“Where was I?  Ah, yes!  The shipping of the stuff to Belgium.  You see, Brellier’s clever there.  He knows that the sudden appearance of all this gold at his own bank would arouse suspicions, especially as the robberies have been so frequent, so he determines that it is safer out of the country, and as the exchange of British gold is high, he makes money that way.  Turns his hand to everything, in fact.”  He laughed.  “But now we’re turning our hands to him, and the Law will have its toll, penny for penny, life for life.  You’ve come to the end of your resources, Brellier, when you engaged those two strange workmen.  Or, better still, your accomplice did it for you.  You didn’t know they were Cleek and his man, did you?  You didn’t know that on that second night after we’d worked there at the factory for you, we investigated that secret passage in the field outside Saltfleet Road?  You didn’t know that while you walked down that passage in the darkness with your man Jim Dobbs—­or ‘Dirty Jim,’ to give him the sobriquet by which he is known among your employees—­that we were hidden against the wall opposite to that first little niche where the bags of sovereigns stood, and that—­though I hadn’t seen you—­something in your voice struck a note of familiarity in my memory?  You didn’t know that, then?  Well, perhaps it’s just as well, because I might not be here now to tell this story, and to hand you over to justice.”

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SOLVING OF THE RIDDLE

“For the sake of le bon dieu, man, cease your cruel mockery!” said Brellier, suddenly, in a husky voice, as the clerk rose to quell the interrupted flow of oratory, and the court banged his mace for quiet.

“You didn’t think of the cruel mockery of God’s good world, which you were helping so successfully to ruin!” continued the detective, speaking to the court but at Brellier, each word pointed as a barb, each pause more pregnant with scorn than the spoken words had been.  “You didn’t think of that, did you?  Oh, no!  You gave no thought to the ruined home and the weeping wife, the broken-hearted mother and the fatherless child.  That was outside your reckoning altogether.  And, if hearsay be true (and in this case I believe it is) you even went so far as to kill a defenceless woman who had been brave enough to wander out across that particular part of the Fens just to see what those flames really were.  And yet,—­your lordship, this man howls for mercy.”

He paused a moment and passed a hand wearily over his forehead.  The telling of the tale was not easy, and the expression of ’Toinette Brellier’s tear-misted eyes added to the difficulty of it.  But he knew he must spare no detail; in fairness to the man who stood in the dock, in fairness to the Law he served, and in whose service he had unravelled this riddle which at first had seemed so inexplicable.