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“THERE is no police force in the world that can counter the intelligent law-breaker,” wrote that remarkable man Len Witlon, in an article he once contributed to the American Press, “providing he lays his plans carefully and skilfully and carries them through without deviation.”

Len Witlon knew five languages perfectly, and had friends and sometimes confederates in at least a dozen European prisons. He himself had certainly been under detention, but had never been dishonoured by a conviction.

You met him at the American bar of Claridge’s in Paris, or dining at Armonvillier; occasionally he took a cure at Vichy or Baden-Baden—there were certain mud baths in Czechoslovakia that he visited regularly. He was a vain and brilliant man, very jealous of his reputation for gallantry.

“To be successful in robbery one must be something of a psychologist. It is not sufficient to know where material danger is to be found: one must be able to read the mind of one’s opponent. That is the art of generalship: success comes when the operator combines with his powers of organisation a loyal and unswerving loyalty to his comrades.”

Inspector O. Rater read this interesting article so often that he could almost quote it word for word. He had cut out the article soon after its publication, had pasted it in an exercise book against the day when Len would commence operations in England.

“Tell that friend of yours,” said the Orator, to a familiar of the great man, “that if he ever puts his nose inside of London he won’t be giving interviews for fourteen years.”

One day Len took up the challenge....

A policeman came through Burford Square at a leisurely pace, moving towards the corner of Canford Street. He had arranged with the constable patrolling the next beat to meet him there at eleven and finish the interrupted story of a brother-in-law’s shortcomings, and the problem of the wife and three children who had been left unsupported by the aforesaid brother-in-law’s hasty departure for Canada.

He came to the rendezvous at almost the same moment as his mate appeared. And the serial was continued :

“...‘Well,’ I says to my sister, ‘you’ve only got yourself to blame...’”

He stopped dead.

The scream came from one of the dark houses of the square, and not very far away.

“Murder... murder!”

The two police officers were already running.... On the doorstep of No. 95 a girl was standing. They saw the white of her nightgown in the dim light of a street lamp.

“Help... please! Oh, thank God you’ve come!”

She retreated before them through the open door into the dark hall.

“I heard him scream... and the struggle... and I tried to get into his room...”

She had been feeling for the switch, and she found it. A big glass lantern suspended from the high ceiling glowed with a golden light.

“What is it, miss? Which room?”

Her trembling fingers pointed to the stairway.

She was very pretty, though as white as chalk, the officer observed.

“Put a coat on the lady, Harry”—he indicated a little alcove where hats and coats were hanging. “Now, miss, you’ll have to show us the room.”

She shook her head; her eyes were wide with horror.

“No, no, no! I can’t.... It is the first landing—the room overlooking the square——”

The two uniformed men raced up the stairs; as they reached the square landing, a light came on, probably controlled from the hall below, for there was a push-button switch on the wall of the landing and nobody could have touched that. Facing them was a polished mahogany door with an ornamental gilt and enamelled door knob.

P.C. Simpson (he of the wronged sister) turned the handle. The door was locked from the inside. He shook the handle vigorously and called out:

“Open this door!”

A futile invitation, and laughable in any other state of affairs. More futile, since when he turned the knob the door opened.

It was a large room, running the whole width of the house. Light came from a crystal chandelier. P.C. Simpson saw a big gilt and mahogany writing-table; behind that was a carved marble fireplace, and on the white hearth an electric fire glowed redly. Until they passed round the table, they did not see the quiet figure that lay, face upwards. It was in evening dress; one hand gripped the edge of the marble curb that surrounded the fireplace; the other was half raised, as though to ward off a blow.

“He’s dead—shot... look!”

Simpson’s companion pointed to the patch of blood above the heart.

P.C. Simpson stared down at his first murder, all too aware of the tremendous importance to him and to his career; he had a confused memory of instructions he had received as to what a policeman should do in such circumstances.

“Don’t let nobody come in,” he said huskily, and gaped round the room. A long window was open—he stepped out on to a balcony, flashing his electric lamp along the rails.

A rope was knotted to the balcony rail and trailing down—as he saw by the rays of his lamp—to the front steps. It had not been there when they had come in or they must have knocked against it.

“He’s got away since we came in, Harry. Come down with me!”

They flew down the stairs into the silent square; they did not see the girl; she must have gone to her room.

The front door was closed. P.C. Simpson jerked at it with confidence, but this door did not open. He twisted the handle and pulled again, but it was a very heavy door, steel-lined, and did not budge.

“It’s been double-locked on the inside,” he said, truthfully. “That girl must have done it, Harry. Go and see her and get the key.”

Harry tried the nearest door; that was locked, and the second door was locked, but the door leading into the back of the house was open. It took him down to a kitchen, and his electric lamp showed him yet another door wide open. He guessed it was the garage; the big gates leading to the mews were swinging idly in the breeze.

He went back to his companion.

“You wait here,” said P.C. Simpson, flew down the stairs, and in a few seconds was in the mews.

With shaking hand he dragged his police whistle from his pocket, and sent out a shrill warning, circumnavigated the house in time to see three policemen running, and ahead of them a stolid, tall figure.

Inspector Rater had business of his own in the neighbourhood that night, but had surrendered all other interest at the alarm. Breathlessly the police-constable told his story as he half ran, half walked back to the mews.

“All right, all right,” said the Orator, impatiently. “One of you fellows stand in front of the door and don’t move.”

He followed Simpson into the house, up to the ground floor. Harry the policeman stood rigidly to attention at the foot of the stairs.

“Where’s the lady? Have you seen her?”

Harry had not seen her or heard her. He ventured the suggestion that she must be “in a faint,” for he was a family man, and knew the effects of such events upon the weak frame of womanhood.

The Orator was half-way up the stairs, and missed the plausible explanation.

“That’s the room, sir.”

Inspector Rater turned the handle and pushed.

“Locked,” he said and, stooping, squinted through the keyhole.

He could see that the door to the balcony was open, and asked a question.

“I left it like that, sir. There was a rope tied to the rails of the balcony. The man who done it must have got out that way, sir——”

“Lend your shoulders to the door,” said the Orator.

Two strong men pushed together—and again. The lock broke with a snap, the door flew open...

“Where’s your body?”

P.C. Simpson stared: where the dead man had lain there was no dead man. The room was entirely empty.

The Orator looked at the policemen, at the floor and then at the window; and then his mind instantly moved to the house of the Marquis Perello, which was on the opposite side of the square. He thought of the Marquis Perello naturally for two reasons: the first was that Len Witlon was in town, and the second that in the Marquis’s house, in a safe, and not a very safe safe, were four packets of cut emeralds that had arrived in London a few days before. They were in transit to an illustrious person in Italy who had a passion for emeralds, and had been purchased in the Argentine at great cost. The Marquis had notified the police, and Mr. O. Rater had thought it desirable to station a uniformed constable before and behind the house. He knew the names of those constables, and, leaning over the balcony, he addressed the small gathering of police officers on the pavement below.

“Is Walton here?”

“Yes, sir,” said a voice.

“And Martin?”

“Yes, sir,” said another voice.

“Then,” asked the Orator gently, “why the hell are you here?”

He was very hurt, because he knew just how quickly Len Witlon worked. He did not wait for the door to be opened, but slid down the rope on to the steps, and five minutes later was knocking at the door of the Marquis Perello’s house. He knocked for a very long time. The marquis and his wife were at the theatre. The three maidservants were locked in a room upstairs. The armed valet who kept guard over the safe was found bludgeoned in the drawing-room, and the safe was open.

“He worked four-handed,” said the Orator philosophically.

Len Witlon invariably worked four-handed, so the Orator had made no great discovery. And after a job was done the four would separate and leave England by various routes. There is, for example, a steamer that goes from Dundee to Holland, and yet another that sails from Plymouth to one of the French ports—Len never made the mistake of following the beaten track. His methods were unique: nobody but Len would have taken a furnished house in Burford Square and staged an elaborate murder mystery in order to bring all the police in the neighbourhood running to that one particular spot and leave unguarded the place he wished to burgle.

A search of the house revealed nothing of value except—in the fireplace of the dining-room were a number of burnt papers, and a little slip printed in red which was only half-burnt. It had apparently to do with passengers and guides and the difficulties of Customs. He put the little slip in his pocket very carefully and sent forth widespread enquiries. The only clue he had—and that came to him the next morning—was from a constable of the City police who, standing at the juncture of Queen Victoria Street and Cannon Street, had seen a car in which was a woman. He was not even certain it was a woman, but she had that appearance, for her head and the upper part of her body were enclosed in a frock. She was, in point of fact, at the moment he saw her, engaged in slipping on a dress.

Cannon Street Station drew blank : no woman had arrived in a car at that hour. She had obviously gone east of Cannon Street.

The Orator was something of a psychologist himself. He knew Witlon’s methods, and knew that that gallant gentleman would first assure himself that his beautiful lady confederate was safe. He interviewed P.C. Simpson, a crestfallen and resentful man, from whom his first murder had been ruthlessly snatched.

“Yes, sir, she talked with a sort of foreign accent.”

“I want you to remember every word she said, Simpson,” said the Orator gently.

P.C. Simpson thought very hard, trying to coax, by a vigorous massage of his head, the half-forgotten facts of the conversation.

“I can’t remember anything she said, sir. The only thing that struck me as curious was that while she was a-moaning and a-groaning she had her eye on her wrist-watch. I saw her look twice.”

“The time was about eleven, I think?”

The constable thought it was a little later.

“To me,” said the Orator, “it is as clear as daylight.”

When P.C. Simpson had gone, the Orator took from an envelope the little half-burned slip of printed paper that had been found in the grate of the dining-room, and reconstructed it...

Early one morning, somewhere in the Bay of Biscay, a British destroyer came up over the horizon behind the slow-moving steamship Emil and signalled the captain to stop. The Emil was a small ship that carried a large number of pleasure-seeking passengers to the Moroccan ports and Madeira. She had left London at midnight on the night of the robbery, and the pretty Anglo-Spanish girl who had already become the belle of the ship had joined the Emil just before she cast off from one of the London docks. Miss Avilez protested vigorously against her arrest, but rather blotted her copybook by attempting to throw a small package overboard—a piece of extravagance on her part, since the package contained seventeen perfectly cut emeralds, none of which was under ten carats.

The matron who looked after her on the destroyer brought her to London and to Mr. Rater. She replied to all his questions with the hauteur proper to a daughter of hidalgos.

The next morning there appeared in the London Press a communication very carefully composed by the Orator himself. He wrote at greater length than he spoke.

“Part of the proceeds of the Burford Square robbery have been recovered by the arrest of a woman calling herself Inez Avilez. It appears that the leader of the gang responsible for this cleverly planned robbery, whilst he was careful of his own skin, had not only sent the woman on a route where she could be easily traced, but had left evidence—possibly with the idea of using her as a decoy to draw attention from himself to her destination.”

On the day following the pretty Anglo-Spaniard’s conviction (she was a British subject from Gibraltar) a second inspired paragraph appeared:

“This woman was deliberately sacrificed by the man who planned the robbery, and goes to prison to bear the punishment for his crime.”

It was a clumsily written paragraph, and there were several sub-editors who would have liked to alter it a little, but the Orator knew his man, though he might not have recognised Mr. Len Witlon if he had seen him pacing the floor of his expensive suite in Aix, crazily incoherent, planning vengeance for the insult that had been put upon him.

“I’ve got Witlon,” reported the Orator laconically.

And yet his superiors knew there was nothing in the world to associate Witlon with the robbery. He had his perfectly turned alibis, and witnesses to prove his presence in France at the hour the emeralds were stolen.

“I’m a mind-reader, too,” said the Orator, when they asked him for an explanation; “and just at this moment I’m reading Witlon’s. What he’s saying about me at this minute is enough to make me turn in my grave. Only I’m not dead.”

Mr. Len Witlon had a brilliant associate, one John B. Stimmings, who came at the request of his master to Aix, not knowing the condition of Mr. Len Witlon’s mind.

“Too bad about Inez,” said Mr. Stimmings as he came into the ornate sitting-room and closed the door. “Clever kid that. I’ll bet this man Rater framed up something on her——”

“This man Rater couldn’t frame a picture,” spluttered Len, his ordinarily good-looking face swollen and purple with anger. “Rater! They call him the Orator, don’t they! I’ll make him talk! Look at this!”

He slammed down two press cuttings before his visitor. “He couldn’t get anything on me. The Sûreté came after me the next morning, and there was I snug in bed in my villa at Auteuil.”

“Up in Paris,” said John B., “they talk about asking you to leave France——”

“Leave nothing! They know I wouldn’t touch a thing in France. I’m going to England to see this Rater fellow.”

Mr. Stimmings looked at him curiously.

“Count me out,” he said. “Take one ticket—single. You’re going dippy.”

The absurdity of the very suggestion that it was not a brilliant idea brought a fleeting smile to the angry man.

“Listen! You know me! I know just what that fellow’s thinking. I’ve got right behind the thing he calls his mind. John, do you remember when I went after the Infanta’s pearls and then went back to Madrid four days after? Did anybody know me or recognise me? I’m going to show you my biggest bit of work.”

He might have added his ugliest, for in a tempestuous and sleepless night he had designed a crime that had no equal in his brilliant record.

A week later there arrived in London an elderly English gentleman who gave his name at the best London hotel as Colonel Pershin. He had a British passport; he was apparently a fussy, rather quick-tempered man, who had no special business in life. He stayed at the Wheetham Hotel, which was at once the most obscure and the most fashionable in London, and he read the newspapers with great industry.

A few days after his arrival Mr. Rater received a scented letter. It was written by a lady who signed herself “One who Knows,” and it ran:

If you wish to know where the rest of the Perello emeralds are to be found, I can tell you. I want you to promise me that I shall not be arrested, but knowing that a police officer cannot make any such promises, I cannot ask you to put that into writing. I will come to Scotland Yard at 2 o’clock on Saturday evening. Will you be in your room?

The Orator read and re-read the communication. Where women were concerned he believed in miracles. And yet he was satisfied in his mind that behind the letter was the inspiration of Mr. Witlon. For a long, long time he stood by his window looking on to the Embankment, staring at the river, and thinking himself into the mind of his enemy.

There was at the Yard at this time a most unpopular Assistant Commissioner, who did not like the Orator, Major Dawlton had had his police training in India. He was an incurable theorist, and had a weakness for interfering with his executive. He summoned the Orator into his office.

“Come, come, Mr. Rater,” he said, a little pompously. “This won’t do at all. Here are emeralds of an enormous value stolen under the eyes of the police, after you had been specifically instructed to protect their owner! Have you seen this morning’s newspapers?”

“I can’t read”—said the Orator wearily, and waited long enough for the Assistant Commissioner to get apoplectic before he concluded—“newspapers when I have got work on hand.”

“It is a scandal, Mr. Rater. Really, I am ashamed to meet my friends at the club. They are constantly asking me why we don’t get detectives in from outside. And I think it would be an excellent scheme.”

“You don’t want detectives, you want mind-readers to deal with Witlon,” said the Orator again.

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Major Dawlton.

It was a very peaceful Saturday afternoon at Scotland Yard. The day was warm and the double windows that shut out the noises of the Thames Embankment were wide open. Sunshine bathed the deserted wharves and warehouses that form so fine a skyline on the southern bank, and laid on the river a sheet of fretted gold.

The tramway-cars were more or less empty, the promenade given over to leisurely sightseeing folk who had brought their children for a stroll.

Inspector Rater took off his pince-nez with a sigh, folded the minute he had been reading and returned it to its envelope. He gazed pensively through the open window. A tug drawing a string of barges was moving slowly upstream. Timber barges stacked high with planks of yellow pine. On the Embankment a few loungers leaned over the parapet.

He turned his head as the door opened and Major Dawlton came in. Without a word he handed the letter to his superior. The Major fixed his eyeglass, read and sneered.

“That, I suppose, is the art of criminal detection,” he said, with heavy irony—the Orator was very unpopular at that moment. “Half the good work at Scotland Yard is done by informers. I should like to see this woman when she comes.”

“If she comes,” said the Orator softly.

“You think it is a hoax? I don’t agree. It is probably some jealous confederate who has been badly treated. These scraps of information have come to the Yard every day since I have been here.”

“They have come every day I’ve been here,” said the Orator, “and that’s seventeen years.”

The Major snorted under this implication of his inexperience.

“She won’t come, but he will.”

“Witlon? Rubbish! He’s in France. That sort of scoundrel is not going to put his nose into this country, and if he did we’ve sufficient evidence to convict him of simple larceny. I’ll be here at eight o’clock this evening.”

“Make it a quarter to,” suggested the Orator, venom in his eye.