CHAPTER XV

IT was now half-past one. He knew that the Chief would be at luncheon, so he determined to have luncheon himself before returning to the Yard.

He turned into Blanchard’s in Beak Street.

During the meal he did not think once of the case.

He knew the advantage of allowing a problem to cool itself, and he had the power of detaching his mind from any business on hand and attaching it to another affair; especially when the other affair was of an edible nature.

He was a frank gourmet. When he had finished he lit a poisonous-looking green cigar and strolled down Regent Street towards his destination.

He was thinking now about the case; reviewing it, gazing at it with his mind’s eye as a Jew gazes at a lustrous jewel.

The thing was as full of fire and cloud and mystery as an opal. He felt that, live as long as he might, he would never again find himself face to face with a case so full of strange possibilities.

It was just now, walking down the crowded street, digesting his luncheon and smoking his cigar, it was just now, that he felt in himself that strange sixth sense stirring which so few men possess. The sense that allows us to see without eyes, hear without ears and feel without hands. The sense which allows us to say to a man whom we have not seen for years, and whom we meet at a street corner: “It is strange, I was thinking of you to-day, and, somehow, I expected to meet you.”

Freyberger, just now, was beginning to feel that, somewhere, lost in the darkness of the world, there existed a mind antagonistic to his own, an appalling mind, a mind of giant stature and dwarf-like subtlety and crookedness.

He had not yet come to grips with it, but he felt it to be there, as one man feels the presence of another in a darkened room. When he arrived at the Yard, he found a new development. A cabman had been found who had driven Sir Anthony Gyde on the night before. The Chief was still absent, so Freyberger took it upon himself to interrogate the man.

He had picked Sir Anthony up in Piccadilly at twelve-thirty on the night before and driven him to Howland Street. Was he sure it was Sir Anthony? Certain. He had driven him before. Nearly every cabman, accustomed to the West End, knew him.

His cab had been coming along slowly by the kerb when he saw Sir Anthony come out of No. 110B. The baronet walked a few paces, stopped, looked around, saw the cab and hailed it.

He ordered himself to be driven to Howland Street, gave no number, stopped the cab towards the middle of the street and paid his fare with a five-shilling piece, asking for no change.

He then walked down the street, and, opening a house door with a latchkey, entered and closed the door behind him.

“Could you identify the house again?” asked Freyberger.

The man believed he could. It was a dingy house beside one that had been new painted.

“How was Sir Anthony dressed?” asked the detective.

“All in dark clothes, wearing a tall hat and carrying a black bag in his hand.”

“That will do,” replied Freyberger. “Is your cab outside?”

“It is, sir.”

“Come on then, you can take me to Howland Street, and if you can identify the house I will give you something over your fare.”

The cabman followed the detective to the street, where his cab was waiting.

Freyberger got in, the man got on the box, and they drove off.

That a millionaire of Gyde’s somewhat dubious moral character should have a second house in London, the address of which was not printed on his visiting cards, was not at all an out-of-the-way fact. Yet one might have thought he would have chosen a more cheerful neighbourhood than Howland Street.

About the middle of the thoroughfare the cab drew up.

“That is the place, sir,” said the man, pointing to a gaunt, grimy-looking house standing by one that had been new painted. “That is the house, if I’m not very much mistaken.”

“Wait for me,” said Freyberger. He knocked at the door.

The door, the knocker, the bell-pulls, all were in the last stage of neglect, an old rug hung over the area railings and a milk can stood on the step.

The door opened after he had knocked several times and rung twice.

“Are you the landlady?” asked Freyberger of the unwashed and wilted-looking woman who obeyed the summons.

“I am.”

“May I come in and speak to you for a moment?”

“No, you don’t,” said the woman. “If you’re after Mr Tidmus he’s gone away, and won’t be back, goodness knows when. What’s your business?”

“I’m after no one especially. I wish to ask you a question which you will be pleased to answer me, for I am a detective from Scotland Yard, Inspector Freyberger. A gentleman called here last night some time between half-past twelve and one; he let himself in with a latchkey. He was a bearded man, wearing a tall hat and carrying a bag. What do you know about him?”

“Well, to be sure,” said the woman, in an interested voice. “And what’s he been doing?”

“I think we had better come in and I will explain things, thank you—” She let him enter, closed the door and led him into a dingy parlour. “What he has been doing is neither here nor there. I want to know about him. Does he live here?”

“No,” replied the landlady. “If he’s the man you mean he came here with a letter from Mr Kolbecker asking me to let him use Mr Kolbecker’s room for the night.”

“Ah!”

“Somewhere about ten to one it was. I’d been sitting up waiting for Mr Giles. He plays the trombone at the Gaiety and mostly comes home late and not to be trusted with candles.

“I hears a latchkey fumbling and I comes into the passage, and there was a gentleman such as you name.

“He said, ‘Mrs Stevens?’ and I says, ‘That’s my name, and who are you?’ He says, ‘Mr Kolbecker has lent me his latchkey and allows me the use of his room to-night.’ I says, ‘Oh!’ ‘Yes,’ says he, ‘and here’s a letter from him.’ He hands me a letter; it was from Mr Kolbecker, and it said to let the bearer use his room for the night as he was a friend. ‘All right,’ I says, ‘the sheets are aired; and what might your name be?’ He laughed when I said that, leastways, it wasn’t so much a laugh, it was more liker the noise a hen makes clucking, only not so loud. ‘Anthony,’ he says. ‘Anthony what?’ I asks him. ‘Mr John Anthony, that’s my name,’ he answers me, and I shows him up. He went at eight this morning and give the servant girl a shilling.”

“Have you the letter he brought?”

“No; he kept it.”

“How long has Mr Kolbecker been here?”

“Some six months, off and on, but for the last six weeks he has been up in Cumberland.”

“Ah!” said Freyberger, “in Cumberland! What is he, this Mr Kolbecker?”

“He’s an artist.”

“An artist?”

“Oh, he’s all right. He pays his way regular. Keeps on his room and sends me the money for it every fortnit regular.”

“Have you any of his letters?”

“I b’lieve I’ve got the last.” She went to a drawer and hunted amidst some odds and ends.

“Here it is; no, ’tis only the envelope.”

“Give me the envelope,” said Freyberger. It was a narrow, shabby-looking envelope, addressed in a curious-looking handwriting. It was post-marked “Skirwith,” “Carlisle” and “London, W.C.”

“This is Mr Kolbecker’s handwriting?” asked the detective.

“It is.”

“I must keep this envelope, please.”

“No, you don’t,” replied the landlady, suddenly waxing wroth. “Here, you gimme that envelope back; you comes in and asks me questions which I answer about my lodgers. You say you’re from Scotland Yard. How’m I to know? Gimme that back.”

Freyberger put the envelope in his pocket.

“If you want my credentials,” he said, “call in a constable; every man in this division knows me. Now listen. Mr Kolbecker left you six weeks ago and went to Cumberland?”

“Yes.”

“You have not seen him since?”

“No.”

“Well, from information in our hands, Mr Kolbecker went to live in Cumberland, took a cottage there under the name of Klein; he was murdered yesterday evening in a cottage on Blencarn Fell.”

“Murdered!” said the woman, staring open-mouthed at the detective.

“Yes, murdered, and the man who called here last night and slept in his room was, we believe, the man who murdered him.”

“Well, to be sure!” said the woman, sitting down on a chair, placing her hands upon her knees and staring at Freyberger.

She was restrained in her exclamation of astonishment because her vocabulary was limited, but her wonder was deep; it was also tinged with a not unpleasant feeling of excitement. Regret, perhaps, she had none.

Freyberger, in giving her the information, had departed from the ordinary rule of his trade, to say nothing.

It is rarely that you find a detective speaking of any point in the case he is investigating, except the point immediately at issue.

But Freyberger’s object just now was to inspect Kolbecker’s room; he had no search warrant, time was precious. He wanted to make this Gyde case his own, and the quickest way to obtain access to the place desired was by bringing the woman in line with himself and not into opposition.

“So, you see,” he went on, “I have come here for no idle purpose or to waste your time; you will be called, no doubt, as a witness. I want to see this Mr Kolbecker’s room. Of course, without a search warrant, I have no legal right to enter it; but it will take me some hours to obtain one, and that will mean the loss of precious time. You wish to assist the course of justice, I am sure.”

“Oh,” said the woman, “you may see his room, and welcome, if that is all; but there’s nothing much to see, for he took all his things with him when he went to Cumberland.”

“Well,” said the other, pleasantly, “we will go up and see what is to be seen—if you will lead the way.”

The landlady led the way up three flights of stairs, Freyberger noting everything as he followed.

He knew the house, though he had never been in it before; knew it, that is to say, by its species. It was a lower, middle-class lodging house of the Bohemian type, a place infested by broken-down or unfledged artists, second-rate musicians, young foreigners of more or less talent living on ten shillings a week and hope; a place where anything might occur, in an artistic-Bohemian way, from a suicide to the construction of an oratorio.

The woman opened the door of the top floor front.

“This is the room,” she said. It was very bare; a bed stood in one corner, and a chest of drawers, with a looking-glass on top of it, in the window.

A table stood in the middle, covered with an old red cloth.

There were two cane-bottomed chairs, and on the carpetless floor in the corner, diagonally opposite to the bed, an old horseskin covered trunk.

Over the mantelpiece hung a cheap oleograph.

Freyberger stood in the doorway before entering. He seemed trying to catch, so to speak, the expression of the room; to surprise it suddenly out of some secret.

But there was nothing at all to tell of the personality of the individual who had last occupied it.

Everything was in order.

In a room just like this, some months ago, two chairs drawn close together at a table, a hairpin lying on the floor between them, and the envelope of a letter stuck in the support of the looking-glass to keep it straight, had gived him a clue that had brought a forger and his mistress to justice.

But there was nothing here of any description to build a clue upon.

He inspected the floor narrowly, then the grate; then he lifted the lid of the trunk, it was empty.

The two top drawers of the chest of drawers in the window were empty; but the large middle drawer was heavy, and difficult to pull out.

It was nearly filled with large pieces of marble.

Freyberger whistled.

“Mr Kolbecker said that wasn’t to be touched on no account,” said the woman. “It’s an old marble thing he broke up ’fore he went into the country.”

Freyberger did not reply. He was examining the pieces of marble attentively.

They were not simply rough lumps of marble; each was rough in part, and partly smooth, and he had not been examining them for more than half a minute when he discovered the fact that they were portions of a bust broken to pieces by Kolbecker, for some reason or other, before he made his mysterious journey to Cumberland under the name of Klein.

He drew the drawer bodily out of the chest of drawers, placed it on the bed and sat down beside it.

Yes, without doubt, these broken up pieces of marble once constituted the bust of a man. Here was part of the nose with the nostrils delicately chiselled, here the chin, here a piece of the forehead.

Freyberger, dropping back into the drawer the pieces he had taken out, fell for a moment into a reverie.

Kolbecker, the man whom Gyde had murdered, had suddenly assumed large proportions in his intuitive brain.

What was the mystery surrounding this man?

He had gone to Cumberland to blackmail Gyde, assuming the name of Klein, that was perfectly understandable. But why, in the name of common sense, had he left his blackmailing letters behind him?

Gyde, driven to desperation, had murdered him. That, too, was understandable, but why the mutilation?

How was it that he had so conveniently given Gyde the letter of introduction to his landlady, thus giving his murderer a burrow to hide in for the night?

Lastly, why, before leaving for Cumberland, had he smashed the bust to pieces?

All these queries suddenly had caused in the brain of Freyberger a new and absorbing interest.

Kolbecker, this mysterious artist, now was the object of his undivided attention.

In the past of Kolbecker, he felt, lay the solution of the mystery.

This bust had been destroyed for some powerful motive.

To find out the motive it would be necessary to reconstruct the bust and find out whom it represented, if possible, or what it represented.

To put the thing together again would be an extraordinarily difficult piece of work. One man alone could do it, and Freyberger knew that man.

In ordinary course of events this drawerful of marble fragments would be taken to the Yard and there placed with the other material evidence. But this involved loss of time. Freyberger felt, with a strange assurity, that in the thing lay a clue that might cast a strong light on the case.

To take it direct to the Yard would mean loss of time.

He determined on his own responsibility to take it to the man he knew direct.

“I wish to take this drawer and its contents with me,” he said to the woman who stood looking on. “I am quite prepared to give you a receipt for it and, what is more, I will place in your hands the value of the piece of furniture I have taken it from.”

“Well,” said the woman, “I suppose I can’t stop you, seeing what’s happened. I ain’t of the having sort, but that chest of drawers cost me a sovereign—item, eleven shillings in the Tottenham Court Road—and without the drawer it ain’t worth tuppence.”

Freyberger took out his pocket-book, wrote a receipt, and placed it, with a sovereign and a five-shilling piece, in her hand.

“There’s a sovereign,” he said, “and the five shillings is for a sheet to wrap the thing up in. I’ll take a sheet off the bed, if you’ll let me; get me some string, too, as much as you have got in the house.”

She fetched the string, and between them, they did the thing up securely, then carrying it in his arms as tenderly as if it were a baby, he left the house, got into the cab, and gave the man an address in Old Compton Street, Soho.