CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
FURTHER REVELATIONS
If you are a constant reader of the newspapers, as probably you are, you will no doubt recollect the great sensation caused next day on the publication of the news of the gruesome find in that, one of the most aristocratic thoroughfares of Bayswater.
The metropolitan police were very reticent regarding the affair, but many of the papers published photographs of the scene of the exhumations, the exterior of the long-closed house, and photographs of the various police officials. That of Guertin, however, was not included. The famous investigator of crime had no wish for the picture of his face, with its eyes beaming benignly through his gold glasses, to be disseminated broadcast.
The police refused to make any statement; hence the wildest conjectures were afloat concerning the series of tragedies which must have taken place within that dark house, with its secluded, tangled garden.
As the days went by, the public excitement did not abate, for yet more remains were found—the body of a young, fair-haired man who had been identified as Mr. Cyril Wilson, a member of the Travellers’ Club, who had been missing for nearly nine months. The police, impelled by this fresh discovery, cut down the trees in the garden and laid the whole place waste, while crowds of the curious waited about in the neighbourhood, trying to catch a glimpse of the operations.
And as time wore on I waited in daily expectation of some sign from the woman I so dearly loved.
Guertin, who still remained in London, assured me that she was safe in hiding with her father, Phil Poland.
“And you will, of course, arrest him when you can discover him,” I remarked, as I sat with the famous detective in his room at the Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square.
“I do not wish to discover him, my dear Monsieur Biddulph,” was his kind reply. “I happen to know that he has deeply repented of his wrongdoing, and even on his sudden reappearance at Stamford with the remaining portion of his once invulnerable gang, he urged them to turn aside from evil, and become honest citizens. He has, by his wrongful conviction of murder, expiated his crimes, and hence I feel that he may be allowed a certain leniency, providing he does not offend in future.”