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.

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