CHAPTER XX

FREYBERGER was now virtually in charge of the case.

He had forty-eight hours before him. He felt about the case just as an engineer feels about some delicate piece of mechanism, which has not yet been put in position, and which any jar or shock may destroy. He shuddered to think of the brutal method of a dragnet search being applied to the Gyde case.

It would be like chasing a moth with a pair of tongs. A million to one the thing will not be caught and a certainty that if caught it will be ruined.

He fancied the derision with which the dark spirit with which he was at war would greet the efforts of the police.

It was half-past one now, the hour when he usually had luncheon, but to-day he was not hungry. He went to a private room, got all the pièces de conviction together and then proceeded to go through the whole case, incident by incident, item by item.

A few more details had come to light in the last few hours. The full report of the post-mortem examination of the body found in the cottage on the fells had come to hand.

There was mention of no mark upon it that might serve for identification, the height before decapitation the surgeon judged would have been about five feet eight inches. The underclothes were marked “E.K.,” evidently Klein’s initials.

At five o’clock Freyberger had finished his review of the case, every minutest detail was in his memory and ready to spring into position when required.

He was just folding up his papers when a knock came to the door and an officer entered with an envelope in his hand.

“From the chief,” said the messenger. Then he withdrew.

Freyberger opened the envelope. It contained a copy of a message just received from Carlisle.

“Very sorry, one detail overlooked by some strange mischance in report of Gyde case. Over second right costal cartilage of body found, are the initials ‘E.K.,’ faintly tattooed.”

Freyberger gave a cry. The whole case for him had tumbled to pieces like a house of cards. If “E.K.,” Klein’s initials, were tattooed on the corpse, then the corpse was Klein’s, Gyde was a murderer, and Freyberger a fool, so he told himself.

He paced the room rapidly in anger and irritation. The chance of his life had not come then, he had been fighting air and all the time he had fancied himself matched against a demon with the intellect of a Moltke!

Freyberger, so logical, so calm, so common-place-looking at ordinary times, was terrible when in anger. His face quite changed and a new man appeared; a ferocious and formidable individual, utterly destitute of fear.

It was the second Freyberger who had arrested Macklin, the Fashion Street murderer. Macklin, armed with a crow-bar, Freyberger, armed with a walking-cane.

It was this second Freyberger who was now pacing the room, treading on the fragments of his shattered theory. Suddenly he paused, placed his hand, with fingers outspread, to his temples and stared before him at the wall of the room, as though it were hyaline and through it he saw something that fascinated, astonished and delighted him.

“Ah! what is this, what is this?” he murmured: “‘Two faint blue letters tattooed over the second right costal cartilage’—The Lefarge case, the bust, the man, the artist. My God! Why did not this occur to me before? What is memory, what is memory, that she should hold such information and yet withhold it till touched by a trifle? My theory is not shattered. Though these letters, tattooed upon the corpse, plunges the case into deeper depths, though they show a more profound mechanism, what do I care for that, so long as they do not shatter my theory.”

He left the room, gave all the things he had been examining into the safe keeping of the sergeant superintendent, and sought an interview with the chief.

“I have received the information as to the tattooing, sir.”

“I think that disposes of Klein,” replied the chief.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but I imagine that in these two letters the crux of the case lies. I believe these two letters are the point or points for which I have been seeking. When I got your communication a few minutes ago, I thought my theory shattered, but it has sprung to life again, not only renewed, but added to. The complexity of the whole thing has been increased doubly, but out of that complexity will now, I believe, spring simplicity. I wish to go home and study some old notes; if I may see you again, sir, in a few hours’ time I hope to put the Gyde case before you in a new and most profoundly interesting light.”

“Do so,” replied the chief, “investigate in your own way and as deeply as you will, but don’t be led away by your own imagination, Freyberger.”

“No, sir,” replied Freyberger, with the simplicity, or the apparent simplicity, of a schoolboy replying to his master. Then he departed for his own rooms that lay on the south side of the water.

I will lay it down as an axiom that a professional man is rarely of much use if he be not acquainted with the literature of his profession. The army man who knows little of the history of war, the doctor who cares little for the history of medicine, the detective who knows nothing of the history of crime, are members of society rarely rising to greatness.

Now Freyberger was a German, absorbed in his profession, and if you know anything about Germans, you will agree with me that that statement covers a great many things. He could speak four languages fluently: English, German, French and Italian. Italian and French he had learned, not for pleasure, but because he felt that they might be useful to him in the pursuit of his vocation.

He read foreign newspapers and made notes of criminal cases that interested him. He had done this for some ten years, and in his shabby lodgings there were a series of notebooks containing the details of very curious crimes. He knew as much about the poisoners, Palmer and Smethurst, as though he had attended their trials, and from the Brinvilliers case to the case of Monk Léothade, to the case of Fran?ois Lesnier, French criminal history was an open book to him.

The clocks were striking six when he arrived at his lodgings in Fox Street, S.E.

He occupied a sitting-room and bedroom on the first floor. The walls of the sitting-room were lined with books. It was a curious library. Any general information you wanted you could find here, and a whole lot of information by no means general. Amidst a host of books dealing with all sorts of facts you might have found Schiller, and a first edition of Heine’s lyrics stood upon a shelf above the last edition of Casper’s Forensic Medicine.

Tea things were laid upon the table and a bright fire was burning upon the hearth and it was an indication of the man’s nature, that, burning as he was to be at his notes, he first had tea and fortified the inner man with a meal that the inner man was badly in need of.

The notebooks, large volumes filled with press cuttings, were on a lower shelf. He took a small ledger, looked up the letter L, found the following entry: “Lefarge case, book B, page 115.”

Then he placed book B upon the table, opened it at page 115 and, drawing up a chair, plunged into details.

He just scanned the columns of printed matter over first for names before going through the case in detail. His heart bounded when he came upon the name, “Müller,” and again upon the name Müller, and again and again.

Müller had a lot to do with the business dealt with by all these columns of printed matter.

That business was what is known in the annals of crime as the Lefarge case; and it had occurred eight years previously in Paris, and the details are as follows:

M. Lefarge, it appears, had owned a shop in the Rue de la Paix. He was a jeweller and very wealthy. He was also a widower, and his family consisted of one daughter, Cécile, whom we saw in the first pages of this story, and who, at the time of the Lefarge tragedy, was just sixteen years of age.

It appears that Lefarge had many friends south of the Seine; he was well known in the Latin quarter as a patron of art and a merry companion when the fit took him, and altogether as a good sort.

He did not make these excursions into the Quartier Latin entirely for pleasure; he was a Norman, and had, even when engaged in the business of pleasure, an eye to business.

The manufacturing of artistic jewellery stands amidst the highest of the fine arts and amidst the Bohemians of the Boulevard St-Michel, M. Lefarge had picked up more than one shabby individual with genius at his finger tips and the mutual acquaintanceship had helped to enrich considerably both the jeweller and the genius. Amongst these Bohemian acquaintances of Lefarge there was a man named Müller. Müller was a sculptor.

He was also without doubt a man of great genius. Without any doubt he was also a great drinker, though no man had ever seen him drunk.

He had exhibited several bronzes at the Salon, one, “A Fight between two Pterodactyls,” was of a ferocity to make one shudder. All his work was stained by gloom and ferocity, yet all his work was the output of a master. So said M. Le Notre in his funeral oration at the grave of Müller, and the words, though spoken in the course of a funeral oration, were strictly the truth.

Well, Müller one day made the acquaintance of M. Lefarge. The jeweller was not only wealthy but vain, and before long he commissioned Müller to execute a bust of himself (Lefarge) giving him numerous sittings for that purpose.

He also wished for a bust of his daughter, but Cécile Lefarge positively refused to sit. She had taken a dislike to the sculptor, one of those dislikes that are born of instinct.

One dark day in October, Lefarge drove up to the house where Müller lodged in the Rue de Turbigo. The concierge saw him enter. Müller was in, he lived on the top floor, and up the stairs went Lefarge to visit the sculptor.

An hour or so later he came down, carrying a black bag, got into his carriage, and drove home to the Rue de la Paix. Here he collected all his most valuable jewels. Jewels worth over a hundred thousand pounds. He drove in his carriage with them to the corner of the Rue d’Amsterdam, here he alighted. The coachman said he was carrying two bags, one the bag he had brought from Müller’s house, the other the bag containing the jewels. He told the coachman to wait for him, turned the corner of the street, and was never seen again.

An hour later, in the Rue de Turbigo, Müller’s landlady took some coffee up to him, she found his decapitated body lying on the floor. In the pocket of Müller’s coat was a letter, the copy of a blackmailing letter written by Müller to Lefarge some months before. In the description of the dead body of Müller the existence was mentioned of two initials, “W.M.” (the man’s initials) tattooed in pale blue ink over the second right costal cartilage.

That no one had entered Müller’s room after Lefarge had left it was indubitably proved by the concierge and several witnesses; proved so conclusively that there could not be any manner of doubt that Lefarge was the assassin. The collection of his jewels by Lefarge and his total effacement after the event sealed the matter.

Freyberger, having gone carefully through the reports, took a pen and began to draw up, for his own satisfaction, the points of similarity between the Lefarge and the Gyde case. Roughly, they were these, each assassin was a rich man, a man of pleasure and more or less dubious morals. Each victim was an artist.

Müller, the victim of Lefarge, had made a bust of his assassin.

Klein, the victim of Gyde, had made a bust of his assassin.

Upon the body of Müller was found the copy of an old blackmailing letter addressed to Lefarge.

In the room where Klein was found dead was found a copy of a blackmailing letter addressed to Gyde.

Upon each of the murdered men’s chests were tattooed initials, exactly in the same place, over the second right costal cartilage.

A strange similarity bound the two cases together, but the strangest thing drawing the two cases together was the fact, the almost certain fact, that Müller and Klein were one and the same person.

The fact that both men were artists of a high type, that both men were blackmailers, that both men kept copies of old blackmailing letters in their own handwriting—a most extraordinary blunder to commit—that both men were decapitated in exactly the same manner, and that each man had tattooed, in exactly the same place on his breast, his own initials, all these facts crowned by the master fact that Klein had left behind him, in his rooms in Howland Street, a portrait of himself with the name “Müller” partly erased from the back. All these facts, I repeat, made it quite clear to the mind of Freyberger that Klein and Müller were one and the same person. If this was so, Lefarge could not have murdered Müller, yet a frightful avalanche of evidence condemned him.

The evidence admitted of no cavil. No one else could have committed the crime. The assassination of Müller by Lefarge was even more conclusively proved than the assassination of Klein by Sir Anthony Gyde; for in the cottage on the fells another person might conceivably have been hidden at the time of the murder, but in the room in the Rue de Turbigo the evidence conclusively proved that no one could have been there at the critical moment but Lefarge and Müller.

The two cases, then, were connected together by many threads. At first sight the fact of this intimate connexion between the Lefarge and the Gyde case might seem to plunge the Gyde case into more profound darkness, to heap perplexity on perplexity.

But to Freyberger the discovery of this connexion was a huge step gained. Having verified the similarity of the incidents in the two cases he did not bother about them for a moment, cast them aside, took a broad view of the whole business and arrived at the grand conclusion that the active criminal agent in the Lefarge case was also the active criminal agent in the Gyde case.

“Now, if this is so,” argued Freyberger, “there are only four men to pick our criminal agent from. He must be either Lefarge, Müller, Klein or Gyde.

“Müller and Klein being the same person the case is reduced to a case of three men from whom to pick our criminal.

“He cannot be Lefarge simply because Lefarge cannot be Gyde. He cannot be Gyde simply because Gyde cannot be Lefarge. It must then be Klein, alias Müller.

“If my premise is correct, that Klein and Müller are one and the same person, and that the active agent in both cases is the same man, then it is mathematically proved that the criminal is Klein.

“It might be suggested that Lefarge, after murdering Müller, escaped, changed his name became Sir Anthony Gyde, and murdered Klein in precisely the same manner as he murdered Müller, that suggestion is at once beaten to death by a hundred bludgeons in the form of records.

“Leaving aside the fact that it would be impossible for Lefarge to masquerade as Gyde, we have the almost certain fact that Müller was never murdered at all.

“The case is quite clear in my own mind. Nothing will shake my opinion. I have the name of the man I am seeking for, I have his past history in part.

“He is undoubtedly the greatest criminal the world has ever seen, and I have not in the least fathomed his infernal method. The method by which he has, I fully believe, murdered two men, making the world believe that they have murdered him.

“What a strange thing is memory. I read the report of the Lefarge case six months ago and more. The facts were in my brain, I never dreamt of connecting them with the facts of the Gyde case until the words, ‘two blue letters tattooed over the second right costal cartilage,’ rang the bell and brought recollection to her duty.

“Those two letters seemed at first to shatter my theory. Behold! on examination of what they recalled to my mind, they have been the means of making my theory absolutely perfect, extending it, and sweeping the real criminal towards my net.

“My theory before those letters were made known to me, consisted of the idea that Gyde was innocent and that some one, presumably Klein, was guilty of the murder in the cottage.

“Now my theory is that Gyde is innocent and that Klein is certainly guilty not of the murder of some unknown man, but of Gyde. Yet the mystery still remains of the tattooing. How is it that the initials of Müller were tattooed on the breast of a corpse that could not have been the corpse of Müller, and the initials of Klein on a corpse that I am sure is not that of Klein? I cannot tell yet, but we shall see.”