The mysterious flight of Nardini, the prominent politician and Minister
for Justice, was, it seemed, still the one topic of conversation in the
"Eternal City", Only that morning I had read a paragraph in the
_Tribuna_ that the fugitive was believed to have reached Buenos Ayres.
The Embassy in London had evidently kept the secret I had divulged, and
even the Italian police were in ignorance that the man wanted for that
gigantic embezzlement--for the sum stated to have disappeared was now
known to be a very large one--was already in his grave.
The mysterious discovery at the dead man's villa out at Tivoli, that
pleasant little town with the wonderful cascade twenty miles outside
Rome, greatly complicated the problem. And the girl who had been found
in such strange circumstances was actually an intimate friend of Lucie
Miller! The whole thing was assuming a shape entirely beyond my
comprehension.
I presently thanked the old porter for his information, slipped another
tip into his hand, and walked back to the Corso, hugging the shade, and
reflecting deeply upon what the old fellow had told me.
Two or three facts were quite plain. The first was that Miller would
most certainly not be in Rome if he had the slightest suspicion that the
police were in search of Lucie. Therefore, although the doctor had
acted as the fugitive's secretary, he was in ignorance of the discovery
made at the Villa Verde. Again, had not Nardini himself for some reason
abstracted from the archives of the Questura the official record of
Miller, his description and the suspicions against him?
Therefore I saw that the police were hampered in their inquiries,
because they were without information. Again, the name of Gennaro
Gavazzi, though not an uncommon one in Italy, struck me as familiar from
the first moment that Lucie had uttered it in Leghorn.
Now, as I walked the streets of Rome, I remembered. It came upon me
like a flash. It had been written in that confidential police record
that the doctor was a Milanese, and that he was suspected of being an
accomplice of the Englishman.
And yet Nardini, being aware of this, had actually appointed him one of
his private secretaries!
That latter fact was one that showed either conspiracy or that Nardini,
crafty and far-seeing, employed the doctor with some ulterior motive.