“I beg your pardon, but I imagine he had.”
“How?”
“He had committed the fault of being alive. The man we are after is a fault-finder when the fit seizes him. A temporary lunacy. Some periodic lunatics have objections. I knew one who, perfectly sane on other points, flew into a paroxysm of rage when a musk-melon was brought within his purview. He objected to musk-melons because they were round.
“He wanted them square. God Almighty, however, preferred that they should be round. Hence the trouble.
“Another quarrelled with grey cats when he met them, simply because they were grey. He quarrelled with them by covering them with paraffin and setting them on fire.
“The man who did this quarrelled with the thing that lies here because it was alive. He has remedied the defect.”
He had indeed.
It is needful only to say that the body exhibited twenty wounds, each in itself sufficient to have caused death.
But the master wound was in the throat. It was evidently the first given. The rest were needless, and the result of maniacal fury on the part of the murderer.
They left the place and went to a clothier’s, where Freyberger bought a mulberry-coloured blazer and a straw hat with a striped ribbon.