It'll take a bit of
time. And first of all, Mr. Triffitt, we'll examine your balcony door--I
know enough about these modern flats to know that everything's pretty
much alike in them as regards fittings, and if your door's easy to open,
so will the door of the next be. Now we'll just let Jim there go outside
with his apparatus, and we'll lock your balcony door on him, and then
see if he finds any difficulty in getting in. To it, Jim!"

Mr. Milsey, thus adjured, went out on the balcony with his little case
and was duly locked out. Within two minutes he opened the door and
stepped in with a satisfied grin.

"Easy as winking!" said Mr. Milsey. "It's what you might call one of
your penny plain locks, this--and t'other'll be like it. No difficulty
about this job, anyway."

"Then we'll get to work," said Davidge. "Mr. Triffitt, I can't ask you
to come with us, because that wouldn't be according to etiquette. Sit
you down and read your book and smoke your pipe and drink your drop--and
maybe we'll have something to tell you when our job's through."

"You've no fear of interruption?" asked Triffitt, who would vastly have
preferred action to inaction. "Supposing--you know how things do and
will turn out sometimes--supposing he came back?"

Davidge shook his head and smiled grimly and knowingly.

"No," he said. "He'll not come back--at least, if he did, we should be
well warned. I've more than one man at work on this job, Mr. Triffitt,
and if his lordship changed the course of his arrangements and returned
this way, one of my chaps would keep him in conversation while another
hurried up here to give us the office by a few taps on the outer door.
No!--we're safe enough. Sit you down and don't bother about us. Come on,
Jim--we'll get to it."

Triffitt tried to follow the detective's advice--he was just then deep
in a French novel of the high-crime order, and he picked it up when the
two men had gone out on the balcony and endeavoured to get interested in
it. But he speedily discovered that the unravelling of crime on paper
was nothing like so fascinating as the actual participation in detection
of crime in real life, and he threw the book aside and gave himself up
to waiting. What were those two doing in Burchill's rooms? What were
they finding? What would the result be?

Certainly Davidge and his man took their time. Eight o'clock came and
went--nine o'clock, ten o'clock followed and sped into the past, and
they were still