“That’s perfectly right; come with me.” They went upstairs. A tall, narrow cupboard in the bedroom wall stood open; on one of the shelves reposed the head of a bearded man. The skin of the face was strangely brown and withered, the upper lip was drawn up as if in some contortion of pain, exposing the teeth; one of these teeth was gold crowned. The thing was sufficiently frightful, but Freyberger took it down and handled it as indifferently as though it had been a cabbage. It was in this room that Leloir, on the night before, had died of terror. What had he seen, and how much had this head to do with the sight? Freyberger wrapped a towel round the thing and gave it to the plain-clothes officer to make a parcel of and remove to Vine Street. Then he went down to interrogate Raymond. He was seated in the servants’ parlour, white and shaken-looking. Was he sure that the thing was the head of his master? Yes, only it looked brown and to have been dead a long time. He was almost sure that the thing was his master’s head. Freyberger stood, with his eyes fixed upon the pattern of the drugget carpet, lost in thought. The case had suddenly, and at a stroke, become complex enough to satisfy the most exigeant solver of riddles. If this was the head of Sir Anthony Gyde, then the murderer of Klein had been in his turn murdered. But Sir Anthony Gyde had been to his bankers that morning, and had signed a receipt for his wife’s jewels and obtained them. This being so, he must have been murdered in the interval. It was now after one o’clock. He must, if this was indeed his head, have been murdered and dismembered in the course of three hours, the head conveyed to 110B Piccadilly, and placed where it was found. Of course, this was absurd. Of one thing alone Freyberger felt sure. If this were indeed the head of Sir Anthony, then the thing bore some relation to the death of the valet Leloir. Whatever unthinkable tragedy, whatever inconceivable transformation, had caused the valet to die of terror, had some strong relationship to the presence of this head in the place where it had been found. The thing must be verified. He obtained the address of Sir Anthony’s dentist from the butler, and having ordered a telegram to be sent to him to call at Vine Street at his earliest convenience, he left the house. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XV IT was now half-past one. He knew that the Chief would be at luncheon, so he determined to have luncheon himself before returning to the Yard. He turned into Blanchard’s in Beak Street. During the meal he did not think once of the case. He knew the advantage of allowing a problem to cool itself, and he had the power of detaching his mind from any business on hand and attaching it to another affair; especially when the other affair was of an edible nature.