“She said ‘Who are you?’ in a frightened sort of voice. And he said ‘I’m your friend. H.B. is in trouble, and he sent me to you.’”

Cunningham was fairly jumping with excitement now.

“What happened next?” he asked.

“She said ‘Has he escaped?’ and the man said ‘We can’t talk here. If you’ll come with me I’ll take you straight to him.’ And he took hold of her wrist and fairly dragged her off the bus. As we started off I glanced back and saw them getting into his car. So I reckon that he was right. He was taking her off to see some pal of hers. Maybe her boy-friend had escaped from the jug or something,” the conductor added helpfully.

“What was the man like?” asked Cunningham.

“Weedy little chap,” said the conductor. “About five foot five, I should think. Thin and miserable-looking. He had black hair, long, greasy-looking, and untidy, and he had a little black beard—a silly little beard like a lot of the fellows calling themselves artists what we sometimes pick up out Chelsea way.”

“That’s very helpful, Bill,” announced Cunningham. “I’m very much obliged to you.”

He produced his photograph of Moses Moss, on which the beard was still pencilled. “This the fellow?” he asked.

Bill shook his head.

“The beard may be the wrong shape,” Cunningham warned him. “I think that it may be a disguise, and I have to draw it in on a photograph of the man when he was clean-shaved.”

“No,” said Bill firmly. “That’s not the fellow. He had a different shape face from that photo. Ask Harry here.”

“This the man, Harry?” asked Cunningham, and Harry looked doubtful.

“Well,” he said, “I really didn’t get a very good view of him, and I wouldn’t swear to it. It might well be him, for all I could tell.”

“And that,” said Cunningham, as he sped back to Shelley to give an account of his evening’s work, “is about as unsatisfactory a piece of identification as I could imagine.”

Chapter XIV

Chapter XIV

The Case Against Moses Moss

Cunningham grinned. He had given Shelley a full account of his investigations in the wild hinterlands of Streatham and Pinner, and Shelley had expressed his very real pleasure and satisfaction that the sergeant had been enabled to get so far in such short time.

“Mind you, Cunningham,” he added in warning tones, “I don’t say that we’ve really got anywhere yet; it’s much too soon to start theorising. Still, I think that we can congratulate ourselves on having got past a very tasty red herring without wasting much time.”

“Red herring?” Cunningham was not always able to follow the workings of his chief’s somewhat nimbler mind, and on these occasions he was compelled simply to wait for the explanation which he knew would shortly be forthcoming from Shelley.