“Well, what happened?” I asked, much interested in the facts.
“The girl, in a frenzy of madness and anger, was about to rush out to betray the man to her fellow-conspirators, when Danilovitch suddenly entered. She had, at that moment, his yellow card in her hand. In an instant he knew the truth and realised his own peril. She intended to betray him. It meant her life or his! Not a dozen words passed between the pair, for the man, taking up his shoemaker’s knife, plunged it deliberately into the girl’s heart, snatched the card from her dying grasp, and strode out, locking the door behind him. Then he went straight to the private bureau of General Markoff and told him what he had done. Needless to relate, the police inquiry was a very perfunctory one. It was a love tragedy, they said, and as Danilo Danilovitch was missing, they soon dropped the inquiry. They did not, of course, wish to arrest the assassin, for he was far too useful a person to them.”
“Then you know the fellow?”
“I have met him often. At first I had no idea of his connection with the revolutionists. It is only quite recently through a woman who is in the pay of the Secret Police, and whose son has been treated badly, that I learned the truth. And she also told me one very curious fact. She was present in the crowd when the bomb was thrown at the Grand Duke Nicholas’s carriage, and she declares that Danilo Danilovitch—who has not been seen in Petersburg since the tragic death of Marie Garine—was there also.”
“Then he may have thrown the bomb?” I said, amazed.
“Who knows?”
“But I saw a man with his arm uplifted,” I exclaimed. “He looked respectable, of middle-age, with a grey beard and wore dark clothes.”
“That does not tally with Danilovitch’s description,” he replied. “But, of course, the assassin must have been disguised if he had dared to return to Petersburg.”
“But I suppose his fellow-conspirators still entertain no suspicion that he is a police-spy?”
“None whatever. The poor girl lost her life through her untoward discovery. The police themselves knew the truth, but on action being withdrawn, the fellow was perfectly free to continue his nefarious profession of agent-provocateur, for the great risk of which he had evidently been well paid.”