“Then you never saw the man at all?”
“No, but Miss D’Arblay did;” and here I gave him such details of the man’s appearance as I had been able to gather from Marion.
“It is quite a vivid description,” he said, as he wrote down the details; “and now shall we have a look at that piece of the mould?”
I disinterred it from my tobacco-pouch and handed it to him. He glanced at it and then went to a cabinet, from a drawer in which he produced the little case containing Polton’s casts of the guinea and a box, which he placed on the table and opened. From it he took a lump of moulding-wax and a bottle of powdered French chalk. Pinching off a piece of the wax, he rolled it into a ball, dusted it lightly with the chalk powder, and pressed it with his thumb into the mould. It came away on his thumb, bearing a perfect impression of the inside of the mould.
“That settles it,” said he, taking the obverse cast from the case and laying it on the table beside the wax “squeeze.” “The squeeze and the cast are identical. There is now no possible doubt that the electrotype guinea that was found in the pond was made by Julius D’Arblay. Probably it had been delivered by him to the murderer on the very evening of his death. So we are undoubtedly dealing with that same man. It is a most alarming situation.”
“It would be alarming if it were any other man,” I remarked.
“No doubt,” he agreed. “But there is something very special about this man. He is a criminal of a type that is almost unknown here, but is not uncommon in South European and Slav countries. You find him, too, in the United States, principally among the foreign-born or alien population. He is not a normal human being. He is an inveterate murderer, to whom a human life does not count at all. And this type of man continually grows more and more dangerous for two reasons: first, the murder habit becomes more confirmed with each crime; second, there is virtually no penalty for the succeeding murders, for the first one entails the death sentence, and fifty murders can involve no more. This man killed Van Zellen as a mere incident of a robbery. Then he appears to have killed D’Arblay to secure his own safety, and he is now attempting to kill Miss D’Arblay, apparently for the same reason. And he will kill you and he will kill me if our existence is inconvenient or dangerous to him. We must bear that in mind, and take the necessary measures.”
“I can’t imagine,” said I, “what motive he can have for wanting to kill Miss D’Arblay.”
“Probably he believes that she knows something that would be dangerous to him; something connected with those moulds, or perhaps something else. We are rather in the dark. We don’t know for certain what it was he came to look for when he entered the studio, or whether or not he found what he wanted. But to return to the danger. It is obvious that he knows the Abbey-road district well, for he found his way to the studio in the fog. He may be living close by. There is no reason why he should not be. His identity is quite unknown.”
“That is a horrid thought!” I exclaimed.