“Give it to me,” said the chief.
He glanced at it, and a change came over his face.
“The Chief Constable of Cumberland has sent me, with splendid promptitude, the blackmailing letters of Klein,” he said. “They arrived only half an hour ago by special messenger. Here they are, and the handwriting of Kolbecker is the handwriting of Klein.”
There could be no doubt; all three documents were in the same weird, extraordinary hand.
“Gyde,” said Inspector Frost, “before he murdered his man must have got him to write that letter. One can understand him, having the murder in his mind, being wishful to have some hole or corner to hide in during the night. He could not stay the night at Piccadilly, knowing that at any moment he might be arrested.”
“Yet,” said Freyberger, “he went next morning to his bankers—an equally dangerous proceeding.”
“The thing that strikes me,” said Inspector Dewhurst, “is, why did he go to the Piccadilly house at all? We know he took his jewels with him, but the jewels came up with him from the north. He could have easily taken possession of his jewel case, sent his man on home with the rest of the luggage, telling him that he would not be back till the morning, and then have disappeared.”
“If he had done that,” said Freyberger, “the valet, Leloir, would now be alive, and not dead of terror.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Again,” said Inspector Long, a man with a black beard seated near one of the windows, “that head found in the cupboard. It is not Klein’s, for Klein was a clean-shaven man. We know, from the evidence of a chambermaid, that there was nothing in the cupboard the day before. It must have been put there during the night; therefore, it must have been put there by either Gyde or his valet, for they alone were in the room, therefore they must have brought it from the north. We know for certain that a man was murdered and decapitated in the north by Sir Anthony Gyde; there is not a hole in the evidence, the boy is perfectly believable; he is borne out by half a dozen witnesses, who saw the motor-car going and coming, and by the headless corpse of Klein. Well, then, did Sir Anthony bring two heads in that bag with him, the head of Klein and the one we found, which is so strangely like his own?”