A late hansom was passing; he hailed it, gave an address to the cabman, and drove away.
The clocks chimed the hours away, and the night-prowler and the policeman passed the house in Piccadilly, the house with the great marble pillars on either side the door, which every habitué of the West End knew to be the mansion of Gyde, the millionaire.
Two o’clock, three and four o’clock passed, and the dawn peeped into the bedroom of Sir Anthony Gyde, where, on his back, upon the floor, lay the valet, Leloir, dead, without scratch or wound, his arms outspread, and upon his face an expression of horror, caught and made immutable by death.
CHAPTER XI
IT was after ten the next morning that Raymond, the butler, made the discovery. Knocking at the door of Sir Anthony’s room and receiving no answer, he opened it, and found the body of the valet.
Had Raymond, instead of calling in the policeman on point duty at the corner, telephoned instead to New Scotland Yard, he would have found coming, as a reply, neither Inspector Alanson or Fairchild, both being away on duty. He would have found a much younger man acting as their locum tenens. A clean-shaved, almost boyish person, suggestive of a café waiter in his Sunday clothes. In other words, he would have found Gustave Freyberger, then unknown, now a European celebrity.
Freyberger, a naturalized Englishman, was exactly twenty-six years of age when the Gyde case fell into his hands like a gift from heaven and it fell into his hands at half-past ten in the morning, heralded by the ringing of the bell of the telephone connecting Marlborough Street Police Station and New Scotland Yard.
It was half-past ten exactly when the message came through, and the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, who had just arrived, received it in person.
“Who’s on duty?” he asked, and on being told “Freyberger,” sent for him.