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 François
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.”
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