ld be trusted simplicity. He
wanted me to hear what that man had to say. He took me at once into a
dressing-room next door, where I saw a big fellow in a heavy overcoat
sitting all alone on a chair, and holding his hat and stick in one hand.
The Baron said to him in French 'Speak, my friend.' The light in that
room was not very good. I talked with him for some five minutes perhaps.
He certainly gave me a piece of very startling news. Then the Baron took
me aside nervously to praise him up to me, and when I turned round again
I discovered that the fellow had vanished like a ghost. Got up and
sneaked out down some back stairs, I suppose. There was no time to run
after him, as I had to hurry off after the Ambassador down the great
staircase, and see the party started safe for the opera. However, I
acted upon the information that very night. Whether it was perfectly
correct or not, it did look serious enough. Very likely it saved us from
an ugly trouble on the day of the Imperial visit to the City.

"Some time later, a month or so after my promotion to Chief Inspector, my
attention was attracted to a big burly man, I thought I had seen
somewhere before, coming out in a hurry from a jeweller's shop in the
Strand. I went after him, as it was on my way towards Charing Cross, and
there seeing one of our detectives across the road, I beckoned him over,
and pointed out the fellow to him, with instructions to watch his
movements for a couple of days, and then report to me. No later than
next afternoon my man turned up to tell me that the fellow had married
his landlady's daughter at a registrar's office that very day at 11.30
a.m., and had gone off with her to Margate for a week. Our man had seen
the luggage being put on the cab. There were some old Paris labels on
one of the bags. Somehow I couldn't get the fellow out of my head, and
the very next time I had to go to Paris on service I spoke about him to
that friend of mine in the Paris police. My friend said: 'From what you
tell me I think you must mean a rather well-known hanger-on and emissary
of the Revolutionary Red Committee. He says he is an Englishman by
birth. We have an idea that he has been for a good few years now a
secret agent of one of the foreign Embassies in London.' This woke up my
memory completely. He was the vanishing fellow I saw sitting on a chair
in Baron Stott-Wartenheim's bathroom. I told my friend that he was quite
right. The fellow