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.
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