“Anything gone wrong?” Roger asked quickly.
The other shook his head.
“Everything went according to plan,” he announced. “I drove up to the place in a horse carriage, found quite an ordinary café with several decent-looking men of the shopkeeper type sitting about and two or three women. No one at all remarkable. I went to the counter, laid down the packet and covered it with a newspaper exactly as I had been told. Then I ordered a Fine—a very good Fine it was too—paid for it and left the place.”
“Who served you with your drink?” Thornton asked.
“He seemed to be quite an ordinary barman, rather above the usual type, if anything—clean white linen coat—spoke English perfectly. I didn’t hurry over my brandy. I was trying to make up my mind about the people. When I left I bade the barman good evening. He replied quite pleasantly and made no reference at all to the parcel I was leaving behind. As I was stepping into my carriage I looked back. The newspaper had gone from the counter and my packet with it!”
“And you drove straight here?”
“I drove straight here.”
Roger called the barman and gave an order. Thornton was tapping a cigarette thoughtfully upon the table.
“I suppose you have still made up your mind to sacrifice the money and let it go at that?” he asked.
Bradley frowned.
“I don’t think I went quite so far as that,” he replied. “I may have hinted as much to Erskine and Sloane here this afternoon, but the point I was definite about was that I didn’t want any outside interference.”
Thornton was suddenly grave, his tone almost inquisitorial.
“Lord Bradley,” he said, “you strike me as being an amateur who may be trying to measure his wits against some very experienced professionals. You have had this demand made upon you and you have paid these men the money they insisted upon. I daresay you have been wise, but I want you to tell me this—are you keeping anything back?”
Bradley made no direct answer. He felt in his hip pocket and produced a well-fitted portemonnaie. From it he drew a mille note and laid it upon the table.
“Do either of you see anything unusual about that?” he asked.
Roger took up the note and examined it carefully. He spent some few minutes over his investigation before handing it back.
“Seems to me all right,” he admitted.
“What about you, Erskine?”
The latter also subjected it to a close scrutiny.
“I should like a thousand of them,” he observed, as he returned it.
“And you, Thornton?”
Thornton adjusted some rarely used spectacles and went over the note inch by inch.
“Seems to me O.K.” he acknowledged finally. “Wait a moment.”
He opened his own pocketbook, produced a mille note and laid it beside Bradley’s. Presently a little exclamation broke from his lips.
“The ‘i’ in the last word of the inscription here is dotted,” he pointed out. “It is not dotted on mine. As it is a block letter, one would not expect it.”
Bradley smiled triumphantly.
“You would expect that to escape ordinary observation then?”
“Ordinary observation—yes,” Thornton agreed. “I am not at all sure, however, about the people you’re up against!”
Bradley glanced around the room for a moment to be sure that there was no one within hearing.
“Well, anyway, there it is,” he confided. “Morris, my Marconi man, and I have spent the greater part of the day making those dots with some white ink I got and a blunted needle end. I have seen—well, the right person to see—at the Etablissement. None of the croupiers have been told the reason, but every one of the cashiers has his orders that the mille notes handed to croupiers for change to-night and to-morrow night will be placed in a special compartment of their boxes and examined later on.”
There was an expression on Thornton’s face which it was hard to classify.
“Of course, if you think it worth while to run a risk like this,” he said a little stiffly, “it is no one else’s business.”
“It’s not a question of the money,” Bradley pointed out. “How do you suppose I feel about being blackmailed by this company of gangsters or cutthroats or whatever they are? It hurts a man’s vanity. I haven’t gone through life being any one’s mug. You especially ought to be thankful, Thornton. You find the man to-night who tries to cash one of those notes—”
“And what do you suppose, Lord Bradley, may happen to you,” Thornton interrupted, “if when our friends up at the Café Regent go through that bundle of bills they discover that dotted ‘i’?”
“They are not likely to,” Bradley scoffed. “I’ve tried it on a dozen people, people of experience too. I tried it on the head cashier of the principal Bank here, and the manager. Neither of them noticed it.”
“All the same,” Thornton said, and he spoke very earnestly and very deliberately, “it is a calm sea, Lord Bradley, and the papers are prophesying good weather. It was only yesterday you said you were ready to sail at any time. Why not to-night?”
Bradley’s jaw was suddenly set. He seemed to have assumed the expression with which he was so frequently caricatured.
“I think,” he confided, “I would rather stay and deal with the men who are trying to rob me of six hundred thousand francs Thornton’s eyes were filled with disapproval as he watched Bradley’s disappearing figure a few minutes later.
“True to type,” he sighed. “It is not the loss of the money he minds but the blow to his conceit.”
“I don’t think it’s up to us to grumble,” Roger objected.
“Why not?”
“It gives us a chance, doesn’t it?”
“In a way it does, of course,” Thornton admitted. “But the more I think of it, Sloane, the more I’m becoming convinced that we’re up against something unusually clever.”
“Open up,” Roger invited. “Why?”
“That faked confession of Crowley’s, for one thing, and the fact that the gang were perfectly willing to commit a featureless murder in order to give the police something to pat themselves on the back for and at the same time divert suspicion from themselves.”
“A dirty business that,” Roger acquiesced.
“Then you must remember this,” Thornton went on; “if Bradley is being watched scientifically—as seems possible from the boldness of their threats—they will know that he was shut up for three or four hours during the day with his Marconi man and they may even have an idea as to what he was doing. They will know, too, that he had an interview with the Casino authorities this morning, or has communicated with them in some way or other.”
“That seems likely enough.”
“I should imagine that before they are put into circulation, every one of those notes will be gone over by an expert with a magnifying glass. If so, they can’t fail to find the white dot. And if they find it—well, I think that Lord Bradley would be very much safer on his way to Egypt. He may not realise it, but it was a pretty foolhardy thing to do to take this gang on.”
“Maybe,” Roger commented. “All the same, it would be a Simple Simon business to sit down and be robbed of a sum like that.”
“If I had Bradley’s millions, I should have paid the money