Chapter 2

The footman, who was an authority upon such matters, gave him a little
inaccurate information. Miska examined the envelope without being
enlightened any further, and then with a chuckle he was about to tear the
letter into pieces but thought better of it.

“Send it up to Scotland Yard,” he commanded his secretary later in the
morning, and would have forgotten the unpleasant communication if he had
not returned from lunch to find a rather sinister-looking man with a short
black beard who introduced himself as Chief Inspector Bliss from Scotland
Yard.

“About that letter? Oh, rot! You’re not taking that seriously, are you?”

Bliss nodded slowly.

“So seriously that I’m putting on two of my best men to guard you for a
month or two.”

Miska looked at him incredulously.

“Do you really mean that? But surely…my footman tells me he’s a
criminal: he wouldn’t dare come to London?”

Inspector Bliss smiled grimly.

“He dared go into Scotland Yard when it suited him. This is the kind of
case that would interest him.”

He recounted a few of The Ringer’s earlier cases, and Miska Guild became of
a sudden a very agitated young man.

“Monstrous…a murderer at large, and you can’t catch him? I’ve never
heard anything like it! Besides, that business in Paris–it was an
accident. The poor, silly dear mistook the window for her sitting-room
door—-“

“I know all about that, Mr. Guild,” said Bliss quietly. “I’d rather we
didn’t discuss that aspect of the matter. The only thing I can tell you is
that, if I know The Ringer–and nobody has better reason for knowing him
and his methods–he will try to keep his word. It’s up to us to protect
you. You’re to employ no new servants without consulting me. I want a daily
notification telling me where you’re going and how you’re spending your
time. The Ringer is the only criminal in the world, so far as I know, who
depends entirely upon his power of disguise. We haven’t a photograph of him
as himself at Scotland Yard, and I’m one of the few people who have seen
him as himself.”

Miska jibbed at the prospect of accounting for his movements in advance. He
was, he said, a creature of impulse, and was never quite sure where he
would be next. Besides which, he was going to Berlin—-

“If you leave the country I will not be responsible for your life,” said
Bliss shortly, and the young man turned pale.

* * * * *

At first he treated the matter as a joke, but as the weeks became a month
the sight of the detective sitting by the side of his chauffeur, the
unexpected appearance of a Scotland Yard man at his elbow wherever he
moved, began to get on his nerves.

And then one night Bliss came to him with the devastating news.

“The Ringer is in England,” he said.

Miska’s face was ghastly.

“How–how do you know?” he stammered.

But Bliss was not prepared to explain the peculiar qualities of Wally the
Nose, or the peculiar behaviour of the man with the red beard.

When Wally the Nose passed through certain streets in Notting Dale he chose
daylight for the adventure, and he preferred that a policeman should be in
sight. Not that any of the less law-abiding folk of Notting Dale had any
personal reason for desiring Wally the least harm, for, as he protested in
his pathetic, lisping way, “he never did no harm” to anybody in Notting
Dale.

He lived in a back room in Clewson Street, a tiny house rented by a deaf
old woman who had had lodgers even more unsavoury than Wally, with his
greasy, threadbare clothes, his big, protruding teeth, and his silly, moist
face.

He came one night furtively to Inspector Stourbridge at the local police
station, having been sent for.

“There’s goin’ to be a ‘bust’ at Lowes, the jewellers, in Islington,
to-morrer, Mr. Stourbridge; some lads from Nottin’ Dale are in it, and
Elfus is fencin’ the stuff. Is that what you wanted me about?”

He stood, turning his hat in his hands, his ragged coat almost touching the
floor, his red eyelids blinking. Stourbridge had known many police
informers, but none like Wally.

He hesitated, and then, with a “Wait here,” he went into a room that led
from the charge room and closed the door behind him.

Chief Inspector Bliss sat at a table, his head on his hand, turning over a
thick dossier of documents that lay on the table before him.

“That man I spoke to you about is here, sir–the nose. He’s the best we’ve
ever had, and so long as he hasn’t got to take any extraordinary risk–or
doesn’t know he’s taking it–he’ll be invaluable.”

Bliss pulled at his little beard and scowled.

“Does he know why you have brought him here now?” he asked.

Stourbridge grinned.

“No–I put him on to inquire about a jewel burglary–but we knew all about
it beforehand.”

“Bring him in.”

Wally came shuffling into the private room, blinked from one to the other
with an ingratiating grin.

“Yes, sir?” His voice was shrill and nervous.

“This is Mr. Bliss, of Scotland Yard,” said Stourbridge, and Wally bobbed
his head.

“Heard about you, sir,” he said, in his high, piping voice. “You’re the
bloke that got The Ringer—-“

“To be exact, I didn’t,” said Bliss gruffly, “but you may.”

“Me, sir?” Wally’s mouth was open wide, his protruding rabbit’s teeth
suggested to Stourbridge the favourite figure of a popular comic artist. “I
don’t touch no Ringer, sir, with kind regards to you. If there’s any kind
of work you want me to do, sir, I’ll do it. It’s a regular ‘obby of mine–I
ought to have been in the p’lice. Up in Manchester they’ll tell you all
about me. I’m the feller that found Spicy Brown when all the Manchester
busies was lookin’ for him.”

“That’s why Manchester got a bit too hot for you, eh, Wally?” said
Stourbridge.

The man shifted uncomfortably.

“Yes, they was a bit hard on me–the lads, I mean. That’s why I come back
to London. But I can’t help nosing, sir, and that’s a fact.”

“You can do a little nosing for me,” interrupted Bliss.

And thereafter a new and a more brilliant spy watched the movements of the
man with the red beard.

* * * * *

He had arrived in London by a ship which came from India but touched at
Marseilles. He had on his passport the name of Tennett. He had travelled
third-class. He was by profession an electrical engineer. Yet, despite his
seeming poverty, he had taken a small and rather luxurious flat in
Kensington.

It was his presence in Carlton House Terrace one evening that had first
attracted the attention of Mr. Bliss. He came to see Guild, he said, on the
matter of a project connected with Indian water power. The next day he was
seen prospecting the house from the park side.

Ordinarily, it would have been a very simple matter to have pulled him in
and investigated his credentials; but quite recently there had been what
the Press had called a succession of police scandals. Two perfectly
innocent men had been arrested in mistake for somebody else, and Scotland
Yard was chary of taking any further risks.