Anthony Cade’s break-in at a secluded Dover house brings him to a bound, injured prisoner—and into the sights of Hiram Fish, who has followed him from Victoria. The episode reverses Anthony’s planned rescue: having slipped past a sentry and entered the prisoner’s room, he is arrested at the bedside by the armed Fish, while the prisoner’s fate remains unresolved in the scene.

The trail to Hurstmere

After reaching Dover, Anthony leaves the station and then turns back as though a thought has just occurred to him. He asks for directions to Hurstmere, on Langly Road, and walks to the last house on the road. Its overgrown grounds, rusty iron gate, and partly obliterated name on the gatepost make it look long unoccupied. Anthony recognizes its isolation as the sort of setting someone might choose for concealment.

He slips through the gate and listens in the drive. The stillness is broken by leaves falling and, farther off, a dog barking. Anthony then hears a closer sound: a short, square, thickset man of foreign appearance comes rapidly around the house, circles it without stopping, and disappears from view. Anthony identifies him as a sentry. The patrol confirms that Hurstmere is guarded, and that entry will require avoiding the house’s watchers rather than simply approaching its door.

A guarded hideout

Keeping out of sight in the shrubbery, Anthony reaches a window and looks inside. Six men are gathered around a table. Four are large, thickset men with high cheekbones and Magyar-looking eyes; the other two are smaller, rat-like figures whose gestures are quick. They are speaking French, though the four larger men speak it uncertainly, with a hoarse, guttural intonation. One asks when the boss will arrive, suggesting that the group awaits someone who has not yet appeared.

A later exchange supplies the urgent clue. One man asks about a prisoner, and another answers that he is all right and is coming round quickly after recovering from the blow to the head they gave him. Anthony withdraws quietly. The answer establishes that the man is alive, but also that the group has deliberately rendered him unconscious and is keeping him under guard. Anthony’s covert observation has become a choice about whether to leave him in their hands or risk entering the house.

The prisoner and the reversal

Anthony hears a stifled groan from above. After checking that Carlo, the sentry, is not due around again immediately, he climbs a heavy Virginia creeper to a window sill. The window is shut, but he uses a tool from his pocket to force its catch. He pauses to listen before springing into the room, preserving the stealth on which his approach has depended.

In the gloom, a man lies on a bed in the far corner. Anthony shines his pocket torch on the prisoner’s pale, emaciated face and sees that his head is wrapped in heavy bandages. The man is bound hand and foot and stares up at Anthony in a daze. Anthony has reached the captive, but has not yet freed him; as Anthony bends over the bed, he hears a sound behind him and turns, moving a hand toward his coat pocket.

Fish’s command stops him. Standing in the doorway with a large blue automatic, Fish says that Anthony did not expect to see him there and reveals that he caught the same train from Victoria. The detail reframes the journey: Fish has not simply happened to find Anthony at Hurstmere but has tracked his movements at least as far as the station. The stealthy rescuer is now the person confronted at gunpoint, and the scene closes with Fish ordering him to raise his hands.

Stakes and narrative turn

The episode makes Hurstmere’s apparent emptiness deceptive: its overgrown grounds conceal a guarded gathering, a sentry’s circuit, and a prisoner kept in a bandaged and bound condition. The men’s talk reveals both the captive’s recent injury and his gradual recovery, while Anthony’s close observation turns those fragments into an attempted intervention. Yet the scene ends before the prisoner can be released, and supplies no resolution to his condition or to the men’s plans.

Fish’s appearance is the decisive reversal. Anthony has read the location correctly, identified the guard, and found the prisoner, but he has not accounted for the detective following him. The last image is therefore not a successful escape from the hideout but a stand-off in its doorway: Fish armed and in control, Anthony caught beside the man he came to help. The unresolved interruption carries the danger forward rather than settling it.