The murder case of Prince Michael is both a crime investigation at Chimneys and a political crisis over who might rule Herzoslovakia. A suspected search for a missing royal jewel supplies Superintendent Battle with one possible explanation for the killing, but the investigation remains unsettled: Prince Michael’s death changes the line of succession, and Anthony Cade’s concealed actions complicate what the police can know. The case ultimately turns on a royal identity long treated as absent from the political calculation.

Background: Revolution and Restoration

The political stakes reach back to the fall of King Nicholas IV. According to Anthony’s account, the king married a Paris music-hall performer who was presented as having Romanov ancestry, and she was crowned Queen Varaga. The monarchy’s acceptance of her did not settle the matter with the population: discontent and suppressions preceded an uprising that stormed the palace, killed the king and queen, and proclaimed a republic. Herzoslovakia remained a republic, though Anthony describes its politics as persistently turbulent.

The revolution did not erase the royal succession question. At the time of Prince Michael’s death, people in Herzoslovakia were prepared to restore the monarchy and offer him the crown. The British government supported the proposed restoration, while Michael was prepared to grant concessions to Herman Isaacstein’s company in return for a loan of about a million pounds to help place him on the throne. The memoirs of Count Stylptitch threatened to disrupt these plans, making the murder case inseparable from a struggle over political exposure, foreign support, and finance.

When Battle asks who stands next in the succession, George Lomax answers reluctantly that Prince Nicholas is probably the heir. Battle later identifies him as Prince Nicholas Obolovitch, Michael’s first cousin, and says the police believe he is in the United States, where he had recently been raising money on his expectations. The apparent absence of the next heir leaves Michael’s death with immediate consequences for the restoration project.

The Murder and Competing Explanations

Battle considers whether King Victor might have come to Chimneys looking for the missing Koh-i-Noor. Victor had been arrested in Paris three days after its disappearance, and investigators had hoped he might lead them to the jewel. Chimneys was one of four places where a royal visitor could have hidden it. Battle proposes that Victor might have been searching for the stone, encountered Prince Michael, and shot him. George considers the theory plausible, but Battle stresses that it is only a possibility, not an established solution.

The house itself supplies another complication. When the crime was discovered, one of the windows was open rather than latched. Anthony points out that this leaves two explanations: someone inside might have opened it after he left to make the murder appear to be an outside job and implicate him, or his own account might be false. He insists that he is telling the truth. Battle responds by declaring that nobody in the house will leave until he has finished investigating, turning the household into a contained field of inquiry.

Battle questions Boris Anchoukoff, Prince Michael’s valet, last. Boris confirms that he served Michael and says that his master retired at half past ten. Boris slept in the adjoining anteroom and believes Michael must have gone downstairs through the other door, which opened onto the corridor. He did not hear him leave and wonders whether he had been drugged. He describes himself as an unfaithful servant because he slept while his master was awake. His account supplies a possible gap in the household’s knowledge of Michael’s movements, but the evidence here does not settle who killed him.

Anthony Cade’s Compromised Position

Anthony recognizes that, within twenty-four hours, he has become entangled in two separate crimes. His handling of the first included deliberately disposing of a body and thereby frustrating the course of justice; then he arrived at Chimneys as another crime was being committed. He decides to tell the truth with one alteration and one grave omission. The case is therefore presented not only through clues and police questions but through the limits Anthony imposes on his own account.

His interventions continue to affect the investigation. When Battle asks about his own line of inquiry, Anthony admits that he has drawn a blank for the second time. He had suspected the French governess because she seemed an unlikely culprit and because a light had been visible in her room on the night of the tragedy. He acknowledges that this suspicion has failed, another discarded theory in a case already crowded with possible explanations.

Later, Battle asks why Anthony has decided to disclose what he knows now. Anthony says he has come to respect Battle’s abilities and does not want to cramp the investigation by withholding facts. Until then, he says, he could not speak for Mrs Revel’s sake; now that the letters have been proved irrelevant to her, he considers any suggestion of her complicity absurd. He recognizes that his earlier advice to her may have been poor and that her claim to have paid a man to suppress the letters merely on a whim might not convince a jury. His disclosure is thus both cooperation and a belated correction to a story he had deliberately constrained.

Succession and the Revelation of Nicholas

The succession question acquires new meaning when Anthony speaks to Isaacstein after Prince Michael’s death. Isaacstein asks whether the same loan, on the same terms, can be offered to Michael’s cousin Nicholas, and wonders whether that prince can even be produced, since he believes Nicholas was killed in the Congo. Anthony confirms that the report of Nicholas’s death was true in the sense that he had spread it, not that he had been murdered. He explains that he promised Isaacstein a prince and offers himself as that candidate, giving his full royal name: Nicholas Sergius Alexander Ferdinand Obolovitch.

The revelation changes the political premise of the case. Prince Nicholas, previously treated as a distant heir in the United States and presumed dead by Isaacstein, has been living as Anthony Cade. His disclosure makes him a potential successor to the throne and returns the succession question to the center of the negotiations. It resolves the mystery of Anthony’s identity, but the evidence here does not establish the identity of Prince Michael’s murderer; the case’s political consequences and its criminal solution remain distinct questions.