“I’ll see you home,” he said as he paid the bill, “and then I’ll toddle down to Kingston. I wish to heaven the Kingston police would make their discoveries at a reasonable hour.” “I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’m not a bit sleepy, and it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht!” He looked at her dubiously. “I don’t know that you’re dressed for a motor-car journey, but if you wish you can come along. I have phoned for the police car; it will be here in a few minutes.” She went out into the lobby to put on the woollen spencer she had brought in preparation for a cold journey home, and over that her coat. It was true that she never felt less like sleep; in a sense, she was at a loose end, and the prospect of doing a little work before she went to bed was a pleasing one, though in all probability she would play no other part than that of spectator and audience. The trip promised to be the more interesting, because she had, that day, been tracing the previous convictions of three men who were suspected of being the motor bandits--and very commonplace individuals they were. That had been the most shocking discovery she made when she came to Scotland Yard--the commonplaceness, indeed the insignificance, of what it described as the criminal class. Out-of-work plumbers, labourers, carters, and clerks, with a painter here and there, formed the bulk of them. The women only had an individuality. There was no habitual woman criminal quite untouched by romance; their stories were altogether different, their lives more varied, and, if the truth be told, their enterprise and inventive qualities more fascinating. She passed through the swing doors into the street. The night was bitterly cold and the sky overhead was clear. The bright moon which she had recklessly inferred was not in evidence, but there were all the other attractive conditions for a midnight ride. The car was an open tourer with a plenitude of rugs, and as Mr. Coldwell fixed the rear screen to shield her face from the cutting air, the journey promised no discomforts. The car passed swiftly through Kensington and across Hammersmith Bridge, and in an incredibly short space of time was running down Kingston Vale. The driver pulled up at the police station behind a big touring car which was unattended, and they got down. In the charge room they found the inspector talking to a middle-aged man who was apparently the owner of the car. “Sorry to bring you down, Mr. Coldwell,” said the inspector, “but this sounds almost like one of the motor crowd’s little jokes.” The car owner apparently was the proprietor of a small garage. That afternoon he had been approached by a seemingly decent man, who asked him if he would come to London with the idea of negotiating for an important journey. The garage keeper, as it happened, had some business in town and had met the hirer at a little restaurant in the Brompton Road.