The doctor’s question wakened him to the man.
“Yes,” he answered, “I follow you ... entirely, Hugo. Go on. There are a few more details.”
“A case of stubborn prejudice that surprises me—in you, Julien,” the scientist remonstrated quietly. “For the sake of an emotional conviction you choose to ignore utterly the logic of the thing. The confession. The dovetailing of every bit of evidence. It doesn’t require much imagination to see Florence Ballau, alias Floria, preparing the camouflaged room after the killing. The cunning instincts of a half-maniac—to divert suspicion from herself. In fact, she remembers finding the beard in an old trunk—in the trunk which contained her mother’s effects. A beautifully conceived impulse, her first one, that of glueing the Vandyke to his chin. But ruined by her indecision. For after she had placed it there, the strange look of the man bewildered her and she tore it off and forced it into his fingers. She reasoned, as she did so, that if he held the false beard in his hand it would appear as if he had torn it from someone else’s face—and therefore seem as if he had been attacked by a disguised man. But her first impulse was infinitely better. I mention it merely as one of those little things which always rise to prove the superiority of intuition over reason. The beard pasted on his face would have been a successful mist over the crime. Consistent, impenetrable and so on. But the beard torn from his face was too obvious a clew. It confused Norton and us, but even without Miss Ballau’s confession it would have eventually given us the correct lead.”
“You sound a bit unconvinced on that point,” De Medici murmured in an abstracted voice, “but I’ll let it go.”
“Yes,” growled Dr. Lytton, “thanks. But the final proof comes now. I return to Jane, the housekeeper. In her youth Jane was a close friend of the mother. Jane is a simple-minded woman and her sympathies were entirely with Florence. She, too, remembered the abuse that Victor Ballau heaped on her mother, and in her own simple way understood the mania that operated the thoughts of the daughter. After the murder Jane helped Florence prepare the scene, dispose of the evidence—you remember the clumsy attempt at concealing the dress on the fire escape. Also the incident of Florence directing the attention of the police to the fire escape. You told me this yourself. This little point itself shows that there were two minds that camouflaged the scene—that Florence was unaware Jane had hidden the dress outside the window.
“There,” concluded Dr. Lytton, “you have the crime in full as Miss Ballau confessed it, as I unraveled it and as I wrote it down, and as she signed it before we got on the train at Rollo this afternoon.”
“And the note from Rollo, Maine, signed by the lady of the dagger while Florence was in New York in jail?” inquired De Medici.
“We will find out that she gave it to someone to mail,” smiled the doctor. “A part of the crude cunning which characterizes her Floria nature.”
“And my visitor last night?” murmured De Medici.
Dr. Lytton looked at him.