"Put on the lights.... I'm afraid of ... the dark...." Birdie's hand went groping for Kennedy's fingers. "Joan ... Joan ... Birdie's goin'.... Never was much use to yer ... But yer ... all ... right ... _Joan!_ ... It's cold.... Kiss me...." "We'll get in through the mews--most of these old houses have back entrances that way," said Teal. Unostentatiously a cordon had ringed round the gaunt, sinister house in Buckingham Gate, and the mews behind was thronged with armed men whose rubber-soled shoes had made no sound on the cobbles. Bill Kennedy was in charge of the men in Buckingham Gate itself, and Teal was left to direct the opening of the attack. A minute study of the tire tracks showed that, although there were six lock-ups along the west side of the mews, all the cars which had recently passed in and out of the garage had entered and left by one particular door. Teal made a careful examination of the lock, and also tested the resistance to a steady, cautious push. "One bar across the centre," was his expert verdict. Then he drew up his men and gave them their instructions. There was an odd furtiveness about the proceedings--the thirty men mustered in the mews might have been conspirators meeting at dead of night to hatch some nefarious plot, instead of burly, stolid plain-clothes men with nothing more sensational about them than the police automatic and truncheons with which they were armed. Even Teal, an unemotional law-enforcing machine, found himself speaking in hushed tones, although their danger lay far more in being seen than in being overheard. Nevertheless, all the men were pressed close up against the garage doors on the west side, to minimise the risk of being observed by anyone who chanced to look out of one of the upper windows. "... And if any perishing sinner falls over his own feet this time, like one adjective noun did in Billingsgate not so long ago," Mr. Teal concluded, with whole seas of incandescent vitriol bubbling up in his measured delivery, "I promise him he won't only wish he'd never been born--he'll pray that there's no such thing as reincarnation, when I've finished with him!" With which horrific prognostication Mr. Teal moved off to take up his position. He glanced round, and made certain that the twelve men whom he had detailed to assist in the breaking in of the door were stationed ready on his heels; and then he took a Smith-Wesson from his hip pocket and thumbed back the hammer. "Ready?" The question ripped out in sibilant warning, and a second later things happened. Teal's revolver thundered, and the heavy bullets shredded the lock completely out of existence. Simultaneously, Central Inspector Teal and his twelve good men and true hurled their total three-quarter ton of bone and brawn against the barred door. And, with one prolonged, rending, splinting crash, the door simply was not....