy calibre bullet. He was a fair young man good-looking even in death, about twenty-six or seven, Blake estimated, and from the condition of his hands and the quality of his clothes, plainly a gentleman.

“The weapon?” Blake asked, looking round the floor.

“There is none,” the doctor said. “At least, there was none when I arrived—nor had anyone seen one.”

Tinker touched Blake’s shoulder and pointed to a small round hole in the plaster above the door.

“The bullet’s in there, for a cert!” he said. And turning back to the window: “Looks as if he must have been shot from that direction—if it’s open.”

Venner went over there and looked at the catch.

“Closed, but not locked,” he reported. Blake joined him, and pulled the heavy brocade curtain farther back. Outside was a small, iron-railed veranda overlooking what appeared to be a kind of side passage to the back of the house. “That’s the answer,” said Venner. “The killer must have been standing on the veranda there, with the window open, and got him as he came in.”

“We’ll look into that later.” Blake released the curtain and turned back into the room, eyeing the fur coats questioningly. “Anything missing?” he asked.

“Only about £41,000 worth of mink!” Venner said. “Evidently it was fur coat night to-night!”

“Who’s the woman yonder?”

“Sort of cloakroom attendant, hired for the night,” Venner explained. “The whole house has been hired by Lord Rune for this ‘coming-out’ party, you understand. She was in the next room when it happened—or so she says. Through that door there—that’s the toilette. She was in charge of that as well.”

The door in question was in the centre of one of the walls. Blake pushed it open and glanced inside. It was fitted with about a dozen washbowls, dressing-tables and the like, and the usual accessories of such a place. There were brushes, combs, powderbowls and so forth, and over all a strong smell of mixed perfumes.

“Does she know anything about it?” he asked Venner.

“I don’t know. I haven’t asked her yet. She was in a dead faint when I arrived.”

Blake glanced at the woman speculatively. So far as appearances went, she did not seem much better now. She looked to be a woman of about fifty, fat and heavy, with grey hair and swollen ankles. He walked across to where she was sitting slumped in a chair.

“Can you tell me anything about this?” he asked.

The woman looked up at him. She began to cry weakly.

“I don’t know anything,” she wailed. “I was in here, cleaning up the bowls. When I came back again I found—him lying there. I don’t remember anything else.”

“Did you hear anything? A shot, for instance?”

“No, I never heard nothing. I was cleaning the washbowls and changing the towels. They get that wet, you wouldn’t believe.”

“You mean, someone had been using them recently?”

“Oh, yes. Seven or eight young ladies came up after the last dance. They always do, when a dance is finished. There’s a big crowd, down there to-night. It’s hot. They come up to powder their noses and that like.”

“Had they gone again before you went in there?”

“Yes. I waited for ‘em to go. Then I went in to clean up after ‘em.”

“So that there was no one in either of these two rooms except yourself.”

“No, there wasn’t. But I didn’t kill him—” she was beginning in sudden panic.

“Of course you didn’t!” Blake soothed her with a smile. “Was that door closed “—nodding towards the outer door—“when you went into the toilette?”

“Yes. It was always shut, except for when anybody came in to use the toilette.”

“How about the window? Was that open—or shut?”

“It was open at the top, to let the air in.”

And the curtains drawn tightly?”

She thought for a moment.

“No,” she said then, “I remember opening them a bit to let more air in. It got stuffy in here as the night went on.”

“And you heard nothing suspicious out there? Nothing at all?” Blake asked. She shook her head, and began to cry again. It was plain that she was suffering badly from shock. Evidently the police surgeon thought the same, for it was he who suggested sending her home in one of the police cars.

“I’ll give her a sedative,” he told Blake. “You can talk to her again in the morning, if it’s necessary.”

Blake’s eyes met Venner’s, and he nodded. He doubted if in any event she had anything worth while to tell them. He took the sooper aside and told him that Emily was in the house somewhere.

“Though while we’re here,” he added, “we’ll treat her as though we don’t know her. Once anyone suspects the connection between us, her usefulness will be gone.”

“Yes, of course.” Venner glanced to where the doctor was helping the cloakroom woman to her feet. “She could be the kingpin in this you know,” he said under his breath. “But somehow I don’t think she is.”

“Nor do I,” agreed Blake. “Though you might keep tabs on her for a few days, all the same. We’ll have to check up on her in any event.” Suddenly he spoke again to the woman, just as the doctor and she reached the door into the passage. “By the way,” he asked, “just one other question before you go. Have you any idea how long you were in the toilette—I mean, from the time you left this room until the time you came back and found the body?”

“I don’t know,” the woman said weakly. “Ten minutes, p’r’aps. A quarter of an hour. Enough to clean all the bowls and straighten up the dressing-tables, anyway.”

Blake thanked her and let her go.

“Well,” he said to Venner, “I suppose we’d better have a word with Lord Rune next?”

“I told him to stand by,” the sooper nodded, “And nobody’s left the house, by the way, since the alarm was given.”

“Who gave the alarm?”

“A couple of girls who came up to the toilette, so Lord Rune told me. I forget their names, but he knows them.”

They stood for a few seconds contemplating the dead man. Then Blake stooped swiftly and went through his pockets. He found the usual oddments—a silver cigarette case, a lighter, spare handkerchief, ten-and-eightpence in loose cash, and a wallet containing six pound notes, three ten-shilling notes, and membership cards of about half a dozen different night clubs. The body itself was still at practically normal temperature. He agreed with the doctor that death had taken place within the last hour.

“Looks like you were right about your ‘Mayfair Playboys’ being behind all this business?” Venner suggested. “Though I’m hanged if I can see quite where?”

“Nor can I, at the moment,” the detective mused, his eyes straying to the window and from there to the bullet-hole in the plaster above the door. “What we really want to know is what he was doing up here, anyhow. There are no men’s coats here.”

“Unless he came up to get a woman’s coat and caught the thieves red-handed?” suggested Tinker. “That’s what it looks like to me. They were getting away with the goods, through the window, when he opened the door there and caught ‘em. And they let him have it.”

“With a silenced revolver,” mused Blake.

“Must have been.”

“Though they’ve never used violence before,” Venner said a bit dubiously.

“I dare say they haven’t,” retorted Tinker. “But that’s not to say they haven’t been prepared to dish it out if ever they found themselves cornered.”

“In which event this young man’s death isn’t going to tell us anything,” said Sexton Blake.

“Not even that you were right in your ‘Mayfair Playboys’ theory,” added the sooper, quick to catch the implication of that latter remark. “If he just walked in here for some quite innocent purpose and was bumped off merely for what he saw—”

Blake pulled himself together.

“Let’s find out why he did come up here!” he decided, “It’s no use trying to form theories until we’ve learned all the available facts. Let’s see Lord Rune.”

Leaving the constable in charge, they returned down the wide staircase to find a tall, spare man, with greying hair, Lord Rune himself, engaged in anxious conversation with his wife and three young ladies in the hall. They broke up immediately they saw the police party coming down the stairs, and after but the briefest hesitation Lord Rune stepped forward to meet them.

“Well?” he asked a bit shakily.

Venner introduced Sexton Blake and his assistant, and the three shook hands.

“This is a dreadful business, Mr. Blake,” Lord Rune said, “And I’m afraid there’s absolutely nothing either I or my wife can tell you about it. The first intimation we had that anything was wrong was when Lady Willan and Miss Dacre yonder came screaming down the stairs shouting that a man was lying dead in the cloakroom. And when I rushed up there, that is what I found—poor Aubrey Bramer lying in a pool of blood, with the cloakroom attendant stretched out all her length on the floor not far away. I immediately rang the police and a doctor—but your own man arrived first.”

“Did you touch the body?” Blake asked him.

“Only sufficiently to assure myself that he was indeed dead,” Lord Rune replied. “Then my wife and I set about trying to revive the woman—and we were still working on her when the superintendent and his men arrived. The rest you know.”

Blake nodded.

“You knew the dead man, I take it?” he asked.

“Oh, quite well. He has been in and out of my house for some time now—a nice boy, I thought him. He was one of my daughter’s friends, you understand. He was a member of our party to-night; now he’s dead. It’s too dreadful to contemplate.”

“This is your daughter’s party, I understand?” Blake asked.

“My daughter, Helen—yes,” the other replied. “Her coming-out party. Now this—poor child!”

Blake nodded his understanding, It was indeed tough on the young lady, he thought, to have murder mixed with her first party.

“I understand the dead man was taking part in some theatricals or something, Lord Rune?”

“Yes, that is so. A one-act play they were putting on. I don’t myself understand much about these things, but Helen is keen on amateur dramatics, and since my son is a member of this particular society, they decided to give a little show. That, indeed, by the most bizarre of chances, is how Aubrey happened to be up there when the thieves shot him.”

“Oh?” asked Blake, his voice suddenly taut.

“But Miss Deane can tell you more about that than I,” said Lord Rune. “She is with my wife now; I thought perhaps you would prefer to hear her for yourselves.” He turned as he spoke. “Susie!” he called.

One of the young ladies detached herself reluctantly from Lady Rune’s side and came across to where they were standing. She was a fair, rather pretty girl, of some twenty-two or three years of age—but she was sheet-white now and had obviously been crying. She looked scared stiff, Blake thought.

“Susie,” Lord Rune said, “these gentlemen would like to know how Aubrey came to be upstairs in the ladies’ cloakroom?”

Susie dabbed at her lips with a handkerchief. Then:

“It’s all my fault!” she broke out suddenly on a high, almost hysterical note, “I killed him! If I hadn’t been such a little fool—”

“Wait a moment, Miss Deane,” Blake smiled kindly, “I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that. Take it easy for a moment, then try to tell me exactly what happened.”

Miss Deane gulped, and turned away. After a minute or two she turned back again, and swallowed—hard.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you. You see, I was in the play to-night. Aubrey and I belong to the same society, but this would have been the first time I’ve ever done anything in public, and I suppose I—I had stage-fright. Anyway, while we were waiting in the wings for our cue, I quite suddenly seemed to forget every word I had to say. I panicked. I couldn’t think of a thing. I felt in my handbag for my lines—and they weren’t there!”

Miss Deane paused again.

“I felt dreadful,” she went on presently. “I knew I was going to let everybody down. Then Aubrey asked me if I were feeling ill, and I told him what had happened. I’d left my lines in my coat pocket and I couldn’t remember a word of what I had to say. Aubrey looked at his watch. Said we still had eight minutes before we had to go on. ‘Where is your coat?’ he asked, and I told him. ‘Be a darling, Aubrey,’ I begged him, ‘and fetch them for me. My coat is Number 209,’ and he hurried off. And now he’s dead!” she wailed. “And I killed him. If I hadn’t sent him up there we’d have—done our play and—”

She could not go on. She broke down again. And as Lady Rune hurried across to throw a protecting arm round the sobbing girl’s shoulders, Blake nodded and moved away.

So that was the way of it? Aubrey Bramer had gone up to the ladies’ cloakroom to retrieve the lines of her part from Susie Deane’s coat pocket—and instead had walked straight into a bullet and his death.

“But at least it pin-points the time of the shooting,” Venner said. “If she had eight minutes to go before she went on, the producer ought to be able to tell us from that exactly what time it was when Bramer went up there. They have these things timed to the minute, don’t they?”

“They do with professionals,” Blake shrugged. “I don’t know about amateurs.” He turned to Tinker, and lowering his voice: “Nip up and have a look in the pockets of the coat hanging on Number 209 peg,” he said. “See if her lines are there. We may as well check up as we go.”

Tinker went back up the stairs, and Blake spoke again to Lord Rune. He asked if he might have a word with the two young ladies who had found the body, and Lord Rune beckoned them across.

“Lady Willan More,” he introduced them briefly. “And Miss Dacre. Mr. Sexton Blake.”

Blake bowed his acknowledgments. Neither of them looked to be more than twenty-two, and their joint story was soon told. They had been helping Bobby—Lord Rune’s son—with the stage effects, and having got pretty dirty in the process had rushed upstairs to wash their hands.

“But when we opened the cloakroom door,” said Miss Dacre with a shudder, “the first thing we saw was a man lying in a pool of blood and the cloakroom attendant also apparently dead.”

“You saw nothing else?” Blake asked. “No sign of an assailant, for example? No one at the window, perhaps?”

The two girls looked at each other, and it soon transpired that neither of them had stopped to look at anything else! The sight they had seen was more than enough for them—they turned tail and bolted.

“We just ran yelling into the ballroom,” said Lady Wiliam “It wasn’t until afterwards that we learned that it was Aubrey who had been killed.”

“And then everybody began yammering about their mink coats!” shuddered Miss Deane. “Positively indecent, I call it—with poor Aubrey lying there dead.”

“They knew there had been a robbery?” Blake asked quickly.

The young Lady Willan gave a grim smile. She was modern, Blake saw, and emotionally pretty tough.

“They did as soon as my respected aunt found that her own coat was missing!” she said. “That was the first thing she thought of, and the first thing she rushed up to make sure about. I should tell you that the old hag worships that moth-eaten mink coat of hers—‘remains of rude magnificence,’ as the family calls it. I’ll bet anything you like she’s got it insured for a couple of thousand, and I’ll swear it isn’t worth a couple of hundred. She’s had it for about fifty years!”

“And that gave the alarm, I suppose?” Blake asked.

“A better word would be ‘mink-rush,’” shrugged the Lady Willan with a nice sense of humour. “Headed by Molly Grandcourt—though hers really was a beauty, I grant her that much. Not insured, either, so she tells me. Personally, I haven’t got a mink—not even one tail. Our family’s been broke for generations: I can’t even get one on credit. So I wasn’t interested.”

“Did you know Mr. Bramer very well Lady Willan?”

“Who—Aubrey?” asked the girl, elevating her aristocratic brows. “I’ve met him round and about, you know, that’s all. Why?”

“Just routine,” smiled Blake, thanking them for their information.

He turned to Lord Rune, who had been listening with something of a frown. Plainly he was puzzled by the emphasis being laid on the dead man rather than upon his assailants.

Blake took him upon one side.

“I’m afraid you’re not going to like this much, Lord Rune,” he told him with a wry smile. “But, believe me, it is necessary under the circumstances—otherwise I would not suggest such a step. How many guests have you here to-night?”

“Well,” said Lord Rune, “three hundred were invited, but I imagine there are nearer five hundred actually here. People bring their friends along, you know, and others bring their entire party. And others again just drift in. You know how it is.”

“Then they are not all personal friends of yours, or of your family?”

Lord Rune laughed shortly.

“I can’t speak for my family,” he said, “but I myself don’t know the half of them—particularly the younger people.”

“Then you won’t object to my taking their names and addresses?”

“Oh, I say—” the other was beginning, but Blake stopped him with a gesture.

“Believe me, it’s entirely necessary, Lord Rune. I understand that no one has left since the dead man was found.”

“No,” the other admitted. “I had the doors closed myself and a man posted at each. That was before we realised that there had been a robbery as well as a murder.”

“You knew it was murder, then?”

‘Well, I could see he hadn’t shot himself, Mr. Blake. There was no weapon. And my idea was to keep the murderer in the house until the police arrived. But since, as we know now, we’ve had thieves in the place, plainly my precaution was unnecessary. I take it we’ve been visited by the same gang that is responsible for these other spectacular thefts, and that young Bramer was shot because, having caught them red-handed, he would be in a position to identify them.”

“It could be so,” Blake nodded. “Probably was. Then you have no objection to my taking the names and addresses of everyone present?” he asked, when the other said nothing.

“On the contrary, I’ve every possible objection,” shrugged Lord Rune. “But I also realise that there’s nothing I can do about it. When will you start?”

“With your kind permission—right away,” said Blake. “As soon as we can find paper and pens, that is.”

“I’ll have them brought to you.”

Lord Rune walked away, and Blake turned to his sooper.

“This last might be useful in the future,” he said under his breath. “If I’m right in my ‘Mayfair Playboys’ theory, some at least of them must be here to-night. Well?” he asked, as Tinker joined them from upstairs.

Tinker nodded.

“I found the lines,” he reported. “Here they are. They were in her coat pocket, just as she said.”

He handed over a folded manuscript, and turning his back, Blake glanced at it swiftly. It was typewritten, and was plainly just what the girl had said—her part in some playlet entitled “Homeward Bound.”

“Okay,” he said briefly, as he returned it. “Put it back just as you found it, Tinker.”

Venner asked how his fingerprint men were getting on up there, and Tinker replied that they were finished.

“But they’ve drawn absolutely blank on the window, sooper,” he added. “There isn’t a dab on it anywhere, and it hasn’t been wiped, either.”

“Then how did that woman open it at the top?” Venner flashed back.

“It has cords and handles, sooper—and her dabs are on both handles. At least, we take them to be hers, since the same dabs are all over the place. But the thieves would have had to open it from the outside, so obviously they were wearing gloves.”

Venner had not really expected anything else, in view of the gang’s previous record. There was, however, just the chance that in the flurry of having to shoot Bramer, their exit might not have been so careful as usual. However, it seemed that not even murder could throw that lot out of their stride!

“The ambulance is outside as well,” said Tinker. “The photographer’s finished, so they might as well take him off now, mightn’t they?”

Venner looked interrogatively at Blake, who nodded.

“Yes, let them take him!” he said. “And leave word for Belford, when he arrives, to get out beneath that window and look for the ladder the swine used. There’ll be one around somewhere, you bet!”

Essential Details.

“LOOKS like a page out of ‘Debrett,’ doesn’t it?” Venner whispered out of the corner of his mouth as Blake and he looked over Sgt. Crocombe’s shoulder at the steadily growing list he was writing.

Lord Rune’s guests were passing slowly one by one past the sergeant’s table—all the men in white ties and tails and the girls in white dresses of every conceivable style and cut. Some of them giggled as they gave their names: others spoke as though under duress, and still others contemptuously. One or two looked distinctly scared—but that could mean anything or nothing. As a precautionary measure, however, Sgt. Crocombe had instructions to put a full-stop after the names of all those exhibiting such symptoms and also after the names of those who appeared over-bold about giving their names!

“Here’s Emily!” Venner whispered suddenly as he spotted that young lady coming up in the queue. She was talking to a longhaired young man of immaculate appearance and most assured bearing. “Who the heck’s he?” muttered the sooper darkly.

“Viscount Moresby,” said Blake—and it was so.

“Lady Emily Westomholme,” said Emily in her turn—and had to spell it because Crocombe wrote it as she pronounced it—“Westum.” And when Crocombe had muttered a flustered apology, she gave her address and passed on with never a glance either at Blake or the sooper.

“I wonder if she’s got anything for us?” Venner mused, as his eyes followed her to the door.

“She’ll be at Baker Street, anyway, by the time we get back,” Blake told him confidently.

“Walter Prothero,” said a voice at the table.

Blake swung back, and stared. Prothero! One of the best-known producers in Town! As Crocombe wrote steadily on, the baldheaded little man looked up and their eyes met.

“Why, hallo, Blake!” called Prothero.

Blake nodded, and beckoned him over.

“Superintendent Venner of the C.I.D.,” he introduced the sooper when they had shaken hands. “This is the famous Walter Prothero, sooper,” he smiled.

Venner grinned. Even he had heard of Walter Prothero—in spite of a complete lack of interest in matters theatrical.

“Horrible business—this,” the producer said, lowering his voice. “Aubrey Bramer was one of my most promising men.”

“Eh?” gasped Blake.

“In the show we were getting on tonight,” Prothero explained, “Aubrey Bramer. The man you found shot.”

Blake drew a long breath.

“Heavens above!” he got out in his astonishment. “You mean—you were producing this show to-night, Prothero? You!”

The bald-headed little man shrugged eloquent shoulders.

“Didn’t they tell you?” he asked. “I’ve been producing them for a year or more now.”

“You!” Blake got out again. “Producing amateurs?”

Prothero glanced round the room.

“I dare say it does sound odd, to you, Blake,” he said. “Not that I don’t like it, I do. I’d rather produce performing fleas than nothing. But between ourselves, there’s method in the maestro’s madness, so to speak. I do them a good turn, and in return they fill my theatre with the wealth and beauty of the cream of Society. What would you? With these people at my finger-ends I’m never under the necessity of hiring big names to give me a first-night send-off. I can have an earl or a viscount in every box—and paying at that! And big names still count with Londoners, even in these levelling days!”

“Well, I’m hanged?” said Sexton Blake. “Well, that’s the last thing I ever expected to find you doing, Prothero—producing amateurs. Who are they, for heaven’s sake?”

“They call themselves ‘The Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society,’ and we give shows for charity and so forth: you know the kind of thing. Like to-night, for instance. We were putting on a little thing entitled ‘Homeward Bound.’ Not at all bad, either. Our host’s son is a member of the society, incidentally. Here!” He felt in pocket and brought out a printed programme. “Look at my cast,” he said with a twinkle. “Reads like a page out of the Court Circular, what? And, believe me, Blake, odd as it seems, these people are not without talent. One or two of them, in fact, could quite easily make names for themselves on the legitimate stage. I’m not a bit ashamed of any of them.”

“Two lords, a viscount, an earl, and three barts.,” read Blake aloud. He turned the programme over and gave a “phew” of amazement. “I’ve never even heard of these people,” he said.

“The Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society?” asked Prothero. “You will, though, take it from me, Blake. They’re really good. Though I don’t know that tonight’s publicity is going to do anything to help us,” he added on a graver note. “I hear poor Bramer had still got his false moustache stuck on when you found him? The papers are bound to get hold of that, I suppose? Who did it, anyway? Have you got any clues?”

“Not yet, Mr. Prothero,” Venner cut in, in his best official manner. “But we soon shall have. We soon shall have. We have our suspicions right now.”

“Well, I’m glad of that, superintendent. I liked young Bramer—he was intelligent. A good actor, too.”

“How about this girl, Susie Deane?” Blake asked.

Prothero shook his head.

“Well, of course, you can never be absolutely certain of amateurs, Blake,” he said. “But I was certainly surprised when I heard what had happened-I mean about her getting into a panic and sending poor Aubrey Bramer up there to fetch her lines. Somehow, I never had that impression of her. I’ve always considercd her to be the opposite, in fact—almost stolid, so to speak. Of course, it was her first part in public, and that makes a difference, naturally. Still, as I say, I was surprised. Though it makes you think, all the same,” he added. “It’s odd to reflect upon what slender threads our fates depend.”

“It does indeed,” murmured Blake, his eyes still on the programme. “She was quite hysterical when I saw her. Kept on saying that it was she who had killed him. That if she hadn’t caught stage-fright and forgotten her lines, she would never have sent him up there and he would have been alive now—sort of thing.”

“Well, it shows you how wrong even an experienced producer can be upon occasions,” shrugged Prothero. “I should have said Susie Deane was the last person in the world to have hysteria, no matter what the disaster she had to face. Odd, isn’t it, how mistaken one can be?”

“I’m afraid we get a lot of such oddities in our profession,” Blake smiled. Is she a good actress?”

“Yes, she is,” said Prothero. “In fact, she’s one of those I mentioned who give every sign of being able to make a name for themselves on the real stage. At least, that was the opinion I had formed of her—until to-night’s unfortunate affair. Now, of course, I’m not so sure.”

Blake was silent for a while, apparently pondering that. Though what there was to ponder over in the hysterics or otherwise of Susie Deane, Venner failed entirely to see. This was a murder investigation—not a theatrical post-mortem!

“What about that timing, Blake?” he reminded the private detective.

“Oh, yes!” Blake pulled himself up with a jerk. “That’s one thing you may be able to settle for us, Prothero,” he said. “What time was your show due to open to-night?”

“At one o’clock—immediately after supper,” the producer replied promptly.

“And did it start at that time?”

“Exactly at one.”

“And do you work to as rigid a time-table as in the theatre?”

Prothero grinned.

“We do,” he said. “And it’s the most difficult lesson they’ve had to learn. Truth is, Blake, these Society people lack discipline; or even any sense of discipline. I’ve had literally to knock it into their understandings with a hammer and chisel. They don’t seem able to realise how split-second timing means all the difference between putting over a witty line with a bang, or letting it off like a damp squib. Why?”

Blake explained about the dead man having looked at his watch and remarked that they had eight minutes to go before Susie and he were due to go on.

“What time, approximately, would it have been then?” he asked.

Prothero took from his pocket what was evidently his “running time.” check of the action of the play.

“I can tell you that easily,” he said, as he ran a well-manicured fingernail down the line of figures. “We were dead on time right up to the moment when that screaming broke out at the back of the hall—here you are, look!” he pointed out, showing the paper to the detectives. “‘Marigold and Julian’—that’s Susie Deane and Aubrey Bramen-1.18 1/2. So if they still had eight minutes to go, it would have been 1.10 1/2 when Aubrey went upstairs to fetch Susie her lines. Ten and a half minutes past one. That do you?”

“Fine!” said Blake. And thanking the famous producer for his assistance he hurried off in search of Susie Deane. He found her without difficulty, lying back in an easy-chair—very pale and wan—in the care of Lady Rune Herself.

“Just one question, Lady Rune,” he smiled when she would have forbidden him to harass the girl any more. “Where exactly were you standing, Miss Deane, when Aubrey Bramer left you to fetch your lines? And which way did he go?”

Susie looked at him for a moment before replying and remembering what Prothero had said about the girl, Blake wondered afresh at the way she was allowing herself to be affected by what, after all, could by no stretch of imagination be considered her fault. In fact, she was more than upset—she was downright scared! He could read it in her eyes and in the way she was trying to hold her lips steady.

“Well?” he asked into the silence.

“I—don’t know,” she got out at last. “I mean—we were standing on the prompt side because we—made our entrance from that side. And Aubrey went out through that—that door in the ballroom that’s just there,” she said, turning to Lady Rune. “That’s all I—can tell you.”

Lady Rune patted her shoulder.

“That’s all you need to tell, my dear,” she said in her motherly fashion. “I can explain the rest–if it’s so necessary,” she added with a hostile glance at the detective.

She took him to the other side of the room.

“If Aubrey used that door, Mr. Blake,” she explained, “as he must have done if they were standing on that side of the room, he would have followed the passage that leads straight into the hall, and so upstairs to the cloakroom.”

“And the passage would have been empty, I suppose, at that particular time, Lady Rune?”

“Yes, quite. Everyone was in the ballroom listening to the play—including the servants. They were all at the back, you understand?”

“Thank you.”

Blake left them and went out into the hall, where he found Tinker in close conversation with Venner. The sooper turned as the detective came up.

“They’ve found the ladder, Blake,” he announced. “Complete with sacking round the top to deaden the noise when they reared it up against the balcony. That’s the first time they’ve ever left that behind, so it could be that the murder’s rattled ‘em more than we thought. And in that case, there’s a chance they may have slipped up in one or two other little matters.”

Blake asked where they had found the ladder, and Tinker said it had been lying on the ground, alongside the house, and about thirty yards from the window. It was in the entrance to what had once been the stables of the house, but which had now been converted into the usual mews.

“On the cobblestones immediately below the window,” he added, “we found a few fresh oil droppings, guv’nor. So it’s pretty certain they had a car or a van down there waiting for the loot. There are people living in the mews, I gather, so it’s on the cards, if anybody was up that late, we might be able to get a description of whatever they did use.”

“We’ll pull a toothcomb through that place as soon as it’s light,” promised the sooper.

Blake told them what he had just heard from Susie Deane.

“I want you to try it, Tinker,” he told his assistant, and see how long it takes. Bramer wouldn’t have run, I imagine, in view of having to go on the stage so soon. But he wouldn’t have lost any time even so.”

They went back to the ballroom which was now beginning to wear that “morning after the night before” look; with the last of the weary guests filing past Sergeant Crocombe’s table—and the sergeant looking even more weary than they! Writing down nearly five hundred names and addresses is no light task.

The stage had been set up at the far end of the room, and the scenery and effects were just as they had been when the screamings of Lady Willan and Miss Dacre had put such an abrupt period to the show. Even the footlights were still burning to add to the macabreness of the scene.

“That’ll be the door then,” said Blake, crossing to the prompt side. And opening it, he found the passage exactly as Lady Rune had described. “Right!” he said. And taking out his watch, Tinker got off for the cloakroom at a good fast walk.

Five minutes later he was back again.

“Two minutes eight seconds dead,” he announced. “That is from here to the spot where the body was lying. And if I lived in a place this size,” he grinned, “I reckon I’d have a light railway installed. Heck, what a barn!”

Blake made a swift calculation.

“Well, assuming that Prothero’s accurate,” he said, “Aubrey Bramer must have met his death between twelve and thirteen minutes past one—which lines up nicely with the medical evidence. And it must have been very shortly after that, that the car or van or whatever it was, pulled out with the loot. Which should give you a chance, Venner, if only we can get a description of the vehicle. They could only have gone either up or down the road after pulling out of the mews.”

Venner nodded. That was true enough so far as it went, but he had not much hope.

“Ten pounds to a penny we shall find it abandoned somewhere,” he gloomed. “And you can bet it will have been stolen anyhow.”

He asked Tinker what the constable was doing up in the cloakroom.

“He’s pretty well through,” Tinker reported. “That constable up there’s been having the time of his life dishing out fur coats to shuddering damsels. Quite the lady’s maid, in fact.”

“Well, it’s nice to know somebody’s enjoying himself!” muttered the sooper more gloomily still. “What I want to know is, what I’m going to put into my preliminary report to the A.C. As far as I can make out, all we’ve discovered so far is that Bramer was killed between twelve and thirteen minutes past one o’clock, with a .45 automatic. And that somebody unknown has got away with £40,000 worth of mink coats. That don’t seem much for a night’s work—or does it?” he asked more hopefully when Blake said nothing.

“I don’t know.” The private detective was staring across the ballroom to where the last of the guests were just going out. He saw Sergeant Crocombe rise stiffly to his feet and begin the collection of his lists of names and addresses. And beyond the open door, he saw Lord Rune and his younger daughter shaking hands with their departing friends and—no doubt—apologising for the tragedy that had so unexpectedly cut short their enjoyment.

“I don’t know,” he mused again. “But I’ve got an uncomfortable feeling back of my mind, sooper, that things might not be quite what they seem.”

“No?” Venner suddenly became alert.

“No,” said Blake, his eyes still on the departing guests.

Venner coughed

“Well,” he said, automatically hedging in his usual face-saving technique. ” Well, of course,” he said, “there are one or two points that I’m not so happy about myself, Blake.”

“Such as what, sooper?” inquired Tinker innocently.

Venner ignored him.

“Just one or two points, Blake—” He stopped and assumed an air of grave dubiety. “One or two points,” he said again. “Small, perhaps, but—”

“That journey of Bramer’s to the cloakroom?” Blake asked.

Venner breathed again.

“That’s one of them,” he admitted. “Bramer’s journey to the cloakroom has had me worried from the start. There’s something about that journey of Bramer’s to the cloakroom—”

“It could be that Emily might be able to help us there,” mused the detective aloud.

“Just what I was about to suggest!” beamed Venner. He had not the remotest idea what Blake was talking about, but it was seldom indeed that Claudius Venner was caught out in his ignorance. “You’ve taken the words right out of my mouth!” he said. “Funny how you and I always seem to get the same ideas, Blake.”

“I could suggest a better word than ‘funny’ for that phenomenon, sooper!” grinned Tinker mockingly from the background. But again Blake seemed to be unaware of the by-play.

“Let’s go!” he said, And they went.

Lady Emily’s Observations.

THEY found the Lady Emily awaiting them in the Baker Street flat. She was, in fact comfortably ensconced in Blake’s chair, with the remains of coffee and a light meal beside her, and in process of being entertained by an elephantine bundle of red flannel and lace which, upon closer acquaintance, proved to be the redoubtable Mrs. Bardell in her dressing-gown, Blake’s housekeeper, indeed, had been asleep for several hours when Emily’s persistent ringing awakened her. Whereupon, knowing that the menfolk were out, Mrs. Bardell had arisen purposefully from her chaste couch, thrown her dressing-gown around her, picked up a poker from the hearth, and with her curl-papers rattling grimly had sallied downstairs to hold the fort against their return.

However, when she perceived who was standing there, the poker was quickly deposited in the hall stand while Emily was gathered with more ardour than comfort in the lady’s capacious bosom. For “Lady Emily” was easily Number One on Mrs. Bardell’s list of favourites, and she was never so happy as when clucking round the girl like a large, fat, friendly hen.

“I’m sorry we’re late, Emily,” Blake was beginning as he entered the room—but that was as far as he got. For Mrs. Bardell, turning, had espied her particular bete noir in the shape of Claudius Venner, and upon him she proceeded to pour the vials of her wrath for keeping that “poor little flower of a ladyship ” out of her bed.

“Though of course,” she added, clutching her dressing-gown around her as though it were a Roman toga, “‘ad I know’d as you were in the party, I wouldn’t have bin surprised. If that Consistent Admissioner of yours knew ‘is job, he’d have ‘ung you years ago!” And out she went, all her chins in the air and her curl-papers rattling haughtily.

“Nighty-night, Heartbreak!” Venner, called after her. And to Emily: “She’s secretly in love with me, you know,” he explained.

Tinker produced cigarettes and they lit up.

“A bad business to-night, Emily,” Blake said as he filled his pipe. “But before we have your story, I’ll tell you briefly what we’ve done”—and beginning with the call from Venner, he related everything exactly as it had happened. “Now then,” he said at the end of it all, “how does that line up with what you actually saw of the proceedings yourself?”

Emily said that it lined up exactly.

“You knew from the list I gave you that I was there?” she asked. And when Blake nodded: “I was in two minds about going, to begin with,” she admitted, “because obviously there could be no jewel raid as the party was in progress, since the house was hired for the occasion and the only jewels in the building would be those on their wearer’s persons—and I didn’t suppose there would be a hold-up for those! In fact, it was not until I heard of the play they were giving that I began to think. And doubly so when I saw the chairs being brought into the ballroom and realised that every soul in the place, including the servants, were going to be gathered together in that one room for half an hour or more!”

“And then?” nodded Blake, eyeing her with an approval that brought a warm flush to her cheeks.

“Suddenly I thought of the other things this gang appear to specialise in stealing. Furs!” said Emily.

Blake again nodded his appreciation. “Good girl,” he said “And then?”

“I made an excuse to go up there, and have a look round.”

“Do you, by any chance, know the woman who was in attendance?” Blake interrupted.

Emily said that she knew her quite well. Her name was Mrs. Sutton, and she worked for an agency who supplied extra staff for big house parties and so on.

“You think she’s all right then?”

“I don’t think there’s a doubt of it,” Emily said. “She’s been doing that work for years round the West End. As a matter of fact, I wondered where she would stand in the event of a raid, because I soon saw there was anything between £35,000 and £40,000 worth of excellent mink fur in that room. And it was plain that in the event of a raid the thieves would have to settle with Mrs. Sutton first. Still, with the window shut and fastened, and the curtains drawn—”

“You looked at that?” Blake asked sharply.

“Yes,” Emily said, “just after midnight. When I went up after the shooting, I noticed that the window was open and the curtains half drawn—but you say that Mrs. Sutton had opened it?”

“For air,” nodded Blake. “Later we’ll ‘check up on what time she did that. It could be important. But go on, Emily!”

“Well, I think it was thought of Mrs. Sutton alone there that finally decided me to take up my stand in the hall while the play was in progress—because I’d already decided that if anything was going to happen, it would certainly happen while everybody was in this ballroom. It occurred to me that with the door of the cloakroom closed, nobody downstairs would be able to hear the poor woman even though she screamed her head off. But I would be able to hear her, down in the hall, and at the same time keep an eye on the guests in case any of them should belong to the gang and be playing the part of inside collaborator—”

“That’s the stuff, Emily!” applauded Venner warmly. “We could do with you at the Yard, my dear.”

“Hands off, sooper!” growled Tinker. “Emily graduated out of the Yard class years ago.”

“Go on, Emily,” nodded Blake. “So you waited in the hall?”

“To be exact, in the dining-room,” Emily said. “I found that by leaving the door an inch ajar, and standing in the darkness, I could see the whole of the hall and the front entrance, as well as the stairs up to the bend.”

“And then?”

“I’d been waiting about ten minutes after the play started when I heard someone approaching from the passage which runs along the side of the ballroom—the one you spoke of just now. The house was very quiet then, you appreciate, with everyone listening to the play; and it seemsd to me that whoever was coming was in something of a hurry. I had already envisaged one of your ‘Mayfair Playboys,’ naturally,” Emily smiled. “And when I saw Aubrey Bramer enter the hall, wearing that silly moustache thing, I was absolutely certain of it—because I knew he had a part in the play, and I couldn’t see what on earth he would be doing there unless he was going upstairs. Of course, I didn’t know about Susie Deane’s missing ‘lines’ then—”

“Just a minute, Emily,” Blake interrupted. “Do you know this Aubrey Bramer at all?”

“Oh, yes,” Emily said. “In the sense that I’ve talked and danced with him, and all that. As a matter of fact, what really riveted my interest in him—then—was that I realised be was just the type of ‘Mayfair Playboy’ you had in mind when you formed your theory about these robberies. He’s just another of the more or less penniless but still socially presentable young men who hang round the West End scene. The type you meet at every party and in every night club. Hangers on, if you like—ready to dance until dawn and make themselves pleasant for the price of a meal and a few drinks.”

“Go on!” said Blake again.

“Well, as I say, there he was coming swiftly across the hall,” Emily repeated. “And I could see even then that he was headed for the stairs. ‘He’s going to deal with Mrs. Sutton and open the window for the gang!” I thought in a flash. And when he paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs, and looked back towards the ballroom, I was sure of it.”

“You’re quite certain that he paused at the foot of the stairs and looked back?” Blake asked—and suddenly there was an unexpected snap in his voice. “It’s important, Emily,” he emphasised before she could answer. “It’s probably the most important part of your story.”

“Eh?” gaped Venner. But no one answered him. Emily was looking at Blake, and suddenly she rose.

“I’ll show you,” She said. “Imagine that door is the foot Of the stairs and that I’m Aubrey.”

She walked swiftly across the room, reached out for an imaginary balustrade, half turned, gave a sweeping glance round the room, and then lifted her foot as though to start up the stairs.

“It was exactly like that,” she said, returning to her chair. “And with that speed and timing.”

“Excellent!” exclaimed Sexton Blake with a quite astonishing enthusiasm. “That’s splendid, Emily. I’m immensely grateful to you. What happened then?”

Emily sat down with shining eyes.

“Well, I’m awfully glad to have been of help,” she said a mite unsteadily. “Though I confess I can’t see why—since we know now that he was merely going to get Susie Deane’s lines from her coat pocket.”

“I know,” smiled Blake. “But never mind that. What happened next?”

“Well,” said Emily, “I was still in two minds whether to go up after him or not—since it would have meant betraying myself, which I thought you wouldn’t want me to do unless in an urgent neccessity—when the whole thing was taken out of my hands by the appearance of Wilan More and the Dacre girl. They were holding their hands in front of them, away from their dresses, I mean, and I realised they were going up to wash after helping with the scenery and so forth. I’d seen them working at it before I left the ballroom, so I knew what had happened. ‘My golly!” I thought. ‘They’ll catch Aubrey red-handed’—and when they started screaming immediately they reached the cloakroom, I took it for granted that they had!”

“You didn’t show yourself then?” Blake asked anxiously.

“No,” she said. “There was no need since—as I thought—he was trapped anyhow! I remained where I was even when they came racing down the stairs again, screaming their silly heads off. And it was not until I heard them yelling ‘Murder! Murder!” in the ballroom and saw Lord Rune and Lady Rune come tearing out and go madly up the stairs, that I realised something was even more wrong than I had supposed. Later, of course, when I learned what really had happened, I perceived that it was not Aubrey who had been caught red-handed—but Aubrey who had caught the thieves red-handed and been shot down for his pains.”

“Which brings us neatly back to where we started,” commented the sooper gloomily. “You didn’t hear the shot, of course? Or that attendant screaming and falling down?”

“Nothing at all,” Emily replied.

“Well, how long do you estimate it was between the time Bramer went upstairs and the two girls followed him?” Blake asked.

Emily thought for a while.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “It’s difficult to say—I was thinking. But, looking back, I can’t believe that it could have been more than a mere minute or two. Three minutes at the very outside.”

“Yet in that time the murderer—or murderers—must have closed the window again, climbed down their ladder, most probably removed it—although unfortunately no one thought of looking out to see—and for all we know to the contrary have got into their car and been on the way out,” muttered Venner. “I don’t get that Blake.”

“It was certainly quick work,” agreed the detective. “But I rather think they had taken what they wanted and were already on their way out when Bramer entered the cloakroom. In that event, it would have been just the work of a moment to plug him and disappear down the ladder. Or, of course,” he added, after a moment of silence, “they may have been waiting for him.”

“Waiting for him?” echoed Venner. And when the private detective said nothing: “But that’s crackers, man!” he cried. “How could they have been waiting for him? They couldn’t possibly have known that he would be coming?”

“Are you sure of that, Venner?”

“Sure?” repeated the sooper. “Well, of course I’m sure! That’s if—”

“Quite!” smiled Blake in his quiet fashion when the sooper paused. “That’s if Susie Deane’s story about her lines is true. But is it true?”

“Well, for heaven’s sake!” Venner exclaimed. “We checked on that, didn’t we? Tinker found the paper just where she said it was—in her coat pocket.”

“I know. But that could easily have been their excuse for Bramer going up there, don’t you think?”

Venner rose.

“Oh, dammit all, Blake!” he protested. “Don’t go making more difficulties than we’ve already got. Why on earth should you think that? Why on earth do you want to start half-a-dozen red herrings across what up to now is a perfectly clear trail?”

“Because I think it happens to be the truth, sooper.”

“What—”

“Or why did Bramer turn round at the foot of the stairs? What need was there for him to do that, unless he wanted to make sure that he was not observed? Would you have thought to turn round, had you been sent on that very simple and innocuous mission? Why should you? What did it matter if fifty people saw you? And don’t forget that you were in a hurry.”

Venner shook his head impatiently. “Look here, Blake!” he demanded. “What exactly are you getting at?”

“The truth,” shrugged Blake. And when the sooper merely stood staring: “For example,” he said, you heard for yourself, Venner, what Prothero told us about that girl. Her hysteria surprised him. He had never taken her to be the hysterical kind—he said so.”

“But dash it all, Blake—she’d sent that fellow to his death! At least she thought she had. She’d seen him lying there dead—”

“No, she hadn’t!” Blake denied on the instant. “She hadn’t been up there. I agree with you that she had received a shock—that was inevitable under the circumstances. But that shock would not have scared her as she was so obviously scared to-night. Shock may, and often does, induce hysteria. But it doesn’t induce fear.”

Venner gave a gesture of impatience.

“You’re flogging a theory now, Blake,” he said. “You’re determined to have this Bramer fellow one of your ‘Mayfair Playboys’—that’s the trouble with you. You can’t accept the facts as they are, you’ve got to twist them round until by hook or crook they’ll fit your pet theory. And it’s all wrong. You haven’t a single shred of evidence to prove that she hadn’t left her lines up there—or that she didn’t, on the spur of the moment, send Bramer up to get them for her. In fact, we know that she had left them up there!”

“Very well,” smiled Blake. “Then let’s leave it at that, sooper. In fact, we must leave it for it’s already gone four o’clock. You’d better stay the night here, Emily,” he went on. “Mrs. Bardell will fix you up. Oh, and by the way, are you any good at amateur dramatics?

“Have you ever done anything in that direction?”

“Well, not since I left school. Except for a few concerts we used to get up in the Wrens,” she said. “Why?”

“You ought to take it up again,” was all Blake said to that. “We must see what we can arrange. I think it would be a good idea if you approached Prothero.”

“Prothero!” exclaimed Venner.

“Well, he produces the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society, doesn’t he?” Sexton Blake asked blandly. “Indeed, he told us himself how good they were.”

“But hell’s bells; Blake—surely you’re not suspecting a man in Prothero’s position—”

“I’m not suspecting Prothero of anything at all, my dear fellow,” Blake hastened to assure him. “On the contrary I have the very highest respect for Prothero both as a man and a producer.”

And as he turned to knock out his pipe: “That,” he added with a shrug, “is why he could provide such excellent cover.”

Sexton Blake’s Theory.

THE Baker Street menage breakfasted late the following morning, and had company. Hours before, it appeared, Mrs. Bardell had telephoned Emily’s maid to bring round suitable clothes for her ladyship; so that when eventually Emily did appear she was wearing a very smart suit of some old gold material in which, as Tinker promptly told her, she looked “smahinger than smashing.”

“Thank you, sir,” bowed Emily, her eyes on Sexton Blake.

“And if I were a rich man, Emily, I should marry you,” added Tinker, as he served her with eggs and bacon from the sideboard.

“I’d much rather you helped me to coffee, my sweet!” said Emily.

Blake, after a first greeting, fell into one of his long silences. Plainly he was pondering the events of the night before, and he appeared in no wise surprised when presently the telephone rang.

“Venner for a sovereign!” he said, brisking up on the instant. “And if I were a betting man, I’d take rather less than evens on the chance of his having found another body!”

“Another one?” Emily exclaimed.

“And a ‘Mayfair Playboy,’ at that,” nodded Blake a trifle grimly. “He won’t like it, I’m afraid, but I can see no other solution to last night’s affair.”

Tinker spoke from the telephone.

“The sooper, guv’nor!” he grinned.

“I thought so.” Blake went over there and took the instrument himself. “Hallo, Venner,” he said. “Blake speaking. Who is it this time?”

There was a moment of silence. Then:

“Who in heck told you?” demanded the sooper.

“Nobody,” the private detective returned blandly, “I was just betting on it. Where did you find him?”

“You’d better come round here,” Venner grunted. “All hell’s popping in the next room,” he added under his breath by way of explanation. “The A.C. will be chewing his carpet soon.”

“Okay! I’ll be round in ten minutes, sooper.” Blake rang off and turned to Emily. “We shall have to go round to the Yard,” he told her. “Things are warming up, I gather. If you’ve nothing better to do, Emily, I’d like you to wait here until I ring you. I may want some information.”

“Of course,” agreed Emily at once.

Arrived at the Yard, the Baker Street experts took the lift to Venner’s office where they found the great man pacing his room like a caged tiger.

He eyed them with a hostile suspicion as they entered.

“What’s the game, Blake?” he demanded without any preamble. “what are you keeping up your sleeve in this affair? I thought we were supposed to be working together on it?”

“So we are, so far as I’m concerned,” the private detective answered, mildly surprised by the other’s vehemence. “You know the theory I’m working on; and if you accept that, it follows automatically that when—and if—you found the vehicle used by the thieves to remove the furs, you would like as not find another body on your hands. Obviously someone had to be driving the thing! Bramer’s task—at most would have consisted only in throwing the coats through the window—though I doubt if he would have had even that much assigned to him. His job was to silence the attendant and open the window for his pals. But go on, sooper! Let’s have the dope?”

Venner muttered something under his breath. He was tired and furious with himself for not having at least mentioned this “Mayfair Playboy” business when the A.C. sent for him. But he had been so sure that Blake was merely up to his old game of making everything seem more difficult than it was. He never could accept a straight line of evidence! He always did have to go round the back and dig out something else.

“Well, we found the van, just after it was light this morning!” he grumbled. “Abandoned, of course, just as I said it would be.”

“A caterer’s van, sooper?”

Venner swore. He dashed down the paper he was holding and eyed Blake red-faced and furious across his desk.

“Look here, Blake!” he snarled. “You’re working behind my back. Who’s the stooge you’ve got here in the Yard? Who’s spilling the beans?”

Sexton Blake laughed.

“Sit down and have a cigarette, Venner,” he said. “And for heaven’s sake use your head, man! Haven’t you realised even yet that these people leave nothing to chance? Do you think they’re going to leave a Rolls in a mews entry for the first inquisitive copper on the beat to stop and question?! Wouldn’t you look twice at a car standing in the shadows of a house which you knew had been hired for the purpose of chucking a posh party? Wouldn’t you have stepped along to the driver and asked him what he was doing?”

And when Venner remained obstinately silent:

“The only vehicle that would arouse no suspicion at all in those particular circumstances would be a caterer’s van—by preference a van bearing the name and style of the actual people who were doing the job. And I’ve no doubt it would even have a few trays of sandwiches and the like inside which it had come to deliver in response to a frantic telephone message that the party was running short. And if an inquisitive copper did pause to investigate, you can bet that the driver would have had a few wry comments to make upon the appetites of these bloomin’ lords and ladies. And the copper would have agreed with him—and perhaps even have accepted a sandwich from the tray the driver pulled out preparatory to carrying into the house—”

“Oh, I give up” stormed Venner. “It’s easy enough to be wise after the event, but I don’t remember your saying anything about catering vans last night!”

“I hadn’t got around to it,” shrugged Blake. “And, anyway, you didn’t like my theory one little bit, as I remember things, Venner. Anyway, whose was the body you found?”

The sooper swallowed—hard—lit a cigarette and sat down at his desk.

“All right,” he said, making a valiant effort to regain his temper. “Forget it!” He picked up the report he had made out. “Here are the facts,” he said.

“At seven-fifty-eight this morning, a constable on the beat noticed a van bearing the name ‘Meyerling & Co., Caterers, 54, High Street, Walham Green’ standing unattended in a side street off the King’s Road, Chelsea. He didn’t take much notice of it then, but when he came back again at a quarter-past nine, and found it still there—and still unattended—he rang his station and reported it. The station sergeant rang the firm concerned, and they promptly reported the van as having been stolen.

“Okay. The constable stood by while Meyerlings sent round a driver to collect it. The constable told him to open it up—just in case—and the man did. Inside were some half-dozen trays of sandwiches and small cakes. And on the floor beneath them a pile of bakers’ sacking—the kind of stuff they spread over such trays to keep the food clean. The driver pulled it out, in case anything was hidden underneath. It was. Underneath was the body of what at first appeared to have been the driver of the van, because he was wearing a brown linen coat with the name of the firm on its lapels. He’d been bashed on the head from behind. He must have died instantaneously. The constable asked the other driver if he knew him, but the driver said he had never seen the fellow in his life before. Certainly he was not one of Meyerling’s men.

“Well, the constable locked the van again, pocketed the key, and at once reported that to his station. They communicated with us, and we collected the van—it’s outside in the yard now. Meanwhile, we’d communicated with Meyerlings and they’d sent their staff manager round to have a look at the dead man. But he could only confirm what the driver had already told us—that he was a complete stranger and was certainly not working for Meyerlings, in spite of the fact that he was wearing their uniform. The real driver of that particular van had turned up for work in the ordinary way this morning, only to find his van missing. That’s when Meyerlings first realised that anything had happened and, in fact, rang up and informed the Yard.”

“Were Meyerlings the caterers for the party last night?” Blake asked.

“Yes,” Venner admitted sourly. “I rang Lord Rune, and he said they were.”

“And the dead man in the van—have you identified him yet?”

Venner shook his head.

“But judging by his manicured hands,” be admitted reluctantly, “he could be one of these cursed ‘Mayfair Playboys’ of yours—in spite of his working clothes and all the rest of it.”

“Anything on him, sooper?”

“Handkerchief, fags and matches—that’s all.”

“No driving licence?” Blake asked sharply. “Surely they wouldn’t risk—”

“They didn’t!” the sooper cut him short in the same wry fashion. He picked up a licence from the desk beside him and pitched it over into Blake’s lap. “That’s the licence we found on him—no, we’ve already tried it for dabs, you needn’t bother about that,” he added when the detective would have handled it gingerly. “But, of course, there weren’t any,” he shrugged.

Blake opened it and looked inside. It was issued in the name of “Thomas Matthews” at a Battersea address.

“Dead, of course?” the detective remarked as he flicked it back again.

“Six months ago,” nodded Venner. “The old racket.”

Blake rose.

“Well,” he said “the sooner we get this fellow identified, the better, sooper. And if you think he may be a Mayfairite, I suggest we get Lady Emily over to have a look at him. She knows most of them.”

“Okay!” said Venner offhandedly.

“Did you get anything from any of the people in those mews, by the way?”

Venner shook his head. Belford had been on that job, he said, but no one appeared to have been up so late. At any rate, no one had any information to offer.

“Then I’ll ring Emily.”

Blake did so, asking her to come round to the mortuary at Cannon Row. Then they went over there themselves. The dead man proved to have been a fairly hefty specimen—blond, not bad looking, well-nourished, and about twenty-five years of age. His manicured hands were in strange contrast to the roughness of the clothes he was wearing—and that roughness extended even to his socks, shoes, and underwear, Blake noticed with a faint feeling of admiration. They certainly left nothing to chance, he reflected—not for the first time since he had been engaged upon this case. There was un- doubtedly a first-class brain behind the show somewhere!

“But their hands give them away every time,” he remarked to Tinker. “And always will—because manifestly they must have well-kept hands for doing their stuff socially, no matter how desirable it would be to have rough hands for the other side of their activities. Looks as though even the master mind can’t find an answer to that one,” he grinned with a sidelong glance at Venner.

Then Lady Emily arrived—like a ray of golden sunshine in a lousy world, as Venner was moved to admit. And one glance at the dead face solved all their problems.

“Good heavens, it’s Jack Devereux!” she exclaimed.

“Who is Jack Devereux?” smiled Blake.

“Why, his father was old General Devereux—Sir Henry Devereux, K.C.I.E., and so on. You remember him, surely? He was killed three or four years ago, out in Kenya. Fell into a dry river bed or something while out hunting lions. Broke his neck, I think it was.”

“Any money?” asked Blake.

“You mean the old man?” Emily shook her head. “Only his pension, I think. The Devereux crowd were never rich—they were too wild. Jack there had nothing, anyway.”

“On a par with Aubrey Brammer then?”

“Just the same,” Emily said. “There are dozens and dozens of them hanging round the West End.”

“And if he were a member of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society?” mused Blake.

“Even the sooper’ll have to get his ideas reorganised in that event!” grinned Tinker wickedly.

“Ha, ha, ha!” grimaced the sooper. “Joke! But since you people appear to know everything—or think you do—assuming that these precious ‘Mayfair Playboys’ are indeed behind all these robberies, would someone have the goodness to inform me how they’ve suddenly started to massacre themselves? If they continue at this rate, we shall have the entire breed wiped out in less than a month.”

Blake was examining the back of the dead man’s head, and did not reply. Devereux had manifestly been struck down with a loaded sock or a piece of lead piping swathed in flannel; for although his skull was smashed in there was no blood visible. The body itself was cold, and rigor mortis almost wholly complete, which indicated that death must have occurred not less than eight hours ago. From other indications Blake was inclined to put it at nearer twelve hours—which meant that he had been killed somewhere around midnight of last night.

Drawing the sheet over the man’s head again, he turned to Venner.

“Shall we have a look at that van now?” he suggested.

“If you like. We’ve already tested it for dabs—so it’s all yours,” shrugged the sooper.

Blake asked if the van was closed. And upon being told that it was, he asked for how long it had been closed.

Venner stared at him.

“Search me,” he said. “I don’t know. Ever since the dabs people went over it, I suppose. And that would be a couple of hours ago.”

“It may be sufficient,” was all Blake said to that.

They found the van in the yard—its sides bearing the name and address of the Meyerling firm exactly as Venner had described. The plug key was still in the lock of the rear door, but before he touched it, Blake asked Emily to step nearer. Then he turned the key and opened the door.

“Smell anything?” he asked as they both put their heads inside.

“Perfume?” said Emily. “Quite strongly,” she added when she had sniffed again.

“The fur coats,” nodded Blake. “Beyond a doubt, this is the van that was used to carry them away. I expect if we made a careful search of the interior we should find a few hairs as additional proof.”

“March ones, I should think!” chortled the sooper, looking round quickly for the applause which was not forthcoming. When eventually the Lady Emily did smile it was only out of the kindness of her heart.

“Though that’s interesting about the perfume,” he added brazenly. “I thought of that right off, but I’ve got a cold and can’t smell anything at all—and although Belford took a sniff or two he wouldn’t know perfume from a pole-cat!” And again Mr. Venner chuckled at his own wit.

But he was no fool—the sooper. And already be could see where he had gone wrong in suggesting that the ‘Mayfair Playboys’ seemed to be wiping themselves out—they weren’t. They were being wiped out by somebody else.

There were two gangs in the racket! And if ever Venner had seen gang-warfare in the making, he knew he was seeing it now.

“This,” he said, and suddenly he spoke with authority. “This is hi-jacking, Blake, on the old American scale. One gang is planning these robberies, and a second gang is stepping in at the last moment and scooping the pool. Am I right?”

“I think you’re dead right, sooper,” said Sexton Blake. “And that’s why Lady Emily here is going to join the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society.”

“But hell’s bells, Blake,” the sooper protested. “You must be wrong about that, man! Half the blessed peerage are members of that—you saw that programme last night!”

“Yes, but right there is the cunning of the set-up, sooper,” the private detective pointed out. “Let’s go back to your office, and I’ll tell you what I mean. Yes, you come, too, Emily,” he added, when Lady Emily hesitated. “It’s essential that you should understand this business, as I see it, from the bottom upwards, before you take on the part that I’m afraid only you can play.”

They took the lift; and arrived at the office Venner paused for a moment to glance over the latest reports which had been left upon his desk in his absence.

“Gloves, gloves, gloves!” he muttered, throwing down the papers in disgust, “Not a dab on that window last night, not a dab on the balcony, not a dab on the ladder even. And now there isn’t a dab on that cursed van. Even the dabs of the real driver have been obliterated by the gloves of the people who drove it last night.”

He picked up another form.

“‘Report from Inspector Lesley, telephoned from Meyerling’s garage,’” he read aloud. “‘Thieves effected entrance through small lavatory window at the back. Catch forced back, but no dabs in evidence. Thieves then opened main door and drove Van away—having first placed in it four trays of sandwiches and cakes already made up and waiting early-morning delivery to various snack bars and so on in the City. The main door was closed and locked again after the van was driven away, and the thief or thieves then returned and made their escape via the same lavatory window, afterwards forcing back the catch before they left.’”

“So at least two men must have been engaged on that little job,” mused Blake. “One to drive the van away; and the other to make everything secure after he had gone. As I said before, they don’t leave anything to chance, that lot! And you can take it for granted that they’d reconnoitered that garage very thoroughly before ever the job was planned.”

“That’s the Master Mind I’ve insisted upon right from the start,” Venner boasted. “It’s been the same in every one of these robberies—each detail dovetails into every other detail just like bits of a jigsaw puzzle.”

“Which tells me that the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society has a traitor in its ranks,” was all Blake said to that.

Venner looked bored.

“I wish I knew on what you were basing all this Dramatic Society theory, Blake,” he sighed, “It’s all very well for you, but I’ve got to put it up to the A.C. And if there’s one thing that bird hates more than another it’s what he calls ‘Excursions into Fantasia.’”

“There’s no fantasia about this business, sooper,” the private detective assured him grimly. “As the two bodies already in the mortuary go to prove. As to what I’m basing my theory on regarding the Dramatic Society—in two words, Susie Deane! Susie Deane was lying when she told us that Bramer had gone up to the cloakroom to fetch her lines. That was his excuse for going up there, true enough. But it was not his actual purpose—and she knew it was not. His real purpose in going up there was to get Mrs. Sutton out of the way and open the cloakroom window for Devereux to step in and remove the selected minks. And Susie knew that, too, I’m afraid.”

“Then why don’t you arrest her?”

“No proof?” retorted Blake with equal brevity.

“Fantasia in other words—eh?” grinned Venner, but Blake shook his head.

“You’re not going to tell me, sooper, that it could possibly have been coincidence that Aubrey Bramer should arrive in the cloakroom at the precise moment when the van was in position below the window, the ladder already erected, and the thief in position on the balcony outside ready to step in and collect the coats the moment the window was opened for him?”

“Couldn’t he have forced the window himself?”

“You’re forgetting Mrs. Sutton, the attendant, aren’t you?” Blake asked dryly. “The moment he started any forcing, she would have given the alarm. And remember that with the curtains drawn, as he had expected to find them drawn, he wouldn’t have been able to see who else might be in there. So obviously he would have to wait for Bramer’s signal that everything was ready and the way clear for him to enter. Devereux’s job was to be on that balcony, with the van ready down below, at precisely twelve minutes past one o’clock. And it was Bramer’s job to reach the cloakroom at twelve minutes past one, dispose of the attendant, and quietly open the window for Devereux to do his stuff. He would then have returned at once to Susie Deane, and the pair of them would have made their entry on to the stage at eighteen and a half minutes past one exactly as per Prothero’s time-table. Thus giving themselves an unbreakable alibi for the time of the actual robbery.”

“Well, then, why was Aubrey shot?” Emily asked into the momentary silence. “And who shot him? Devereux?”

“Devereux was already dead and in the van, or I’m badly missing my guess,” Blake told her. “That’s where the hi-jacking party stepped in. And that’s why I say that the Dramatic Society has a traitor in its ranks—because nobody can persuade me that those hi-jackers could have worked in so smoothly as they did last night unless first of all they had had complete knowledge of the Dramatic Society’s plans—including the time-table. The Mayfair Dramatic Society planned the raid, that’s obvious—or at least the man behind them planned it. And it’s equally obvious that the hi-jackers were aware of every move they intended. Somebody in the society sold the pass, in short, and right there under that window the hi-jackers took over.”

“Suggesting that Devereux was killed under the window?” frowned the sooper.

“He must have been—if only because he would not have stopped anywhere else,” Blake pointed out swiftly. “What happened, I imagine, was something like this. The hijackers were already in hiding down there a few minutes before the van arrived. They knew when it was due to arrive, just as they knew exactly what Devereux would do when it did arrive, and also where the ladder was lying in readiness for use. They knew, in fact, everything that Devereux himself knew.

“Right! The car arrives and Devereux jumps out—and that’s when they got him. Whether or not they meant to kill him, I don’t know—but at least they had to knock him unconscious, and that they did. Then, while one of them lifted the body into the van, the other fetched the ladder and reared it against the balcony. Bramer’s job—timed to the same split-second that has been such a feature of all these robberies—was to have the attendant out of the way and the window opened by the time Devereux reached the balcony, which, of course, the hi-jacker knew. He also knew that having done his part of the work, Bramer was due to return immediately to the ballroom to carry out his part in the play.

“Well now, when the hi-jacker arrived on the balcony he found the exact conditions he expected to find—the window was open, and through the slightly parted curtains he could see that the cloakroom was empty. Bramer, evidently, had done his job and gone again—as per the book of words. And you can easily imagine the hi-jacker lifting the bottom sash and entering the room in complete confidence that everything was going according to plan.

“But it was not. The conditions the hijacker found were entirely fortuitous—the work of Mrs. Sutton who had found the place getting stuffy and had opened both the window and the curtains—though, of course, he was not to know that. What really happened, I imagine, was that Bramer was a few seconds late in reaching the cloakroom, or the hi-jacker a few seconds early in reaching the balcony. But in any event, and whatever the reason, there can be no doubt but that those two found themselves face to face when Bramer opened the door!”

“And then?” Venner demanded tautly.

“That’s the riddle we’ve got to solve,” Blake said. “My own feeling is that those two knew each other. It could be, of course, that both were members of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society—I don’t know. But it’s plain enough that the hijacker knew himself discovered and saw in a moment that the game was up unless Bramer was silenced then and there. So he shot him. He whipped out the .45 automatic he was carrying, and shot him dead. But even so he did not panic. On the contrary he collected the mink coats he had come for, carried them out off to the balcony, closed the window behind him, went down the ladder, threw the coats into the van while his companion removed the ladder—and only then did the pair of them drive to that side street off King’s Road where a second car was un-doubtedly awaiting them.”

A short and thoughtful silence followed the private detective’s exposition of the affair. Finally the sooper rose with a sigh.

And so that’s your reading of the night’s events, Blake?” he asked heavily.

“And I don’t think you’ll find it far wrong, sooper, when you come to weigh up the evidence,” Blake nodded. “As I see it, and hidden behind the aristocratic frontage of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society, you have a hard core of reckless young men engaged in the commission of wholesale robberies. That core is directed by what you prefer to call the ‘Master Mind,’ and up to last night we have to admit that it appears to have worked amazingly well.”

“But now, you think, one or two of that hard core have broken away and determined to go into the hi-jacking business? Is that it?” Venner asked.

“It could be, of course,” Blake agreed, “or it could be something rather more subtle—and I think that the more likely if only because the actual hard-core boys would be under constant surveillance by your Master Mind. I think we can take it for granted that the Master Mind wouldn’t concern himself with the purely aristocratic section of the society. They were enrolled as frontage, and as frontage they remain. But supposing one of their innocent number, by chance or otherwise, happened to get wise to the real business of the society—I mean to the hard-core boys and what they were doing. And supposing that he, knowing himself to be utterly and completely unsuspected, decided to gather one or two kindred souls to himself and go into the hijacking business?”

“Yes, but how would he get to know of the plans?” objected Venner on the instant. “You said yourself that there was absolutely no connection between the aristocratic section and the hard-core boys.”

“And there isn’t,” confirmed the private detective. “The whole set-up depends on that for its existence. But there is an explanation, sooper, and it’s this. Nearly all these aristocratic families have cadet branches, as of course you know. And in a close market such as we have here, it could easily happen that while young Lord Tom-noddy is amusing himself in the aristocratic section, his fourth cousin or something—someone like this Jack Devereux, for instance—could be down among the hardcore boys taking his orders from your Master Mind.”

“Actually, he was!” cut In Emily unexpectedly. “Jack Devereux happens to be second cousin to Sir Clive Charteris whose name you may have noticed on the programme last night.”

“Well, there you are, then!” laughed Blake softly. “And blood’s still thicker than water! Had this Devereux fellow been on the hi-jacking side, we would have looked closely into the affairs of Sir Clive Charteris—but unfortunately for him, he wasn’t. Yet you see what I mean, don’t you? And that’s why I want Lady Emily to join the society and have a look round for us from the inside. And first of all we want to know where they meet and where they rehearse—because I have the feeling that it’s at their meetings and rehearsals that the Master Mind manages to make contact with his men.”

“Well, we can easily get that from Prothero, and fix up Lady Emily at the same time,” said Venner, reaching for the telephone. But Blake stopped him before the receiver was even clear of its bed.

“For heaven’s sake—no!” he cried. “That’s the very last thing we want to do, sooper. Prothero has no more idea than the dead that anything is amiss with his precious society—and he mustn’t know, either. Why, if you even hinted to Prothero that the Yard was interested in the activities of his amateurs he would resign on the instant. And if that happened, you can bet your boots the Master Mind would soon smell a rat and have disappeared long before we could get our hands on him. It is absolutely imperative that both Prothero and the genuine members of the society remain in complete ignorance of what they are being used for. That’s why Emily must be introduced by some friend of hers into the aristocratic section in the ordinary way, and join as an enthusiast. Then we shall have to sit back and await events.”

Venner looked down his nose at that. He was thinking of the A.C.

“And how long d’you reckon that’s going to be?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Blake admitted. “But I don’t think it ought to be too long, in view of last night’s contretemps. There’s bound to be some uneasiness in the ranks as the result of that, and the ripples of it should be visible on the surface. And of course, unless I’m right off the rails from start to finish, we know that Susie Deane at least is somewhere near the heart of the matter—and she’ll obviously be Emily’s target Number One. If I read that young woman aright, she joined in the plot for the sake of its excitement, never dreaming that murder might result. Now she’s scared stiff, naturally, and if she’s properly handled I think she might talk. Do you know anything about her, Emily?”

Emily shook her head. Last night was the first time she had seen or even heard of the girl.

“But I’ll soon find out all about her,” she said confidently. “When do you want me to join these people?”

“As soon as you reasonably can,” Blake told her.

“Then I’ll contact Carruthers this afternoon and have my name put up at the next meeting,” she promised,

Three days later Sexton Blake received a brief note from her—since it had been decided that to avoid any possible breath of suspicion attaching to her membership they should not meet in public or visit each other’s flats. The note said:

“Am now a duly elected member of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society—headquarters above a pub called ‘The Mason’s Arms,’ which is in Dover Court, off Eaton Square. Meetings on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays during the season at 9.30 p.m. Shall be there on Monday and will report later.—Emily.”

“The Mason’s Arms,” repeated Blake thoughtfully as he passed over the note to Tinker. “We might do worse than have a drink in The Mason’s Arms, I think, about 9.15 on Monday night.”

A Tight Corner.

LADY EMILY WESTOMHOLME was admittedly one of the most popular girls in the smart set, and she had not been in the long, low clubroom above the Mason’s Arms for more than a couple of minutes before she was surrounded by a crowd of her gay young friends.

“Emily Westomholme!” exclaimed the young Lord Delford as he came over to greet her. “I had no idea you had the acting bug, too. Where have you been all my young life?”

“Oh, grazing around,” said Emily. “What’s going on?”

He told her they were rehearsing “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray ” and breaking old Prothero’s heart in the process.

“He tears strips off us!” he laughed. “It’s just like being at school again, but it’s great fun all the same. He’s awfully good, you know. We were lucky to get him, actually.”

“That’s what I thought,” Emily agreed. “How did you?”

“I don’t know exactly, I think it was Carfax’s idea originally. Anyway, it was he who roped him in. That was a stinker the other night at Rune’s place, by the way?” be broke off suddenly. “Were you there?”

Emily said that she was.

“Funny I didn’t see you,” Delford said. “But it was an infernal crush. You knew Bramer, I suppose?”

“I’d met him going round—yes.”

“Damn bad luck on him, wasn’t it? On that kid, Susie Deane, too. Funny how things happen. Might have been anybody. But I suppose it was in the Book.”

“And you can’t beat the Book,” smiled Emily.

“Well, I’ve never been able to find a way of doing it,” Delford grinned back at her. “Or I wouldn’t be so damnably poor to-day. Oh, curse!” he broke off as a tall, slim, almost dangerously handsome man came sauntering across the floor towards them. “Do you know Moss Baring?” -

“What is it—a face powder?”

Delford grinned.

“That’s good, that is!” he applauded, heaving a sigh of relief when the handsome man paused to talk to someone else. “A face powder—I must put that round.”

“Well, who is he, anyway?” Emily asked.

“Old Ravenham’s heir—you remember old Ravenham? Couldn’t bring himself to snuff it until he was ninety-three, and by then he’d just about spent his last bean and watched every known heir die of sheer despair. This Moss Baring appeared out of the blue last year—or was it the year before? I forget now, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Well, it seemed he was some kind of fifty-second cousin twice removed whom the lawyers had tracked down out in Kenya. I think he was a white hunter or something. At any rate, they brought him home and proclaimed him the heir—and I understand he nearly went gunning after the lawyers when he discovered what they’d let him in for. He’d thought he was coming into money; instead of which he found himself saddled with that great barn of a place outside Tunbridge Wells and not a shot in the locker to keep it up. He swears the only thing he owns that’s in going order and self-supporting is a church.”

“A church?” Emily echoed.

“Yes. One of those private chapel arrangements attached to the property—mainly, so far as I ever saw, as a vault for dead and gone Ravenhams! Old Ravenham turned it over to the villagers some years back and they’ve been using it ever since. Hence Baring’s crack. There’s an old priest in charge, I gather, who went all out after Baring’s soul when he first arrived. But Baring said he wasn’t interested in his soul—only in some good-looking young heiress who’d’ marry him and put the family fortunes on their feet again. So you watch out for him, Emily! He’s too darned good-looking to be true, if you ask me. And if it comes to putting family fortunes on their feet, if you ever go into that line of business, my dear, you might care to consider me as a suitable object for your attention. I mayn’t be an oil painting, exactly, but the family’s all right. And I have a heart of gold, don’t forget.”

“Who told you that?” asked Emily Westomholme.

“I was born with it, my dear,” confided his lordship gravely. “And I know it by the good impulses I have. You’d be surprised, Emily, by the number of noble impulses my heart registers in the course of a single day.”

“I should!” said Emily. “Very!”

“Furthermore,” proceeded his lordship, in no way put out by her interruption, “I am thoroughly house-trained and easy to live with, Emily. You would think, if you married me, that you had a great big friendly shaggy dog gambolling about the place—you really would. I’d come larrumphing along the moment you called me; and every time you took out your cheque book, I’d sit up and beg with my swimmy brown eyes all goofy—”

“And your tongue hanging out a yard,” laughed Emily, “Don’t be an ass, Delf—you’ve never had a noble impulse in your life. And if you did, you’d run to the doctor wondering what was the matter with you, and if it was malignant. Do we run to a bar in this society?”

“Now,” approved his lordship, “you’re talking like a lady should, my dear. We don’t run to a bar on the premises, so to speak, but for a small fee I should be prepared to escort you downstairs and round the corner into the pub below. Have you a lot of money on you?”

“Enough for a couple of beers.”

“Make mine a large brandy, and it’s a deal?”

“A large brandy it is, then,” agreed Emily, “Lead on, Macduff!”

Monday night, at the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society’s headquarters, was more of a general meeting than a rehearsal. And although Emily could see the leonine head of Walter Prothero surrounded by a dozen or more eager enthusiasts anxious, so Delford said, to be given parts in the next production, for the most part the members were gathered in little groups talking. In one such group, Emily thought she recognised the back of the handsome man against whom Delford had warned her—Moss Baring as he named him. And from the swift way in which one of the girls to whom he was talking leaned forward and whispered something as she passed, Emily caught the impression that she herself was the subject of their conversation—and rather anxiously wondered why. It could be, she supposed, that the fortune hunter was already making inquiries about her financial status. Or what was infinitely worse, it could be that someone knew of her connection with Sexton Blake!

Delford led her down the stairs into the street, and round the corner to the saloon bar of the Mason’s Arms. It was run by a chap named Thrupp, her companion told her—an ex-gentleman’s gentleman—and was quite a cosy little place.

“Thrupp himself’s a joy,” he added. “To hear him, in these democratic days, you could easily imagine yourself back in early Victorian times.”

“Not me,” said Emily, “I never lived in early Victorian times!”

“You amaze me,” responded his lordship gallantly, “Evidently you have not worn so well as I had supposed, Emily.”

He pushed open the door for her, and Emily caught an instant impression of light and warmth and cosiness. Everything in the place shone, from the glasses ranged at the back to the bottles on their various stands. Behind the counter, dressed in a stand-up gates-ajar collar, bow tie, black jacket and striped trousers was a man whom Emily realized at a glance could be none other than the “gentleman’s gentleman” Delford had described.

The next moment she was sure of it, for in a deep, sepulchral voice:

“Good-evening, your lordship,” he greeted Delford with an old-fashioned little bow, “And what may I have the pleasure of doing for your lordship this evening?”

“A large brandy—” Emily was beginning.

“And ginger ale,” added his lordship.

“And a gin and Italian,” Emily finished, opening her bag on the counter and fishing for her purse.

“Yes, your, ladyship,” bowed Mr. Thrupp, “Certainly, your ladyship.” And with the air of a ducal butler he turned to fulfil the order.

“Known in all the pubs, my dear—evidently!” grinned her companion.

“Scarcely, your lordship, Mr. Thrupp corrected him with exquisite politeness. “I had the honour of knowing Lady Emily Westomholme when she was quite a child and used to visit the Duchess of Ayrton during her school holidays. I was at that time, gentleman’s gentleman to His Grace, the Duke.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Emily. “Were you really.”

“I had that honour for several years, my lady,” bowed Mr. Thrupp.

“Better than Debrett, is old Thrupp!” commented Delford in amusement. “Have a drink with her ladyship, Thrupp, She can stand it.”

“Yes, do, Mr. Thrupp,” seconded Emily.

“Thank you kindly, your ladyship,” bowed Thrupp. “I will have a small beer with your ladyship, if I may.”

The drinks were served, and with another little bow the gentleman’s gentleman took a delicate sip of his beer and went off to serve another customer.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Delford grinned. “He’s a joy, isn’t he? I should think he knows everybody in London with any pretensions to being anybody—their family histories and just what they’re worth. Amazing, isn’t it? And he runs this little place as though it were a salon in Mayfair. He’s having the time of his life since the Dramatic took over that upstairs room of his.”

Bat Emily scarcely heard What he was saying. Her attention had been caught by two men in the four-ale bar, a part of which was visible from where she was standing. One of them was tall and thin, the other shorter and plumper—but both were in zoot suits and American shirts and ties, and were obviously a pair of barrow boys or similar out for the night. But as she watched them, the taller one of the two sniffed and drew a finger across his nose, and on the instant Emily became absorbed in the glass she was holding.

With their cheek pads and nostril expanders and cheap cigars cocked in their mouths, she had been guilty, until she received the sign, of failing to recognise Sexton Blake and Tinker!

Her companion was still rambling on in his amiable fashion about this and that when Emily recalled her real purpose in bringing him here. Deftly she turned the coversation back to the Dramatic Society, and to the tragedy of the other evening.

“The person I was sorriest for was that girl who sent Aubrey up there,” she said. “Of course, it wasn’t her fault, but all the same it must have been a shock to her.”

“You mean the Deane kid?” asked his lordship,

“If that’s her name—yes, Who is she, Delf? I’ve never heard of her before?”

Delford hunched his shoulders.

“She’s someone Bramer himself brought in,” he said. “I seen to remember somebody saying that her father was in the City or something, so likely enough Bramer was hoping to make a touch with the old man for a dowry. I don’t know, mind you, but he was broke enough for anything from all one hears. Though it never struck me that Susie was particularly keen on him.”

“Is that her name—Susie Deane?” Emily asked innocently.

“Reminds you of the immortal Nellie of that ilk, what?” chuckled her companion. “Though I never noticed anything of the ‘old mill stream’ touch about Susie, I must say,” he added, “Always seemed a remarkably self-possessed young woman to me. All twentieth century female, if you get me, my dear. You know: ‘What do I get out of all this this?’ sort of thing—with the accent on the ‘I.’”

“You’re a cynic, Delf,” laughed Emily.

“What, me?” retorted his lordship. “Darlin’, I couldn’t afford to be—you need money to be a cynic. I’m just a knockeron-doors of wealthy spinsters, or even widows. I’m not a bit particular. Just a great, big, friendly, shaggy dog—that’s me. With—”

“Swinnny eyes all goofy-looking!” Emily finished his sentence for him. “Have another brandy, Delf—before you get sentimental and weep tears of self-pity. Why don’t you work for your living?”

“Emily, don’t be brutal!” replied his lordship, with immense dignity. “You should know that there are certain abominable practices in which no self-respecting man can with decency engage himself—and heading that list of abominations is the thing called work. Thrupp!” be called loudly.

“Your lordship?” came instantly from the four-ale bar.

“Her ladyship, having deeply wounded me, Thrupp, will now sooth my hurt with a second large brandy and ginger,” he told the man solemnly.

“Certainly, m’lord — your ladyship,” bowed Mr. Thrupp. And reaching for the brandy bottle, he quoted softly: “O woman in our hours of ease, m’lord—”

“Thank you, Thrupp,” mourned Delford, “You quote my sentiments exactly. You must have been a great comfort to the gentlemen you served.”

Emily eyed the man curiously. He was quite a new one on her—she had read of his like in books but had thought the breed long extinct. He looked to be about sixty, partly bald, very lean, but with a face that beneath its respectful mask of servility might easily have been clever. His mouth was wide, and thin; and his eyes, beneath their out-jutting brows, saw—she fancied—a lot more than Mr. Thrupp would willingly have admitted.

“Her ladyship has joined the Dramatic Society?” he asked as he set the drink before Lord Delford.

“My first night, Mr. Thrupp,” Emily agreed. “Though I don’t seem to be doing much about it, do I. Delf! Drink up and let’s get back,” she urged her companion.

Mr. Thrupp became respectfully reminiscent.

“In my younger days, your ladyship,” he sighed, “I must confess I had a great urge to play the part of a stage butler. I mentioned that old ambition to Mr. Prothero the other evening when he happened to honour my house, and he was kind enough to say that he thought I should have been a great success. In fact, he promised that if ever he produced a play upstairs which called for the perfect butler, he would try his best to persuade me to take the part.”

“And would you, Mr. Thrupp?” Emily asked.

Mr. Thrupp spread his hands.

“I confess I should be very tempted, your ladyship,” he admitted frankly, ‘But the cares of my present profession—” And he sighed again.

“You have been here long, Mr. Thrupp?” Emily asked.

“Nearly ten years now, your ladyship,” Thrupp replied. “My last gentleman died abroad, and with the money he was kind enough to leave to me, I bought this little house and retired from further service. It was a wrench, of course—I admit it. But with all respect, your ladyship, I felt that the new generation of gentleman was outside my understanding, I had served my purpose, it seemed, and the best thing was for me to retire quietly from a world I no longer understood.”

Neither Emily nor her companion spoke for a moment. Emily, in fact, was quite startled—for Thrupp’s speech might quite easily have been the closing speech of the “perfect butler ” he had mentioned, immediately prior to the fall of the curtain! Fortunately, before the silence became embarrassing, Thrupp was called away to serve another customer.

Dolford drew a long breath.

“Well, what do you know about that for an effort?” he asked. “The damned man’s an actor already, if you ask me.”

“You think it was an act, then?” Emily asked. “Something he was putting across for our benefit?”

“Dunno,” shrugged his lordship. “Funny line of talk, though, all the same, for the landlord of a boozer! Still, as I told you, he’s a character all right. And he certainly has been round here for a good many years. I don’t know another publican in London who’d dare to talk as he does, with his ‘my lord’ and ‘my lady’ and his funny little bows. His democratic customers would hoot him from behind the bar—but they don’t here, as you see. They don’t take the slightest notice. Are you ready, my dear? We hadn’t better be too long away or we’ll have old Prothero reminding us that this is a dramatic society, not an excuse for a binge!”

Emily glanced across at Sexton Blake, but the private detective gave no sign. That surprised her, for until then she had taken it for granted that he was there in order to give her some fresh instructions, and was only awaiting a suitable opportunity to do so. To make quite sure, she picked up her bag and made obvious preparations to depart—and only when he still gave no sign did she turn to her companion.

“Right!” she said briefly. “Let’s go.”

Back in the upstairs room they were just in time to find Mr. Prothero about to deliver one of his talks on stage technique. He spoke for half an hour, and Emily was quite frankly as interested as the other aspirants to acting honours, for the famous impresario knew his subject from A to Z and all the way back again. At the same time, that did not prevent her from taking note of her fellow-members—and right in front of her she was quick to spot the girl, Susie Deane, standing beside the handsome man Delford had told her was Moss Baring.

After Prothero had finished his discourse, and had been duly applauded, Emily’s companion touched her arm and nodded towards the girl in question.

“That’s Susie Deane,” he said, “talking to Moss Baring, just in front of you. I wonder if she really has got any prospects?”

And when Emily smiled and hunched her shoulders:

“I can’t see why Baring’s so interested In her if she hasn’t,” he added cynically. “He’s got nothing to offer her beyond an old house. I have at least a title for sale.”

“Well, why not offer it?” Emily suggested brightly.

Delford appeared to consider the suggestion.

“I can’t afford to miss any chances,” he said at last. “My bank manager wouldn’t approve of me if I did. You take Baring out of the way, Emily, while I try my charm on Susie. The things I do for that bankrupt estate of mine!” he sighed. “And my lousy ancestors who spent as they chose and never gave their descendant a thought. Come on, Emily—into battle!”

They strolled across to where Susie and the man, Baring, appeared to be in earnest conversation—though as they drew nearer it appeared to be solely about the talk they had been given. Emily heard Susie saying something about the last Prothero production she had seen at the Scala, and then Delford butted in.

“‘Lo, Susie?” he drawled, turning on the famous Delford smile. “‘Lo, Baring? What are you two conspiring about?” Then he turned to his companion. “Emily,” he said, “this is Susie Deane, Susie—Lady Emily Westomholme.”

Emily held out her hand and the two shook. It occurred to her, at closer quarters, that Susie Deane was by no means the simple girl she had been disposed to believe her on the night of the Rune party. There was a hardness about her mouth, even when it smiled—and in her eyes—that immediately awakened Emily’s professional interest. There was also a considerable wariness about the girl—indefinable yet clearly perceptible.

So much Emily’s awareness registered in the moment their hands touched. Then she turned to Moss Baring whom Delford was already introducing.

“Moss Baring,” he added, “owns a fine old place outside Tunbridge Wells, Emily, that only needs about fifty thousand spending on it to make it reasonably habitable. He’s also in the ecclesiastical line—he owns a church.”

“Do you really, Mr. Baring?” Emily laughed.

“A mausoleum, at any rate, Lady Emily,” Baring replied, gripping her hand and smiling elegantly. “You wouldn’t be in the market for two or three tombs, by any chance, I take it? I have a magnificent collection for you to choose from, if your tastes happen to run that way. And I’ll deliver free to your door. They’re all beautiful specimens of ancestral pride, every one guaranteed sound and in good working order. I should perhaps mention that they represent my sole inheritance—any one of them would be more comfortable as a residence than the family mansion. No?” as Emily shook her head.

“Nothing doing,” said Emily, “I don’t like tombs, Mr. Baring, they depress me.”

“Well, what about a nice wall memorial? I have a fine stock of those, too.” And when Emily, laughing, still shook her head. “it’s just as well to be prepared, you know,” he insisted. “And good wall memorials may be in short supply when you most urgently need one.”

“Is this high-powered salesmanship?” she asked.

Moss Baring laughed. He was, Emily thought, undeniably a handsome man.

“Fact is,” he said, “I’ve got to get some new tyres for my car, Lady Emily. I’m desperate. And the only things I’ve got to sell are the family tombs—unless I start selling the doors out of the house. Not that it would make much difference to the comfort of the place if I did, for even now, whenever the wind blows, you have to tack your feet to the floor to prevent yourself from being blown away.”

They chattered on in the same light vein for a time until Emily noticed that Susie Deane was glancing surreptitiously at her wrist-watch whenever she thought that no one was looking.

“She’s got an appointment to keep,” Emily thought to herself. “She’s anxious about it, too.”

Then, suddenly, Susie asked a question which brought Emily up all standing. It came out apropos of nothing at all that was obvious.

“Has anyone seen Jack Devereux tonight?” she asked.

“Devereux?” Delford repeated. He shook his head, “I don’t think he’s been here—or if he has, I haven’t seen him,” he said. “Haven’t seen him for some days, in fact.”

“Have you, Mr. Baring?” Susie asked.

“Sorry, I haven’t,” Baring replied. He turned to Emily, and it might have been her fancy that there was a faintly mocking note in his voice as he spoke again. “I don’t know if Lady Emily has?” he suggested.

“I’m afraid not,” Emily said, conscious that her pulses had quickened to the challenge. “In fact, I didn’t know until now that he was a member of this society.”

“Who—Devereux?” Delford asked a little vaguely, his eyes continuing to appraise, Susie Deane’s possibilities as a propper-up of the Delford’s declining fortunes. “He’s one of the originals here. In fact, it was he and Clive Charteris who found this place for us, I believe.”

Emily made a mental note of the fact, and did some quick thinking. At Blake’s suggestion, all news of the discovery of Jack Devereux’s body in the Meyerling van had been kept a close secret by the Yard—the idea being that the uncertainty over his fate would worry the minds not only of whoever was behind the original robbery set-up but also those of the hi-jackers themselves. And when minds become harassed and uncertain, mistakes are apt to occur.

Was that, Emily wondered, why Susie Deane was inquiring for Devereux? If Sexton Blake were right in his theory concerning Susie’s role in the originally projected robbery, she would almost certainly have known that Jack Devereux was the man detailed to collect the mink coats after Aubrey Bramer had opened the window for him. And in that event, with Bramer dead, might she not be wondering if a similar fate had overtaken Devereux? Or fearful, perhaps that it was Devereux who had shot him?

Or, Emily thought, reverting to her original idea, it could be that Susie had been sent here to-night expressly to try to gather news of Devereux from his friends—and report results later to whoever was behind the racket. That, in fact, could easily explain her frequent glances at her wrist-watch; and there and then, Emily determined to take a chance and follow the girl when she left. It might lead to something or it might not, but it was worth chancing, she thought.

Sure enough, a very few minutes later, Susie glanced openly at her watch and announced that she would have to be going. Delford at once offered to give her a lift to her destination, and Emily’s suspicions were immediately strengthened when the girl replied that she already had an escort.

“Foiled again!” sighed Delford as she went off to the cloakroom to get her things. And that was the precise moment when Emily espied George Carruthers leaning his stocky length against the far wall and regarding her with his lazy smile.

I must have a word with George over there,” she told Delford and Baring. “Excuse me, won’t you?” And as she smiled and turned it was Baring who said “Foiled again!” and said it with that peculiarly mocking intonation of his which may or may not have been his natural style.

“Fallen among thieves, Emily?” Carruthers grinned as she came up. “I thought it wouldn’t be long before that Baring fellow got his nose down on the trail, once be knew who you were. Delford, of course, you expected!”

Emily laughed.

“Have they moved on, George?” she asked.

George Carruthers glanced over her head.

“Yes, they’ve shifted,” he reported. “Why? Do you want to make a getaway?”

“You’re a mind-reader, George,” she told him. “Cover me as far as the door, there’s a dear.”

The ladies’ cloakroom, fortunately, was off the top of the stairs from the street: and once through the door she was safe from observation from anyone in the large room.

“I’m beating it myself,” George told her as they paused for a moment on the landing. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

“No, thanks, George,” she smiled. “I’m making a call across the Square. Thanks so much for rescuing me. Good-night.”

“Good-night, my dear,” said George, turning and making his way down to the street.

Emily pushed open the cloakroom door to find Susie already dressed.

“Hallo!” the girl greeted her. “Are you going, too?”

“Only across the Square,” Emily told her. “Are you going that way, by any chance?”

“No. I go in the opposite direction,” Susie said quickly—a bit too quickly for truth, Emily thought. And with a brief good-night she opened the door and disappeared.

Emily slipped on her own things while listening to the girl’s footsteps hurrying down the stairs. The moment they ceased, she herself opened the door and followed her down to the street.

Under pretence of fastening her gloves, she looked swiftly up and down the Square. Yes, there was Susie, she saw, hurrying along the Square in the direction of Eccleston Street. Emily backed against a pillar and waited a few moments. Then, when she judged the distance great enough to avoid discovery should the girl turn, she stepped off briskly in the same direction.

Susie turned into Eccleston Street, and taking the corner wide—as Blake had taught her—Emily followed along the opposite pavement closely enough to keep her in sight. Susie went right, on into Buckingham Palace Road, where she turned left in the direction of Victoria, and Emily followed.

Just why Emily herself turned and looked back along Eccleston Street as she rounded the corner, she was never quite sure. It may have been some sixth sense, or it may have been sheerly precautionary. In any event she did turn—and that was when she had her first sight of the rough-looking man not thirty yards behind her. He was wearing an overcoat that was too long for him, and a black felt hat pulled low over his eyes. She did not immediately connect him with herself but she did become aware of him. So much so that when she had walked another couple of hundred yards along Buckingham Palace Road she turned again—and he was still there, although he had dropped a little farther behind.

Susie was now nearing Grosvenor Gardens, and presently paused at the crossing for the traffic lights. Emily paused, too, some fifty yards behind her—and turning, saw to her dismay that the man behind her had also paused, ostensibly to light a cigarette. Susie crossed as the lights changed, and Emily hastened after her. As she crossed the road she glanced sideways—and sure enough the rough-looking man was coming along, too.

“Is he following me—or Susie Deane?” Emily wondered suddenly. Because if he were following Susie, he could easily be connected with whoever it was she was going to meet.

Emily felt herself on the verge of a discovery—but to make quite sure she put her theory to the test. As Susie turned into the station yard, Emily halted by the steps of the Grosvenor Hotel—and the man stopped, too! He halted on the edge of the pavement as though waiting to re-cross the road and manifestly he could not have cared less that Susie Deane was already out of sight round the corner and in danger of becoming lost altogether.

“So it is me he’s after!” Emily muttered uneasily.

That put a totally different complexion on the matter, she realised. A dangerous complexion, too, because if she herself were being tailed it could only mean that somehow or other she had come under suspicion from one side or the other—or someone had become aware of her connection with Sexton Blake, Unless—and the thought struck her suddenly—the man in the long overcoat had been detailed to tail Susie, only to discover somewhere along the route that she was already being tailed by someone else. And it could be, she argued, that in that event he had thought it better worth his while to switch his attention from Susie, whom he knew, to this other girl whom probably he did not know!

As a final test, Emily moved swiftly round the corner into the yard of Victoria Station. Susie Deane was going either by rail or underground, or merely walking through the yard into Vauxhall Road. Actually, she was just entering the station as Emily rounded the hotel corner—and sure enough, when a few seconds later she herself turned into the station, glancing back she saw that the man in the long overcoat was again on her trail.

That settled it. Whoever the man was, it was certain now that he was trailing her and not Susie—and that put Emily in a quandary. She knew that her usefulness to Sexton Blake, in this case, would cease immediately she herself came under any suspicion of being connected with the police—and Emily did not want her usefulness to cease. She wanted to go on working with Sexton Blake—she always did! And so her best course now, she decided swiftly, would be first of all to disabuse the mind of the man behind her of any idea he might have that she was trailing Susie Deane. And secondly—in the hope that he did not know her already—to shake him off before he had a chance to see her face.

With that in mind, Emily hurried across the platform. And since from the corner of her eye she had seen Susie Deane crossing to the west side of the station, she herself promptly went off to the east side as though supremely uninterested in anybody’s business save her own. She glanced up at the clock—it was twenty-five minutes past twelve, she noticed, and already there were signs that the station was preparing to close for the night. As she passed the Departures Board, she glanced up as though to check the time of her train—only to hurry on again when a sideways look showed her that the man in the long overcoat was rapidly closing the distance between them in an endeavour, she was certain now, to get a closer look at her.

Emily increased her pace across the main platform—but so did he. He was determined to get a good look at her for future reference, but Emily was equally determined that he shouldn’t. The next moment she broke into a run—as though to catch her train. And on the instant he broke into a run behind her.

Then Emily panicked. Too late she saw that she had trapped herself. To the few people on the station at that hour they were merely a couple of people running to catch the fast train home—and even had there been a policeman there he would have been useless in this emergency since Emily’s sole object now was to prevent the man from seeing her face! Had she possessed a ticket she could have rushed one of the barriers, but she had no ticket. And if she turned to leave the station altogether, he would cut her off long before she could reach the exit.

She was at her last gasp when straight in front of her she caught sight of the notice “Ladies Waiting Room” and perceived her chance of sanctuary! She thought the man behind her had seen it too, and guessed her intention, for he suddenly increased his pace until she expected every second to feel his hand on her shoulder—but by then she was at the door. Fortunately it was a swing door. In a flash she was through and inside.

And not feeling safe even there, she went straight through into the toilettes beyond.

“Anything wrong, miss?” the woman in charge of the place asked quickly when Emily stood getting back her breath.

Emily looked at her, and had a bright idea. She would not be able to stay there long because they would be closing the station in a very few minutes and the man outside would know that. All he had to do would be to wait in the yard until she was forced to leave—and then he would see her, fix her in his memory, and all would be lost.

“I’m trying to escape from a man,” she told the woman breathlessly. “He’s been trailing me all the evening.”

“Police?” the other asked suspiciously.

“Good heavens, no!” Emily laughed. She opened her bag, took out two or three letters and a pound note. “That’s who I am,” she said, showing the woman the addresses, “and this is for you”— showing her the pound note—“if you will show me out the back way.”

“Not allowed, miss—lady, I mean,” the woman corrected herself hastily. “Dead against regulations, miss—lady, I mean.”

“Look,” urged Emily. “If you are unsure of me, ring up Scotland Yard and ask for Superintendent Venner. Tell him you’ve got Lady Emily Westomholme here, and tell him what I have asked you to do. He will tell you to do it—and never mind regulations.”

Carelessly, she added another note to the first, and the good woman wavered— whether because of mention of the Yard, or sight of the second note, Emily neither knew nor cared. A third note added to the other two was plainly more than flesh and blood could stand!

“Okay. miss—lady. I mean,” the attendant got out hoarsely. “I’ll take a chance. come on!”

She led Emily to the end of the passage and unlocked a door at the far end.

“I’ll switch the light off,” she whispered, “and then nobody’ll see you—but mind the steps when you set outside. They’ll take you up into a narrow passage that’ll bring you into Wilton Road. Will you know where you are then?”

“Yes, rather! And my very best thanks,” Emily told her quickly, handing over the notes.

“Thank—you!” whispered the woman. “And good luck, miss. Off you go!”

She opened the door quickly and Emily slipped outside into the darkness. She found the steps, climbed them carefully and a few minutes later was safe in Wilton Road with no sign of the long-overcoated-one anywhere in sight. Better still, a taxi was standing close by, its driver at the coffee-stall.

“Taxi!” Emily called.

“Yes, miss!” the man answered promptly. At sixteen minutesto one, Emily entered her flat and straightway rang up Sexton Blake to make her report. Unknown to her, Venner happened to be with him—a fact which was destined to expedite matters considerably a few hours later.

The Waiting-Room Mystery.

MARTHA ROBBINS yawned, rolled up her sleeves, seized her two-foot-six broom, and started her daily task of sweeping out the “Ladies’ Waiting Room.” The hour was half-past five in the morning, and Martha was still half asleep. The light in the place was none too good, either, which may have accounted for the fact that she did not see the intruder lying fast asleep under one of the wall-benches until her brush actually struck him.

Then she paused, staring.

” Well, what d’yer know?” she asked of the empty room disgustedly. And seizing her broom she proceeded to jab the sleeping man viciously in his back. “Come out, yer drunken reptile!” she bawled at him—for Martha had arms like a navvy and feared no man on earth, drunk or sober. “Come out of it, yer scamp! Yer dirty tyke, you!”

Under the vigorous assaults of Martha’s broom, the sleeping man began to bestir himself. He rolled over and out from under the seat. The next second, the entire station was startled by a series of ear-splitting screams from the direction of the east side. And in the same instant, the two porters who happened to be working on that platform beheld the buxom Martha Robbins literally erupt from the door of the Ladies’ Waiting Room and charge blindly down the platform shrieking “Help! Murder! Police!”

“In there!” yelled Martha as she passed them. “Under the seat! A dead man! Murdered!”

“Blimey!” gasped one of the men. And after a merely momentary hesitation they set off at a run to see what was afoot. Rather gingerly they pushed open the door and entered. “Blimey!” gaped that same man again.

Martha’s prodding had evidently upset the balance of the body for it had rolled over from its side on to its back and now lay with its hideously distorted face upturned towards the ceiling. The dead eyes appeared to be starting from their sockets, and a blackened tongue was protruding from between swollen lips.

Then a railway policeman came hurrying in, followed hastily by a sergeant. One look at the corpse, and the sergeant realised that the job was already out of their hands.

“Nip back to the office, Jim,” he told his constable crisply, “and phone the Yard. The sooner they get on to this little lot, the better!”

Within a quarter of an hour, an inspector and detective-sergeant, together with their ancillary services, debauched upon the station and were taken along to the scene of the discovery.

“Has he been moved at all?” was the inspector’s first question as he stood gazing down with typical Yard phlegm at the remains.

“Yes, he was under the seat, inspector,” the railway sergeant explained. “The woman cleaner found him when she was sweeping out the room. He was lying on his left side with his face to the wall. She thought he was a drunk and poked at him with her broom. Then he rolled over and finished up just like you see him. The woman’s suffering from shock at the moment. She’s still a bit hysterical, but you can see her later on.”

“Okay!” The inspector turned towards the police surgeon—but turned back again with a sudden exclamation. “Sa-y!” he drawled to his assistant. “Does that long overcoat ring a bell, sergeant?”

The sergeant grinned.

“Just what I was thinking myself, sir,” he agreed. “This could be the bird the sooper was making inquiries about last night.” He knelt down and peered under the seat. “Yes, and here’s another he cried triumphantly, bringing out a badly crumpled black felt hat. “‘Long overcoat and dark hat,’” he quoted. “That was the description the sooper issued, wasn’t it?”

“And about, five-ten in height,” nodded the inspector. “Which is what this bird would be if he were straightened out.” He stood back while the police surgeon did his stuff. “Not much doubt as to cause, anyway!” he said grimly as the doctor proceeded with the usual superficial examination.

“No you’re right, inspector,” the other agreed. “Manual strangulation, with a strong possibility that the killer operated from behind him—which suggests that the man you want will be something over six feet. Almost certainly he would be taller than his victim. At a rough estimate he’s been dead from five to six hours. Say between midnight and one o’clock this morning, and you won’t be far out. I’ll give you a closer bracket after the P.M.”

“Okay, doc. That’ll do to be going on with.” The inspector went down on one knee and made a rapid search of the dead man’s pockets but found nothing. Not even a handkerchief. “Cleaned up!” he remarked. “Which don’t look so good, either—if he happens to be the bird the sooper wants. Is that door left open at night?” he asked the railway sergeant, nodding towards the door leading out on to the platform.

The sergeant didn’t know, but said he would find out. In the meantime, the photographer was instructed to take a few pictures, even although the body had been moved; and the dabs man to take his prients for checking with Records.

“And don’t move anything, Jim,” he added. “I’ve a notion we shall have the sooper out before we go much further. I’ll ring him now, and see what he says.”

He rang the Yard from the offices of the railway police, and the Yard operator relayed the information to Superintendent Venner at his home. Within a couple of minutes of receiving the information, Venner was on the telephone to Sexton Blake, with the result that barely three-quarters of an hour later, Blake, Tinker and the sooper himself stood looking down speculatively upon the murdered man.

“So now what?” Venner asked at last into the silence. “Is he the bird, d’you think?”

“We’ll get Emily to decide that, at the mortuary,” shrugged Blake. “But he certainly corresponds to her description.” He knelt down and examined the bruises about the dead man’s throat; and when the inspector told him of the doctor’s suggestion as to the exact manner of the strangling, he nodded. “I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt but that he was strangled from behind,” he confirmed. “Here are the thumb marks on the back of his neck where the killer exerted the necessary leverage. Death would be almost instantaneous with that particular grip. It isn’t often you see it in this country.”

“Seen his nails, guv’nor?” Tinker asked softly.

Blake nodded, and hunched his shoulders. Rough clothes the man might be wearing ill-fitting clothes. But in common with the hands of Devereux and Co., the dead man’s fingernails were beautifully manicured.

Venner asked the inspector what was the dope—so far, And the inspector related all that he had discovered from his questioning of Martha Robbins, the railway police, and the stationmaster.

“What time did the woman in charge of the toilettes leave?” Blake asked.

“She hasn’t arrived yet, Mr. Blake,” the inspector answered. “But generally she leaves between half-past twelve and a quarter to one.”

“Are the platform lamps left on all night?”

Only one or two on the main platform. This particular bay would be in darkness, I’m told, immediately after the last train leaves at 12.36. In fact, it was. I have spoken to the man who switched them off.”

“So the lights went off at approximately 12.36,” said Blake, “and the attendant might have already left by that time?”

“She may have done—yes,” the inspector agreed.

“Does she leave by that door on to the platform?”

The inspector said not. There was a back door out of the toilettes, and she left by that because it was nearer to her lodgings.

“She lives at the far end of Wilton Road,” he added.

“I see,” Blake studied the body for a while, thoughtfully. “So that it’s quite possible that the man had been strangled and his body pushed under the seat there before ever the attendant left? Would the waiting-room be in darkness from approximately 12.36?”

“And probably sooner,” the inspector explained. “The attendant switches the lights off in this place when she leaves.”

“Better get her evidence and telephone me through at the Yard,” Venner told him.

“Once we know what time the attendant turned the lights off, we’ll know more or less how the crime was committed,” Blake agreed. “In the meantime, there’s nothing more we can do here, sooper, so I suggest we get the body along to the morgue and let Emily have a look at it. Its no use expecting dabs in a station waiting-room—even if that lot were accustomed to leaving their prints all over the place.”

“If it was ‘that lot’!” growled Venner.

“It was!” Blake said with shattering certainty. “And I’m beginning to think I can see why.”

“Yes. I’ve got a pretty good notion myself about that!” cut in the sooper in his best vein. “You might get the body shifted now, inspector,” he went on. “But keep this place locked for the present in case there’s something we want to come back for.”

The ambulance was already outside, and the inspector’s assistant went off to fetch the boys and their stretcher. Blake, meanwhile, telephoned Emily—whom he had already alerted—asking her to come round to Cannon Row station.

They drove straight round there, and the body arrived almost immediately afterwards. Barely had they laid it on a spare slab when Emily arrived in her little red M.G.

“I dunno how you do it, Emily!” Venner greeted her. “You’re up till heaven knows what hour at night, and at half-past seven you’re round here looking fresh as a June rose! Oh youth—youth!” he declaimed ponderously.

“Blimey!” grinned Tinker. “I’ll say you choose a nice place for your poetic outbursts, sooper!”

Emily was looking at Sexton Blake, and as their eyes met he beckoned her over.

“I’m sorry to inflict this on you before breakfast, Emily,” he apologised. “But I think it’s your man, all right. He’s been strangled, as I told you—but you needn’t look at his face just now, unless you feel up to it.”

“I’m up to anything you want,” declared Emily on the instant, and was rewarded by one of the detective’s slow, but extraordinarily charming smiles.

“Come along, then,” he said, turning and leading the way into the sanctuary.

They had laid the body flat, and Blake himself had pulled down the man’s overcoat to its full length so as to assist Emily’s identification. It isn’t always easy to recognise again in the full light of day something that you have only seen before by night—but one glance at that overcoat, finishing somewhere between the dead man’s calves and his ankles, and Emily proclaimed him to be the same who had tailed her last night. And when they showed her the black felt hat, then she was sure of it.

“That’s the man, I’m certain!” she said. Same height, overcoat, hat and everything.”

“Like to see his face?” Venner asked. “We have straightened it up a bit for you,” he added.

Emily drew a quick breath, her eyes on Blake, and it was Blake who lifted the cloth from the murdered man’s face. For several minutes Emily considered it then, to Blake’s obvious surprise, shook her head.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before,” she said slowly.

“Are you positive of that, Emily?” Blake asked.

“Yes, quite,” she said after another long look. “There was nothing at all familiar about him, last night—his walk, carriage, or anything. Why? Do you think I should have known him?”

“It would have helped,” sighed the private detective. “You see, if I’m right in my theory, he simply has to be a member of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society if anything about this murder is to make sense.”

“Because his hands happen to be manicured?” Venner asked wearily. But Blake shook his head.

“Say rather because be happens to be lying where he is instead of being out and about in the light of day,” was all he said to that. And after a moment of silence: “Let’s go back to your office, Venner, and see if any of those reports are in yet.”

The Forbidden Way.

THEY adjourned to Venner’s office at the Yard and found that two reports had come in. The first was from the Records Department, announcing that they had checked the prints submitted against their files, but had no trace of them. The second was from Inspector Braden at Victoria Station, and had been telephoned.

“I have interviewed the toilette attendant,” the message read, “and obtained the following statement. She switched off the lights in the waiting-room-at approximately 12.30 a.m. And she left via the back door from the toilette immediately afterwards. Then, switching on the lights in the waiting-room, she saw that the platform door was closed and, so far as she noticed, everything was quite normal. Asked if she would have noticed the body had it been there at that time she thought not—because the light switch is just inside the door from the toilette and she merely popped her head round the jamb to make sure that the room was empty before she switched off the lights. The switch is on the same side of the room as the seat beneath which the body was hidden; and trying it out for myself, I do not think she could possibly have seen anything unless she had walked out into the middle of the room.”

“So?” said Blake thoughtfully when the sooper finished reading. “In that event she must have skipped it immediately after seeing Emily off the premises—I suppose those three pound-notes were a bit too much for her! What time did the inspector say the platform lights were switched off?”

Venner turned to his notes.

“At approximately 12.36,” he reported.

“Then that gives us our time bracket for the crime, sooper. The man was killed between approximately 12.30 and 12.36 this morning.”

Venner frowned.

“I don’t see how you can be so darned sure of that, Blake!” he objected.

“Logic, Venner,” Blake retorted. “We know from Emily’s evidence that it was exactly 22.25 when she walked on to the station with the dead man following her. We know that she raced to the waitingroom, and that by the time she reached it, Long Overcoat was only a step or two in rear. Emily dived straight through, spoke to that attendant, handed her the money, and was obviously clear of the place before the attendant herself left at approximately 12.30. And somewhere handy, even then, was the killer.”

“How do you know that?” objected Venner.

“Logic again,” said Blake. “Look at it this way, sooper. When Emily dived into that waiting-room, Long Overcoat knew himself stymied. He dare not follow her in there without risking a riot—the last thing he would want in those particular circumstances. Moreover, he would think her sanctuary at best only temporary—since she would have to come out some time! So all he had to do was to wait.

“Well, he did wait. He waited until he saw the lights switched off—and only then did it dawn upon him that there might be another way out. On the other hand, it might be only a trick to persuade him to go away. So, to make quite sure of that, he opens the door a little way and peeps inside. And that’s when the killer struck!”

“Well, if you say so, of course—” Venner shrugged.

“But it must have been so, sooper,” the detective argued. “If only because no other sequence is possible in the time bracket. At 12.36 the last train leaves from that particular platform—which means that the platform would then be completely bare of people. Having seen the train off, the porter walks back along the empty platform and switches off the lights, afterwards closing the iron grille and sealing off the bay for the night. Well, now—had there been anyone still on the platform at that time, it is surely reasonable to suppose that the porter would have seen him. And the fact that he did not see anyone proves conclusively to my mind (a) that the murder had been already committed and the killer gone, or (b) that both killer and victim were in the darkened waiting-room, and that later on, having hidden the body, the killer made his escape along the line as the inspector assures us would be quite possible.”

“But hang it, Blake—somebody would have seen the struggle if the attack took place on the lighted platform!” Venner argued. “People aren’t strangled without—”

“A struggle?” Blake took him up with a smile. “You’re wrong there, sooper, they are! And this man definitely was—as evidenced by the marks on his neck. When Long Overcoat turned his back on the platform to peep through that darkened doorway, the killer leapt. In that moment he had him completely at his mercy. He circled his throat with his hands, locked his fingers over his windpipe, dug his locked thumbs into the back of his victim’s neck, and squeezed—at the same time kneeling the body forward through the doorway—that being a swinging door, you will remember, under that particular grip, sooper, unconsciousness would result in a mere second or two. And death would follow a second or two later. There would be no struggle, no fuss, no noise. And you may be certain that before ever the killer seized his man, he had glanced round to make sure that no one was near, enough to spot him—as indeed would not be likely with the last train of the night already on the point of departure from the far and of the platform.”

“Then why didn’t Long Overcoat see the killer standing beside him?” Venner came back swiftly.

“In the first place because his whole attention was concentrated upon the door of that waiting-room; and in the second, because only a yard or so away from that door, there is another recessed doorway leading—I think it is—into the general waiting-room,” said Blake. “There could be another explanation, too,” he went on thoughtfully, “and that, that Long Overcoat knew the killer—and moreover knew him as a confederate in the racket they were playing. But that is beside the point, at the moment—”

“Though it’s interesting,” mused the sooper, “because it might explain one or two rather difficult details. It could be, for example, that if Long Overcoat knew and trusted the killer, as you suggest, that he had actually set him to keep watch while he himself opened the door to peep inside the waiting-room. And it could explain how on a practically deserted platform, the killer was able to get so close to his victim, without being suspected and challenged, Still, go on!”

“Well,” pursued Blake, “safely inside the waiting-room—which wouldn’t be dark, remember, while the lights were still on on the platform outside—the killer lowers the body of his victim to the floor and, looks round for somewhere to hide it in case anyone should look in at the last moment, a porter or the like, and catch him red-handed before he can get away. The seat by the wall seems the only place, so under the seat he shoves the body—and after it he thrusts the black felt hat which has slipped off in the affray. And now he’s ready to go. Well, either he leaves then and there and walks coolly off the platform in the ordinary way, or—if its too late for that by this time, and the porter has already switched off the platform lights and closed the grille—he makes his way along the darkened platform end escapes along the line as I’ve said. Which course he actually adopted remains to be seen. But that, I’m tolerably certain, is how and when the crime was committed.”

Venner glanced sideways at Emily, whose face was wearing the completely wrapt expression it always did wear when she listened to Sexton Blake reconstructing a crime out of nothing but a few odds-andends. And Mr. Venner didn’t like it. He hated playing second fiddle to any man, and he was not going to do it now.

He cleared his throat.

“Yes—well,” he said, with a great air of judiciousness, “that’s pretty well as I’d figured things out for myself, Blake. In fact, I can see no other explanation upon the facts as we have them.” And blandly ignoring all be had said before: “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check your theory as to the motive for the killing with the one I have already formulated?” he added.

“What is your theory, sooper?” Tinker asked innocently, but the gentleman had already become inconceivably busy with the various papers on his desk, and for the moment was unable to reply.

In the end it was Blake who spoke.

“As to the motive, sooper,” he said slowly, “the only sure and certain thing is that in some way it ties up with the Rune affair and the muder of Bramer and Devereux. What we want now is the identity of the man on that slab, and information as to precisely What he was doing when Emily first spotted him. Had he been detailed to tail Susie Deane, and only switched to Emily when it dawned upon him that she was tailing Susie, too? Or had he, from the first, been set to tail Emily?”

“Well, I suggest pulling in Susie Deane and have done with it!” growled Venner. But Blake shook his head.

“I can’t agree, sooper,” he argued. “Susie Deane is our last card—and if we misplay her, we’re done for. The alarm will be up for the whole bang shooting match. Her life wouldn’t be worth a moment’s purchase—surely you can see that for yourself the way timings are shaping now? And if she refuses to speak—as she easily could, and for her own sake, probably would—we should have thrown away our hand to no purpose at all. We just daren’t risk it.”

“Well, we can’t sit here for ever, doing nothing!”

“Nor are we going to,” Blake assured him. “But bashing our heads against a brick wall, just for the sake of bashing them, isn’t going to help anyway. Our chief need at the moment is to get the dead man identified, and to that end you might try your most knowledgeable West End expert. What about Inspector Charles?”

Venner reached for the telephone and gave the necessary instructions. The inspector was out, at the moment, he reported, but he’d go round to the mortuary as aeon as he returned.

“And if he fails, well have to risk Prothero,” said Blake, “Though I don’t like it.” He turned to Emily, “Isn’t there anyone you know in Society whom you can really trust and whom you can suggest we might call in? Someone well In the swim of the clubs, and so forth?”

Emily thought for a moment.

“Well, there’s George Carruthers ” she suggested at last. “He put me up for the Dramatic Society, you remember, and I’d stake my life on George. Moreover, he gets around. He’s one of the very few there who have money.”

“Who is he?” Venner asked.

Emily told him, and at the recital of the Hon. George Carruthers’ family and background, the sooper withdrew his objection. In the end, if Inspector Charles failed to identify the dead man, it was agreed that they would risk calling in George Carruthers.

“Was he at the meeting last night?” Blake asked suddenly.

Emily said that he was, and explained how he had covered her retreat to the door.

“But it wasn’t George who followed me!” she added, as Venner started to speak. “George isn’t an inch above five-feet-eight.”

“Well, was there anybody there who was?” Venner asked. “That’s what I was going to say, Emily—was there anyone there of six feet and over?”

“Any man who could reasonably—or even unreasonably—fill this particular bill?” Blake encouraged her, seeing Emily’s natural aversion to answering such a question. “What about the man you were buying drinks for at the bar of the Mason’s Arms?”

“You mean Delf?” she asked, “Lord Delford?”—and she laughed. “Delf is over six feet, but I’ve known him all my life, Mr. Blake. All Delf’s interested in is a rich heiress—though I think he’d be too lazy to marry her even if he found one. Delf isn’t the kind of man to be in this racket—he hasn’t the mentality for it. Or the energy.”

“Well, anyone else?”

Emily thought for a moment and frowned. “Well, there was one other,” she said at last.

“Who?”

“A man by the name of Baring,” she said slowly. “Moss Baring “—and went on to tell them as much concerning Baring’s history and background as she could remember from what Delford had told her.

“And you say he has no money?” Venner asked eagerly.

“Oh, I suppose he has some—he must have,” Emily shrugged, “though nothing like what he expected when the lawyers brought him over here, and certainly not enough upon which to run that great barn of a place of his. He was saying last night that all he could find to raise money on about the place were the tombs of dead and gone Ravenhams. In fact, he offered me my choice of them, cheap, delivered to my door!”

“Funny man, eh?” snarled the sooper, who could never admit humour in anyone save himself. “What other tripe did he get off his chest?”

Blake waved the question aside, It was not material.

“What kind of man is this Baring, Emily?” he asked instead. “What’s he look like?”

“Why, I’d say he’s between twenty-eight and thirty, at a guess,” Emily replied. “About six-feet-two, noticeably handsome of his type, with fair, slightly wavy hair, and a very tanned face—”

“Wearing a dark grey bird’s-eye suit?” Tinker cut in swiftly.

“Yes,” Emily nodded, surprised. “He was.”

“We saw him then, guv’nor,” Tinker reminded the detective. “He came to that little serving hatch while we were there, and Thrupp went out to speak to him in the passage? It was a few seconds before Emily and her boy-friend entered the balloon bar. Remember?”

Blake nodded—but Emily shook her head.

“It couldn’t have been Baring,” she said. “At least, if it were only a few seconds before Delf and I came in—because he was upstairs then. We left him there talking to some girls.”

“But Emily—” Tinker frowned and turned to the detective for corroboration.

“He was, Emily!” Blake confirmed instantly. “And it could not have been more than the few seconds Tinker named before you and Delford came into the bar. He stepped up to the little serving hatch, looked at Thrupp, and without a word Thrupp went out into the passage to speak to him. A very tall young fellow, he was, good-looking, with fair wavy hair and a heavily tanned face. He was wearing a dark grey bird’s-eye pattern suit, double-breasted. I remember.”

Emily shook her head.

“Well, I don’t understand that at all,” she said. “He was wearing a dark grey suit all right, and you certainly describe him exactly. But the fact remains that Moss Baring was up in the club room when Delf and I left—and had been for at least a quarter of an hour before that. And definitely he did not pass Delf and me on the way down.”

“Then he must have arrived by another route, that’s all,” shrugged Blake, “Because be was certainly there, Emily.”

“But there is no other route!”

Blake stiffened on the instant.

“Eh?” he asked on a sharper note. “What did you say, Emily? No other route?”

“No other route,” confirmed Emily confidently, “I had that from Delf himself. We have to come down the stairs into the street, and round the corner into the bar—”

“But surely there is an internal staircase?” Blake snapped,

“There is—but we’re not allowed to use it,” she explained. “Delf said so. It’s something to do with the licence, I gathered. Anyway, the door is kept locked on the other side, and its never used.”

Involuntarily, Blake’s glance went to the sooper, whose eyes had suddenly become wary as his own. For a long minute there was silence, while question and answer passed unspoken between them.

Finally Venner drew a long breath.

“You’re quite certain of this, Emily?” he asked. “I mean about that back staircase not being used?”

“I’m positive,” she confirmed. “I was saying what a nuisance it would be in wet weather, and that’s when Delf told me about the other staircase that couldn’t be used owing to some clause in the licence or something. He said they had tried again and again to make old Thrupp see sense, but he was adamant. He simply would not allow them to use the back staircase.”

Important Points.

SUPERINTENDENT VENNER rose briskly to his feet.

“Well, Blake,” he said, “this looks like it!” And in his voice was all the authority of the Yard. “Looks like we were dead right about those Mayfair Boys, and the heart of the matter being at the Mason’s Arms. We said from the start that this Amateur Dramatic Society was only a facade to cover the meetings of crooks.”

It was entirely characteristic of the sooper to use the word “we” when things wore going right, but “you” when they were going wrong.

“But is it important—this stair business, I mean?” Emily asked, as the telephone-bell rang on Venner’s desk.

“It could be of the very first importance,” Blake told her. “Because on the face of it, Emily, whatever the other members of the society could or could not do, this man Baring evidently could, and did, use that back staircase—or how else did he get to be where Tinker and I saw him, at the time we saw him? And what had he to tell friend Thrupp—just before you yourself entered the place—that was of sufficient importance to induce him to take that risk while the upstairs room was full of people? Could it, for example, have had anything to do with the fact that when you left the place yen were tailed?”

Venner, who had listened to that explanation in silence, lifted the telephone and spoke.

“Oh, hallo, Charles?” he asked, evidently recognising the West End expert’s voice. “You’ve seen him? Good! Well, what about it?”

There was a brief silence while Inspector Charles made his report.

“Then you don’t know him?” the sooper asked at length on a noticeably flatter note. “Never seen him before in your life? Okay, Charles. Can’t be helped. Thanks for the effort.”

“No good?” Blake asked as Venner replaced the telephone.

“Never seen him in his life before, he says—his sergeant neither,” the sooper reported. “So since we can’t afford to lose time, I suggest we pick up this Carruthers bird Emily mentions and get him to take a peek. And if he fails, we’ll have to risk Prothoro himself, Blake. It’s absolutely essential now, as I see it, that we get on the inside of this business before the balloon goes up. Because whoever these people are, they can’t stand murders at this rate. This is gang warfare gone mad. They’ll panic, and they’ll pull out before we can grab them; and what’s more, they’ll destroy the evidence as they go. We’ve got to get in—and get in fast. Don’t you agree?”

The private detective said nothing for a moment; he was thinking. That chance remark concerning an internal staircase had reawakened a theory which—in spite of the fact that it had been his first thought and his first suspicion—he had abandoned upon meeting the man Thrupp and checking his record. William Tbrupp had been licensee of the Mason’s Arms for close on ten years, and before that he had most certainly been the “gentleman’s gentleman” he proclaimed himself to have been. Moreover, he had bought the place—as he told Emily—out of a legacy of £2,500 which had been left to him by Sir Walruffe Pargett, whose valet he had been at the time of the latter’s death from pnumonia in Zanzibar, There wee absolutely nothing in his flawless record to suggest that he could be sitting in on wholesale thievery and murder at this late stage of his career. The local police had for years regarded him as an amiable oddity who was a bit cracked on the subject of the old aristocracy.

“Don’t you agree, Blake?” Venner asked again.

Sexton Blake sighed.

“Yes, I’m afraid so. And without any preparation,” he agreed reluctantly. “If the dead man over yonder proves to have been a member of the Amateur Dramatic Society, that fixes it. The root of the whole mystery must—must!—lie in their meetings at the Mason’s Arms. But before we move, we must be dead sure of our ground. One mistake at this stage could easily be fatal.”

He glanced at at his watch.

“I suggest that we have breakfast now while you send a car to collect this Carruthers fellow. I don’t like risking him, but I’d rather that than alarm Prothero—and anyway, we’ve got to take a chance somewhere. Where’s he live, Emily?”

Emily gave a Knightsbridge address. And as Venner took up his telephone to give the necessary order, he invited them all to breakfast in the Yard canteen.

“It’ll save time,” he said. “And we’ll all be here when they bring Carruthers in.”

They were all there. Breakfast had been sent up to them in Venner’s office, and they had barely finished when word came up from below that George Carruthers had arrived. Venner asked for him to be sent up, and a few minutes later Emily was introducing him to them all.

Blake liked the man on sight. He was entirely typical of his kind—cool, calm, exhibiting not the slightest curiosity as to why he had been brought to Scotland Yard before eight o’clock in the morning.

“Mr. Carruthers,” said Blake, “we think you may be able to help us in a very difficult matter. We understand from Lady Emily that you are a member of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society? Are you interested in amateur theatricals?”

Carruthers gave his lazy smile.

“Not particularly, Mr. Blake,” he answered, “I’m afraid with me it was just something to do. Why?”

“I take it that many of your friends are members?”

“Yes, that is so. That, in fact, is how I came to join myself. Everybody seemed to be drifting along to the Mason’s Arms on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, so I thought I might as well drift along, too. It was something to do,” Carruthers smiled, “You know how it is.”

Blake nodded.

“Were you at Lord Rune’s party the other night?” he asked.

“No.”

“Where were you, Mr. Carruthers?”

Carruthers glanced at Emily.

“I was down at Rox’s place,” he said, “Went down for a week-end shoot. But why the inquisition?”

“Lord Roxbourne has a place outside Lincoln,” Emily told Blake, “George isn’t particularly interested in parties,” she added. “He never was a lounge lizard, were you, George?” she asked with a smile.

“Too old,” grinned George. “And in my younger days, not sufficient of a conversationalist. I bored everybody stiff—including myself.”

Venner moved restlessly in his chair. And observing the symptoms, Blake came to the point.

“We want you to look at a dead man for us, Mr. Carruthers,” he said abruptly. And as Carruthers stared: “A murdered man,” he added, “We want to know if you can tell us who he is. Are you willing to do that?”

George Carruthers looked from one to the other of them, and finally at Emily.

“Well,” he said at last, “I don’t know what all this is about—or how you come to be hobnobbing with the chiefs of New Scotland Yard, Emily,” he grinned. “But if I can help you—of course. Delighted. Though dead men before breakfast are not exactly my idea of amusement.”

“We get ‘em here before every meal, Mr. Carruthers,” said Venner. “In fact, corpses of one kind or another could be said to be our hors d’oeuvre!” he added, with his usual execrable taste in humour. “Will you come this way, please?”

They went along to the mortuary, and for a minute or two George Carruthers stood looking down upon the dead man while the others waited breathlessly.

“Well?” Venner jerked out at last.

Carruthers looked at him.

“I don’t know why he’s wearing that rig-out,” he said slowly, “But the man himself is Bertie Grandborongh.”

“Who’s he?” snapped Venner.

“Why, he’s Tom Grandborough’s son,” Carruthers said, speaking more to Emily than the others. “I doubt if you’d have known him. He came unstuck as a kid at Harrow—went off the rails altogether, as I remember it. His father sent him out to Australia on a small allowance—he only came back recently, I believe, after his father’s death.”

“Is he—or was be, rather—a member of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society?” Blake asked.

Carruthers said, “Yes.”

“So?” Blake looked at Venner, a faint triumph discernible in his glance. “Was he at the meeting last night, do you know?” he asked Carruthers.

“Yes, he was, Mr. Blake. I saw him. Spoke to him, in fact.”

“Dressed as he is now?”

“Good lord, no!” Carruthers said. “Matter of fact, he was in a dinner jacket. He was going on somewhere afterwards,” he said.

“Do you know what time he left the clubroom?”

“No, I’m afraid not. I didn’t see him go.”

“Did he say where he was going on to—after the meeting, I mean?” Blake asked. Carruthers nodded.

“He said that Rita Lumsden was having a bit of a do at the Bows and Bells. He said he’d promised to look in in time for supper. I don’t know whether he did or not.” And after a moment of silence: “But I could soon find out, if it’s important?” he added.

“No,” said Blake—than checked. “Wait a minute, though,” he went on quickly. “That might be quite an idea. As a matter of fact, he didn’t go. He was in no position to go. And he wouldn’t have gone in any event—in those clothes. I wonder if he rang up and excused himself?”

“I’ll ask Rita, if you like?” Carruthers volunteered.

“It’s the time he made the call that’s important,” Blake explained as they walked back to the sooper’s office. “If he made a call at all, I would like to know the time of it”—and he suggested to Carruthers what shape his conversation should take in order to achieve that purpose.

Carruthers made the call from Venner’s desk, and Blake, with a separate earpiece, listened in. A girl’s voice answered, and after a few preliminary sentences, Carruthers got round to the point at issue.

“By the way, Rita,” he asked, “did Bertie Grandborough look in last night?”

“No, he didn’t—the wretched stiff!” came the girl’s reply—the term more appropriate than she could possibly have dreamt. “He ‘phoned to say he wouldn’t be able to make it.”

“When was that, Rita?”

“Why, just after I arrived here,” the girl said. “Five-past ten, it was—I was furious. He’d promised to give Peter and Rosemary a lift; their car’s in dry dock. I had to send a taxi for them.”

Blake lowered his earpiece and nodded to Carruthers that was all he wanted. While Carruthers finished off the conversation, he crossed to Venner, who was standing with Emily and Tinker by the window.

“He rang that girl at five minutes past ten, saying he wouldn’t be able to make it,” he reported.

“So what?” demanded Venner.

“This,” Blake told him, “It was five minutes to ten when Emily and her escort walked into the saloon bar of the Mason’s Arms. One minute before that—I’m certain it was no longer—Moss Baring was at the serving hatch beckoning Thrupp, and Thrupp went out to him. They spoke together in the passage for several seconds, then Thrupp returned to the bar and Baring disappeared. Do you think it coincidence that ten minutes later, Grandborough should be ringing this girl to apologise for not being able to make her party?”

“You mean—” It was Emily who spoke.

“I mean, he’d been given his marching orders!” Blake said tautly. “His orders to change his clothes and be ready to tail you when you left. Baring suspected you, Emily—he must have. And the second you and Delford left that room, he dived down the back stairs to acquaint Thrupp of his suspicions before you had time to reach the bar. Thrupp—and I think it must be he who is at the back of this business—immediately gave orders for you to be shadowed when you left the place. And Grandborough was the man detailed for the job. Obviously Baring would know that—”

“And it was he who followed him and killed him?” Tinker suggested, when the detective paused. “Killed him, before he could kill Emily?”

Blake hunched his shoulders.

“It could have been,” he said. “Or, of course, it could have been one of his men. But, as I see it, that time sequence definitely pins the trouble on Baring, Thrupp and Grandborough. Grandborough, was obviously one of Thrupp’s men—one of the Mayfair Boys. And the mere fact that he was killed by Baring—or at any rate through Baring’s agency—suggests to my mind that Baring could very easily be the traitor we spoke of. Baring, in fact, could be the hi-jacker!”

Emily nodded, slowly. She had just remembered something.

“You could be right about him being suspicious of me,” she mused. “I thought at the time that it was just his manner—remember I’d never met him before. But when Susie Deane was asking if any of us had seen Jack Devereux, Baring looked at me in such a mocking kind of way and suggested that I might have seen him!”

“He might have been watching the Yard when we brought Meyerling’s van in that day,” Venner put in thoughtfully. “It’s quite likely they’d have kept a watch on it just to see how things were going, In that case he might have seen you drive in, and seen you going, over to the mortuary with us. He might even have seen you when you and Blake looked in the van.”

Blake nodded his agreement, inwardly cursing himself for not thinking more of Emily’s safety. Then he noticed that Carruthers had finished telephoning, and went across to thank him for his assistance.

“I don’t want to butt in where I’m not wanted,” Carruthers shrugged as they shook hands, “but I can’t help remarking the fact that our Amateur Dramatic Society seems to be losing its members at a pretty rapid rate, Mr. Blake, and under unpleasant circumstances. Grandborough makes the second to have met it in a matter of few days—the third if you like to count Devereux in.”

Blake smiled.

“I’m afraid that’s true, Mr. Carruthers,” he said. “Do you think we could trust you not to voice that observation in public, until we give you leave?”

“I think so,” said Carruthers, frowning. “Certainly, if you prefer it. All the same, I think I’ll refrain from attending any further meetings! I’d hate to make a fourth!”

“You might forget having seen Emily here, too.”

“Oh, well, now—I could never forget seeing Emily anywhere, Mr. Blake,” grinned George Carruthers, “But I’ll not mention that I’ve seen her here, if that will do?”

“That will do,” replied the detective. “And one other thing—make no mention of Grandborough being dead.”

Carruthers agreed, and shortly afterwards took his departure.

“And now—what are we going to do?” asked Venner, sitting down at his desk. “All this theory is nice, as far as it goes, but I shall want something the dickens of a lot more factual before I can apply for a warrant. What about pulling in Susie Deane, as a start-off?”

“I’m against that, Venner,” Blake said again. “For one thing, I very much doubt if she really knows anything beyond the fact that she had to pretend to send Bramer to fetch her lines that night. And for another, if we pull her in now, I’m certain Thrupp and the rest would take alarm and get clear of the country before we got close enough to grab them. You can be sure they’ve fixed their escape route, long before this.”

“Well, where do you reckon they’ve got the loot hidden?” Tinker asked. “Jewels they could hide easily enough—but furs mink coats’ud be more difficult. They’d scarcely risk unloading a parcel of mink coats outside the Mason’s Arms!”

Venner scratched his head.

“The truth is,” he said at last, “we haven’t a single fact to go on, have we? We can’t even prove that Baring ever used the back stairs! We can’t even attempt to prove that Grandborough took his orders from Thrupp—or Baring—to follow Emily, last night. While as for—”

“Wait a minute!” cut in Sexton Blake. “According to Carruthers, Grandborough was already in dinner clothes when he arrived at the meeting. He was going on to the ‘Bows and Bells’ night club, you remember, for supper. Well, since manifestly he would not leave the meeting after he had received his orders—in case Emily should elect to depart while he was away—it follows that he must have changed on the premises. And in that event his evening clothes would still be there—unless Thrupp’s had them sent round to his home early this morning. But I don’t think he’d do that. I don’t think he would risk it. For that matter, I don’t think Grandborough himself would have risked returning home in that long overcoat and the rough clothes underneath.”

“You mean he was scheduled to return to the Mason’s Arms after the job was finished?”

“No, I don’t!” Blake returned with decision. “I’m absolutely convinced that no member of the gang went anywhere near the Mason’s Arms save on those nights when the Dramatic Society was in session. That’s the whole point of the thing, don’t you see? I rather think there would be other arrangements for those who had to change back again into their own clothes before returning home.”

“Another hide-out?” Venner groaned.

“Something of the kind—yes,” Blake agreed, “It might be that another member of the gang is favourably situated with regard to changing facilities. It could be that—”

“Well?” Venner asked when he, stopped.

Blake turned swiftly to Emily.

“This ruin of a house you mentioned?” he asked her. “This place Baring inherited—where is it, exactly?”

“Outside Tunbridge Wells,” she told him. “A place called ‘The Priory.’ I believe it was a priory, or a monastery or something, in the fifteenth century.”

“Well, he’d scarcely go all the way to Tunbridge Wells to change!” shrugged the sooper.

“I’m not so sure of that,” Blake retorted. “A place like that would be ideal for the job—and it could be that Baring is Thrupp’s right-hand man in the whole racket. It could even be that that’s where the loot is hidden. And if he did happen to be Thrupp’s right-hand man—completely in his confidence—who would be in a better position to pull a double-cross such as was pulled over the Rune affair?”

Venner mulled over that notion thoughtfully. This Baring bird appeared to be growing in stature with every theory enunciated—but unfortunately it was only theory! They still had no real facts.

“Well, let’s stick to one thing at a time,” he said at last. “This dinner suit that you reckon might stilI be in the Mason’s Arms—what can we do about that? We’d need a search warrant to look for it—and I don’t know that I could get one on the flimsy chance of finding a suit that might be anybody’s even if we found it. You know how touchy the higher-ups are on the subject of search warrants.”

“I don’t want a search warrant—and wouldn’t use it if I had one,” Blake told him cheerfully. “To exercise a search warrant would give the show away completely. All you have to do, sooper, is to arrange to have the Mason’s Arms kept under closest surveillance from now on until, say, one o’clock to-morrow morning, to make sure that no one leaves with a parcel. You’ll, need your very best men, and you’ll need to have them changed every hour. A heavy lorry breakdown would be useful—that kind of thing—always remembering that there are no flies on Mr. Thurupp!”

“And then what?” Venner asked suspiciously.

“I’ll attend to the rest,” Blake promised. “And there’ll be no trouble, either,” he added. “But by the early hours of tomorrow morning, I shall hope to have solved not only the problem of Grandborough’s evening clothes, but also the secret of the back staircase.”

He rose as he spoke, ignoring the sooper’s glare of professional disapproval. Venner was a Yard man, and the Yard can work only within very clearly defined limits—limits which do not include burglary, housebreaking, illegal entry, or skullduggery generally!

“Point is,” Blake told him, correctly reading his thoughts, “we’ve got to make a start somewhere, sooper. From this hopelessly tangled skein we have to pick out one loose end from which we can start the unravelling process—and this evening suit could easily be it. Thrupp’s our man, I’m certain—if only because it couldn’t be anybody else. But we have to prove it. And short of anybody blabbing—which isn’t likely seeing that they’re all in the same boat—this is the quickest way of getting him. In any event, you know nothing about it. Okay?”

Venner sniffed. It was his favourite boast that if he had the freedom of action allowed the private detective he could beat Sexton Blake on his own ground every day of the week. But as it was, hedged round by a thousand rules and regulations, his natural brilliance hadn’t a chance.

“I don’t koow what you’re talking about, Blake,” he said irritably. “I don’t want to know. But I’ll be sleeping here tonight,” he added as Emily smiled, “and there’s always a telephone if you’ve anything you want to tell me.”

“And you’ll fix to have the Mason’s Arms watched?”

“I suppose so,” growled Venner.

Blake nodded his thanks.

“Good!” he said. “Come on, Tinker—Emily! We’ve work to do.”

“Making your rope ladders and your dope, I suppose!” Venner positively snarled. ‘Breaking every rule in the Police Handbook and then thinking—”

But the Baker Street outfit were already gone.

The Secret Wardrobe.

AT exactly one o’clock the following morning, Sexton Blake strolled along Eaton Square towards a small canvas erection set up across the pavement. A couple of red lamps served to warn pedestrians of its presence there, and when Blake drew level, a couple of workmen were just climbing out of the shallow trough where apparently they had been doing something to the telephone cables.

Blake paused for a moment to look.

“Okay?” he asked one of the men softly.

The fellow grinned, and nodded.

“Everything okay, Mr. Blake,” he said in the same quiet fashion. “Nothing has been taken out of the place at all. The upstairs light went out at eleven-thirty-five, and there’s been no light anywhere since—so I guess he’s settled for the night.”

“Anybody gone in or come out since closing-time?” Blake asked.

“Not a soul, sir,” said the workman. “Good! You can clear off now,” the detective told them.

“Okay, Mr. Blake. We’ll pack up right away.”

Blake nodded and moved on. He turned into South Eaton Place, at the bottom, and left into the Mews, where two people awaited him in the shadows.

“Okay?” Tinker asked as the detective came up.

“They’re moving out now,” Blake nodded, “And the place has been in darkness since thirty-five minutes past eleven—so that should he all right. Where did you leave the car, Emily?”

Lady Emily Westomholme—looking a very slight slip of femininity he the belted raincoat she was wearing over her slacks and jumper—told him. Her hands were thrust wrist deep into her pockets, and from her utter coolness no one would ever have guessed that in the right-hand pocket her slim fingers were even then caressing the butt of the deadly little automatic Blake had insisted upon her carrying,

“We’ll move in another five minutes,” announced Blake, glancing at his watch. That should have given Thrupp ample time to get into his first sleep.”

They waited in silence. Then, when Blake gave the word, they drifted soundlessly as shadows out of the Mews into South Eaton Place. Back into Eaton Square, across the road, round the narrow turning into Dover Court—and there was the Mason’s Arms standing still and dark and silent before them.

Upon his previous visit, Blake had noted the interior geography of the place from’ front to rear; and during the day both Tinker and he had paid a second visit to study the outside geography. The window Blake intended to use opened directly on to that inner passage where Thrupp had gone out to speak to Moss Baring—and he had selected that in case the doors from the two bars should have been locked on the outside. To begin with, at any rate, he could not afford to risk making the slightest sound.

Tinker handed him the tools, and the detective set to work on the catch—while Emily, back to the wall, fulfilled her part of watching the Court and the square for any occasional passer-by. In five minutes of very careful work, Blake had the catch back and the window opened sufficiently for them to climb through—but first of all he leaned in and flashed a pencil-thick beam of light round the interior to make certain that everything was clear.

“Okay!” he whispered then—and straightway Tinker went into action. A leg up from Blake lifted him on to the sill, and in no time at all he had lowered himself carefully to the floor on the other side. Emily followed, and Blake came last of all—afterwards turning and pulling down the window again so as to obviate the chance of an alarm from outside while they were at work.

They had previously ascertained that Thrupp slept alone in the place, and that his bedroom was in the front of the house immediately above the saloon bar. The stairs went up from the end of the passage, and silently Blake led the way in that direction—having first of all flicked his torch to make sure there was nothing in the way, and thereafter steering himself by keeping a hand on the wall.

Nothing happened, and they reached the foot of the stairs in safety, Tinker opened the small bag he had brought and from it, by the light from Emily’s torch, extracted a thin cane, to the end of which was fastened a surgeon’s swab. That he handed to Blake, together with a small bottle of a very powerful yet quite harmless ansthetic which Blake, with his medical qualifications, had specially prepared for the job that afternoon. That swab, when drenched with the ansthetic and held at armslength beneath the sleeping Thrupp’s nostrils would, in a very few seconds, drift him into a state of complete anaesthesia, from which he would not awake for at least two hours, and of which he would have no after effects and no knowledge whatever.

“Right!” nodded the detective soundlessly when he had pocketed tho various articles. And directing the pencil-beam from his torch on to the stairs, he commenced a careful ascent, cat-like, up the extreme edges at the treads-his progress anxiously watched by Tinker and Emily from the foot of the staircase.

At last he reached the top, and the light disappeared. Thereafter, for what seemed a very long time indeed, Tinker and Emily waited in the dark, their ears stretched for the slightest sound that would betray trouble—but none came.

Five minutes passed-ten-fifteen. Beside him, he could feel Emily becoming restless—and Tinker himself was beginning to wonder what on earth could have happened. Blake had reckoned to be through in something under ten minutes from start to finish—but soon twenty minutes had passed and still there was no sign of him returning. Tinker, in fact, was just beginning to think about going up to investigate when a welcome gleam of light above them brought the waiting to an end.

But their relief was short-lived, for they soon saw that Blake was coming down as carefully as he had gone up—which wasn’t in the book. With Thrupp well and truly under the influence, noise should have become of no further importance—that, in fact, was the whole of Blake’s scheme: to render Thrapp unconscious so that they could search the premises and collect the evidence they wanted without him having the faintest idea that he was even under suspicion; much less that he had been visited!

A minute or two later they learned the startling truth.

“He’s obt up there!” Blake whispered the instant he reached the bottom of the stairs, “His bed hasn’t been slept in. I’ve looked in the other three rooms; he’s not there either. He isn’t anywhere.”

“You mean he’s bolted?” Tinker asked incredulously,

“He can’t have—if Venner’s men were doing their job properly,” Blake replied. He was silent a moment, thinking. “We’d better search the entire premises,” he decided then. “If he is hiding anywhere it follows that he has already taken alarm—so we may as well come out into the open now, and have done with it.”

“Bight-ho! Where do we start?” Tinker asked cheerfully, pleased with the prospect of immediate action.

“You and Emily had better stay here,” Blake told him. “We don’t want to have him dodging us up and down these stairs. He isn’t upstairs now, I know that—so while I flush the cellar and the bars, you watch that he doesn’t double back up there.”

“Right-ho!” agreed Tinker. “Do we put a light on?”

Blake thought of Emily, and nodded.

“You may as well,” he said, “here in the passage, I don’t think it matters much now.” He flashed his torch along the wall as he spoke, and discovering the switch, snapped it down. A solitary bulb sprang to life in the ceiling, and by its light Blake noticed that both the door into the saloon bar, and the one into the public, were locked from this side and the keys of both doors were still in the locks. “So he isn’t in either of the bars!” he shrugged. “And if he isn’t in the cellar or one of the private rooms, it means that he’s gone. In which event, he’ll have taken Grandborough’s dinner suit with him, and we’ll have had our trouble for nothing. Curse those wretched Yard men!” he burst out angrily. “I warned Venner to use only his best operators!”

He went off to search the cellar, leaving Tinker and Emily to guard the stairs. That job did not take many minutes, for the Mason’s Arms was only a small place, and a single glance round—once he had found the light switch—was quite sufficient to show that Thrupp was not there. On the way back he searched the small private room at the rear of the premises, and then the kitchen, the outhouse, the backyard, and finally the two bars.

“Gone?” Tinker asked as he came out of the “Public.”

“You’ve seen nothing of him, of course?” Blake asked as he looked from one to the other of them still standing on guard.

They shook their heads, and Blake admitted that he hadn’t either.

“Those fools must have let him a some time after twenty-five minutes to twelve,” he growled. “He fooled them with the light in his bedroom. Anyway, we’l have a look at the back stairs to the club room while we’re here—they lead up from the rear of the premises, I noticed.”

“You saw no sign of the dinner suit upstairs anywhere?” Emily asked.

Blake said no. He had looked in the wardrobe and in all the drawers. He had looked in every room.

“But if he’s really bolted, he’ll have taken that damning piece of evidence with him,” he shrugged. “In fact, that’s why he’s probably gone—to dump it somewhere, before we closed in and found it for ourselves. Let’s look at this back staircase.” He led the way, and together they ascended the carpeted stairs.

“That’s a bit unusual, too, isn’t it?” Tinker commented. “Carpet on these stairs?”

“Carpet for silence!” Blake said bitterly. “You can bet that every member of that gang was in the habit of slipping down these stairs at some time during rehearsals either to make his report to Thrupp, get his orders, or receive his share of the pay-out from their various robberies. And every one had a key to the door.”

They had reached a landing at the top by now, and to Blake’s surprise he found not one door but two! One was straight ahead of him at the end of the landing, and the other a few feet back in the right-hand wall.

“And the keys in both are on this side, guv’nor!” Tinker exclaimed. He switched on his torch for a better illumination. “Sufferin’ cats!” he cried a moment later. “Look at this! That key hasn’t been turned in years; it’s smothered in rust and cobwebs!”

“And so’s the one in this door!” Blake reported from the door facing him.

The two had turned, and were staring at each other blankly. It was Emily who spoke:

“Well, Delf said Thrupp wouldn’t allow them to be used because of some clause in his licence,” she reminded them. “He said the back staircase was never used.”

Blake turned back to the door he had examined, and searched it again more closely. Holding his torch scarcely an inch from the wood, he ran it slowly up the jamb, across the top, and down past the hinges on the other side. Then he stood staring at it, puzzled.

“You know,” he heard Tinker saying from behind him—and his voice held much of Blake’s own bewilderment—“It isn’t only the key—it’s the door as well! The door itself has never been opened in ages.”

“Nor has this one!” muttered the private detective, crossing over to confirm Tinker’s opinion of that secoed door. He went over it with his torch, as he had with his own. And when he had finished he looked from Tinker to Emily without a word.

Finally Tinker scratched his head.

“Well, this is it corker!” he said ruefully. “This puts us right back where we started. I suppose they haven’t been doctored, by any chance?”

Blake shook his head. “No, the dust and the fluff and the odd bits of spiders’ webs were genuine enough,” he said.

“Yet if Baring didn’t pass Emily down the other stairs, he simply must have used this back staircase somehow!” he insisted. “He couldn’t possibly have arrived at that serving hatch, at the time we saw him there, without having come down this way!”

Tinker looked about him.

“Well, there’s no other door here that he could have used—that’s a stone ginger!” he said. “Where does that door at the end lead to?”

“Straight into the clubroom, I imagine,” Blake said.

He stepped over there and tried the key. Tried again, but it was apparently immovable. Not even a screwdriver slipped through the handle to afford him greater leverage could shift it. The handle itself would have twisted off rather than the mechanism of the lock move.

“Rusted solid!” said Tinker. “Let’s have a look at the key, guv’nor.”

Blake tried to withdraw it, but it was stuck fast. It would neither turn the lock nor come out of the keyhole. Frowning, he tried the key of the other door, but precisely the same conditions prevailed there.

“Well, that settles it!” sighed Tinker when he, too, had tried, with no better result. “Both of ‘em have obviously become rusted solid in the locks—and in that shape it sticks out a mile that no one could possibly have opened either of them from the other side!”

And that was when Sexton Blake gave an odd little laugh.

“On the contrary,” he said—and there was just the least touch of excitement discernible in his voice—“it proves that one, or other of these is in use all the time, Tinker!”

“Eh?” Both Emily and Tinker demanded together.

“Listen!” cried Blake tautly. “Those locks have been doctored. No lock on earth, on inside doors like these, could have rusted so solid, without being doctored! Someone has injected a rust-forming liquid into both of them—obviously to give them the appearance of never having been used—and this is the result. They’re trick doors—or one of ‘em is. And that means that the gang did use this back staircase. Baring did, on the night we saw him. And now, by heavens, we’ve got something to work on! Stand aside, Emily!”

Emily backed hard against the opposite wall while Blake, throwing caution to the winds, proceeded methodically to kick out one of the lower panels of that door which was at the end of the landing—the one leading, as he supposed, into the clubroom. It was a noisy business, but now the detective seemed not to care. He was nose down on the trail—he was sure of it. And chances had to be taken.

“Can you crawl through there?” he asked Tinker when only the jagged edges of the panel remained. “I’m pushing against the jamb from this side, but you may be able to smash down the whole thing from the other side. Just a minute?”

Blake threw himself flat on the floor, poked one hand and his torch through the opening, and followed it with his head until he found himself looking into a large, empty room. Instantly he withdrew and stood up again.

“The clubroom!” he announced briefly, “And empty. Go ahead, Tinker! Mind the jagged edges.”

It was close work, but Tinker managed it. They heard him scrambling to his feet on the other side, and there was a brief silence—evidently while he looked round.

“I say!” his voice came excitedly the next moment. “There’s a gentlemen’s cloakroom here, guv’nor—and that other door must lead out of it.”

“So that was the trick!” Blake was jubilant. That solved the last of his problems, and convinced him that he was on the right track at last. The members of the gang would not have to open that door in full view of the rest of the Dramatic Society’s members! They simply slipped into the cloakroom and out through that second door and so down the back stairs! “Let’s have this door down, Tinker, so that I can come in and have a look round!” he called. “I’ll help from this side.”

They heard Tinker walk across the clubroom for his run, while Blake inserted his screwdriver between the jamb of the door and the edge of the mortise lock and forced them apart as far as he could.

“Right?” Tinker called.

“Right!” panted Blake. “Come on!”

Tinker came. A short run, a thundering impact on the other side—and the broken door crashed inwards, carrying both Blake and Tinker with it.

“And that’s that?” grinned Tinker as he picked himself from the wreckage. “If ever you want a door-buster, Emily, all you have to do is to apply to yours truly!”

Blake was already through the doorway and into the clubroom. The door leading to the gentlemen’s cloakroom was no more than half a dozen yards along the wall from the door they had just broken down. Blake pushed it open and went in. It was only a smallish place, lined with pegs for clothes and so on, but at the far end was the other side of the door they had already examined on the landing—and three large, rusty screws, driven right through the edge of the door into the wooden jamb, emphasised the fact that it was not in use!

Blake paused and stared. That was a facer. He looked more closely at the heads of the screws, but there could be no doubt as to their genuineness. That door, literally, had been screwed up for years!

Tinker came in, followed by Emily, and all three of them stood silently staring. Presently Emily went out again, and they heard her back on the landing.

“Mr. Blake!” she called suddenly. “I don’t think that is the door!”

“What?” Blake turned sharply as she came in again.

“Look at this!”

She was beckoning him out to the clubroom, and he followed her to the broken door.

“Look!” she said excitedly. “From the wall of the passage to the cloakroom door is eight of my paces. But from the cloakroom door to that screwed-up door is only six paces across the cloakroom, What’s happened to the other two”

Blake’s jaw came up with a click.

“Emily, my dear—you’re golden!” he cried then. “By heavens, that’s the secret! There’s a concealed room or passage between the screwed-up door and that one leading on to the landing. The screwed-up door is set in a false wall. You listen out there while I tap inside!”

He rushed back into the cloakroom and tapped on the panels with the handle of the screwdriver.

“You’re not tapping on this door!” Emily called from the landing, “I can hear you, but it’s not on this door!”

“Okay!” Blake set to work furiously on the screws. It was a trick door, he guessed, but he had not time to find the secret of it now. Fortunately it opened away from him, and with the holding screws out, it would not be difficult to smash it in. Time, he felt, was of the utmost importance—now.

Tinker came in to join him, while Emily waited on the landing, listening. Those screws were tough, and the last of them Tinker took out to give the detective a rest. It was all of fifteen minutes before the last of them came out.

“Okay,- Emily—we’re in!” called Tinker, bunching himself for the charge.

They hurled themselves at it together, Blake and he, and the door flew inwards with a crash. The room beyond was so narrow that both of them were carried, reeling, on to the landing this time!

“This is it, Emily!” Blake cried,” banging upon it with his fist. But before she could answer, Tinker had grabbed his arm.

“Look!” he gasped, pointing to the wall on his left.

Blake looked, and a slow smile of triumph widened his well-cut mouth. Along that wall hung a whole wardrobe of what appeared to be working men’s suits and overcoats, caps and soft hats. There were overalls hanging there, dust coats, and several uniforms. But the thing Blake was staring at was a dinner suit hanging on a “shoulder” on the nearest peg. And on the peg next to it hung a boiled shirt and underwear and all the accessories—just as they had been taken off.

“Grandborough’s!” he breathed. “Granhorough’s dinner suit, Tinker. Now we’ve got Thrupp where we want him. He’s head of the Mayfair Boys, just as I thought—and I’ll stake my reputation upon Moss Baring being his chief lieutenant and, unknown to Thrupp, the leader of the hijackers. Fetch Emily!”

Tinker went out, calling as he went—while Blake fell to examining the trick door on to the landing. Since the door itself was immovable, it followed automatically that the whole thing must swing out—jamb and everything. The entire woodwork—door and frame—must be hinged into the solid brickwork and move in one compact mass. He was still feeling round the brickwork for a hidden spring, when he became aware of Tinker, calling him from some distance away.

“Guv’nor! Guv’nor!” came his voice frantically, “She isn’t here! She’s gone!”

The Sunken Car.

FOR a split second the brain of Sexton Blake failed to register what he had heard. Then, like a spring released, he whirled on his toes, rushed through the cloakroom, round through the clubroom, and out on to the empty landing.

“What?” he yelled. “What’s that?”

“Emily!” came Tinker’s voice from downstairs, “She’s gone! She’s disappeared! I can’t find her anywhere!”

Blake leapt down the stairs, taking them two at a time.

“Emily!” he shouted as he went. “Emily!”

Tinker came running from the back of the premises.

“She not here!” he panted. “She wasn’t on the landing when I went to fetch her. I thought she’d popped down here for something, and hadn’t heard you call. But she isn’t anywhere—and the side door’s open!”

“Thrupp!”

The single word escaped the detective almost without conscious volition—but even as it passed his lips he knew it for truth.

“Thrupp!” he said again, “He must have been hiding in the secret room up there and pounced on her before she knew what was happening.” He was running to the open side door as he spoke, but when a moment later he burst into the Court it was empty. “He can’t have gone far!” he said. “You take that direction, while I run down into Eaton Square.”

Tinker hared off deeper into Dover Court, while Blake raced away In the opposite direction. But Eaton Square was deserted. Nothing was stirring anywhere—nor, when he listened, could he hear anything, either. Turning, he raced back to the Mason’s Arms, only to find that Tinker had similarly failed.

“But there’s an open garage, not fifty yards down the Court,” he reported breathlessly. “That is, the door’s still open and inside there’ a strong smell of hot exhaust gas. I reckon he had a car there, and he’s got away in it!”

“But why take Emily?” Blake rapped out on the instant. “If he’s on the run, surely he wouldn’t risk burdening himself with an unwilling passenger—that would be the act of a lunatic.”

“Maybe he’ll drop her somewhere,” Tinker suggested. “Maybe he took her just to confuse the issue?”

“With us only a few yards away?” asked Blake acidly. “And when obviously he would have to carry her?” He shook his head. “He’d never risk it,” he said again. “Nothing save life or death would induce any sane man to take such a chance!”

“Well, maybe it was life or death—for him!”

“How?” snapped the detective. “Even it he were wanted for murder—how would having Emily help him?”

“Hostage?” muttered Tinker.

“For us—maybe. But not for the police!” Blake pointed out quickly. “Besides, consider the facts. Hidden in that secret room Thrupp must inevitably have heard everything we said. He must have known that we believed him already gone. Well, what would have been easier for him than to have slipped through the trick door on to the landing and down the stairs to freedom, while we three were in the cloakroom staring at that screwed-up door? He was only just on the other side of that door, remember, and could hear us talking. He would have realised in a moment that now was his chance—and his last chance!—to get safely away. Well, why didn’t he go?”

“Obviously, because he wanted Emily!” Tinker maintained obstinately. “I mean, if this Thrupp bird really is the brain behind the Mayfair Boys, guv’nor, he’s no slouch. That sticks out a mile, doesn’t it? And he wouldn’t risk his liberty by hanging on in that secret room merely for fun, when he knew his discovery and arrest to be imminent. That bird wanted Emily! And he wanted her badly enough to risk knocking her out and carrying her down to that car—knowing all the time that we were practically within arm’s reach of him! Well, why in heck could he want her as badly as all that? It couldn’t be for anything she knew, could it?”

They were back in the Mason’s Arms by now, and Blake was pacing the corridor, monotonously pounding one clenched fist into the open palm of the other, while he racked his brain for the answer to this problem.

“I mean—Emily didn’t know anything that he didn’t know himself, did she?” Tinker insisted.

Blake opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again without saying anything. In the first stunning shock of finding Emily missing, his brain had gone dead on him, but now it was getting into action again.

Prodded by Tinker’s question, he suddenly realised that Emily did know something that Thrupp himself did not know!

“Wait a minute!” he said slowly into the taut silence. And, pausing only for a second or two to collect his thoughts: “This hijacking may have been going on for some time,” he said, “with only the last one involving murder. It could be, in fact, that the Rune affair was intended as the hi-jacker’s grand finale—hence the recklessness with which it was carried out. And it could be that Moss Baring, having acquired all the money he needs, is now ready to quit the whole racket and return a comparatively rich man to Africa. Perhaps he has even hinted that to Thrupp. And Thrupp—”

“Yes?” Tinker urged-excitedly.

Blake snapped his fingers.

“Of course!” he said. “You’re perfectly right, Tinker—Thrupp has taken Emily because of what she knows! Baring had already warned him, last night, that she was working in with me on the Rune case—hence Thrupp sending Orandborough after her. Not, however, as we thought, to do her harm—but merely to get hold of her somehow, and force her to tell everything she knew of the police side of the affair. Maybe Thrupp already had his suspicions of Baring being behind the hi-jackers—and you can bet that Baring would sense that fact. And when Baring learned that Grandborough was going after Emily to squeeze her for information, he would instantly see the danger to himself. So Baring went after the pair of them, and thinking that Grandborough had Emily cornered in the waiting-room, and would get her the moment she came out, Baring struck at Grandborough.”

“Suggesting that he was fighting for time?” put in Tinker still more excitedly. “That he knew the end was near. Suggesting, as you said just now, that he’s ready to clear out and doesn’t intend to be scuppored at the last moment, no matter what risks he takes?”

“I think so,” Blake agreed, “Otherwise none of this makes sense. Thrupp, for example, must have noticed Venner’s men outside during the day and been on the oui vive for trouble. He heard us breaking in, and hid himself in that secret room—sure that we’d never rumble it. Unfortunately, while we were up there, we talked—and it’s my guess that Thrupp then learned for the that time that we, too, suspect Baring. He believed we had something on him, and he argued that if we had—Emily would know what it was. And armed with that, and Emily herself to prove it, Thrupp saw a way of compelling Baring to come clean and return everything he had stolen from him. That—or of taking his revenge on the man!”

“Got it!” enthused Tinker. “That’s the answer, for a quid, And in that case—”

“There can only be one place he’s heading for,” cut in Sexton Blake. “Where’s the telephone here?”

Ten seconds later he was through to Venner at the Yard—and from the bull-like roarings and ravings that came from the other end, Tinker gathered that the sooper was not best pleased by the news Blake had for him.

“Cut it, Venner!” the private detective rasped at last. “That stuff gets us nowhere. I’ll wait here for a couple of men to take over, than I’m leaving at once for Tunbridge Wells, via Bromley, Farnborough, Seven oaks and Tonbridge. You can do as you like. I’m going after Emily, and neither you nor anybody else will stop me. I give you ten minutes to get somebody here to take over. If they’re not here by then, I shall leave!” And he slammed down the receiver.

“What’s he kicking at?” Tinker asked.

“Oh, the usual stuff, from Venner,” Blake replied, “Knew we’d make a mess of it. Ought to have done it himself on a search warrant—”

“Why, he said he couldn’t get a search warrant!”

“I know. That that doesn’t bother him now,” retorted the private detective. “Not now that we’ve discovered what we expected. That’s what annoys me so about the sooper—he’s always so devilishly wise after the event. Anyway, get the car round. You know where Emily left it—in the Mews.”

Tinker rushed off, and Blake, after a minute or two’s thought, returned upstairs to have another look at the false door. He had never actually seen that particular trick used before, but from his study of the subject he could easily envisage the principle upon which it worked. On one side or the other it would be locked and unlocked by means of a sliding bar running in the brickwork—and by the time a Yard car came screaming to a standstill down below, he had found it. It was worked by a half-inch movement of one of the clothes pegs on the wall, and the door was actually swinging silently outwards on to the landing—door, frame, jamb and all, complete in one solid mass—when Venner himself came storming up the staircase, bawling like the Bull of Bashan.

“You madman, Blake!” he burst out furiously when be caught sight of the private detective standing in the false doorway. “Oh, you crazy fool—letting him get away with Emily like that! I told you to let me do the job with a proper search warrant. I warned you what would happen if you insisted upon going on alone. I ought to arrest you now for housebreaking, larceny, burglary, violence—heaven alone knows what! The A.C.‘ll be spitting blood when he learns what you’ve been doing, and how you’ve let that swine, Thrupp, beat you to a getaway. I warned you from the start that he was head of this Mayfair Boys racket, and that the Dramatic Society was all hooey. If it hadn’t been for you and your cockeyed theories, I’d have had the lot behind bars by now!”

He paused for breath, his face flushed and ugly. And, looking at him—not by any manner of means for the first time in their long association—Blake was aware of an amused admiration.

“Heaven help you, Venner—I honestly think you believe that!” he said, “You are really an amazing man.”

“Okay, guv’nor!” came Tinker’s voice from down below.

Blake turned immediately, pausing only to point out to the Yard man how the trick door worked, and to show him Grandborough’s dinner suit and etceteras hanging on their pegs.

“The other stuff is the various disguises the gang assumed from time to time,” he added. “You’d better take charge, of everything—I don’t think you’ll see Thrupp here again.”

“Me?” snarled Venner. “I’m not staying here—I’m coming with you! You don’t think I’m going to have you running loose over the countryside, do you? You’ve done enough damage for one night as it is!”

“Okay!” shrugged Sexton Blake. “Just as you like, sooper. If that’s how you feel.”

“That’s how I do feel,” retorted Superintendent Venner, determined to have the last word. “This is my case, Blake, and from now on I’m handling it in my own way.”

It was then close on four o’clock in the morning—with Thrupp, according to Blake’s estimate, at least an hour in front of them. Once clear of London, Tinker gave the Rolls her head; but, even so, it was half-past five by the time they arrived at Tunbridge Wells. There, as a matter of courtesy, Venner called at the local police headquarters to report his arrival in the district and to explain the reason of his visit, and in the end—since none of them knew the way—a plain-clothes detective-inspector named Clay offered to accompany them to the Priory.

The two or three miles between the town and their destination would at any other time have attracted Blake’s interest by its wooded beauty, but to-day he was too worried about Emily to notice the countryside. He was not actually in fear for her—not yet. But he knew that fear was not far off, and he was restless and on tenterhooks of unease.

“That’s the Priory bell you can hear ringing,” the local man mentioned when the sound of a distant church bell came stealing softly across the wooded slopes.

Venner glanced at his watch.

“Church bells at this hour of the morning?” he asked.

“First Communion, sir,” Clay nodded. “For the benefit of the field workers and farmers’ wives and so on. It comes from the private chapel attached to the house, but the late Lord Ravenham installed a priest and handed it over for the use of the villagers at the tail end of ‘41—some said to insure his immortal future—and the present owner has continued the innovation. Indeed, he attends some of the services, so I’ve heard—which is more than the old man ever did!”

The tolling of the bell took on a more sombre note as they turned in through a weathered stone gateway above which were the broken figures of two lions—causing Blake to remark irritably that church bells should never be heard save at a distance. From there the uneven, poorly-kept road ran through a quarter-mile of rough parkland, until, rounding a bend, there in front of them—etched black against the early-morning sky—was the dilapidated home of the Ravenham family.

“The front is round the other side,” the local man instructed Tinker at the wheel. “Keep to the left and go right round.”

Blake studied the pile curiously. Half-castle, half-church—its origin and age were written plainly all over the grey stone walls and mullioned windows. Plainly bits had been tacked on here and there through the centuries and other parts had been rebuilt altogether; but the general impression was one of ruin and decay.

“There’s only about half-a-dozen rooms in the place habitable, sir, so I’ve heard,” said the local man in reply to the detective.‘s comment. “Well, I was born round here, and it’s been the same ever since I can remember.”

Tinker ran the Rolls along the lengthy, flat facade of the place, to pull up eventually before a flight of worn stone steps leading to double, iron-studded doors set deep in a pointed stone archway.

“No sign of any other cars about,” Blake said a mite anxiously, as he climbed out. “None round the back, either, I noticed.”

“Well, it was your hunch we’d find them here,” Venner reminded him, preparing the way for his well-known ” I told you so ” act, should things go wrong. “I’ve had my own ideas about this from the start.” And he added facetiously: “But you know best, of course!”

Blake ignored him, and ran up the steps, found the old-fashioned, iron-chain bell-pull, and jangled it briskly. From the far end of the house, rendered faintly nostalgic by distance, came the sound of human voices raised in prayer—evidently the chapel was on that side, he thought.

The bell brought no response, so he rang again. A third tug brought to the door a white-haired old man wearing a green baize apron, who stared at him blankly.

“Mr. Baring at home?” Blake asked him.

The old man glanced from Blake to the car—and the others—and back again.

“Mr. Baring is at—service, sir,” he said slowly.

“When will he be back?”

“The service lasts about half an hour, sir. It has just started.”

“Is there anyone else at home? Anyone from London?” Blake asked. “The man who arrived about half an hour or so ago?”

The old man gaped at him.

“I don’t quite—understand, sir,” he said. “There is no one here except Mr. Baring. We have no guests. We never do.”

“Well, we’ll come in and wait!” announced Venner abruptly. “I am Superintendent Venner, of the Criminal investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, my man,” he reeled off in his usual sonorous fashion. “And I want a word or two with Mr. Moss Baring!” He beckoned the local inspector, who came running up the steps. “Keep an eye on him,” he whispered, “The less collusion now, the better.” And, pushing past the astonished old man, he stalked into the house.

Blake, however, remained where he was; whereupon the sooper, becoming aware of the fact, turned on the instant and came back again.

“Aren’t you coming in to wait?” he asked.

Blake shook his head.

“I’m going to have a look round for Thrupp’s car,” he said. “But first I’m going to take a peep into the church to make sure that our man’s really there.”

“I’ll come with you!” Venner turned back to Inspector Clay. “Stay put, inspector,” he called. “We’re going to look round.”

Clay nodded, and the three moved off. As Blake had figured, the chapel was built on to the east wing of the house and a small wicket gate—beyond which a clearly-defined path ran across the park to the distant roofs of the village—proclaimed the public entrance. With the sound of chanting voices growing momentarily louder in his ears, Blake tiptoed forward, removed his hat, quietly pushed open the door and stepped into the dim interior.

For a second or two he could see nothing. But as his eyes accustomed themselves to the twilight occasioned by the stained-glass windows—a twilight against which the flickering candles on the altar were darting their sword-like rays in vain—he realised that he was looking at one of the finest examples of a medieval private chapel he had ever seen.

Up beyond the altar rails, the priest was moving softly about his office; while facing him, kneeling, were perhaps a dozen men and women whose religion was strong enough to get them out at so early an hour of the morning. The walls everywhere bore memorials to dead and gone Ravenhams, their wives, children and relatives. And scattered about the nave itself were a dozen or more tombs, for the most part bearing sculptured effigies—presumably of the more famous members of the family—the one nearest Blake, indeed, holding the effigy of a man in armour who had evidently attended all three Crusades. The heavy smell of incense was in the air, and over all pressed that indefinable atmosphere of age, of sanctity, and of continuity with things that were past.

All that, the private detective became aware of in the half-minute or so that it needed for his eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom. And then he saw Moss Baring!

The hi-jacker was kneeling in what Blake took to be his private pew—a pew flanked by the aisle on one side and a magnificent Ravenham tomb on the other. Blake recognised him even kneeling; but was sure of it a second or two later when, with a dull rustle of clothing and shuffling feet, the tiny congregation rose and stood for another part of the service. No mistaking that tall figue then! No mistaking that fair hair, or the reckless set of his shoulders.

“That the boy?” Venner whispered from beside him; and Blake, with a nod towards the door, said that it was.

They stepped out into the bright daylight again, and Venner, grinning crookedly, remarked that he was liking Blake’s hunch less and less with everything he saw.

“Either Thrupp hasn’t arrived yet,” he suggested, “or he was never coming here, I can’t see that bird in there having bumped off a bloke, and hidden Emily in the recesses of his castle, walking sedately into a six o’clock service!”

And even Tinker looked dubious.

“Emily said something about the priest wanting to save Baring’s soul. But Baring wasn’t interested in his soul being saved as much as in a pretty heiress who’d set the family fortunes on their feet again,” he said slowly. “This business doesn’t seem to fit with that, does it?”

“It don’t fit with anything, if you ask me!” jeered the sooper. “What exactly have we got against this bird, anyway? What handle have we got an him?”

“Find Thrupp’s car, and I’ll tell you,” was all Blake said to that. “Thrupp was coming here, sooper, because there’d be no sense in his going anywhere else—not with Emily! And it’s my firm belief that he duly arrived here —Emily as well!”

“Then let’s look for his car.”

They looked for his car, but did not find it. They searched the outhouses, unhampered by meeting a single soul; but the only car they found was a two-seater Jaguar, in the dash-cupboard of which they found a driving licence in the name of Moss Bating.

“Maybe he’s hidden it in the house?” grinned Venner cheerfully; sure, now, that the private detective was clean off the wicket. But Blake shook his head and stood rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Thrupp had come here! He was certain of it. And if the car he had arrived in was not here now, then it could only mean that Baring had disposed of it somehow—and he had better brace himself for the worst.

He walked round to the back of the house, following the tracks of his own car, He followed them until, coming suddenly upon a second line of tracks, he stopped abruptly and caught his breath.

“That it!” he got out in a strained voice a split second later. “Here you are, Venner. Thrupp drove his car as far as this and stopped. And he stopped because of Emily and because he did not want to raise the alarm in the house. He stopped here for some considerable time—at least, his car did. You can see from these spots of oil here—look! But then the car was reversed—here’s the tyre marks—swung right round and driven away again. Come on!”

Like a questing hound, Sexton Blake started off along the trail of the new tracks. In a very few minutes they turned off the road leading from the stone gateway into another, and smaller, road which cut away across the parkland towards a spinney some quarter of a mile away. With his heart in his mouth, Blake broke into a run and the others followed. There would be a pool in that spinney—he knew it before he arrived there. And he was right! And on the lip of that pool were the last of the tyre-marks of Thrupp’s car.

For a moment the three looked at each other, and now even Venner’s face was grim.

“Is it—deep enough?” he jerked out hoarsely.

Blake threw a stone—and it fell with a hollow “plonk.” The next moment he was tearing at his clothes; but Tinker beat him to it.

“Hold hard!” he cried. “I’m better at this than you, guv’nor! I’ll fix it!”

A moment later be was gone, cutting the surface of the pool cleanly as an arrow. And before the widening circles had reached the bank, he bobbed up again.

“It’s there!” he shouted, shaking the water from his eyes and ears. “Standing upright on its wheels. I’ve got—one door open. I’m going in—now!”—and turning over on himself he dived again.

That time it seemed as though he never would come up—so great was the strain on the two awaiting him. Blake, his lean face gaunter than ever and hard-set like a granite mask, was actually on the point of diving in himself—convinced that Tinker must be trapped—when with a rush and a swirl of muddy water, his assistant broke surface at last.

“Oke!” he gasped, sticking up a thumb. And the moment he could speak at all: “It’s all right!” he panted. “Emily’s not in there! Thrupp, neither, the—the saloon’s empty!”

For several timeless seconds Blake stood perfectly still. Then, with a long breath of relief, he passed a hand over his eyes and shook himself.

“Thank—heaven—for that!” he whispered. And for once Superintendent Venner was in complete accord with him.

They hauled Tinker out, and after giving him their handkerchieves to add to his own, they left him to dry off and dress while they raced back to the house to corner Moss Baring.

“I think he’ll try to make a bolt for it to-day!” Blake said. “You wait inside the house, and I’ll watch that door from the chapel—the service is still on, I can hear!”

Buried Alive.

SEXTON BLAKE reached the little wicket gate used by the public just as the handful of elderly, early-morning communicants were leaving the chapel to return across the park to their homes. He stood aside for them to pass, and only when the last had gone, did he remove his hat and step inside.

The old priest, still in his robes, was in conversation with Moss Baring, who was sitting carelessly on the front of his private pew. They appeared to be discussing something about the ornate statuary which decorated the tomb beside them, the old priest referring now and again to a paper he held, and then pointing to an item of the tomb-decoration.

Blake watched them in silence, puzzled, eyes accustoming themselves to the dimmer light of the sanctuary—he suddenly realised that the original painting of the tomb was being restored—and that was what they were discussing. The gilt, and the vivid blue and reds of the original painted robes had already been restored, and were shining brightly in the gloom. And from the way in which they were talking, it looked as though they were supervising the work between them.

They had their backs to Blake, and had not seen him. And, taking advantage of the fact, the detective moved nearer on his rubber soles. But before he could get within earshot the conference finished, and with a brief: “I’ll put that right this morning, father,” Moss Baring turned and disappeared through a door in the opposite wall.

But do not work too hard, my son!” the old priest called after him, smilingly.

Blake frowned. That door, he guessed, led into the priory proper—where Venner and the local men would be awaiting Baring’s arrival. He himself half started to follow, but on the impulse of the moment turned aside and approached the priest, who was still comparing what he had in his hand with the actual tomb.

“Good morning, father,” Blake said quietly.

The old man turned, stared for a moment, then smiled.

“Good morning, my son,” he said. “You are indeed an early visitor. You would wish to look round the chapel?”

“I really came to have a word or two with Mr. Baring,” Blake told him, having already solved the problem of the recent discussion. The paper the old man was holding was merely a coloured print—aged and yellowed—of the particular tomb under discussion. And plainly it was being restored exactly to that pattern.

“We aim,” the old man told him softly, “in time, to restore them all, my son. We aim, Mr. Baring and I between us, to restore the whole chapel to something like it must have been in the great days when it was first dedicated. In the chapel archives I have found several old prints such as this one, and very accurate accounts of things as they were before the Ravenham family allowed the chapel to fall into desuetude. Unfortunately, we have no money—but Mr. Baring is clever and filled with the enthusiasm of the old craftsmen. And while I, alas, am too old to climb about and ply a steady brush, I can still undertake the necessary research while Mr. Baring puts it into execution. You can imagine, my son, what the chapel will look like when all these old statuaries have been restored to their original glowing colours! When they have all been cleaned of the dust of centuries and brought out again into the full light of day!”

“I can, indeed,” Blake nodded, anxious to get away now that he knew what the talk had been about. But in his enthusiasm, the smiling old priest was not so easy to shake off.

You see the gilding on that angel’s wing up there, for example?” he went on, clutching Blake’s arm and directing his eyes upwards. “Now those wings are so aligned as to catch the light from the westering sun as it comes streaming through the stained glass of that window over there. You can imagine the effect of that on the gilt. All the colours of the rainbow will be reflected from those wings, and then down here—” He paused, and leaned closer. “Dear me!” he smiled. “We have been a little careless, I see—but no matter. We are not professionals and it will clean off. But as I was saying, my son, down here on this recumbent figure—which actually represents the third Earl of Ravenham, circa 1472—”

It was five minutes before Blake succeeded in slinking himself free of the garrulous old man’s enthusiasm—and by then he was amazed, if nothing else, by the manner in which Moss Baring had evidently worked himself into the priest’s affection. To what end, he could not imagine—nor why a man of his character should have bothered with an old priest nor with the restoration of his ancestors’ tombs and memorials either! But he had sufficient experience of crime and criminals to know that even in the very worst of them, there was often an unexpected streak of idealism and romance. And it appeared that this last of the Ravenhams was a man of that type.

Blake left the chapel by the same door that Baring had used—and, continuing along the corridor he found on the other ride, came out eventually into the great hall where he found Venner and Tinker confronting a somewhat surprised-looking but easily-smiling Moss Baring.

“Ha!” said Venner. “We’ve been waiting for you. Mr. Baring—this is Sexton Blake, of whom you may have heard.” And as Blake bowed coldly: “And now we can get on with it!” he said on a stiffer note. “And we won’t beat about the bush, either. Quite briefly, Mr. Baring, we want to know all you can tell us about William Thrupp, landlord of the Mason’s Arms?”

Moss Baring—and there was no doubt of his looks, Blake thought as he watched him —stared for a moment and then gave a short laugh.

“Well,” he said—and his voice was perfectly cool. “I don’t know that I can tell you much more than you’ve just told me. That is, that he is landlord of the Mason’s Arms!”

“When did you see him last, Mr. Baring?”

“I last saw Thrupp, superintendent, upon the night of our dramatic meeting,” Baring said. “That would be last Monday night. I went down for a drink,” he added.

“By the back staircase?” Blake snapped.

“I beg your pardon?”

“By the back staircase?” Blake repeated.

“We are not allowed to use the back staircase,” Baring told him coolly. “I came in by the ordinary staircase to the street and in through the public bar.”

“See anybody on the way?”

Baring affected to think for a moment.

“Why, yes,” he said then. “I remember seeing Delford and Lady Emily Westomholme going down the stairs just in front of me. But they went round to the saloon bar, I think—which is farther round the corner. I cut in through the public bar.”

“Baring—you’re a liar!” cried Sexton Blake on the instant. “You came down by the back staircase, and you came through the cloakroom and the trick door!”

“I’m afraid,” smiled Mr. Baring, “that I have not the very least idea what you are talking about, my dear fellow.”

“So you stick to your story?” asked Blake bleakly, realising that the man was not to be so easily stampeded. “And you say Lady Emily Westomholme was going down the stairs into the street just in front of you?”

“That is what I said!”

“Then out of your own mouth you stand condemned, Baring!” the detective cried. “Where is Lady Emily now?”

“Lady Emily?” Baring echoed. He smiled and spread his hands. “My dear sir, I haven’t the remotest idea where she is.”

“And Thrupp?”

“In his bed, I should imagine.”

“Then perhaps,” snarled Blake, thrusting his face to within inches of Baring’s own, “perhaps you’ll tell us why Thrupp’s car is lying at the bottom of the pool in the spinney over yonder?” he demanded. And perhaps you’ll tell us how it managed to get there without a driver?”

Baring stiffened, and for a second his eyes gleamed wickedly—but he was himself again in a moment.

“I know nothing whatever about Thrupp’s car,” he shrugged. “Or pools in spinneys, either. If you have anything to tell me, gentlemen, I wish you would tell it and have done with the matter, I loathe going round in circles.”

“The only circle here, Baring, is the circle of rope I can already see around your neck!” Blake flashed back at him. “Thrupp arrived here in the early hours of this morning. He came by car, and in that car—unconscious or otherwise—he had the person of Lady Emily Westomholme. Thrupp came to see you, and he came on business. And he brought Lady Emily as proof of what he intended to tell you concerning the murder of the man, Grandborough—whose dinner suit we found last night in the secret little room between the cloakroom and the exit on to the landing of the back staircase at the Mason’s Arms. Baring!” the detective rapped out bleakly. “The game’s up! Thrupp came here to recover what you had stolen from him—the £40,000 of mink coats, for example, which you hi-jacked from him at Rune’s party! You were in with Thrupp from the start of his racket—but you double-crossed him all the way, and last night Thrupp had the evidence to prove that you had doublecrossed him. Thrupp came here for the showdown—now his car is lying empty at the bottom of a pool in your park!”

He paused, his face a white mask in its utter implacability.

“Baring!” he said again. “What have you done with Thrupp?”

“And what have you done with Lady Emily Westomholme?” Venner demanded viciously.

Moss Baring had backed against the wall, his eyes were very bright in their sockets, his mouth a thin straight line. But he was not broken yet—by any means.

“What is this—third degree?” he sneered. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about—any of you. And if you’ve any more of these crazy statements, to throw around, I’ll telephone for my lawyer.”

“You can telephone for whom you like, Baring!” the sooper bored he relentlessly. “I am an officer of Scotland Yard, with authority to arrest you on any charge I care to formulate. I can tell you now that the very least charge against you will be one of murder! And before we go any further, we’ll have the bracelets on you!”

He felt in his pockets as he spoke—but his hand never came out with them. Instead, he froze where he stood when a voice behind him rapped out sharply:

“Stick ‘em up! All of you!”

Blake froze, too—then turned slowly. It was the old man in the baize apron—but he was old no longer. Too late Blake realised that his white hair was a wig, for the hand that was holding them all covered with a heavy automatic was as steady as a rock.

“Another of the Mayfair boys turned hi-jacker!” Blake smiled thinly—and Moss Baring laughed. Laughed, again as he strolled carelessly between them—being careful not to blanket his colleague’s gun as he moved—and finally taking up his position alongside him.

“Nice work, Gerald,” he said smoothly. “Hoist happily on their own petard, I think.”

“You won’t get away with this, Baring’!” Venner promised through his teeth, “You’ve made the mistake of your life, and so has your friend there.”

“Dead men, superintendent, tell no tales,” Baring laughed softly, but the sooper shook his head.

“You’re a fool; Baring,” he laughed back at him—for Venner’s courage was the one thing about him that had never been in doubt. “You’ve got the drop on me—okay. Shoot! But behind me there are twenty thousand men in the Metropolitan Police Force—and every man-jack will be out to get you. And you can’t kill twenty thousand cops!”

“He can’t kill one,” put in the local inspector quietly—from the sideline, so to speak. He was standing slightly in front and to the left of the man with the gun, and as the latter’s eyes flickered for the fraction of a second in his direction, Blake came in from the right as though shot from a gun. He had had his foot braced against the wall behind him while Venner was speaking, and when his eye caught that of the local man who had been taken completely off-guard, the inspector picked up his unspoken request in a flash and calmly proceeded to put it into execution.

That was when Blake leapt. He went in like an arrow, in a long, flat dive. And although the gunman whirled on his heels and fired twice, both shots went over his head and passed along his back.

And in the same split second the gunman’s attention was diverted, the local inspector leapt in on his own behalf. In a flash Tinker had whirled on Baring—and Venner, with a roar of fury, charged in regardless. For the space of three minutes there was a free-for-all, with the gun going off wildly as both Blake and the inspector fought for its possession. Then the gunman went flying under an uppercut from Blake, and before he could pick himself up again, Baring crashed all, his length on top of him consequent upon a rabbit punch from Venner that literally jarred his head from his spine.

Tinker whipped up the fallen gun—and the fight was over.

“So?” panted Venner triumphantly. “Pull a gun on a superintendent of the Yard—would you, you scum?” He reached down and tore off the white wig, threw it on a side table and hauled the wretch to his feet by yanking at his collar and shirt front. “Where’s the Lady Emily, eh—you rat?” he demanded. “What have you done with her?”

“Find out—and to the devil with you!” snarled the young man. “You’ll never get anything out of me—or Moss!”

“That’s what you think!” Venner turned to the local man and asked him to phone his station for reinforcements. “Plain clothes or uniform,” he said “Doesn’t matter which, so long as there’s enough of ‘em. We’ll take this place to pieces brick by brick if necessary—”

“And even then you won’t find them,” laughed the man who had pulled the gun. Not in a million years—because they aren’t here. And never have been here!”

“‘They?’” rapped out Venner smartly. “‘Them?’” he rasped, as too late the gunman perceived how he had been caught. “I never said anything about ‘they’—or ‘them.’ Or, for that matter, anything about the fur coats and jewels you’ve got hidden around here somewhere. You spoke too soon, little boy. You shouldn’t have got into this business until you’d grown up and acquired at least the semblance of a brain. You aren’t fit to run a mobile fish-and-chip van, let alone a crime racket. I told you you’d made the mistake of your life in pulling a gun on me. But you’ll learn more about that when you take the nine o’clock one morning, and are wishing you’d never been born.”

“You’ll never get me!” bawled the other furiously. “You won’t frighten me, either. Go ahead with your searching, you great ape. Pull the place down if you want to—it isn’t mine, anyway, and Moss won’t care. He’ll be delighted to run you for damages, because you can’t prove a thing. You’re roped and hog-tied, you fool! You haven’t a scintilla of evidence against either of us—any of us. You’ll be on your knees to us before this is finished, or out of the Yard on your ear!” He turned and looked at Moss Baring, who was beginning to struggle to his hands and knees. “Come Moss!” he laughed. “Get up and have a look at these clever fellows who think they know everything. I’m telling you, it’s a laugh!”

Blake, who had been watching the fellow closely while the sooper baited him, knew a sudden feeling of unease. The priory was a big place. It would take hours to search it thoroughly. It might take days—meanwhile, what was happening to Emily? Was she even in the place at all? Would that fellow be so cocksure if she were?

A cold fury shook him. He knew a wild desire to wade in and literally choke the truth out of that swine with his bare hands, but he forced himself to calmness. This was a battle of wits, not of brawn. Nor was it a thing of yesterday, but of many months’ duration—of that he was certain. Somewhere these follows had established a hiding place big enough to accommodate hundreds of fur coats as well as jewels and all the other stuff that had been stolen. He was certain, now, that the hi-jacking had been going on for months: that Baring had been behind it all, and that Baring had the loot.

Turning swiftly, he went into the lounge; the great dining-room; what had evidently been a morning-room; and on into a dilapidated billiards-room—but there was nothing in any of them to suggest what he was looking for. The next room he entered was bare except for a long table covered with pots of paint, books of gilding leaves, brushes, saws, chisels, stone-mason’s tools—evidently the work-room from which Baring was steadily restoring the tombs in the old chapel. There were one or two rough sketches, and one or two photographs on the table, most of them touched with colour as though to afford specimen ideas.

It was difficult to imagine a man like Baring spending his time on such work—and doubly so in view of what he had told Emily about—

Blake’s thoughts stopped dead, and for a moment it seemed that the short hairs on his neck lifted coldly as though to a sudden draught. Maybe it was the pot of red paint that gave him the idea. Or maybe it was memory of what Emily had said about the possibility of her wanting a memorial at short notice. But whatever started the train of thought, there was no doubt about its effect. It literally stopped the breath in his throat and momentarily took the strength from his bones.

Then he was running. Running madly down that passage which led to the chapel—and somehow or other Tinker was following hard on his heels.

He burst through the door into the chapel without a pause. And without a pause he made straight for the tomb over which the old priest had so recently enthused. Over his head the golden wings of the angel glowed warmly in the morning sunlight, but Blake had no eyes for those. Only in his memory was lingering the picture of the old man stopping in his discourse to look at something on top of the slab: and all he could hear were those words: “Dear me, we have been a little careless—but no matter. We are not professionals, and it will clean off.”

Panting, Blake searched for the precise spot the old man had noticed. Yes, it was there. He found it—and he found what had caught the old man’s eye. Three spots of red paint! Three red spots! Blake touched the nearest with his finger, rubbed it against another finger.

“My God!” he gasped. He leapt back as Tinker came into his range of vision. “Crowbars!” he positively croaked. “Hammers! Sledges!” He seized the nearest piece of statuary in his bare hands, wrenching at it like a maniac. “Crowbars!” he yelled again. “Crowbars—and men! She’s here, Tinker! She’s in here!”

Tinker, his eyes almost starting from their sockets, flew. Back he raced down the corridor and into the great hall where Venner had by now handcuffed Baring and the other man together, herded them into a corner, and was standing guard over them with the local inspector.

“We want crowbars with those men, inspector!” Tinker yelled. “Emily’s in one of those tombs in the chapel—the guv’nor’s there now. For Pete’s sake hurry. Crowbars and sledges!”

“They’re bringing sledges—and crowbars,” replied the inspector as with a howl of animal-like rage Baring and the gunman leapt forward to smash him down with their handcuffed wrists. But Venner was ready, and so was the inspector. Neatly, crisply, the sooper measured Moss Baring and sent him down with a pile-driver in the exact moment that the inspector dealt with the would-be gunman. The two went down together like pole-axed bulls, just as a van pulled up outside and a dozen hefty men jumped out armed with sledge-hammers and long steel crowbars.

“Bring ‘em along!” shouted Tinker desperately, and raced back to assist Blake.

Tinker said afterwards that he would never forget the sight that met his eyes as he burst into the chapel again, Blake had found a small oak pew from somewhere, and in what appeared to be a frenzy of destruction was swinging the thing round his head and literally bashing angels and effigies and stone tracery to pieces. His hair was alt over his face; his eyes wild with a species of madness. Sweat was pouring down his face and falling off his chin and, every time he struck, he yelled curses at the solid marble that would not smash as fast as he wanted it to smash.

“They’re here, guv’nor!” Tinker shouted. “They’re coming with crowbars and sledge-hammers.”

“Smash this down!” roared Blake, apparently not comprehending. “Hit it! Smash it! She’s suffocating!”

But already the police were pouring in on his heels. Venner, with one look at Blake, locked his arms round the straining man’s chest and forcibly dragged him back.

“Knock that top-hamper off!” he gasped at the inspector who had come in with his men. “Swipe that off, and then get your crowbars and lift the top. Air’s what she needs first—we can get her out afterwards. Steady, now! Steady men! Use your brains!” he implored them, as they leapt on to the tomb to complete the work Blake had so desperately started.

Meanwhile, the detective had dropped his pew, and with a sob of sheer physical exhaustion was almost hanging on to Venner for support.

“Sit down, man!” the sooper said with extraordinary gentleness, hooking up a chair with his foot and lowering the detective into it. “Leave this to me. I’ll see to this job. Look after him, Tinker—he’s all in,” he whispered—and then he, too, snatched up a sledge and lent his herculean strength to the work of destruction.

“Okay!” he gasped, when enough of the broken statuary had crashed to the floor. “Let’s try the lid now. Get the crowbars under this end, and for heaven’s sake, chaps, give it all you’ve got!”

The sweating men, urged on by voice and example, gave it all they had got. They drove in their crowbars beneath the six-inch solid covering slab of the tomb, and they heaved. At the second heave they broke the cement fixing and the slab lifted.

“Wedge it!” panted Venner desperately. “Wedge it up!”

Someone rammed in the head of one of the sledges—it was Sexton Blake. He was there again, swaying on his feet, but still there! The opening was too narrow to see inside, but at least it was admitting air.

“Prise it along now!” he cried hoarsely. “Never mind it crashing back. Prise it along its length. Even six inches will do it!”

The men inserted their crowbars in the opening, and at a word from Blake—prised. The heavy lid fell off the hammer head but slid nine inches or more lengthways along its supporting walls. Leaning down, Blake looked inside.

“She’s there!” he yelled a second later. “Emily! She’s there—and she’s alive!”

How they got that ton of solid marble back sufficiently for Tinker to get inside and lift Emily out, even the men themselves never knew. But they did it, and they stood back in something very like awe while Blake and Venner, between them, received the bound and gagged girl from the tomb and placed her tenderly on the pew cushions the men had had ready for her on the floor beside it.

And as Blake removed the gag from her mouth, with fingers that shook in spite of himself—and even while Venner was still cutting the rope from her wrists and knees and ankles—Lady Emily Westomholme opened dazed eyes which, after roving blankly over the faces of the men so breathlessly watching, finally focused themselves upon the shattered face of the detective—and remained there.

And slowly—very slowly—her bruised lips smiled.

“I—knew you’d—come!” she, whispered. And with a shuddering little sigh, fainted.

The Finale.

THREE hours later, with Emily sitting back comfortably in an easy chair in the lounge of the Priory, the case against Moss Baring and his gunman friend—since identified by Emily as one, Gerald Martin, a member of the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society, and obviously one of Thrupp’s “Mayfair Boys” who had turned traitor and joined Baring in his hi-jacking business—was finally cleared up and brought to its close.

From that same tomb where they had found Emily, the inspector and his men had since removed the body of William Thrupp—dead from strangulation—a large quantity of Russian sables and mink coats, and a collection of stolen jewellery of immense value and sufficient to stock a West End shop. And Sexton Blake, sane and in his right mind again, had discovered how Moss Baring, under pretence of restoring his ancestor’s tomb, had in reality worked surreptitiously at cutting out one of the smaller sides of the structure, and arranging a simple system of levers by which, at any moment, he could swing that side out, deposit his stolen loot inside, and close it again without trace. And he had completely hoodwinked the old priest by his pretence of interest in restoring the chapel to something like its pristine glories, and his piety in attending the services.

But the full story of all that had happened came—literally—from the grave. From Thrupp himself, via Emily. Emily related how, on the landing at the Mason’s Arms, turning away to join Blake and Tinker in the cloakroom she had heard a sound behind her and swung round just in time to see Thrupp himself emerging—apparently from the solid wall! For a second she had been too utterly taken aback to move—and in that second, Thrupp struck. And thereafter she knew no more until she came to, to find herself lying gagged and bound beneath a rug on the floor of a car. Later, Thrupp had stopped the car and come round to her. He had removed the gag, lifted her on to the back seat, apologised profusely for the circumstances which had compelled him to offer her violence—and then proceeded to tell her everything.

He was, he admitted, the brains behind the recent series of big robberies. It was he who had suggested the formation of a Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society which would meet in the clubroom over the Mason’s Arms and act as cover for the activities of the half-dozen reckless young Society men whom he had already gathered about him. The first of these was Jack Devereux, and it was he, working through his cousin, Sir Clive Charteris, who had put the idea over to the Younger Set of Mayfair Society and actually started the thing going.

The use of the back stairs had been Thrupp’s own idea, and it was he who had devised the trick doors and he who had constructed them. The idea was that during any society meeting in the clubroom, any member of inner circle could, by popping into the cloakroom, pass through the trick doors and down by the back staircase to consult with, or take orders from, Thrupp in the bar, without causing any suspicion among the innocent members of the society.

Moss Baring had been among the earlier members to join the Mayfair Amateurs—and, bitterly resentful of the fact that old Ravenham had left him nothing but the ruins of a house, had been only too ready to fall in with any scheme calculated to line his pockets. There was also a suggestion that his life in Africa had given him rather more than the recklessness of outlook necessary for the job. Soon he had risen to be Thrupp’s trusted lieutenant—and according to Thrupp, it was not long before Baring had been trying to double-cross.

Originally, the loot from a robbery had been kept in the secret room between the cloakroom and the landing at the Mason’s Arms until such times as Thrupp could get rid of it through channels abroad, of which he was careful to reveal nothing to Emily. But then—it was after the Sloane Gardens job—Thrupp was shattered to find that some of the hidden loot had disappeared mysteriously from the secret room. And although it could have been taken by any member of the gang using the back staircase, for some reason Thrupp suspected Moss Baring. After the Rune disaster he was practically certain that the traitor was Moss Baring—but he could not prove it. And Baring was so far in his counsels that he dare not openly accuse him until he could bring such proof against him as would satisfy the other members of the gang.

That, then, had been the situation when Baring reported to Thrupp that Lady Emily Westomholme had joined the Amateur Dramatics and was even then in the clubroom above with Lord Delford. She was, he told Thrupp, suspected of being a friend of Sexton Blake—who was known to be investigating the Rune affair—and should therefore be treated with the utmost caution. Thrupp, unknown to Baring, had immediately instructed Grandborough to follow her when she left and find out where she went, and what she did—his object being, if possible, to obtain through Emily a better line on Baring. Grandborough accordingly changed in the secret room and went outside to wait for Emily when she left. Meanwhile, Baring himself had pleaded an engagement and gone off, so he said, to the Priory.

Thrupp was suspicious of that, but by then Emily had left and Grandborough had gone after her. But when Grandborough did not telephone back, in accordance with the usual custom, Thrupp’s suspicions turned to certainties. He tried to get hold of Grandborough, but failed. And when he rang the Priory, a voice he did not know replied briefly that Mr. Baring was not at home.

That left Thrupp on tenterhooks, and when the next day there was still no news from Grandborough, Thrupp was almost certain of what had happened. Baring, he figured, had found out that Grandborough was tailing Emily; and in his usual cold-blooded way had determined to silence him before he could report back to Thrupp what Emily might have been forced to reveal concerning the views of the police on Baring himself over the Rune affair. Baring, he figured, was on the point of making off with the proceeds of his double-crossing, and because of that he was determined to take no chances. But still be had no proof of his fears.

The following day, Thrupp was very much on his guard. And when he became aware of the relays of people loitering for one reason or another in view of the Mason’s Arms, he knew that he himself had come under police surveillance. That frightened him; and when he heard Blake and Tinker entering through the passage window, he did the only possible thing—he hurried upstairs and hid himself in the secret room. But hiding there, he had—as Blake guessed—heard all that the three were saying out on the landing. And in a flash he realised that Emily did have the full police dope on Moss Baring. He realised that the game was up, so far as he himself and the Mayfair Amateur Dramatic Society were concerned—and that his only chance of getting away with anything at all was to force Baring into at least splitting the loot with him before they disappeared. Himself he could only threaten Baring. But with Emily to hand him the police-dope concerning the murder of Bramer and Devereux after the Rune affair—not to mention the murder of Grandborough!—he figured that would be more than enough to bring Baring trembling to heel.

All that Thrupp told Emily as he sat with her in the back of his car on that country road. He was quite calm, she said, but obviously in deadly earnest. If Emily would do as he wanted her to do—put the fear of the rope into Baring—he, on his part, would guarantee to leave her safe and unharmed in a position from which she would be able to free herself—once he had secured the start he needed to clear the country with his loot.

That was his proposition. And having no choice in the matter—since he had found and taken away the automatic Blake had given her—Emily agreed. And thus, some half-hour later, they had arrived at the Priory and been admitted—after some time—by a white-haired old man in whom, unfortunately, both Thrupp and Emily had failed to recognise or even suspect the person of Gerald Martin. He had fetched Baring from his bed and straightaway—as though the very sight of that dressing-gowned figure drove Thrupp to fury—the ex-gentleman’s gentleman whipped out the pistol he had taken from Emily and plunged in.

He accused Baring of double-crossing him from the start, of hi-jacking him at the Rune party, of murdering—or causing to be murdered—both Bramer and Devereux, and definitely of murdering Grandborough the previous night.

“But you’ve shot your bolt now, Baring!” he snarled. “The game’s up all along the line. You’ve brought the police on to me at the Mason’s Arms, and they know everything—Lady Emily Westomholme came in with them, and she’s here to bear me out in what I’m telling you. They know you murdered Grandborough. Within a few hours they’ll be here to arrest you. Hand over everything you’ve stolen from me, or here you stay until they come! And you’ll hang, Baring! You’ll hang, you swine! Now, then—what’s your answer?”

Baring had heard him out in silence, smiling and cynical. He appeared to be in no wise worried. Without a qualm her admitted to murdering Grandborough, and also to stealing the stuff from the secret room and the hi-jacking of the Rune stuff.

“It was easier than taking candy from a kid, Thrupp!” he laughed. “You’re a misearble little sparrow coming here thinking you can tame a hawk. You haven’t a chance, man!”

“No?” screamed Thrupp, the last of his control snapping as he raised his gun.

And that was when it happened. Even as he raised the weapon to fire, Gerald Martin knocked it down with his hand so that the bullet crashed into the floor. And in the same moment Moss Baring leapt forward, seized Thrupp by the arms, spun him round and—still smiling—strangled swiftly and efficiently from behind. It was all over in a moment, and, as Emily screamed she was seized by Martin, knocked unconscious, bound and gagged, and carried into the chapel to be thrust with Thrupp’s dead body into what later she was to learn was a tomb. Then Martin had driven Thrupp’s car away and turned it into the pond.

Later they were to discover that Baring and Martin actually had planned to fly the country that morning in a plane that was waiting for them in a near-by airfield. But Blake’s arrival on the scene had been too quick for them—and incidentally had saved Emily from being suffocated alive in that dead and gone Ravenham’s last resting place.

*

Such was the story which later on, told in the Central Court of the Old Bailey, was destined to shock London Society to its core. Martin, at the last moment, would have turned Queen’s evidence against his accomplice in one last mad effort to save his own neck—but the prosecution had no need of his services, since it was plain from the start that both men were doomed, and did, ultimately, pay the full penalty of the law.

Just what extraordinary kink had caused Thrupp to go wrong after all his years of honourable service, was something no one knew. And the only good thing that could be said for either Baring or Martin was that right to the very end they refused to divulge the names of the other members of Thrupp’s “Mayfair Boys.” As Blake had suspected, Susie Deane, when questioned at the Yard, could say no more than that Aubrey Bramer had told her what she had to do, and she had done it—never dreaming that she would be sending him to his death. She knew that something was afoot, but exactly what she had not been told. She had entered the game for the excitement of it—but Bramer’s death had completely finished her.

In the end, they let her go with a caution; more particularly, as Venner admitted, because they had no evidence against her save what she had supplied herself.

The sooper, of course, came out of the affair with flying colours. He was in terrific evidence right through the trial—and from the reports in the Sunday papers one gathered that it was entirely due to Superintendent Venner’s well-known brilliancy of deduction that the murderers had been brought into court at all. One paper went so far as to say that it was the famous Yard ace’s greatest triumph—and added that when the great man had been asked his own opinion he had, after a greet deal of thought, admitted with that modesty which was so essentially a part and parcel of his make-up, that he thought perhaps it was!

As for Sexton Blake, the one memory he would always have of the case was of that moment when—from the evidence of three drops of blood, which it afterwards transpired had dropped from a small cut on Martin’s hand occasioned by scratching the skin on the foresight of Thrupp’s gun when he had knocked it down in the struggle—he had realised that Emily Westomholme, dead or alive, was in that tomb.

“Never again, Emily!” he said on the night when the three of them sat chatting over the little dinner Emily gave to celebrate their victory. “I had no right to subject you to any such ghastly risk. I shall never forgive myself for that.”

But Emily—who had been privately appraised by Tinker of all that had happened prior to the local cops arriving with sledges and crowbars to break the thing open—merely smiled that slow, secret little smile of hers and raised her glass to him.

“That,” she said very softly, “is what you think, Sexton Blake!”

“And he only thinks that to-night, Emily?” stuck in Tinker boldly, his eyes watching Blake’s long arm. “The guv’nor knows as well as I do that the old firm wouldn’t be the same without you being on call!”

And oddly enough, staring into his glass, Sexton Blake did not deny the accusation.

THE END.

This Month’s Companion Novel is

THE MAN WITH A NUMBER

By Stephen Blakesley

Ask for No 278 of THE SEXTON BLAKE LIBRARY