“No one saw me last night but the landlady, and her description will scarcely help the police against me: a tall man with a black beard. “Oh, damnation!” Freyberger suddenly leapt to his feet. “What possessed me! What possessed me to use such a simple artifice in the pursuit of this man, who, whatever else he may be, is half a logician, half a magician? “When he read that description in _The Daily Telegraph_ this morning, what said he to himself? He said ‘Why this exact description of a man who was not there? “‘It is either the landlady’s terror that caused her to see what was not, or it is a device of the police. Now the police never use a device like that, which, after all, clouds a case to a certain extent, unless they have some important reason. “‘Of course, it may be simply due to the terror of the landlady, yet this false description, widely circulated, coupled with the fact that I have been followed, is, to say the least, suspicious.’ “That would be the line of his argument. Double fool that I was to forget that I was dealing, not with a criminal but a genius in crime. “This man forgets nothing, foresees everything. “I have been a fool, and yet—” Freyberger’s face unclouded a bit. “Is there another man in London who would have dug into his plans so deeply as I have done, connected the Lefarge case with the Gyde case and proved him indubitably the prime mover in both? “A few days ago I knew nothing about this man whom Sir Anthony Gyde is supposed to have murdered. What do I know now? What have I discovered by the aid of my own intelligence? I know his name, his face, his mind in part. I know that he has not been murdered by Gyde; I am almost assured that he has murdered Gyde. “I know that, under the name of Müller, he was not murdered by Lefarge; I am almost assured that he murdered Lefarge. I know that he is a homicidal maniac, whose pet method is strangulation. “I know that he has about him Gyde’s jewellery, of which he is sure to try to dispose. I know that he has lived here; I know the address where he lived in Howland Street. But my most important knowledge is the knowledge of the statue and the bent of his mind. “I have accumulated a mass of evidence that will damn him and crush him whenever I catch him, a mass of evidence that will clear two innocent men and expose to the world’s gaze the greatest and most complete villain that the world has ever beheld. Come, it is not so bad. I have committed a fault; I tried to match him at his own game of subterfuge, and that telegram was my answer. Alas! I am not so clever as he. But I have this in my favour, that I know much about him and he knows nothing about me. “I have seen his hand, he has not seen mine.