King Victor’s fugitive status

King Victor’s fugitive status is the hidden pressure behind the danger at Chimneys: after leaving prison, the celebrated jewel thief slips French surveillance, enters England, and uses impersonation on a scale that has already brought him a fortune. The revelation that he posed as the supposedly dead Prince Nicholas makes his flight more than an escape from justice; it connects a master of disguise to the political and criminal mysteries surrounding Prince Michael’s death and the jewel.

Release and Evasion

King Victor had been serving a sentence, but his term ended a few months before the investigation at Chimneys. The French police expected to keep him under observation. Instead, he evaded them almost immediately, leaving his whereabouts uncertain. Their belief that he was in England was strong enough to prompt them to notify the British authorities, but it did not amount to a successful trace: when Superintendent Battle discussed the case with Anthony Cade, he admitted that the authorities did not know where King Victor was.

The escape is presented not as a routine lapse in surveillance but as a measure of King Victor’s unusual ability. Battle calls him one of the coolest operators he has encountered, while M. Lemoine ruefully describes him as a devil who gave the French police the slip at once. The repeated emphasis on the speed of the escape makes the gap in official knowledge part of the danger: the police know the fugitive may be in England, but cannot say where he has gone or what he intends to do.

The Impersonator

Battle identifies King Victor as an internationally celebrated jewel thief and a man with a rare genius for impersonation. His parentage is Irish and French, and he can speak at least five languages. These details make the threat both practical and transnational: King Victor can cross linguistic and social boundaries, while disguise allows him to do more than hide from investigators. He can occupy another person’s identity convincingly enough to act in that person’s name.

The discussion of disguise sharpens the distinction between ordinary concealment and King Victor’s particular skill. Battle observes that changes of make-up, complexion, hair, clothes, eyebrows, or false teeth may alter a person’s appearance, but argues that few men can evade identification in this way. King Victor is the exceptional case. The conversation is not abstract for Anthony: Battle raises the question abruptly, and Anthony checks the response that first comes to his lips. His light remark that a fugitive jewel thief would be interested in jewels rather than political memoirs does not settle the question of whether King Victor is already near them.

The American Fraud

King Victor’s flight from the French police leads to a history of deception in America. He seized on the rumor that Prince Nicholas had died in the Congo years earlier, a death difficult to establish conclusively, and brought the supposedly dead prince back to life in the public imagination. By impersonating Prince Nicholas, he obtained a substantial sum of American money on the strength of supposed oil concessions.

The fraud ended when King Victor was unmasked by chance and had to leave America hurriedly. Its scale and method enlarge the meaning of his fugitive status: he is not merely a thief who has escaped custody, but an impostor able to turn uncertainty about a royal death into financial gain. The supposed oil rights supplied the commercial pretext, while the royal identity supplied the credibility. His escape from one country thus follows a successful deception that depended on another country’s inability to verify who had died—and who had returned.

Chimneys and the Renewed Pursuit

The American exposure brought King Victor to England, where M. Lemoine expects him eventually to appear at Chimneys. The French detective cannot be sure whether he has already arrived. Battle and Anthony hear the revelation that King Victor impersonated Prince Nicholas with open amazement; Anthony’s matchbox falls from his hand, registering the force of the disclosure before its consequences are fully understood.

M. Lemoine then gives the suspicion a precise connection to the events at Chimneys: he believes King Victor was there on the night Prince Michael died and again the previous night. Battle recognizes the second visit as another attempt, and M. Lemoine confirms that interpretation. The claim remains a suspicion at this point, not a fully established account of King Victor’s actions, but it changes the investigators’ view of the incidents. The fugitive’s presence could link the death and the renewed search for the jewel, while his expertise in impersonation warns that an apparent identity may be as misleading as an unknown location.

Significance

King Victor’s fugitive status joins three uncertainties that the investigation must confront: where the escaped convict is, whom he may be pretending to be, and what he is seeking at Chimneys. His passage from France to America and then to England is a trail of failed surveillance and successful deception. The same capacity that enabled him to evade the police also allowed him to turn Prince Nicholas’s reported death into a profitable false identity.

The disclosures about King Victor therefore complicate the distinction between a person’s absence and a person’s death. The rumor of Prince Nicholas’s death was not enough to prevent an impostor from reviving his name; likewise, King Victor’s absence from the police’s grasp does not mean he is absent from the scene of the crime. His suspected appearances at Chimneys leave the investigation with a sharper danger than a fugitive merely at large: someone who can move unseen by assuming another identity may already be inside the circle of suspicion.