CHAPTER XV
IT was now half-past one. He knew that the Chief would be at luncheon, so he determined to have luncheon himself before returning to the Yard.
He turned into Blanchard’s in Beak Street.
During the meal he did not think once of the case.
He knew the advantage of allowing a problem to cool itself, and he had the power of detaching his mind from any business on hand and attaching it to another affair; especially when the other affair was of an edible nature.
He was a frank gourmet. When he had finished he lit a poisonous-looking green cigar and strolled down Regent Street towards his destination.
He was thinking now about the case; reviewing it, gazing at it with his mind’s eye as a Jew gazes at a lustrous jewel.
The thing was as full of fire and cloud and mystery as an opal. He felt that, live as long as he might, he would never again find himself face to face with a case so full of strange possibilities.
It was just now, walking down the crowded street, digesting his luncheon and smoking his cigar, it was just now, that he felt in himself that strange sixth sense stirring which so few men possess. The sense that allows us to see without eyes, hear without ears and feel without hands. The sense which allows us to say to a man whom we have not seen for years, and whom we meet at a street corner: “It is strange, I was thinking of you to-day, and, somehow, I expected to meet you.”
Freyberger, just now, was beginning to feel that, somewhere, lost in the darkness of the world, there existed a mind antagonistic to his own, an appalling mind, a mind of giant stature and dwarf-like subtlety and crookedness.