The rain was descending in sheets, and along the lengthy road ahead of them the yellow glow of the street lamps stretched in a seemingly endless line into the distance. The paler colour of gas lamps took their place, and then the hideous sheen of the newer type of daylight lamps made their faces look ghastly as they peered at the road where it slipped away, an endless shiny ribbon ahead.

After this had continued for some time they saw a traffic policeman, a solemn, solitary figure in a streaming mackintosh cape, standing in the middle of the road where another important artery of traffic crossed it at right angles. Cunningham spoke excitedly.

“Stop!” he said. “Let’s see if this fellow has anything to say.”

They stopped, and Cunningham pulled down the window at his side of the car, and popped his head out, looking intently at the policeman.

“Here,” he said, and the constable approached. Cunningham showed him his authorisation as a Scotland Yard man, and described what they were after.

“A young lady,” he said, “was travelling on a bus to Pinner and Harrow. She was probably hailed by a young man”—and he described Moses Moss—“who took her off the bus, probably in his car.”

Stolidly the constable shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Seen nothing like that, Sergeant. Nothing at all out of the usual has happened here this evening, I’m afraid. Sorry I can’t help you.”

Cunningham shut the window with a slam, and ordered the driver to go on. The madcap chase after nothingness started once more. He remembered similar chases in the past, when he had been in the company of Shelley, thought of the times that he had spent in racing thus after desperate characters, never quite knowing what might be waiting for him at his journey’s end. Never before, however, had he chased something as vague as this, never before had he been engaged in trying to track down something that might never exist at all. Still, it was enough for him that Shelley had a “hunch” on the matter, for he was quite prepared to back Shelley’s “hunches” as much as he would back another man’s certainties.

Soon they found another traffic policeman, but here again they drew blank, and, his temper fast deteriorating, Cunningham ordered the policeman at the wheel to drive on once more. And again this happened…and again…and again. At last Cunningham began to think that the whole affair was the craziest of wild-goose chases, for they were now drawing near to Pinner. Above them on the hill they could see the tower of Harrow Church, and still they had not succeeded in finding the least trace of Miss Arnell and her possibly hypothetical kidnapper.