“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.