“I have received the information as to the tattooing, sir.”
“I think that disposes of Klein,” replied the chief.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but I imagine that in these two letters the crux of the case lies. I believe these two letters are the point or points for which I have been seeking. When I got your communication a few minutes ago, I thought my theory shattered, but it has sprung to life again, not only renewed, but added to. The complexity of the whole thing has been increased doubly, but out of that complexity will now, I believe, spring simplicity. I wish to go home and study some old notes; if I may see you again, sir, in a few hours’ time I hope to put the Gyde case before you in a new and most profoundly interesting light.”
“Do so,” replied the chief, “investigate in your own way and as deeply as you will, but don’t be led away by your own imagination, Freyberger.”
“No, sir,” replied Freyberger, with the simplicity, or the apparent simplicity, of a schoolboy replying to his master. Then he departed for his own rooms that lay on the south side of the water.
I will lay it down as an axiom that a professional man is rarely of much use if he be not acquainted with the literature of his profession. The army man who knows little of the history of war, the doctor who cares little for the history of medicine, the detective who knows nothing of the history of crime, are members of society rarely rising to greatness.
Now Freyberger was a German, absorbed in his profession, and if you know anything about Germans, you will agree with me that that statement covers a great many things. He could speak four languages fluently: English, German, French and Italian. Italian and French he had learned, not for pleasure, but because he felt that they might be useful to him in the pursuit of his vocation.
He read foreign newspapers and made notes of criminal cases that interested him. He had done this for some ten years, and in his shabby lodgings there were a series of notebooks containing the details of very curious crimes. He knew as much about the poisoners, Palmer and Smethurst, as though he had attended their trials, and from the Brinvilliers case to the case of Monk Léothade, to the case of François Lesnier, French criminal history was an open book to him.
The clocks were striking six when he arrived at his lodgings in Fox Street, S.E.
He occupied a sitting-room and bedroom on the first floor. The walls of the sitting-room were lined with books. It was a curious library. Any general information you wanted you could find here, and a whole lot of information by no means general. Amidst a host of books dealing with all sorts of facts you might have found Schiller, and a first edition of Heine’s lyrics stood upon a shelf above the last edition of Casper’s Forensic Medicine.