These valuables lay, carelessly displayed, on the table when the party from Pilmansey's Tea Rooms came tumbling into the shop and the parlour, an hour later. Melky was calmly smoking a cigar--and he went on smoking it as he led the Inspector and his men upstairs to the prisoner. He could not deprive himself of the pleasure of a dig at Ayscough. "Went one better than you again, Mr. Ayscough," he said, as he laid his hand on the key of the locked room. "Now if I hadn't seen through my young gentleman--" But there, as Melky threw open the door, his words of assurance came to an end. His face dropped as he stared into an empty room. Yada had risked his neck, and gone down the water-pipe. CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE THE DIAMOND NECKLACE For the better part of a fortnight the sleuth-hounds of New Scotland Yard hunted for Mr. Mori Yada in all the likely and unlikely places in London and sent out their enquiries much further afield. They failed to find him. One small clue they got, with little difficulty. After the hue-and-cry was fairly out, an Edgware Road pawnbroker came forward and informed the police that at two o'clock, or thereabouts, on the afternoon of the day on which Yada had made his escape from the window, a young Japanese gentleman who gave his name as Mr. Motono and his address at a small hotel close by and who volunteered the explanation that he was temporarily short of cash until a remittance arrived, had borrowed five pounds from him on a pearl tie-pin which he had drawn from his cravat. That was Yada, without a doubt--but from that point Yada vanished. But hunger is the cleverest detective, and at the end of the fortnight, certain officials of the Japanese embassy in London found themselves listening to a strange tale from the fugitive, who had come to the end of his loan, had nowhere to turn and no one but the representatives of his nation to whom he could appeal. Yada told a strange tale--and all the stranger because, as the police officials who were called in to hear it anew recognized that there was probably some truth in it. It amounted, when all was heard, to this--Yada was willing to confess that for a few days he had been a successful thief, but he stoutly denied that he was a murderer.