Thomas Tennant, a highly popular man as far as the staff at "the Yard" went, and trusted implicitly by his superiors from the Assistant-Commissioner downwards, worked with an iron sense of the red-taped duty for which he received his salary. "I'm sorry," said Tennant, looking at the young man; "but all these denials will not, I fear, help you in the least. As I warned you, they are being taken down in writing, and may be used in evidence against you," and he indicated a clerk writing shorthand at a side-table. Jack Sainsbury grew furious. "I don't care a brass button what evidence you can give against me," he cried. "I only know that my conscience is perfectly clear. I have tried, since the war, to help my friend Dr Jerome Jerrold of Wimpole Street, to inquire into spies and espionage. We acted together, and Jerrold reported much that was unknown to Whitehall. He--" "Doctor Jerrold is the gentleman who committed suicide--if my memory serves me correctly," interrupted the police official, speaking very quietly. "Perhaps he did. I say perhaps--remember," exclaimed the young man under arrest. "But I don't agree with the finding of the Coroner's jury." "People often disagree with a Coroner's jury," was the dry reply of the hide-bound official, seated at the table. "But now, let us get along," he added persuasively. "You admit that you are John James Sainsbury; that you were, until lately, clerk in the employ of the Ochrida Copper Corporation, in Gracechurch Street, from the service of which you were recently discharged. Is that so?" "Most certainly. I have nothing to deny." "Good. Then let us advance a step further. You were, I believe, an intimate friend of Dr Jerome Jerrold, who lived in Wimpole Street, and who, for no apparent reason, committed suicide." "Yes." "You do not know, I presume, that Dr Jerrold was suspected of a very grave offence under the Defence of the Realm Act, and that, rather than face arrest and prosecution by court-martial as a spy--he took his own life!" "It's a lie--_an infernal lie_!" shouted young Sainsbury. "Who alleges such an outrageous lie as that?" The fair-haired detective smiled, and in that suave manner he usually adopted towards prisoners, with clasped hands he said: "I fear I cannot tell you that." "But it's a confounded lie! Jerome Jerrold was no spy. He and I were the firmest friends, and I know how he devoted his time and his money to investigating the doings of the enemy in our midst. Did you not read the words of the Lord Chancellor the other day?" "I'm afraid I didn't." "Well, speaking in the House of Lords, he admitted that we have not only to fight a foe in the open field, but that their spies are in every land and that the webs of their intrigue enmesh and entangle every Government. It was in order to assist the authorities--your own department indeed--that Dr Jerome, two friends of his, and myself devoted our time to watching at nights, and investigating."