Page:Edgar Wallace - The Man who Knew.djvu/278

 Court, which was another cul-de-sac, running parallel with Silvers Rents.

Mr. Mann returned to the house, and again searched the upstairs rooms, looking particularly for a trapdoor, for the bamboo ladder suggested some such exit. This time, however, he completely failed. Jasper Cole, he found, had made only one visit to the house since John Minute's death.

It is a curious fact, as showing the localizing of interest, that Silvers Rents knew nothing of what had occurred almost at its doors, and, though it had at its finger tips all the gossip of the docks and the Thames Iron Works, it was profoundly ignorant of what was common property in Royston Court. It is even more remarkable that Saul Arthur Mann, with his squadron of detectives, should have confined their investigations to Silvers Rents.

The investigator was baffled and disappointed, but by the oddest of chances he was to pick up yet another thread of the Minute mystery, a thread which, however, was to lead