You're to employ no new servants without consulting me. I want a daily notification telling me where you're going and how you're spending your time. The Ringer is the only criminal in the world, so far as I know, who depends entirely upon his power of disguise. We haven't a photograph of him as himself at Scotland Yard, and I'm one of the few people who have seen him as himself."

    Miska jibbed at the prospect of accounting for his movements in advance. He was, he said, a creature of impulse, and was never quite sure where he would be next. Besides which, he was going to Berlin—"If you leave the country I will not be responsible for your life." said Bliss shortly, and the young man turned pale.

    At first he treated the matter as a joke, but as the weeks became a month the sight of the detective sitting by the side of his chauffeur, the unexpected appearance of a Scotland Yard man at his elbow wherever he moved, began to get on his nerves.

    And then one night Bliss came to him with the devastating news, "The Ringer is in England," he said.

    Miska's face was ghastly.

    "How—how do you know?" he stammered.

    But Bliss was not prepared to explain the peculiar qualities of Wally the Nose, or the peculiar behaviour of the man with the red beard.

    When Wally the Nose passed through certain streets in Notting Dale he chose daylight for the adventure, and he preferred that a policeman should be in sight. Not that any of the less law-abiding folk of Netting Dale had any personal reason for desiring Wally the least harm, for, as he protested in his pathetic, lisping way, "he never did no harm" to anybody in Notting Dale.

    He lived in a back room in Clewson Street, a tiny house rented by a deaf old woman who had had lodgers even more unsavoury than Wally, with his greasy, threadbare clothes, his big, protruding teeth, and his silly, moist face.

    He came one night furtively to Inspector Stourbridge at the local police station, having been sent for.

    "There's goin' to be a 'bust' at Lowes, the jewellers, in Islington, to-morrer, Mr. Stourbridge; some lads from Nottin' Dale are in it, and Elfus is fencin' the stuff. Is that what you wanted me about?"

    He stood, turning his hat in his hands, his ragged coat almost touching the floor, his red eyelids blinking. Stourbridge had known many police informers, but none like Wally.

    He hesitated, and then, with a "Wait here," he went into a room that led from the charge room and closed the door behind him.

    Chief Inspector Bliss sat at a table, his head on his hand, turning over a thick dossier of documents that lay on the table before him.

    "That man I spoke to you about is here, sir—the nose. He's the best we've ever had, and so long as he hasn't got to take any extraordinary risk—or doesn't know he's taking it—he'll be invaluable."

    Bliss pulled at his little beard and scowled. "Does he know why you have brought him here now?" he asked.

    Stourbridge grinned. "No—I put him on to inquire about a jewel burglary—but we knew all about it beforehand."

    "Bring him in."

    Wally came shuffling into the private room, bunked from one to the other with an ingratiating grin.

    "Yes, sir?" His voice was shrill and nervous.

    "This is Mr. Bliss, of Scotland Yard," said Stourbridge, and Wally bobbed his head.

    "Heard about you, sir," he said, in his high, piping voice. "You're the bloke that got The Ringer—"

    "To be exact, I didn't," said Bliss gruffly, "but you may."

    "Me, sir?" Wally's mouth was open wide, his protruding rabbit's teeth suggested to Stourbridge the favourite figure of a popular comic artist. "I don't touch no Ringer, sir, with kind regards to you. If there's any kind of work you want me to do, sir, I'll do it. It's a regular 'obby of mine—I ought to have been in the p'lice. Up in Manchester they'll tell you all about me. I'm the feller that found Spicy Brown when all the Manchester busies was lookin' for him."

    "That's why Manchester got a bit too hot for you, eh, Wally?" said Stourbridge.

    The man shifted uncomfortably. "Yes, they was a bit hard on me—the lads, I mean. That's why I come back to London. But I can't help nosing, sir, and that's a fact."

    "You can do a little nosing for me," interrupted Bliss. And thereafter a new and a more brilliant spy watched the movements of the man with the red beard.

    He had arrived in London by a ship which came from India but touched at Marseilles. He had on his passport the name of Tennett. He had travelled third-class. He was by profession an electrical engineer. Yet, despite his seeming poverty, he had taken a small and rather luxurious flat in Kensington.

    It was his presence in Carlton House Terrace one evening that had first attracted the attention of Mr. Bliss. He came to see Guild, he said, on the matter of a project connected with Indian water power.