“How d’you do, doctor?” he added.
De Medici sat down beside the lieutenant’s desk.
“So you’ve found the murderer?” he asked quietly. “In which case you must have changed your mind about Mr. Ballau’s suicide.”
“Sit down, sit down, doctor,” Norton beamed, “and I’ll apologize for a lot of things. Have a cigar?”
The visitors declined. Dr. Lytton, regarding the red-faced detective, mused silently.
“He’s stumbled on something. An intelligent man, but clumsy and superficial,” he was thinking.
Norton seemed to expand in his chair. His face glowed with delight as he began to talk.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I owe you my first apology for pretending to you I thought Victor Ballau had killed himself. I was absolutely convinced it was a murder on the night we found the body. I had the impression of suicide for a few minutes. But before ten minutes had passed investigation showed me that there were a number of things not to be explained by the suicide theory. Well, gentlemen, realizing that the murder was an intricate one and that it would take a great deal of care to unravel the mystery, I adopted the suicide theory as a ruse and instructed my force to take a similar attitude. We harped on this theory at the inquest. You see, it was my purpose to throw the criminal off the track and make the capture a bit easier.”
“Marvelous,” murmured De Medici. The lieutenant’s naïveté had suddenly amused him. “A bewildering deception. And you got him.”
Norton grinned at the man’s banter.