I. ONE OF THE SECRET SQUAD

The big clean-shaven man with the florid, humorous face and mobile lips would have passed anywhere for a barrister in prosperous practice, or perhaps, a cabinet minister, well-dressed, assured, and certain of himself, and it was his business to convey that impression, because Lytton Barle was head of the Secret Squad at New Scotland, a position not to be proclaimed on the house-tops. He was seated at a desk in his private room, with a big cigar in his mouth, like some gentleman of leisure, and his younger companion, in his neat, well-cut lounge suit, might have just stepped out of his club in search of a congenial way of passing an idle morning.

“Uncommonly glad to see you back in England again, Ray,” Barle was saying. “And more pleased still to know that you are ready to take a hand at the old game. Tired of New Guinea, what?”

“Well, not exactly that, Harry,” Ray smiled. “I’m looking for Edward Keen, the man who robbed me of something like £40,000, and, like the boy in the advertisement, I shan’t be happy till I find him. But that’s a long story of tropical adventure, and, as the last chapter is rather crude still, I don’t propose to go into it now. A slender clue led me from New Guinea to London, and here I am. Been golfing most of the summer at Hunstanton, and came on here last Monday ready to take up the clue I spoke of in earnest. Then I thought of you and the early days here before the war claimed me. You know how one thing leads to another in criminal investigation. The man I am after is in London, unless I am all out, and if he isn’t a master criminal, I never met one. And I don’t even know him by sight. But for the last three years of the war I wa