Storm turned to the other in surprise. Could he have uttered his thoughts aloud?
“I—er, I didn’t——” he began, but the Commissioner smiled.
“It was a simple matter to follow your trend of thought, Mr. Storm. You were surprised at seeing such a thing there, naturally; then you noticed the needle on the spring and recalled the case which put the dainty, innocent little slipper in a different light to you. It was an extraordinary case, too much so for the ingenious gentleman who conceived it to have hoped for success. Its bizarre, unusual features rendered it all the more simple to solve. The casual, unpremeditated cases are the ones which give us the most trouble because as a rule they leave fewer clues. The man who plans a crime most carefully is bound to over-reach himself in some particular, but the one who picks up a weapon lying innocently or accidentally to his hand, strikes with it and lays it down again, is the man who gives us the longest run.”
Storm could feel the blood ebbing from his face. Could this genial, smiling person be reading his mind, probing to the depths of the secret he guarded; or was he merely voicing his own favorite theory? At any rate, Storm realized that his previously formed opinion of the Commissioner was undergoing a swift reversal.
He murmured a polite phrase or two of interest, and the Commissioner said:
“I wish I had time to tell you the history of even a few of the things there, for each is a relic of some case celebrated in the annals of the Department. However, I suppose you gentlemen would like to have a look at the Homicide Bureau and the Bureau of Missing Persons; they are usually the most interesting departments to outsiders. My secretary will introduce you.”
He took leave of them with hearty cordiality, and once outside the anteroom Storm smiled quietly to himself. The Commissioner’s unique collection lacked two specimens which might have graced it: a certain golf club known as a driver, and a cane with a wickedly heavy head. But the Commissioner, astute as he was, would never miss them! His theory was all very well in its way, Storm conceded, but it did not go quite far enough. What of the man who did not over-reach himself; the man who perfected his coup in advance and left no clues whatever behind? All unconsciously the Commissioner had been lauding Storm’s own achievements, and his sense of elation heightened.
“Nothing doing in the Homicide Bureau this afternoon that would interest you, I am afraid,” the secretary announced. “We’ll try the Bureau of Missing Persons; there is usually something going on there.”
He led them down the wide stairs and along the echoing corridor to a door at the left, and Storm saw a large room divided by a rail and subdivided again at the end by partitions forming two smaller offices. An older man with a delicate, high-bred, sensitive face came forward, and as he was presented to the Captain, Storm watched the latter’s quick changes of expression with something of the contempt with which he had at first discounted the Commissioner’s frank, genial manner. This man, he reflected, might have been a scholar or priest; a father confessor, but surely not an analyst of human nature; a pedant, not a person of quick decision and unerring action. Pah! The Captain would be a mere tool in his hands; he could deceive him, trick him, beat him at his own game as easily as he had tricked the Greenlea officials and the simple-minded, guileless community out there.
He had already beaten him! Storm smiled again at the thought. The Captain must be combing the country now for a man whose body had lain exposed more than thirty-six hours within the limits of the city, and Storm alone knew where! One word from him would set that quiet office in a furore! And this was the man who had located the supposed Du Chainat on board the Alsace! Du Chainat must have been more of a bungler than Storm had believed!