But McCulloch was jubilant. He regarded his prisoner with the almost friendly interest taken in his quarry by the slayer of wild beasts to whose rifle has fallen some peculiarly rare and dangerous "specimen." He enlivened the road with anecdotes of famous criminals, and each story invariably concluded with a facetious reference to the "chair" or a "lifer." Once or twice he gave details of the breaking up of some notorious gang owing to information extracted from one of its minor members, who, in consequence, either escaped punishment or received a light sentence; but the captive remained mute and apparently indifferent, whereupon Curtis, who had been revolving in his mind certain elements in a singularly complex mystery, broke fresh ground by saying:
"The strangest feature of this affair is probably unknown to you, Mr. McCulloch. To all intents and purposes, the men who killed the journalist were acting in concert with a Frenchman named Jean de Courtois, and their common object was to prevent a marriage arranged for last night. Yet this same de Courtois was found gagged and bound in his room at the Central Hotel shortly before midnight. Someone had maltreated him badly, and the wonder is he was not killed outright."
Now, the roundsman, wedged close against the prisoner, felt the man give an almost unconscious and quite involuntary start when de Courtois was mentioned, and there could be no question that he was straining his ears to catch each syllable Curtis uttered.
"So it was a near thing that two weddings were not interfered with last night, sir?"
"No, not two, only one. I married the lady."
The policeman's undoubted bewilderment was convincingly genuine, but, despite his surprise, he was alert to catch the slightest move or sign of emotion on the part of the captive.
"Yes," said Curtis. "I married her before half-past eight."
"Then you must have possessed some knowledge of the parties mixed up in this business?"
"No, not in the sense you have in mind. I cannot supply full particulars now, but you will learn them in due course. The point I wish to emphasize is this--poor Mr. Hunter's death was absolutely needless. I imagine he only came into connection with the intrigue by exercising the journalistic instinct to obtain exclusive details of a sensational news item which involved several distinguished people. The miserable tools employed by men who wished to gain their own ends were not even true to each other, and they undoubtedly attacked Hunter by error."