He took the advertisement from his pocket and read it over again.
It was short and to the point:
“Blades bought! Oriental blades! Top prices paid for the right sort! OPEN FOR BUSINESS DAY AND NIGHT!
“Ali Yusuf Khan, 356 Coal Yard Street, Drury Lane.”
“Open for business day and night thought Hector. "Well—it seems that Mr. Ali Yusuf Khan is as anxious to buy them as I am to sell this particular one.”
He caught a green bus, dropped off at Drury Lane, and turned into Coal Yard Street, that ancient, crooked alley still fragrant with memories of Nell Gwynne and, too, with the names rather less ambrosial, of Jack Sheppard and the Round House.
It was deserted but for a mangy, guilty looking tomcat, and the nearest lamp post was at the corner of Drury Lane. But a full, golden moon was in the western heaven, and Hector Wade found Number 356 without trouble, in the middle of a packed, greasy mob of low, sixteenth-century houses that rose sheer from the pavement, with leaded windows protruding like bastions, with wrought-iron scrapers and yawning cellar hatches and overhanging, buttressed angles of walls that in the course of time had become bow-legged and knock-kneed.
A flickering, neurotic gas jet lit up a fly-specked display window. But there were no swords nor daggers of any sort; only a large square of pasteboard which echoed the newspaper advertisement:
“Blades bought. At all times of the day and night. Ring bell at left.”
