Cleek presented a keen contrast to him.  His broad-shouldered, well-groomed person would have adorned any company.  His head was well-set upon his neck, and his features at this moment were small and inclined to be aquiline.  He had closely set ears that lay well back against his head, and his hands were slim and exceedingly well-kept.  Of his age—­well that, like himself, was an enigma.  To-day he might have been anything between thirty-five and forty—­to-morrow probably he would be looking nineteen.  That was part of the peculiar birthright of the man, that and a mobility of feature which enabled him to alter his face completely in the passing of a second, a gift which at least one notorious criminal of history also possessed.

He sat now, playing with the silver-topped cane between his knees, his head slightly to one side, his whole manner one of polite and tolerant interest.  But Mr. Narkom knew that this same manner marked an intensity of concentration which was positively unique.  Without more ado he plunged into the details of his story.

“It happened in this wise, Cleek,” he said, tapping his fountain-pen against his blotter until little spouts of ink fell out like jet beads.  “This is at least the ninth case of the kind we’ve had reported to us within the space of the last fortnight.  The first robbery was at a tiny branch bank in Purley, and the bag amounted to a matter of a couple of hundred or so sovereigns; the second was at Peckham—­on the outskirts, you understand; the third at Harrow; the fourth somewhere near Forest Hill, and the fifth in Croydon.  Other places on the South East side of London have come in for their share, too, as for instance Anerley and Sutton.  This last affair took place at Hendon, during the evening of Saturday last—­the sixteenth, wasn’t it?  No one observed anything untoward in the least, that is except one witness who relates how he saw a motor car standing outside the bank’s premises at half past nine at night.  He gave no thought to this, as he probably imagined, if he thought of the coincidence at all, that the manager had called there for something he had forgotten in his office.”

“And where, then, does the manager live, if not over the bank itself?” put in Cleek at this juncture.

“With his wife and family, in a house some distance away.  A couple of old bank people—­a porter and his wife who are both thoroughly trustworthy in every way, so Mr. Barker tells me—­act as caretakers.  But they positively assert that they heard no one in the place that night, and no untoward happening occurred to their knowledge.”

“And yet the bank was broken into, and the gold taken,” supplemented Cleek quietly.  “And what then, Mr. Narkom?  How was the deed done?”

“Oh, the usual methods.  The skeleton keys of a master crook obviously opened the door to the premises themselves, and soup was used to crack the safe.  Everything was left perfectly neat and tidy and only the bags of gold—­amounting to seven hundred and fifty pounds—­were gone.  And not a trace of a clue to give one a notion of who did the confounded thing, or where they came from!”