"So has his sister confessed. In an hour or two, when the silence and horror of a cell have done their work, we shall have Osborne confessing, too. Oh, man, man, can't you see that Furneaux has twisted each of us round his little finger?"
"But—sir——"
"Yes, I know," cried Winter, in a fume of wrath and smoke. "Believe these foreign idiots and we shall be hearing of a masked tribunal, glistening with daggers, a brace of revolvers in every belt—a dozen or more infuriated conspirators, cloaked in gaberdines, gathered in a West End flat, while a red-headed woman harangues them. Furneaux has fooled us, I tell you—deliberately brought the Yard into discredit—made us the laughing-stock of the public. Oh, I shall never——"
He pulled himself up, for Clarke was listening with the ears of a rabbit. Luckily, the detective's ideas were too self-concentrated to extract much food for thought from these disjointed outpourings.
"I don't wish to seem wanting in respect, sir," he said doggedly, "but have you forgotten the diary? Why, Rose de Bercy herself wrote that she would be killed either by C. E. F. or Janoc. Now——"
"Did she mention Janoc?" interrupted Winter sharply. "In what passage? I certainly have forgotten that."
Clarke, stubborn as a mule, stuck to his point, though he felt that he had committed himself.
"Perhaps I did wrong," he growled savagely, "but I couldn't help myself. You were against me all along, sir—now, weren't you?"
No answer. Winter waited, and did not even look at him.
"What was I to do?" he went on in desperation. "You took me off the job just as I was getting keen in it. Then I happened upon Janoc, and found his sister, and when I came across that blacked-out name in the diary I scraped it and sponged it until I could read what was written beneath. The name was Janoc!"