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 over their glasses, they discussed this mysterious case, which at first had looked so simple of solution if only because it offered so many unusual features, but which, the deeper they probed, merely revealed fresh complications.

“The business of those Fry people, in Scotland, was a rotten disappointment,” said Dunbar, suddenly. “They were merely paid by the late Mrs. Vernon to re-address letters to a little newspaper shop in Knightsbridge, where an untraceable boy used to call for them! Martin has just reported this evening. Perth wires for instructions, but it’s a dead-end, I’m afraid.”

“You know,” said Sowerby, fishing a piece of cork from the brown froth of a fine example by Guinness, “to my mind our hope’s in Soames; and if we want to find Soames, to my mind we want to look, not east, but west.”

“Hear, hear!” concorded Stringer, gloomily sipping hot rum.

“It seems to me,” continued Sowerby, “that Limehouse is about the last place in the world a man like Soames would think of hiding in.”

“It isn’t where he’ll be thinking of hiding,” snapped Dunbar, turning his fierce eyes upon the last speaker. “You can’t seem to get the idea out of your head, Sowerby, that Soames is an independent agent. He isn’t an independent agent. He’s only the servant; and through the servant we hope to find the master.”