The colonel shrugged his massive shoulders.
"No, I couldn't tell you anything about that, sir," he said.
"He was not an American?" asked the commissioner again.
"I could swear to that," answered the colonel.
There was a pause and he waited.
"There's another matter." The commissioner spoke slowly. "I understand that you are being bothered by a mysterious individual who calls himself the Knave of Judgment."
"Jack o' Judgment," corrected the colonel with a contemptuous smile. "Those sort of monkey tricks don't bother me, I can assure you."
"I have my theories about the Jack o' Judgment," said the commissioner. "I have been looking up the circumstances of the murder, and I seem to remember that on the body was found a playing card."
"That's right," said the colonel, who had remembered the fact himself many times, "the Jack of Clubs."
"Do you know what that Jack of Clubs signified?" asked the commissioner, but the colonel could honestly say that he did not. Its presence on the body had frequently puzzled him and he had never found a solution.