“What about the children?” asked Leslie, anticipating the reply. The sergeant laughed. “One of them’s hers; the others are what she calls ‘adopted.’ That is to say, they have been inconvenient children of whom she has taken charge for a small weekly sum or for a larger payment cash down. The only one we have been able to trace is a little boy.” For a moment wild hopes had surged up into Leslie’s heart, but they were to die at his words. “Oh, you’ve traced the boy?” she said. She remembered the wizened little fellow who had looked up at her with big, sleepy eyes when she had made her incursion to the kitchen. “Well, we’ve found his mother, at any rate. The other children mostly belong to poor little working-class girls.” “Are there many baby farmers in England?” “Thousands,” said the officer, and her heart sank. “They’re supposed to be under police supervision, but of course they’re not. There is no law to prevent anybody adopting a child, though the actual adoption is not recognized in law.” “There is no list of them?” He shook his head. “There may be a few hundred on the books. You would know that better yourself, Miss Maughan, as you’re at the Yard.” And then, unconsciously extinguishing her last lingering hope: “I was once asked to trace a little baby that had been handed over to a ‘farmer,’ but it is like looking for a needle in a haystack, trying to find an ‘adopted child’ after trace has been lost of it,” he said. “A few of them drift into the workhouse schools; most of them die. It doesn’t pay the kind of woman who makes a living out of that sort of thing to feed them properly. There should be a State institution where unwanted children could be taken and cared for and become an asset to the country.” He had been gone half an hour when the Plymouth call came through and the news was not especially helpful. Martha Druze had qualified as a maternity nurse in the years ’89-’90, and had left the hospital to take up a private position as a general nurse. It was believed she had gone abroad, but there was no actual evidence of this fact except that the present matron, who remembered her, had received a postal card mailed at Port Said a month or two after Martha had gone away. There was also a rumour that she had married very well, to somebody who was variously described as a carpenter of Cape Town and a rancher in Australia. There was only one clue which was faintly promising. Martha was known to have registered herself in the books of a London agency, the name of which Leslie jotted down. As soon as the conversation was through, she searched the telephone directory for the nurses’ agency. It was not there; possibly it had been overwhelmed by competition and had died, as so many other agencies die, from sheer inanition. To make absolutely sure on this point she called up one well-known woman agent and asked her a question.