The Perfume of the Lady in Black

by Gaston Leroux

  Unfortunately, her unease only grew the more I tried to drive it away, and it was clear that it arose from a lingering suspicion as to the true identity of her uncle, Old Bob.

  At length, we went outside. By then, it was nearly noon, and the garden was a blaze of sunlight and perfume. Since we were without our dark glasses, we had to shield our eyes with our hands from the glare of colour from the flowers, but in spite of this, our aching eyes felt the fiery glow of the monster geraniums. When we had become somewhat accustomed to the strong light, we went slowly on, hand in hand, over the scorching ground, but our fingers glowed with a warmth even greater than that of the air around us. We bent our eyes to the ground to keep them from the endless mirror of the waters.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ repeated my companion.

  So was I, predisposed as I was by the mysteries of the night, followed by the oppressive silence of midday. It is worse to feel that something indefinable is going on in broad daylight than at dead of night. Noon! Everything is at rest and yet alive, dumb and yet quivering with life. Listen! The ear echoes like a shell with sounds more mysterious than any that rise from the earth at the coming of evening. Close your eyes and stare into your eyelids. You will find them full of silvery visions infinitely more puzzling than the phantoms of the night.

  I looked at Mrs Rance. Drops of cold perspiration stood out on her brow. I began to tremble, just as she was doing, for I knew, alas, that I could do nothing to help her, and that what would be must be, in spite of us.

  She hurried me towards the doorway that opened on to the courtyard of Charles the Bold. The vaulted roof of the archway stood out darkly against the surrounding glare, and beyond it we saw Rouletabille and Darzac facing in our direction. Rouletabille was carrying Arthur Rance’s beaked walking-stick. This insignificant circumstance disturbed me, I don’t know why. With the end of the stick he was showing Robert Darzac something at the top of the arch which we could not see, and then he pointed at us. We could not hear what they were saying, for they spoke in an undertone like accomplices discussing a secret. Mrs Rance stopped, but Rouletabille motioned to her to come ahead, and repeated the signal with his stick.

  ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘what does he want now? Really, M. Sainclair, I’m frightened out of my wits. I shall tell my uncle everything, and then we’ll see what happens.’

  We entered the archway, and they waited, not coming a step towards us. They were, in fact, singularly still. And I called out to them in a voice which echoed oddly beneath the archway:

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  When we were beside them, they made us turn our backs to the courtyard, so that we could see what they were looking at. It turned out to be the Mortola coat of arms carved on a block of stone at the top of the arch. The stone was loose, and looked as if it might fall at any moment. Rouletabille had noticed the danger and asked Mrs Rance if she had any objection to having the masonry repaired.

  ‘I’m quite sure’ he said, ‘that if you poked the stone with the end of this stick, it would fall. You’re taller than I am. Try,’ he added, handing the stick to Mrs Rance.

  We all took turns at it, but not one of us could reach the stone. I was just wondering what possible aim this foolishness could have when suddenly, behind us, the death-cry rang out!

  We all turned round at once with an exclamation of horror. That awful cry, ringing in our ears under the noonday sun, having already haunted us at night! When would it stop? When would there be an end to the dreadful sound that I first heard in the night at Glandier? And now there was another victim. Once again, one of our number had been suddenly and secretly struck down by crime, as if by plague. The onward march of pestilence was not as invisible as this fatal hand! And there we stood, all four of us, trembling with horror, staring into the blinding light, that still seemed to vibrate to the death-cry! Who had died? Who was dying? Whose were the dying moans we heard? Which way should we turn? It seemed as if the daylight itself were crying out in pain.

  Rouletabille was the most scared of us all. I had seen him retain an almost superhuman composure in the face of the most unexpected events. I had seen him answer that death-cry by plunging recklessly into the night. Why was he then trembling like a leaf in broad daylight? After all, he was but a child, and he had relapsed into a child’s weakness instead of being the masterful man he wished us to think him. Hadn’t he foreseen this murder in the noonday glare?

  Mattoni, who was just crossing the first enclosure, heard the cry, and ran towards us. A sign from Rouletabille caused him to freeze in his tracks and stand like a sentry on duty at the door. Rouletabille now ran towards the spot where the moans were coming from, or, rather, towards the centre of the circle, for the fiery air all around us was vibrating with the wail.

  We followed him breathlessly, our arms stretched out before us like people groping in the dark. Ah, at last we found it, beyond the eucalyptus. There lay the body! It was Bernier! He was gasping for breath and vainly trying to lift himself up. The death-rattle was in his throat. Blood was welling from his breast. As we bent over him, he summoned his last strength for the words: ‘Frédéric Larsan!’ Then his head drooped and it was over!

  Frédéric Larsan! Frédéric Larsan everywhere and yet nowhere! Here was a corpse, and yet nobody seemed to have been near it. The only exit from the place where the murder was committed was by the archway where we were standing, and we had all turned at once, so quickly, as soon as we heard the death-cry, that we ought to have seen the deed. All we saw was the blaze of daylight.

  Prompted by the same idea, we all made for the Square Tower, and went through the open door into Old Bob’s sitting room, which was empty. We opened the door of his bedroom and found him lying quietly on his bed, with an old woman watching beside him. The woman was Bernier’s wife. She caught sight of our faces and guessed that some disaster has happened. She screamed. She had heard nothing and she knew nothing about the tragedy, but she was frantic to rush out and find out, though quite what she did not know.

  We tried in vain to hold her back. The moment she left the tower, she saw the body. She moaned plaintively as she bent over it. We tore off his shirt and found a deep wound just under the heart. Rouletabille rose with the same expression I had seen on his face after he had examined the corpse at Glandier, and said:

  ‘It could have been done with the same knife. The wound is just the same size. But where is the knife?’

  We hunted everywhere for the knife, but could not find it. The murderer must have taken it away with him. Where was he? Who was he? Though we knew nothing, Bernier knew before he died, perhaps he died because he knew. Frédéric Larsan! We shuddered as we repeated the dying man’s words.

  Suddenly we saw Prince Galitch coming towards us with a newspaper in his hand. He was reading as he walked and seemed amused. Mrs Rance rushed up to him, snatched the paper out of his hands, pointed at the body and exclaimed:

  ‘This man has just been murdered! Fetch the police!’

  Prince Galitch looked at the corpse, then at us, and hurried off without a word to fetch the police. Bernier’s widow was still moaning. Rouletabille sat down on the edge of the well. He looked weak and purposeless. Looking at Mrs Rance, he said quietly:

  ‘Very well, let the police come! It will be no one’s fault but yours!’

  Mrs Rance looked at him contemptuously with her great dark eyes. I knew what she was thinking. She hated Rouletabille because he had made her doubt her uncle, though only for a moment. While Bernier was being murdered, was not Old Bob in his room, being tended by the victim’s wife?

  In a weary sort of way, Rouletabille examined the lock on the well cover and found it intact. He stretched himself out on the edge as if he were lying down on a comfortable couch and asked, still more quietly:

  ‘What are you going to tell the police?’

  ‘Everything!’

  Mrs Rance hissed the word viciously through her teeth. Rouletabille shook his head as if in despair, and closed hi
s eyes. He looked as if he were completely crushed and beaten. M. Darzac came and touched him on the shoulder. He wanted to search the Square Tower, the New Castle, every corner, in fact, adjacent to the courtyard from which no one could have escaped, and where the murderer must still be.

  Sadly, Rouletabille dissuaded him from that idea. Its futility was only too evident to Rouletabille and to me. At Glandier, where mind seemed to have become miraculously separated from matter, Rouletabille and I had made no attempt to find the man who had so mysteriously vanished from the gallery.

  I knew only too well that eyes were of no use when it came to finding Larsan. A man had been killed immediately behind us. We heard him cry out at the blow. We turned and saw nothing but daylight. To see, I had to shut my eyes, as Rouletabille was doing. But suddenly he opened them and stood up with renewed energy. He shook his fist at the sky.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ he exclaimed, ‘unless reasoning is mere folly!’

  He knelt down on the ground and started crawling about on all fours, with his nose close to the earth, sniffing at every pebble, and going all round the corpse and the widow whom we had tried in vain to separate from her husband’s body. On he went, round the well, round each of us. He looked like a hog rooting for its food in the mire. We stood watching him, without understanding.

  Suddenly he took a pinch of dust between his fingers, and, with a triumphant exclamation, threw it into the air as if he expected to see the figure of Larsan materialise from it. What new mystery had he solved? Why did he suddenly look so sure of himself? Why had his voice resumed its usual pitch? When he spoke to Darzac, his tone was perfectly normal.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed, there is no change,’ he said, and turning towards Mrs Rance, he added: ‘We must simply wait for the police. I hope they will be here soon.’

  She trembled. Rouletabille, though a mere boy, had alarmed her yet again.

  ‘Oh, yes, let them come. Let them take charge of everything. Let them think for us, no matter what happens!’ she exclaimed, taking my arm.

  Suddenly, we saw Old Jacques coming towards us, followed by three gendarmes. They were the Mortola sergeant and a couple of his men, who had been notified of the crime by Prince Galitch.

  ‘Here are the police. They say there’s been a crime!’ exclaimed Old Jacques, who knew nothing of what had happened.

  ‘Be quiet, Old Jacques,’ Rouletabille said, and when the breathless porter was near him, he whispered: ‘No change, Old Jacques.’ But Old Jacques had seen Bernier’s corpse, and answered: ‘Another death! Larsan’s doing!’

  ‘It is Fate,’ replies Rouletabille.

  Larsan and Fate are the same thing. But what did Rouletabille’s ‘no change’ mean, unless it was that Bernier’s death was merely another incident in the terrible mystery going on all round us?

  The gendarmes jabbered on in a patois incomprehensible to us. The sergeant told us that they had summoned the delegato, or special superintendent, who was usually at Ventimiglia railway station, but just happened to be in the neighbourhood. He would begin the inquiry, which would be continued by the examining magistrate who had also been notified.

  The delegato arrived. He was delighted, and had not even stayed to finish his lunch. A crime, a real crime, at the Chateau d’Hercule! What a stroke of luck! He was puffed up with importance. He told the sergeant to station one of his men at the door of the castle with orders to let no one pass. Then he knelt down beside the corpse. A gendarme dragged the widow away and shut her up in the Square Tower, where she wailed louder than ever.

  The delegato examined the wound and exclaimed in excellent French: ‘That’s a first-class stab-wound!’ He seemed quite pleased. If the murderer had been on hand, the delegato would doubtless have complimented him on his skill. He looked at us hard. Perhaps he was trying to pick out the perpetrator of the crime in order to express his admiration.

  ‘How did it happen?’ he asked, as he got up, evidently savouring the prospect of having to deal with such a crime. ‘It’s incredible,’ he said, ‘really incredible. I have been a delegato for five years, and this is the first time there has been a murder. The examining magistrate will be …’

  We mentally finished the sentence for him. ‘Delighted’ is what he was going to say. He brushed the white dust from his knees and mopped his brow, repeating, ‘Incredible,’ Recognising a doctor from Menton, who had just come to attend to Old Bob, the delegato exclaimed:

  ‘You’re just in time, doctor. Have a look at him and tell me what you think of a stab-wound like that, but take care not to move the body before the examining magistrate comes.’

  The doctor looked at the wound and gave us all the technical details we could possibly desire. It was a clean, upward thrust in the region of the heart. The point of the weapon had pierced a ventricle. While the delegato and the doctor were talking, Rouletabille was gazing fixedly at Mrs Rance, who was leaning on my arm. She avoided his eyes. He was trying to hypnotise her into saying nothing, and I knew she was burning to tell everything she knew.

  At the delegato’s request we went into the Square Tower. We took our places in Old Bob’s sitting room, where we were to be questioned and each of us called upon to give an account of the crime. The widow was questioned first, but she had nothing to tell. She had been with Old Bob in his room when we all rushed in like mad people. She had been there for more than an hour, and had left her husband in the porter’s lodge busy mending a rope.

  Curiously enough, I was less interested in what was going on and what I could see, than in what I could not see. I was waiting. Would Mrs Rance speak out? She kept staring out of the open window. A handkerchief had been placed over the dead man’s face, and a gendarme stood close by, on guard. Like me, our hostess was not much interested in what was going on. She was gazing distractedly about her.

  The delegato’s chatter grew wearisome. As the examination went on, his astonishment assumed alarming proportions, and the murder struck him as more and more remarkable. He was not far from considering it an impossibility, when it was Mrs Rance’s turn to be questioned.

  She had already opened her mouth to answer the first question, when Rouletabille quietly interposed:

  ‘Look at the shade beneath the eucalyptus tree.’

  ‘What about it?’ asked the delegato.

  ‘The weapon is there,’ replied Rouletabille. He jumped through the window into the courtyard, and, from amongst other blood-bespattered stones, picked out a shining, pointed one. He brandished it before our eyes.

  ‘It’s the oldest chisel in the world!’

  CHAPTER XIX

  Rouletabille closes the iron gates

  The weapon with which the crime had been committed belonged to Prince Galitch, but it had been stolen from him by Old Bob, and we could not forget that with his last breath Bernier had denounced Larsan as his murderer. Never had Old Bob and Larsan been so closely identified in our minds since the moment that Rouletabille had picked up the ‘oldest chisel in the world’ covered with Bernier’s blood.

  Mrs Rance realised at once that Old Bob’s fate lay in Rouletabille’s hands. He had but to say a word to the delegato about the strange events connected with Old Bob’s fall in the cave, state the reasons he might have for thinking that Old Bob and Larsan were one and the same person, and finally to repeat the latest victim’s accusation, for all the authorities’ suspicions to fall upon the unfortunate geologist’s bewigged head. Mrs Rance, though never doubting that the person passing himself off as Old Bob was, in fact, her uncle, imagined that Larsan was using the chisel to throw all the guilt, and also the dangerous weight of his own personality, upon Old Bob.

  Mrs Rance trembled for Old Bob and herself, trembled like an insect caught in an invisible web spun by Larsan between the castle walls. It seemed to her that if she gave the slightest sign, they were both lost, and that the loathsome spider was only waiting for that sign in order to pounce on them. Before, she had resolved to speak, but now she was dumb, and it was he
r turn to be uneasy lest Rouletabille should break his silence. Afterwards, she described to me what she had endured then, and she told me that she had experienced the Larsan terror to a greater degree than any of us.

  She was at first inclined to smile at the fear he inspired, but she had then become interested in the Yellow Room affair, because of the authorities’ failure to explain how Larsan had escaped. That interest became intense excitement once she learned of the drama in the Square Tower, because no one could make out how he had got in, but now, under the blazing noonday sun, Larsan had committed a murder almost before her eyes, within walls containing no one but herself, Darzac, Rouletabille, Sainclair, Old Bob and Bernier’s wife, and not one of them could possibly have been within an arm’s-length of the victim when he was stabbed.

  And Bernier had accused Larsan! Where was Larsan? In whose body? she asked herself, reasoning as I had taught her to do in connection with the mysterious gallery affair. She was under the archway, between Darzac and me, and Rouletabille was standing in front of us when the death-cry came from the shade of the eucalyptus tree, less than twenty feet away.

  As for Old Bob and Bernier’s wife, they had not been out of each other’s sight. If they were left out of the reckoning, there was no one who could possibly have killed Bernier. This time there was no telling, not only how Larsan had come or gone, but how he had been present at all. She began to realise how the thought of Larsan might terrify one beyond all endurance.

  There was nothing near the corpse but the stone chisel stolen by Old Bob. It was a terrible feeling, enough to give rise to the wildest suppositions. She read this conviction in Rouletabille’s eyes and in Robert Darzac’s. But Rouletabille’s first words showed her that his only object at present was to guard Old Bob against suspicion.

  Rouletabille was between the delegato and the examining magistrate, and as he talked he was holding the chisel in his hand. At this point, it seemed that, to all intents and purposes, the criminal must be one of the group already enumerated, but, to the evident pleasure of the magistrate, and the disgust of the delegato, Rouletabille proceeded to prove that the real and only criminal was the dead man himself! Since the four people under the archway and the two in Old Bob’s room had been watching one another when Bernier was murdered a few yards away, it followed that the only person who could have killed Bernier was Bernier himself.