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.
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