So carefully had the police gone about their work, that not an inkling of the truth that they were on his track had reached Mr. Candover’s ears when, his daring and audacious plan for turning Audrey out of the premises for which she had paid having failed owing to Gerard’s unexpected intervention, he had been brought suddenly face to face with the fact that Gerard had recognised in one of the sham detectives the man who had procured his conviction for forgery by means of false witness against him. Tom Gossett was so certain that Gerard had recognised him that he caused a panic amongst the confederates, and the failure of the device for frightening Audrey having struck terror among them all, Mr. Candover found himself in a dilemma, and for once lost his self-possession. On no other grounds could his mad attempt to shoot Gerard be accounted for. It could only be surmised that he intended to let it be supposed either that Gerard had committed suicide or that he had shot him by accident in self-defence. In the meantime the three subordinates who had had the principal share in carrying out the various swindles of which Candover had been the promoter, had conceived the idea that he meant to give them the slip and to prepare his own escape in case of a crash. When, therefore, he failed to appear at the flat at Victoria Street at the hour he had appointed for the meeting at which they were to discuss the situation, they had all decided to follow his daughters, in the well-grounded belief that by so doing they would reach him. And when they discovered him in the act of flight, Tom Gossett’s impulse for revenge brought about the act which caused the arch-conspirator’s death. At the trial of the three remaining prisoners, which came off within a few weeks, an astounding career of crime and fraud was disclosed, by means of which Reginald Candover, alias Eugène Reynolds, had lived in princely style upon the earnings of his subordinates in crime. Forgery was almost the only share of the rascally business which he undertook in person. He left to lesser lights cheating at cards, perjury, and the hundred and one various forms of crime of which he had been the instigator, and the perpetrators of which he took under his august protection, passing them off, now in one capacity and now in another, as his servants, his dependants or his friends. Wherever he went, he always took care to have one or more of these precious assistants near him; and Jim Johnson, who was one of the three, confessed to the whole story of the disappearance of the unfortunate woman who called herself Madame Rocada, and to the share he had had in that mysterious occurrence. This woman, who had formerly been a great beauty, had fallen into a rapid consumption, so that she could no longer carry on the gaming-house in Paris, which had been one of Mr. Candover’s most prosperous speculations.