answer any questions you asked, and, if you go anywhere in consequence of the letter, I could go with you."
"I've only one question," he remarked. "Do you know what time Mr. Parslewe left the hotel?"
"Yes," I said. "I found that out. He left just about eleven—a few minutes before, I gathered from the hall-porter."
He nodded, turned a key in his desk, put the key in his pocket, rose, and asking me to sit down a moment, went across the room and through a door at its farther extremity. Within a couple of minutes he was back again, in company with a man in plain clothes; he himself had put on a uniform overcoat and peaked cap. He made some whispered communication to a sergeant who was busily writing at a table in the centre of the room; then he beckoned to me, and the three of us went out into the night.
At that moment I had not the slightest idea as to our destination. There was a vague notion, utterly cloudy, in my mind that we might be going to some dark and unsavoury quarter of the city; I had been in Newcastle
