CHAPTER 5For a moment Mr. Pinkerton sat trying to extricate his tongue from the creeping paralysis that had it in a death grip. The times he’d got himself into similar predicaments, though never one as devastatingly incriminating as this, heaven knew, flashed through his mind the way a drowning man’s sins are said to flash through his. And not the actual times themselves, so much, as what Sir Charles Debenham, Assistant Commissioner of the C. I. D., had said about them. “Where there’s smoke, Mr. Pinkerton, you know,” he had said, at least a dozen times. Although he had laughed each time when he said it, nevertheless. . . . Once he had even said, “You’re a crime carrier, Mr. Pinkerton. We lock up typhoid carriers, you know.” Mr. Pinkerton had not been sure that the noise he made then was ev
