“No one saw me last night. Why, then, did this man follow me? Can it be that they suspect that I, who was supposed to be murdered in Cumberland, am alive? Can they have circulated my description? It will be safer for me not to go back to No. 18 St Ann’s Road, and, to confuse Messieurs the Police, should they set a trap there, I will send a telegram to Gyde at that address, so that they may be reconfirmed in their idea that Gyde is still in the land of the living and Klein in the land of the dead.
“No one saw me last night but the landlady, and her description will scarcely help the police against me: a tall man with a black beard.
“Oh, damnation!”
Freyberger suddenly leapt to his feet.
“What possessed me! What possessed me to use such a simple artifice in the pursuit of this man, who, whatever else he may be, is half a logician, half a magician?
“When he read that description in The Daily Telegraph this morning, what said he to himself? He said ‘Why this exact description of a man who was not there?
“‘It is either the landlady’s terror that caused her to see what was not, or it is a device of the police. Now the police never use a device like that, which, after all, clouds a case to a certain extent, unless they have some important reason.
“‘Of course, it may be simply due to the terror of the landlady, yet this false description, widely circulated, coupled with the fact that I have been followed, is, to say the least, suspicious.’
“That would be the line of his argument. Double fool that I was to forget that I was dealing, not with a criminal but a genius in crime.
“This man forgets nothing, foresees everything.