CHAPTER XXXVII

HE caught the Birmingham express that leaves Paddington at 12.15, and arrived at Reading nine minutes after one.

Here he took a bed at the Vastern Hotel, and went to sleep.

At eight o’clock the next morning he was in consultation with the Chief of the Berkshire Constabulary.

“It is a most extraordinary case,” said that gentleman. “Of course, it can be nothing else but the work of a lunatic. The body was found at three o’clock yesterday in a turnip field, close to the river. The man had no enemies, a simple, inoffensive creature, with a wife and five children. Our surgeon says that the murder must have taken place some time early in the morning. The throat was cut from ear to ear, most extraordinary case—mutilated too, but you will see the body for yourself.”

“Have you the knife?”

“Yes.”

“May I see it?”

“By all means.”

The chief constable opened a drawer and produced something wrapped up in brown paper.

He unwrapped the paper and produced a savage-looking knife with a green shagreen handle.

“It is a case knife,” said the chief constable. “The case will be perhaps a clue when we come upon it.”

“I believe I have it in my pocket,” said Freyberger, and he produced the sheath he had found in the house in St Ann’s Road.

The chief constable took the sheath and fitted the knife into it.

It fitted exactly.

“But how did you get it?” asked the chief constable in considerable surprise. “We found the knife in the body; it was fixed by such a ferocious blow between the ribs that the murderer could not extricate it. How did you come upon the sheath? You came from London only last night; did you find it here or in London?”

“I have not time to tell you, sir, the whole history of the case. I found that sheath more than a month ago in a house in London. If that knife could speak, its tale would, perhaps, turn your hair grey with horror. We must act at once, or the game will escape us. We are after a person who is more than a man, a person infinitely more in the shape of a devil, a person who can change his form. I tell you, I would sooner tackle a tiger than this man; yet I am going to tackle him and take him, too. Have you a map of Sonning?”

The chief constable produced an Ordnance map.

“This,” said he, “is the field where the murder was committed.”

He placed his finger on the spot.

“Is there a pathway across the field?”

“Yes, here between these two roads.”

“There is a cottage here,” said Freyberger, pointing to a spot so marked at the angle where the path met the road.

“Yes, Bronson’s cottage. He was murdered a hundred yards away from his home. There is a great heap of refuse in the middle of the field, and the body lay behind it and so was not discovered for some hours. There are no back windows to the cottage and no back door.”

“Are there any strangers lodging at Sonning?”

“Yes, a few, but no one at all of a suspicious nature, or likely to have anything to do with the crime.”

“I imagine,” said Freyberger, “that the murderer is still in the neighbourhood of Sonning. Of course, I may be wrong, still I intend to go there and make some observations. I would prefer to go alone; you are known in the neighbourhood and I am not.”

“How shall you go?”

“I—Oh, I shall go as if I were going for pleasure, not business. I shall hire a boat and go by river.”

“Have you any arms?”

“No; if I had a pistol, and if I were so fortunate as to find my man, I might be unfortunate enough to shoot him. Pistols have a habit of going off in struggles. Besides, I have a nervous horror of them.”

“I remember you arrested that man in Fashion Street, and he was a pretty tough customer.”

“I have met others worse, but I have never had fire-arms about me. A walking-stick is the only weapon I ever carry.”

“You have lots of pluck.”

“Lots, but I tell you, all the same, this man I am after now almost frightens me. No matter, what is, is, and what will be, will be. Can you tell me where I can get a butterfly net?”

“What do you want that for?”

“To catch butterflies; this warm weather has brought them out in flocks. I want, also, a flannel coat, such as boating people wear; one does not go butterfly-hunting in a tall hat.”

“I see; come down town and I will rig you out; but, first, shall we go to the mortuary?”

“Yes,” replied Freyberger. “Before meeting the murderer I should like to see the victim.”

They repaired to the mortuary, and there the detective inspected the body of the unfortunate Bronson.

“It is a most extraordinary case,” said the chief constable. “He was a most inoffensive creature; he had never, to any man’s knowledge, made an enemy. He had committed no fault.”

“I beg your pardon, but I imagine he had.”

“How?”

“He had committed the fault of being alive. The man we are after is a fault-finder when the fit seizes him. A temporary lunacy. Some periodic lunatics have objections. I knew one who, perfectly sane on other points, flew into a paroxysm of rage when a musk-melon was brought within his purview. He objected to musk-melons because they were round.

“He wanted them square. God Almighty, however, preferred that they should be round. Hence the trouble.

“Another quarrelled with grey cats when he met them, simply because they were grey. He quarrelled with them by covering them with paraffin and setting them on fire.

“The man who did this quarrelled with the thing that lies here because it was alive. He has remedied the defect.”

He had indeed.

It is needful only to say that the body exhibited twenty wounds, each in itself sufficient to have caused death.

But the master wound was in the throat. It was evidently the first given. The rest were needless, and the result of maniacal fury on the part of the murderer.

They left the place and went to a clothier’s, where Freyberger bought a mulberry-coloured blazer and a straw hat with a striped ribbon.

Having purchased a butterfly net he returned to the hotel and dressed. When his toilet was complete, he looked at himself in a glass and felt satisfied.

He looked, in fact, like a shopboy whose taste for entomology had devoured his taste in dress.

Smug and plump, you never would have suspected this shopboy or café waiter out for a holiday, to be a detective destined to European fame. A chilly-blooded calculator, a profound thinker, with an intimate knowledge of all the most terrible abysses of crime. A man merciless and fearless as a sword.

An hour later, at the boat-slip just above the bridge, Freyberger stood bargaining for a boat.

It was a lovely day, soft and warm with a cloudless sky.

He was not a very good oarsman, but good enough to scull a boat safely on a smooth river. After he had passed the bridge and East’s boat-slip, he rested on his oars for a minute.

“If I had not questioned her imagination,” he said to himself, “that man Hellier would not have remembered those other crimes, and I would not have come near the bull’s-eye like this. How terribly right she was. She divined this devil, she knew his construction, his capacity for murder without a motive. She is an innocent woman, yet she knew this demon as well as if she had constructed him—sub-consciously. Ah, the sub-consciousness of women, what does it not hide? A woman who loves is a terrible thing, more keen-scented than a hound, more dangerous than a tiger.

“My friend, Klein, if I miss you here it will not be the fault of Mademoiselle Lefarge. If I miss you here, I shall find you again, but if I find you here, I will be the means of saving the lives of perhaps two more men, perhaps three.”

He resumed his sculls.

The warm weather had brought boats out as well as butterflies and butterfly-hunters, girls in summer dresses and men in flannels, who little dreamt that tragedy was passing them in the form of the little man in the mulberry-coloured coat.

At Sonning Lock he managed to get through without drowning himself or upsetting his boat. It was the first time he had negotiated a lock, and he was not sorry when his cockle-shell was safely moored to the landing-stage of the White Hart Hotel.

There were several people in the gardens, men in flannels and girls in boating costumes, seated in the arbours.

He passed them and entered the hotel by the backway.

There was no one in the hall, and he took a cane-bottomed easy chair by the bar window, put his butterfly net in a corner and called for a stone ginger-beer.

He intended to make a thorough examination of Sonning, and his plan would be very much simplified by the fact that he could eliminate all residents, all people who kept servants. What he was looking for was a man living in a cottage alone.

“Had good sport?” asked the young lady who served him, speaking in a perfunctory manner and twisting a hairpin straight that had somehow got loose, whilst she gazed over Freyberger’s head at the sunlit garden as if she were addressing some one there.

“Oh, the butterfly net?” said he, “it’s not mine. I brought it down for a friend, he promised to meet me here, a Mr Rogers—you haven’t seen anything of him, I suppose?”

“What was he like?” asked the lady behind the bar in a disinterested voice.

Freyberger drew a word picture of Klein.

She shook her head and settled herself down behind the bar to resume the perusal of a Trumper’s penny story, a compound of love, murder, arson and religion wonderfully mixed.

Freyberger sipped his drink. He looked around him admiring the place, for the hall of the White Hart is one of the prettiest and pleasantest little hotel halls in the world.

“You have had a murder down here they tell me,” he said, lighting a cigar.

“Yes,” said the girl behind the bar, “Jim Bronson. I saw him brought by, covered with a sheet. Hacked about horrid they said he was.” She looked up like an ogre, and then relapsed into Tracked by a Stain just at the part where the parson in the dogcart is approaching the murderer, who is hidden behind the hedge.

“It’s not often you have those sort of occurrences here?” said Freyberger.

“No,” replied the girl, with her eyes glued to the book.

“Very quiet neighbourhood, as a rule, I should think.”

“Yes.”

“Artists and people come here, I suppose, a good deal.”

“A good deal.”

Just at this moment a shadow darkened the doorway.

An old gentleman had entered the hall of “The White Hart.” He walked, leaning on a stick.

He was dressed in well-worn grey tweed, and wore a felt hat, fawn-coloured and rather broad of brim.

He came to the bar and called for an absinthe, and his voice caused Freyberger to examine him more attentively.

There were many things about this voice, and they all conspired to mark it out as a distinctive voice. A voice in a million.

It was the voice of an educated man, and it would be very hard to say what there was in it repellent and chilling, but repellent and chilling it was.

But it was the face of the newcomer that fascinated Freyberger.

“Where have I seen that face before?” he thought.

And then all at once came the reply born of the question.

“It is the face of Klein grown old.”

For a moment Freyberger was seized by a feeling of physical sickness. The horrors and perplexities of the Gyde case had culminated in this last horror and perplexity.

This could not be the man who, eight years ago, had sat for his portrait to the photographer in Paris; this could not be the man whom Hellier had followed on account of the likeness to that photograph.

This was an old, old man.

Had he aged then in the course of a few weeks? Had premature decay fallen upon him, turning him almost at a stroke from a man of forty or so to a man of seventy and more?

Was he himself mistaken?

No. This was indeed the face of the photograph, the face that had left its imprint on the retina of Leloir, the same face seen through the veil of age.

Yet if that were so, one would have to believe that this old man, who seemed scarcely strong enough to harm a child, had a few hours ago killed, with brutal ferocity, a fellow being.

As Freyberger sat examining the newcomer, he became aware that the newcomer was examining him.

The young lady behind the bar had relapsed into Tracked by a Stain, the shopboy with the butterfly net, the old gentleman sipping his absinthe were of no interest to her.

Freyberger yawned. He felt that he was being observed, and he fancied that he was being observed with approbation—the approbation with which a butcher observes a fat sheep.

If this were so, the situation was not without its humour. The humour of it did not, however, strike him. He was deficient in that sense.

He was on the point of making a remark upon the weather in the hope of starting a conversation when the old man forestalled him.

You never know a man’s face properly till you talk to him, and Freyberger, as the conversation proceeded, sat drinking in with his eyes the details and the tout ensemble of the countenance before him.

What a strange, weary, wicked and altogether mysterious face it was!

One said to oneself, “If blood circulates behind it, that blood must surely be grey in colour.”

They conversed, and it was wonderful how the old man drew Freyberger out, and in the course of ten minutes or so, without seeming at all inquisitive, learned most of his private affairs and much about his life.

Freyberger told him frankly and freely how he had come to England only a few weeks ago from Bremen in search of a job as book-keeper, how he had no friends in England, how he had a maiden aunt living in Cologne, and a widowed sister living Düsseldorf, how he had wandered down to Sonning in search of the picturesque.

The girl behind the bar here put down her book to answer a call from the coffee-room, and they found themselves alone.

“You are fond of nature?” asked the old man, sipping the remains of his absinthe.

“It is my passion,” replied Freyberger.

“Well, if you will allow me to be your guide, I will conduct you to a spot the most beautiful in England, quite close here, it lies.”

“Ah!”

“Indeed, yes, the most beautiful in England.”

“I shall be happy.”

“We will walk together,” continued the other. “A cigar, please,” to the young lady who had just returned.

He held out the box to Freyberger, who took one and thanked him.

That the stranger was Klein, despite his miraculous ageing, he felt almost certain. But to arrest him there and then for no other reason than lay in an unconfirmed belief was not to be thought of. To let a murderer escape is bad, but to arrest a man who, if he is not innocent, still, has no stains or proof of guilt is worse. It is what the Criminal Investigation Department calls a “serious mistake,” and Freyberger did not fancy such a tag to his reputation.

The only other course was to leave the protection of houses and people, to go with this satanic criminal where no eye could see what happened, to be attacked by him and to master him.

“Are you ready?” asked the old man.

“I am ready,” replied Freyberger. The girl, who was putting the cigar-box back on its shelf, turned round.

“If your friend calls, shall I say you will come back?” she asked.

“My friend?” said Freyberger, who saw across the grey face of his awful companion a shadow pass.

“Your friend, Mr Rogers,” said the girl. “He you brought the butterfly net for.”

He had distinctly told the stranger that he knew nobody in England, and that he had come down to Sonning moved by impulse and for no especial purpose save the search after the picturesque. In his surprise at the old man’s likeness to the man he was in search of he had quite forgotten the butterfly net—a serious mistake, as he was about to find out.

Another man might have entered into explanations or attempted to do so. Freyberger laughed in a brutal and cynical manner.

His whole being seemed to change in one swift moment.

He turned his back on the girl and, without vouchsafing an answer, said to the stranger, “Come.”

It was almost as if he had said, “I arrest you.”

They passed out together into the garden. The day was clouding over, and the last rays of sunshine fled as if from their presence as they followed the rose-bordered path to the little gate opening upon the road.