“But I must admit that I was not quite satisfied; the circumstances were so remarkably odd. I told Wilson so, and I advised him to look further into the matter. I reminded him of the D’Arblay murder and the finding of that guinea, but he said that the murder was our affair, that the men he had come to look for were dead, and that was all that concerned him. So back he went to New York, taking with him the death certificates and the two photographs with the certificates of recognition on the backs of them. But he left the notes of the case with me, on the chance that they might be useful to me, and the two sets of finger-prints, which certainly don’t seem likely to be of much use under the circumstances.”
“You never know,” said Thorndyke, with an enigmatical smile.
The Superintendent gave him a quick, inquisitive look and agreed: “No, you don’t, especially when you are dealing with Dr. John Thorndyke.” He pulled out his watch, and, staring at it anxiously, exclaimed: “What a confounded nuisance! I’ve got an appointment at the Law Courts in five minutes. It is quite a small matter. Won’t take me more than half an hour. May I come back when I have finished? I should like to hear what you think of this extraordinary story.”
“Come back, by all means,” said Thorndyke, “and I will turn over the facts in my mind while you are gone. Possibly some suggestion may present itself in the interval.”
He let the officer out, and when the hurried footsteps had died away on the stairs he closed the door and turned to me with a smile.
“Well, Gray,” he said, “what do you think of that? Isn’t it a very pretty puzzle for a medical jurist?”
“It is a hopeless tangle to me,” I replied. “My brain is in a whirl. You can’t dispute the facts, and yet you can’t believe them. I don’t know what to make of the affair.”
“You note the fact that, whoever may be dead, there is somebody alive—very much alive, and that that somebody is the murderer of Julius D’Arblay.”
“Yes, I realize that. But obviously he can’t be either Crile or Bendelow. The question is: Who is he?”
“You note the link between him and the Van Zellen murder; I mean the electrotype guinea?”