The telephone buzzed. Grant took it up with an eagerness of which he was not conscious. It was Williams.

"We've located him, sir. Would you like to come, or shall we carry on?"

"Where is it?" Williams told him. "Have you got the exits all secured? No chance of failure if we hang on for a little?"

"Oh, no sir. We've got him all right."

"In that case meet me at the Brixton Road end of Acre Lane in half an hour."

When he joined his subordinate he asked for details, and Williams supplied them as they went along. He had found his man through the house-agents. Lamont had engaged a furnished top flat — two small rooms — three days before the murder, and had moved in on the actual day of the murder, in the morning.

Yes, thought Grant, that fitted Mrs. Everett's story. "What name did he give?" he asked.

"His own," Williams said.

"What! His own name?" repeated Grant incredulously, and was silent, vaguely troubled. "Well, you've done well, Williams, to run him down so soon. Shy bird, is he?"

"He is," said Williams, with emphasis. "Even yet I can't get any one to say that they've seen him. Shy's the word. Here we are, sir. The house is the fourth in the terrace from here."

"Good," said Grant. "You and I will go up. Got a shooter in your pocket, in case? All right, come on."

They had no latchkey, and there was apparently no bell for the third floor. They had to ring several times before the inhabitants of the ground floor came grumbling to their rescue and admitted them. As they ascended the increasingly shabby stairs in the last of the daylight Grant's spirits rose, as they always did at the point of action. There would be no more pottering round. He was about to come face to face with the Levantine, the man he had seen in the Strand, the man who had stuck Sorrell in the back. He knocked abruptly at the door in the shadows. The room beyond sounded hollow and empty; there was no answer. Again Grant knocked, with no result.

"You might as well open it, Lamont. We're police officers, and if you don't open it we'll have to burst it."

Still a complete silence. "You're sure he's here?" Grant asked Williams.

"Well, he was here yesterday, sir, and no one's seen him since. The house has been under observation since three this afternoon."

"We'll burst the lock, then," Grant said, "and don't forget to stand back when the door goes in." With their combined weight they attacked the door, which gave up the unequal struggle with a groaning crash, and Grant, with his right hand in his pocket, walked into the room.

One glance round him told him the truth, and he suddenly knew that ever since he had arrived on the landing outside he had had a conviction that the rooms were empty. "The bird's flown, Williams. We've missed him."

Williams was standing in the middle of the floor, with the expression of a child from whom a sweet has been taken. He swallowed painfully, and Grant, even in the middle of his own disappointment, found time to be sorry for him. It wasn't Williams' fault. He had been a little too sure, but he had done well to locate the man so quickly.

"Well, he went in a hurry, sir," said Williams, as if that fact were a palliative to his own hurt pride and disappointment. And Certainly there was every evidence of haste. Food was left on the table, drawers were half open and obviously ransacked, clothing had been left behind, and many personal possessions. It was not a methodical getaway, it was a flight.

"We'll go through what he has left behind," Grant said. "I'll test for fingerprints before we have to light the lights. There seems to be nothing but the lamp for illumination." He went round the two rooms with his light powder, but there were few surfaces in the flat on which a print was likely to show clear and unmistakable, and these were so patterned over with prints as to be unproductive. But fairly high up on the varnished wood of the door, where a person's left hand would rest as his right took a coat from the hooks nailed there, were two good prints. A little consoled, Grant lit the lamp and went through the things Lamont had left behind. An exclamation from Williams in the bedroom took him there. Williams was holding a wad of Bank of England notes.

"Got them at the back of this drawer, sir. He did go in a hurry!" Balm was flowing on Williams' excoriated soul. "Won't he be biting himself!"

But Grant was searching in his own pocketbook, and presently produced a list of numbers, which he compared with those on the notes. Yes, there was no doubt about it, these were the notes that Lamont had drawn with the cheque he had had from Sorrell. And Lamont had been so hurried in his flight that he had actually forgotten a thing so vital. The whole amount was there, except for the twenty-five pounds sent for Sorrell's burial. That was rather extraordinary. Why had the Levantine, as Grant continued to think of him, spent none of it in the ten days between the time he had received it and the murder? There had been no need of fear then, surely. The value of the notes was large, but that was no explanation. The man had drawn the money himself, and could have had the whole amount in Treasury notes if he had so wanted. Why had he spent none of it?

There was little else in the flat to interest them. The man had a catholic taste in literature, Grant thought, looking along the single row of books that adorned the mantelpiece: Wells, O. Henry, Buchan, Owen Wister, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Sassoon's poems, many volumes of the annual edition of Racing Up-to-Date, Barrie's Little Minister. He took down one and opened it. On the flyleaf, in the writing he had seen on the cheque at the bank, was the owner's name: Albert Sorrell. He took down the others one by one. Nearly all of them had belonged to Sorrell. They had evidently been bequeathed to Lamont by Sorrell on his departure for the United States. Up to the last minute, then, these two men had been friendly. What had happened? Or was it only an outward friendship? Had Lamont always been a snake in the grass?

And now there was the new problem of Lamont's present hiding-place. Where would he be likely to go? He was in a hurry — a desperate hurry. It was no planned affair. That meant that he had probably had to take what refuge came his way. There was no need for them to consider any such possibility as an escape abroad in an elaborate disguise. He had not done that, certainly. He had almost certainly not gone out of London. He would, as he had done before, stick ratlike to the place he knew.

Grant left instructions that the search was to go on as before, and went back to the Yard trying to put himself in the wanted man's place in the hope of working out a line of flight. It was very late at night, and he was very weary, when at last he found light on the matter. The photographs of the prints he had found on the door were sent to him, and the prints were Mrs. Everett's! There was no doubt of it. That first finger that had left a mark at the back of Sorrell's photograph in the little room at Brightling Crescent belonged to the hand that had leaned against the door in the effort of reaching for something in Lamont's room. Mrs. Everett. Good Heaven! Talk of snakes in the grass! And he, Grant, should really retire. He had got to the stage of trusting people. It was incredible and humiliating, but he had believed Mrs. Everett was being straight with him. His putting a man to watch her had been the merest form. Well, it was a bad break, but he had his line on Lamont now. He would get him through Mrs. Everett. He did not doubt for a moment that it was information furnished by Mrs. Everett that had stirred Lamont into flight. She had probably gone straight to him after he had left her yesterday evening. She was gone before the watcher arrived, but he should have seen her come back; that would have to be looked into; Andrews was careless. And in all probability she had either suggested or provided the new hiding-place. He did not believe that a woman of her intelligence would be fool enough to believe that she could keep Lamont hidden at Brightling Terrace, therefore he had now to find out all about Mrs. Everett and all the ramifications of the Everett family. How should he do it? What was the best avenue of approach to a woman of Mrs. Everett's moated and castellated type? No back-door business, anyhow. She was not a door-gossiper, evidently, and now she was on her guard. That effort to stampede her into a show of emotion had been both futile and ill-advised. He might have known that she wasn't the woman to give anything away in a back-door conversation. Well, what then? In what kind of society, on what kind of occasion, if any, did Mrs. Everett open out? He visualized her in various surroundings, and found her invariably grotesque. And then he suddenly had it. Church! The woman shrieked church-worker. She would be greatly respected by all the congregation, but very slightly unpopular because she kept herself to herself, a quality little beloved by the earnest members of work-parties and such Christian activities who, having provided a titbit such as a rumoured bankruptcy among the flock, expect to be offered a decently sized and tolerably luscious titbit in return. «Church» had placed her, and since she was most certainly not overpopular, her fellow-worshippers would be all the more ready to talk about her.