“Oh, yes, I know him. He’s one of the convicts who recently escaped from Dartmoor. We’ve been looking for him.”

“My life, already,” Mr. Klein said. “You’re telling me that the man who broke into my shop and took those rings was that same Robbins?”

“Almost certainly so.”

“Then I’m lucky I wasn’t murdered in my bed.”

“You are very lucky, I agree. In fact, you’re the only one he hasn’t attempted to murder, most of them in ingenious ways.”

“Oh, he was a slick one, all right, from what we heard of the way he got around these old ladies. Knew how to charm people. Smarmy, that’s what I called him, but some of the ladies believed him. I don’t quite approve of having ladies sit on juries, if you don’t mind my saying so. Not enough experience of the outside world and too easily swayed by a charming smile.”

“What did he look like, Mr. Klein?” I asked.

“We know what he looked like. We have his mug shots,” the inspector said.

“I wanted Mr. Klein’s impression of him,” I said.

“Well-built chap, good solid jaw. Quite a big man and, as I said, charming smile. Charming manner altogether. If you’d believed him, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”

“I take it you haven’t seen him recently?” the inspector asked. “He didn’t come into your shop, for example?”

“Oh, no. I’d have remembered him, I’m sure,” Mr. Klein said. “A person like that you don’t forget so easily.”

We took our leave then.

“Well, that’s a turnup for the books, isn’t it?” the inspector said. “If we’re to believe him, that Robbins fellow is still hiding out in these parts and bumping off the members of the jury, one by one.”

“He still has two to go,” I said. “We need to find out who the other members were before it’s too late.”

“That trial would have been at the Crown court in Exeter,” the inspector said. “The local magistrate’s court wouldn’t have touched a case like that.”

He turned to his driver and we swung onto the main Exeter road.

“What I want to know,” my grandfather said as we negotiated the narrow streets near the center of town, “is how he obtained all this local knowledge if he was locked away in Dartmoor Prison. Someone from around here must have found out about the details of the people he killed.”

“The same one who is hiding him, presumably,” I said.

“Doing a bloody good job of it too,” the inspector said. “We went door to door in all those local villages when the convicts escaped, but nobody claimed to have seen hide nor hair of them.”