ertinacity with which he had haunted the morgue and dwelt upon the image
of the young girl who had perished under no random shot.

Here the old man paused, shrinking as much from what he had yet to say as
they from the hearing of it. It was not till the Chief Inspector had made
him an encouraging gesture that he found the requisite courage to
proceed. He did so, in these words:

"I know that the evidence I have thus far advanced is of a purely
circumstantial nature, capable, perhaps, of a more or less satisfactory
explanation. But what I have to add cannot be so easily disposed of.
Connections have developed between persons we thought strangers which
have opened up a field of inquiry which brings the doubts and surmises
of an old detective within the scope of this office. I do not know what
to make of them; perhaps their full meaning can only be found out here.
Of this only I am assured. The gentleman whom it seems presumptuous on my
part to connect even in a casual way with crime has not gained but lost
by what I have to tell of Madame Duclos' suicidal death. To those who see
no association between the two, it looks like the opening of a new lead,
but when I tell you that they knew each other, or at all events that she
knew him and in the way of actual hatred, it looks more like a deepening
of the old one. See here, gentlemen."

Opening a package he had hitherto held in hand, he showed them
Fredericks' fifteen-year-old photograph of Mr. Roberts, together with its
mutilated counterpart, and explained how the latter came to be in its
present mutilated condition.

"But this is not all," he continued, as the remarks incident upon this
proof of deadly hatred on the part of the mother of the victim for the
man whom circumstances seemed to point out as her slayer subsided under
the pressure of their interest in what he had further to impart. "As you
will see after a moment's consideration, this token of animosity does not
explain Madame Duclos' flight, and certainly not her death, which, as the
unhappy witness of it, I am ready to declare was not the death of one
driven to extremity from personal fear, but by some exalted feeling which
we have yet to understand. All that I now wish to point out in its
connection is the proof offered by this shattered photograph, that Mr.
Roberts was in some manner and from some cause a party to this crime from
which a superficial observation would completely dissociate him.

"Where is the