“This is Dr. Gray, Miller; you may remember his name. It was he who discovered the body of Mr. D’Arblay.”
“Yes, I remember,” said the Superintendent, shaking my hand unemotionally and still looking at me with a slightly dubious air.
“He is a good deal interested in the case,” Thorndyke continued, “not only professionally, but as a friend of the family—since the catastrophe.”
“I see,” said the Superintendent, taking a final inquisitive look at me and obviously wondering why the deuce I was there. “Well, there is nothing of a very secret nature in what I have to tell you, and I suppose you can rely on Dr. Gray to keep his own counsel and ours.”
“Certainly,” replied Thorndyke. “He quite understands that our talk is confidential, even if it is not secret.”
The officer nodded, and, having been inducted into an easy chair, by the side of which a decanter, a siphon, and a box of cigars had been placed, settled himself comfortably, lit a cigar, mixed himself a modest refresher, and drew from his pocket a bundle of papers secured with red tape.
“You asked me, Doctor,” he began, “to get you all particulars up to date of the Van Zellen case. Well, I can do that without difficulty as the case—or at least what is left of it—is in my hands. The circumstances of the actual crime I think you know already, so I will take up the story from that point.
“Van Zellen, as you know, was found dead in his room, poisoned with prussic acid, and a quantity of very valuable portable property was missing. It was not clear whether the murderer had let himself in with false keys or whether Van Zellen had let him in; but the place hadn’t been broken into. The job had been done with remarkable skill, so that not a trace of the murderer was left. Consequently, all that was left for the police to do was to consider whether they knew of any one whose methods agreed with those of this murderer.
“Well, they did know of such a person, but they had nothing against him but suspicion. He had never been convicted of any serious crime, though he had been in chokee once or twice for receiving. But there had been a number of cases of robbery with murder—or rather murder with robbery, for this man seemed to have committed the murder as a preliminary precaution—and they were all of this kind; a solitary crime, very skilfully carried out by means of poison. There was never any trace of the criminal; but gradually the suspicions of the police settled down on a rather mysterious individual of the name of Bendelow; Simon Bendelow. Consequently, when the Van Zellen crime came to light, they were inclined to put it on this man Bendelow, and they began making fresh inquiries about him. But presently it transpired that some one had seen a man, on the morning of the crime, coming away from the neighbourhood of Van Zellen’s house just about the time when the murder must have been committed.”
“Was there anything to connect him with the crime?” Thorndyke asked.