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Down the middle of the room there was a long, polished table, furnished as for a Board Meeting with blotting-paper, ink-pots, ash-trays and note-paper arranged with geometrical precision. The Detective-Superintendent responsible for the arrangements gave one more critical look at the table, moved one blotting-pad a quarter of an inch to the left and went out of the room, shutting the door behind him. Five minutes later the door opened again, a dozen men came in together and stood about talking quietly until a tall grey-haired man entered and went straight to the arm-chair at the head of the table.

“Please be seated, gentlemen. Thank you. Now, I think you all know that this rather unusual meeting has been called at the express desire of the Home Secretary in order that we may consult together about what steps can be taken to deal with those to whom—er—‘Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage.’ In fact, any course of action upon which we decide might well be called, in the jargon of the day, ‘Operation Stonewall.’ ”

The Commissioner paused, looked at some notes he held in his hand, and went on in a more business-like tone.

“Every one of you here knows some part of this story, but not many of you, I think, know it as a whole. It will be as well, perhaps, if I run through it as briefly as possible so that we may all have an equal knowledge of the essential facts. Here they are.

“For just over two years there has been a series of daring and successful prison-breaks. Disquieteningly successful. Those of you present here who are Prison Governors have had personal experience of them. What is so particularly—er—disquietening about it is not merely the fact that prisoners have got away, because that is a thing which is bound to happen occasionally now that we no longer manacle our charges and confine them in dungeons. It is the fact that they are not recaptured, at least, not at once. They are diligently sought for, but not found unless and until they have done some other crime which has brought them within reach of the law. In most cases—in all cases, in fact—they have either been apprehended abroad, or they have spent some time abroad and have been arrested on their return to this country. That is correct, Chief-Inspector Bagshott?”

“That is so, sir, in every case we have dealt with so far.”

“It follows,” went on the Commissioner, “that behind these escapes there is an extremely efficient organisation which not only gets the men out of prison but conceals them afterwards and conveys them away to a place of safety. Now for a few figures. It is difficult to say exactly where to begin, since the organisation does not advertise its successes, but we have agreed to take as the start the escape of the forger Greenwall from Parkhurst Prison just over two years ago. He escaped from a working-party, evaded his pursuers, and was not seen again until he was arrested in Paris on a similar charge eighteen months later. We applied for his extradition and he was handed back to us by the courtesy of the French authorities. Since then—that is, within the space of twenty-six months—there have been no less than nineteen successful prison-breaks, counting as two the case of the coiner Mankatell who has escaped twice.”

The Commissioner paused to blow his nose, rearranged his notes and continued.

“The methods employed have varied in each case to suit the difficulties encountered. In the majority of cases we have a fairly clear idea of how the scheme was worked, in two or three cases—two certainly—we have none at all. The prisoner was there and then he was not.”

One of the Prison Governors previously referred to sighed suddenly and then looked round to see if anyone had noticed it.

“The obvious conclusion,” went on the Commissioner, “is that in these cases someone has bribed a warder. Such a thing is commendably rare but it would be absurd to regard it as impossible. No amount of inquiry has, however, enabled us to identify the warder, or warders, responsible. It follows, therefore, that if a warder was guilty, that warder is still employed. A disquietening thought.”

He followed his general remarks by giving a short account of each of the nineteen cases and of the prisoner concerned, referring every time to one or other of the men at the table for confirmation or fuller details. One of the escaped prisoners was a foreigner named Vissek.

“An expert housebreaker,” said the Commissioner. “He is a national of a friendly Power, and when we applied to the Police of that Power for news of him, they found him for us and very courteously sent him back. It is in regard to this man that Mr. Hambledon, of Foreign Office Intelligence, is with us. Can you tell us anything interesting about him, Hambledon?”

“I knew him,” said Hambledon. “He was—we are all discreet here—working for the Intelligence Service of the Power to which the Commissioner has just referred. Why not? We all do it, friendly or no. He was an extremely able burglar, but as an Intelligence Agent he wasn’t so bright. He would get in anywhere, even into the most impossible places, and I wish I knew how he did it. I would back him to break into the Tower of London and steal the Crown Jewels. Only—if the Crown Jewels had been replaced by replicas in paste, he would have brought them away quite happily. That is a metaphor, he may have been an expert about jewels for all I know. I only know that in the case of documents of any kind he was singularly easily foxed. I don’t wish to say anything unkind about a poor man in trouble, but I must admit I found him very useful on at least three occasions. Eventually, of course, this Government got tired of paying him for things like breaking into the Chinese Embassy for a list of the Chinese troops in Upper Burma and coming away with a Chinese laundry bill——”

“Oh, really, Hambledon!” said the Commissioner across the laughter.

“It’s a fact,” said Hambledon seriously. “I put it there for him myself. You couldn’t expect him to read Chinese. So his Government sacked him and he took to ordinary burglary for a living. When he bolted back home they naturally didn’t want him starting in business over there, so they made a magnificent gesture and handed him back. Sensible people, the—the Power in question.”

“These international courtesies,” murmured one of the Prison Governors.

“Quite, quite,” said the Commissioner hastily. “The next case, gentlemen——”

At the end of the discussion the Commissioner put down his notes and leaned back in his chair.

“Has anyone anything further to add? No? Very well. Full minutes of this meeting have, as you noticed, been taken, and a practically verbatim report will be sent to the Home Secretary. I thank you all for your attendance.”

Ten days later Hambledon received, to his surprise, a summons to an interview with the Home Secretary himself. In accordance with instructions Hambledon said nothing about it to anybody, not even to Chief-Inspector Bagshott of Scotland Yard who usually knew as much about his doings as anyone. At the appointed hour Tommy Hambledon arrived at the Home Office and was not kept waiting more than ten minutes.

“The subject I wanted to talk to you about,” said the Minister, “or rather, the subject I wanted you to advise me about, if you will, is all this prison-breaking business. Will you have a cigar?”

“Thank you,” said Tommy.

“I had a very full account of that meeting you attended the other day and I read it very carefully, but I can’t say that I found it very helpful.”

“No?”

“I was hoping that some fresh and ingenious method would have been put forward for preventing escapes, but I must admit I found none. More careful checking and counter-checking, greater vigilance—the treatment as before only stronger, in short. That was all. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” said Hambledon frankly, “I do. But one should remember that they were all policemen—even the Prison Governors in a sense—and their actions are all laid down for them in Regulations. I think that’s an excellent thing, mind you; unregulated police are the devil, I’ve met them in Germany and didn’t like them a bit. But you can’t have strict Regulations and sparkling initiative.”

The Home Secretary nodded. “That’s perfectly true, but what I was thinking was this. They all look at the problem from the inside, as it were. Escapes must be prevented: double the warders, build another six feet on the walls, frame better regulations for working parties, all that sort of thing. Now I was wondering whether escapes couldn’t be forestalled.”

Hambledon nodded. “It’s exasperating to consider that you could probably open up the whole thing by giving one man five hundred pounds and a free passage to the Argentine, if only you knew whom to give it to.”

“You have done as I knew you would,” said the Minister. “You have put your finger on the spot, and that brings us to the reason why I sent for you, Mr. Hambledon, and not for a policeman. You have spent years of your valuable life finding out what people were going to do before they did it. Can you advise me how to find the man for the five hundred pounds?”

“When I received your letter making this appointment,” said Hambledon slowly, “I guessed it would be this which you wanted to discuss, and I spent the intervening three days thinking it over. There isn’t much doing in my Department at the moment. If you agree, I think I’d better go to jail myself.”

“Good gracious——”

“With a very carefully arranged background, sir, and nobody must know. Nobody. Well, I suppose somebody must know, because I can’t expect you to fix up identity papers, finger-prints on documents, official transfers and so on with your own hands. What I mean is that the police mustn’t know, nor the warders, not even the Prison Governor of wherever I go. By the way, the prisons from which escapes are made are always convict prisons, aren’t they? Not local prisons.”

“That is so, yes. Local prisons are only used for short sentences up to two years and in the great majority of cases much less. Six months, that sort of thing. It wouldn’t be worth while staging an expensive jail-break for a short sentence. When it comes to five or seven years or even longer, it’s another story.”

“Yes. Haven’t you got a nice middle-aged prisoner with a five-year sentence for smuggling diamonds or something like that, who could be moved from his present abode to another? En route he could be switched off to the docks, shipped to the Argentine and told never to come back, while I take his place, name and record? Surely you could spare one prisoner in a good cause,” said Tommy, and stubbed out the end of his cigar.

The Home Secretary laughed. “A good example of the sort of sparkling initiative you spoke of just now, which one couldn’t expect from the police. Just a moment, though, you’ve given me an idea. Excuse me a minute while I turn something up.” He rang the bell and sent the clerk who answered it for a certain file.

“There was one thing which I noticed about these escapes,” said Hambledon, while they were waiting. “They seemed to me to fall into two very different classes. Either they were the sort of men to be useful to a criminal organisation if there is such a thing—expert forgers, coiners, housebreakers and so forth—or else they were rich men who could afford to pay for freedom.”

“You’re quite right, I noticed that myself.”

“So if I were a comfortable City man of no use to anybody but myself,” went on Tommy, “I should be less likely to be lured into a life of crime as the price of liberty, which is a nice thought. I don’t, of course,” he added more seriously, “really expect to be involved in an escape myself, I only hope to get some news of one.”

The clerk came into the room, handed a file of papers to the Home Secretary, and went out again.

“I shouldn’t like to take the responsibility for your being lured into a life of crime,” said the Minister, untying the traditional red tape which is really pink, “we might be out of the frying-pan into the fire as we said in the nursery. Well, here we are. Edwin Vincent Hawkley, aged 49—in 1945 that was—convicted at the Old Bailey of fraudulent misrepresentation in connection with the issue to the public of shares in a company called the Beauty House Replacement Corporation. He headed his note-paper,” said the Minister indignantly, “ ‘To give unto them beauty for ashes,’ the sacrilegious dog! The idea was to buy up the sites of completely demolished houses by a small cash payment to the owner plus some shares in the business, and sell more shares to the gullible public. By this means money would be available to rebuild houses on the bombed sites. The shareholders were to have the first option on the new houses when they were built. That’s what he said. Of course it transpired at the trial that he’d only bought three sites and was twisted over one of those, the seller didn’t own it. It had occurred to Hawkley that there was no need to buy properties to show his clients, any property would do, and copies of the title-deeds were readily available. The originals, he said, were deposited in his bank at Llandudno for safety. The properties were all small lots in the poorer parts of London and the cheaper suburbs, thus tapping a class of customer unlikely to be familiar with the laws of property and so forth. He collected about fifteen thousand pounds, and then somebody smelt a rat and the whole thing blew up. He tried to bolt, signing on as a steward on a liner for South America, and the police collected him ten minutes before she sailed. He got seven years.”

“And rightly, in my opinion,” said Tommy. “Did they get the money back?”

“No. He was convicted in December 1945, and served thirteen months of his sentence. He then escaped from prison—that was in January this year. He had a brother who was a pilot in a firm of private passenger aircraft, on charter, you know. The brother faked an order to fly a passenger to Glasgow, picked up Edwin Vincent Hawkley and started off with him across the North Sea. They were reported crossing the coast and again about forty-five miles out, but the weather turned bad, strong north-easterly winds—a head-wind, naturally—snow, sleet and so forth. They did not arrive so far as anyone can discover. What is more, wreckage was picked up by a fishing-boat on the Dogger and considered by experts to be part of the missing aircraft. So that was probably that.”

“He’d have done better to stay in jail,” said Tommy. “Better for himself, I mean.”

“Yes, quite. Well, there you are. If he wasn’t drowned after all, and the police got their claws on him, he’d go back to serve the remainder of his sentence. Suit you? I should like to point out that this isn’t one of the series of escapes which we are investigating, though it occurred during that period. There was no mystery about this one, the police traced it all out. The brother worked it. So if you should contact any of the people we want there is no fear of their saying, ‘This isn’t the man we got out before.’ ”

“What about his past?” asked Hambledon. “Had he been associated with criminals before?”

“No. He was a clerk in a solicitor’s office for some years, then he was employed by two or three City companies in succession, with gaps between jobs. But he’d never been what they call ‘in trouble’ before.”

“I see. And what about his family, any more brothers or sisters? Was he married?”

“One other brother was killed in the war and their parents are both dead. Hawkley was a widower, no wife, no children.”

“I always prefer, on these occasions,” said Hambledon, “not to have a wife.”