Clarke looked with a hard eye at him. The resemblance, if they were two, was certainly very strong. Since it seemed all but impossible that Émile Janoc should be in England, he accepted the statement grudgingly.
"Perhaps you wouldn't mind letting me see your papers?" he asked.
"That I will do with big pleasure, sare," he said, and produced a passport recently viséd in Holland, by which it appeared that his name was not Émile, but Gaston.
They parted with a bow on Janoc's side and a nod on Clarke's; but Clarke was puzzled.
"Something queer about this," he thought. "I'll keep my eye on _him_.... What was he doing talking like that--_so earnest_--to the actress's cook? Suppose she was murdered by Anarchists? It is certain that she was more or less mixed up with them--more, perhaps, than is known. Why did those two come over the night after her murder?--for it's clear that they had no design against the Tsar. I'll look into it on my own. Easy, now, Clarke, my boy, and may be you'll come out ahead of Furneaux, Winter, and all the lot in the end."
When he arrived at his Chief's office in the Yard, he mentioned to Winter his curious encounter with the other Janoc, but said not a word of Bertha Seward, since the affair of the murder was no longer his business, officially.
Winter paid little heed to Janoc, whether Émile or Gaston, for Furneaux was there with him, and the two were head to head, discussing the murder, and the second sitting of the inquest was soon to come. Indeed, Clarke heard Winter say to Furneaux:
"I promised Mr. Osborne to give some sort of excuse to his servants for his flight from home. I was so busy that I forgot it. Perhaps you will see to that, too, for me."
"Glad you mentioned it. I intended going there at once," Furneaux said in that subdued tone which seemed to have all at once come upon him since Rose de Bercy was found lying dead in Feldisham Mansions.
"Well, then, from henceforth everything is in your hands," said Winter. "Here I hand you over our dumb witness"--and he held out to Furneaux the blood-soiled ax-head of flint that had battered Rose de Bercy's face.
He was not sure--he wondered afterwards whether it was positively a fact--but he fancied that for the tenth part of a second Furneaux shrank from taking, from touching, that object of horror--a notion so odd and fantastic that it affected Winter as if he had fancied that the poker had lifted its head for the tenth part of a second. But almost before the conceit took form, Furneaux was coolly placing the celt in his breast-pocket, and standing up to go.