The door to the president's office was locked, as Angel had expected, and Crane's divination made it clear that the ring was being kept safe, and if the door was wide open and the ring was on the table for anyone to take it, it would make her wonder if it was a trap.

She took out a simple lockpicking tool from her pocket, which was a must-have item for Cole Granger to walk in the underground world of Tingen, and because it was small and lightweight, she always carried it with her, and this was the first time she had taken it out and used it.

The door lock of this era is not as complicated as the previous life, Angel, who has inherited a lot of experience, used the wire in the lockpicking tool to pull back and forth in the lock hole, and the paddle of the other hand probed into it to exert torque, and soon aligned all the reeds, and gently rotated to open the door lock.

The president's office was twice as large as the other rooms, as could be seen by the distance between the door and the other rooms. She walked in and closed it carefully, locking it so that no one could enter the room and disturb her search unless it was the person with the key.

The curtains of the unmanned office were closed, and only a ray of sunlight shone into the room from all sides of the curtains when the door was closed, but she had the dark vision to see all the furnishings in the room, so she did not turn on the gas lamp, otherwise the light leaking through the crack in the door would definitely make people suspicious.

In the center of the office is a wooden desk with a matching chair inserted into the recessed position.

The edges of the table, covered with leather and fastened with rows of decorative rivets, occupy a third of the area on the tabletop, but only a few newspapers are placed on it, and it is clear that the owner of the desk did not want to pretend to be a man of culture.

Behind the desk is a window with curtains drawn, and according to the orientation of the office, the window should be the main entrance of the warehouse, and at this time, the noise below is clearly audible, and the unscrupulous profanity has replaced the original appeal and dissuasion, and it seems that the previous conflict has further escalated.

A single sofa sits by the window wall, next to a low coffee table, a small coffee pot and a few upside-down cups arranged irregularly. A black top hat hung on top of the coat rack next to the sofa, and there was already a lot of dust on it.

Other than that, there is no other furniture in the office, not even the usual filing cabinets, except for the oil paintings hanging on the walls on both sides that add a touch of color to the room. The room was more of a guildmaster's private lounge than an office, and he didn't need anything personal, not even a second chair for visitors.

Angel went to the other end of the desk and flipped through the shelves of newspapers, several stacked newspapers were the Tingen Zeitung, the top one was dated a week earlier, and the front page carried the news that the second son of Conston City banker McGovern had died in a burglary in Tingen.

Reaching out and sliding her fingers across the tabletop, Angel rubbed her fingertips, which already had a thin layer of ash.

It seems that the president has been gone for at least a few days, and because he doesn't have a key, no one else can come in and clean up for him.

She removed the chair from the table and looked down at the bottom of the table, where there were three drawers on each side, and she opened them one by one, and found only half a pack of cigarettes, coins totalling about £1, and a pile of papers that meant nothing to her.

Looking around the room, there is no place to hide anything except the desk.

This was a little different from Angel's expectations, she was worried that there were too many rooms and the furnishings were too complicated to find the ring, but she didn't expect that a room that was too simple would be even more of a headache.

This time she missed Klein a little bit as a "soothsayer", if he was here, a divination rod would solve the problem. It's a pity that the other party has been turned away by him, and now he doesn't know where to press the road.

Angel even pulled out a few drawers to check if there were any mezzanines, but unfortunately found nothing.

In the end, she could only set her eyes on the paintings hanging on the wall, and if there was no result, she would have to retreat today.

Both paintings are richly colored oil paintings, in a flamboyant style, not like they were made by famous artists, and may be cheap decorative paintings, and it can be seen that the owner of the room does not like art but has ambivalence about decorative needs.

The paintings are framed with wooden frames, and the borders of one painting are even a little paintless.

Well, paint off?

Angel walked up to the painting, stroked the paint defect at the bottom right of the frame, and gently pushed it to the left, and as expected, the painting was pushed away along the fixed point in the upper right corner, revealing the wall behind the painting, as well as a small gap in the wall.

Sure enough, it was a secret "little vault", and because the owner of the room had removed the painting for a long time to use it, the part of the paint that had been touched on the frame was wiped off.

Holding the painting in one hand, Angel looked into the gap, which was divided into two layers, upper and lower by partitions, with rings, a diamond necklace, and a stack of gold pounds on top, all of which were old banknotes of small denomination, and below was a notebook with a leather cover.

It's all easy to carry...... The small denominations of old banknotes are easy to use, and the jewelry can be sold or used for bribes if necessary, and it appears that this small vault contains "escape money" prepared by someone.

After taking the notebook and tucking it under her armpit, Angel grabbed the ornaments with her free hand, thought about it, and took out the stack of banknotes as well.

Resetting the paintings, she sat down at her desk, spread out the ornaments on the table, and examined them one by one.

The ring that Mrs. Green needed was exactly one of them, and as described, the ring had a golden surface, but the hardness was obviously not pure gold, and one side was made into an oval flat surface, with the word "Grimm" embossed with the word "Grimm" in flower body, and some stripes and symbols used to verify authenticity around it.

The other two rings are ordinary gold rings, but they are both set with precious stones, and the market price is estimated to be about twenty pounds, and the diamond necklace can be sold for about thirty pounds.

Or is it for the convenience of running away, so that he only uses hanging pictures to cover the vault, so that he can take it and go with him, instead of protecting his property with a complicated combination lock?

Angel unceremoniously pocketed the belongings. As far as she knew, although the Labor Mutual Society was rarely killed, it did not do much to make money, and from the appearance of Mrs. Green's stolen ring, it was clear that the money must have come from the wrong source.

There was a faint shout of scolding and pain outside the window behind her, and the two sides of the confrontation outside began to do it without accident, she quickly flipped through the notebook found in the vault, ready to leave after a cursory inspection.

The corners of the leather cover were a little worn, but less than a quarter of the paper had been used, and it looked like the notes had been used for years, but the owner of the notes had only written down important things.

Angel quickly flipped through the lines at a glance, and most of the content in the notes was the "gray business" of the labor mutual aid association, including the amount of protection fees paid by the industries in the southern district adjacent to the dock area, the whereabouts of the smuggled goods, etc., which belonged to the important information of the gray industry of the mutual aid society.

But Angel was not very interested in this, and he only came to retrieve Mrs. Green's ring, not to find evidence of the gang's illegal activities.

Besides, are the Tingen police really unaware of these grey industries? Why do you bother to do this, it's boring to talk about yourself.

Flipping to the last few pages of the notes, she found something that was different from the others.

"That guy contacted me again, this time not only as an inducement, but also as a threat! I, Jike, have come up from the bottom, how can I be afraid of the threat of these villains in the shadows? ”

"An agreement was reached today, and the mutual aid society only needs to arrange the boats and workers, and the rest will not have to interfere. Hmph, anyway, the police can't control us, and this money is not earned in vain. ”

"Why did you say that some of the dead died on the way and made up for it with my boatman? A boatload of people only came back two-thirds, how can I explain to my subordinates? Don't these guys take me seriously anymore? ”

"After deducting the hush money paid to the family, a laborer can save 20 pounds! Anyway, the population of the docklands is so mobile, who can notice how many people are missing? ”

"Let's go to Enmatt Harbor next week, if we can do something good over there, we can do a big job there in Stonen City!"

In between these words are the departure and arrival times of some of the ships, which basically depart from the city of Limon in the county of Jianhai and follow the Tasok River through the city of Tingen and finally arrive at the port of Prieze.

This guy really dares to write anything?

When Angel saw this, he was already in a cold sweat, if he understood correctly, this person named Jike should be the president of the Labor Mutual Aid Association, and the text before and after the contact showed that he was involved in the business of human trafficking!

Although the slave trade has been abolished in the Northern Continent, it is said that many factories and plantations still secretly use slaves for heavy labor. Where there is buying, there is selling, and in the black corners where the sun does not shine, this kind of human trafficking has become more lucrative because the law prohibits it.

Judging from the records, Chairman Jike was initially coerced and lured into the thief ship, and he may not even know the details of the business, but he was soon attracted by the high profits he received, and spontaneously participated, expanding the scale of the business.

This is not the same as the petty fight of collecting protection money and handing off stolen goods, and Angel believes that if this notebook is handed over to the Tingen police, the Docklands Labor Mutual Association will inevitably be destroyed by the police.

This has to be reported......

She closed her notebook, turned around and lifted the corner of the curtain, and looked downstairs to see that there were few people left at the main entrance of the originally bustling warehouse.

Most of the workers left the scene, the platform stacked with wooden boxes was overturned, and several strong men who worked part-time bodyguards had blue noses and swollen faces, and their clothes were disheveled, and they seemed to have suffered a lot of losses, but judging from the looks of the middle-aged people they were protecting, the conflict should have ended with a compromise on the workers' side, or at least postponed the conflict.

It seems that he is about to leave quickly, and once the following "performance" is over, the staff on the second floor will return to the office, and it will be much more difficult to evacuate quietly.

Lowering the curtains, Angel looked around the room to check if she had missed anything, then she spilled the newspaper on her desk on the floor, opened the drawer, and took all the change inside, making the scene where the office was visited by burglars.

In this way, even if the guy who called Jike came back, his first reaction was that he was looted by thieves when he was away, and at most he thought that someone came to the notebook, and he would never think that someone came just to retrieve Mrs. Green's ring, and the possibility of himself, or the Black Thorn Security Company's exposure, was greatly reduced.

After doing all this, Angel took the notebook and walked quickly to the door of the office, first listened to the movement outside the door with bated breath to make sure that there were no footsteps or breathing, and then gently unlocked the door and twisted the handle to open the door.

At the moment when the light outside the door shone in, her spirit moved, and her sense of crisis covered her whole body like ice water, and her steps stopped in mid-air.

A dagger struck through the light like lightning, stabbing straight at her face.