The Cottage on the FellsStacpoole, H. De Vere (Henry De Vere)
General
The Cottage on the Fells
Stacpoole, H. De Vere (Henry De Vere)
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction
Freyberger, having gone carefully through the reports, took a pen and
began to draw up, for his own satisfaction, the points of similarity
between the Lefarge and the Gyde case. Roughly, they were these, each
assassin was a rich man, a man of pleasure and more or less dubious
morals. Each victim was an artist.
Müller, the victim of Lefarge, had made a bust of his assassin.
Klein, the victim of Gyde, had made a bust of his assassin.
Upon the body of Müller was found the copy of an old blackmailing letter
addressed to Lefarge.
In the room where Klein was found dead was found a copy of a
blackmailing letter addressed to Gyde.
Upon each of the murdered men’s chests were tattooed initials, exactly
in the same place, over the second right costal cartilage.
A strange similarity bound the two cases together, but the strangest
thing drawing the two cases together was the fact, the almost certain
fact, that Müller and Klein were one and the same person.
The fact that both men were artists of a high type, that both men were
blackmailers, that both men kept copies of old blackmailing letters in
their own handwriting—a most extraordinary blunder to commit—that both
men were decapitated in exactly the same manner, and that each man had
tattooed, in exactly the same place on his breast, his own initials, all
these facts crowned by the master fact that Klein had left behind him,
in his rooms in Howland Street, a portrait of himself with the name
“Müller” partly erased from the back. All these facts, I repeat, made it
quite clear to the mind of Freyberger that Klein and Müller were one and
the same person. If this was so, Lefarge could not have murdered Müller,
yet a frightful avalanche of evidence condemned him.
The evidence admitted of no cavil. No one else could have committed the
crime. The assassination of Müller by Lefarge was even more conclusively
proved than the assassination of Klein by Sir Anthony Gyde; for in the
cottage on the fells another person might conceivably have been hidden
at the time of the murder, but in the room in the Rue de Turbigo the
evidence conclusively proved that no one could have been there at the
critical moment but Lefarge and Müller.
The two cases, then, were connected together by many threads. At first
sight the fact of this intimate connexion between the Lefarge and the
Gyde case might seem to plunge the Gyde case into more profound
darkness, to heap perplexity on perplexity.
But to Freyberger the discovery of this connexion was a huge step
gained. Having verified the similarity of the incidents in the two cases
he did not bother about them for a moment, cast them aside, took a broad
view of the whole business and arrived at the grand conclusion that the
active criminal agent in the Lefarge case was also the active criminal
agent in the Gyde case.
“Now, if this is so,” argued Freyberger, “there are only four men to
pick our criminal agent from. He must be either Lefarge, Müller, Klein
or Gyde.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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