The Case of the Climbing Rat: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “New skin?” said Gallois somewhat puzzled.

  “Yes, new skin had been grafted on his cheek. There is practically no limit to the amount one can graft. When I came to have a really good look,of course, I could see the scars underneath the hair.”

  Gallois did his best to speak calmly. “It was an old operation?”

  “Oh, no. I should say it had been done in the last few months.”

  He went on to give an experience of grafting when the wrong skin had been chosen for the nose of a patient, and subsequently hair, much to the patient’s embarrassment, began growing on the nose. However, he was recompensed by a considerable sum obtained in the courts.

  Aumade was highly amused at that anecdote. Gallois waited impatiently for his chuckles to subside. Briant came in with a fatal comment.

  “It’s by no means an uncommon mistake,” he said. “All the same the whole thing, however interesting it may be to me professionally, shows precisely why Letoque grew a beard and then dyed it.”

  “And what might have caused the original wound that made the grafting necessary?” Gallois asked.

  “One cannot say for a certainty,” Briant told him. “In all probability it was a burn. I thought I could detect faint traces.”

  Another minute and the final good-nights were over. Gallois lingered on the steps. His eyes rose to the clear heaven with its innumerable stars. Then he was shaking his head and his hand went out to Travers.

  “Thanks to you, my friend, there is no longer doubt. This Letoque is Bariche, and you will be able with a good conscience to relate the history to your grandchildren.”

  Travels smiled. “Not thanks to me. It’s Briant we have to thank.”

  “And it is I who should have known,” Gallois said. His shoulders rose and his palms spread in humiliation. “I am the imbecile. Everything under the nose and I announce that this Rionne is a nobody—an unimportant who is not worth the attention of me, Gallois.”

  Travers shook his head again.

  “In another day or two you will be back in Paris and saying to certain gentlemen, “Messieurs, this Bariche was not only a murderer, and a robber of women, he was also a magician, He burned himself to death at Auteuil and now, six months later, he has contrived to have someone else blow out his brains at Carliens!”

  Gallois was patting Travers on the shoulder and smiling with a mournful anticipation.

  “Yes” he said, and all at once was taking Travers’s arm. “And now, my friend, we arrange at once our own inquiries for to-morrow. Two days perhaps, as you say, and we complete for the last time the dossier of Bariche.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  TREASURE TROVE

  COFFEE had been ordered early for that morning. Charles was anxious to lend a hand in the day’s inquiries, for he was no longer appreciating a convalescence which, in fact, had ceased to exist. But Gallois was adamant. When he was of the age of Charles, he said, he would never have ventured to thrust himself in upon the decision of his superiors. Travers listened amusedly to their arguments. To one like himself who knew the whole history of Charles, there was always a joy in the brief squabbles, though it was Charles who was the main amusement, with his shrewd discernment of when to be the deferential subordinate and when the adopted son.

  “You will remain here and continue to rest,” was the last word of Gallois.

  “Then I shall swim,” said Charles.

  Gallois made a gesture of indifference. “If you wish to excite yourself contrary to the orders of the doctor, it is your affair. The cemeteries are full of such.”

  “Then I shall write a letter to Dr. Debran and Gabrielle,” Charles said, and, with a quick look at Travers, “unless you, yourself, have already written as you promised.”

  Gallois looked about to explode with exasperation. Travers cut in quickly.

  “Write your letter by all means, Charles, and send our very best wishes. But you cannot post the letter here. We are supposed to be at Mariette and Gabrielle would feel very badly hurt. And what about those stitches in that head of yours?”

  Charles said they were of no consequence. Dr. Debran had told him that they could be removed in a week or ten days.

  Gallois was impatient to be off, and it was to the Hôtel du Sud that he and Travers made their way. Travers, who knew the waiter, was to do the talking. It was the proprietor, however, a M. Cabon, whom they happened to see first. Travers said they had come in the matter of Rionne. First as to his voice.

  “A peculiar sort of voice,” Cabon said after considerable thought.

  “You will pardon me,” broke in Gallois, “but was it anything like this?”

  The imitation he gave quite astonished his hearer.

  “Then you knew this M. Rionne?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Gallois off-handedly. “But now we want to obtain some information that requires absolute accuracy—the movements of Rionne last Tuesday week.”

  Cabon gasped. The gentleman was asking the impossible.

  A couple of minutes later there was a miniature conference in the dining-room. An elderly domestique was there, a boy, Cabon himself and the waiter. A hubbub of argument and there emerged the fact that on that Tuesday M. Rionne for the first and only time had been late for his dinner. He arrived home at nine o’clock and announced that he had already dined. And nine o’clock, as Gallois knew, coincided with the arrival at Carliens of the autobus from Toulon.

  “And now on the Thursday,” he said. “Two days, that is, after that Tuesday.”

  But another minute or two of hubbub produced nothing except the certainty that Rionne had spent the afternoon out of the hotel, which in fine weather was his usual practice. Gallois, who still had another string to his bow, expressed his satisfaction. A tip of appreciation was bestowed on the staff.

  “And where now?” asked Travers. “Furolles?”

  “One moment,” Gallois told him. “There are difficulties. We arrive at a time when it requires an agility to keep this Bariche to ourselves. If we interview M. Cippe and obtain perhaps information, then consider what might happen. M. Aumade decides for reasons of his own to bring Cippe here and question him, and you and I are at the examination. He observes us—this Cippe—and remarks that he has already given us the information which M. Aumade demands. Then M. Aumade says to himself, ‘What is this? Things arrange themselves behind my back.’”

  “Then why not go and see Aumade now?” suggested Travers. “Say there ought to be absolute certainty that Rionne was at Furolles, and since you have discovered his peculiar voice, you have only to ring Cippe and he should be able to give you that final proof.”

  Half an hour later Gallois joined Travers and Charles on the beach. The voice had been verified by Cippe, he said, and Aumade had at the same time arranged that Cippe was to be present that afternoon at the preliminary examination of Mme Perthus.

  “He hinted also a surprise which he keeps, as you say, up the sleeve,” Gallois said. “The afternoon promises indeed an amusement, and it is with regret to us, my dear Charles, that you will not be able to observe the excellent methods of our friend Aumade. But now we arrange our information.”

  All the next hour Travers kept thinking that the three were like adventurers who had hunted for treasure and unearthed it. Now it was as if they were in some lonely spot and examining each item with gloating eyes and caressing fingers. And the pick of the treasure and the most miraculous find of all was the fact that the informer, though no priest, had been discovered.

  Gallois with almost a solemnity was writing in his note-book the sequence of events, some undoubted facts and some never to be proved. First there was Bariche who, having left a corpse for himself, made his doubtless prearranged way to Switzerland with the money of his latest victim. But in lighting the fire which ought to have entirely wiped out the Auteuil villa, he received a nasty burn on the face which would not only make him a marked man for life, but would put a very definite end to his highly profitable Bluebeard career. But the
n he ran up against Rionne. Skin was grafted and time was left for the scars to heal and the beard to grow before Bariche set out to resume in France his profitable career.

  What Charles suggested was that Bariche had swindled Rionne out of the proposed fee for the operation, for practically no money had been in the possession of Rionne at his death. A man of the cold-blooded and murderous treachery of Bariche would not have thought twice about a swindle of that sort, and then Rionne, with his special knowledge as a surgeon, then or previously, put two and two together, and either from the newspaper description or from what Bariche himself had chanced to reveal, had formed the opinion that his swindling patient was either Bariche or someone very much like him. Then he had the good luck to spot him in Carliens. He was hard up and he decided to get his own back with interest.

  But it was not professional etiquette that made Rionne hesitate about an open personal denunciation of Bariche. Like Bariche, Rionne himself had very few scruples. His primary concern was that in making the revelation his own record should not be unearthed by the police. Therefore he was going to induce a third party to make the disclosures and then collect the reward himself, probably insisting on cash. That third party was undoubtedly the woman with whom he was discussing his plans in Cippe’s restaurant at Furolles. As for his choice of the Syndicat building in Toulon for the rendezvous, that now appeared natural. Rionne was probably a stranger in Toulon. He would have gone to the Syndicat d’Initiative for information and it would have struck him as an excellent place at which to meet Gallois.

  Now how had Rionne become aware of the woman, and the desirability and likelihood of her co-operation with himself? Only by spying on Bariche as soon as his preliminary plans were made. And who was the woman? Doubtless either Mme Perthus or Mme Brassier, with enormous odds on the former. And what did he tell her? He gave her vague hints perhaps that Letoque was not all he seemed and gradually led up to the supposedly dead Bariche, and so to a sudden fearful terror in her mind. There would be a proof he could suggest to her. The dyed hair was a minor one and she could watch his reactions if she refused after all to realize her securities and to leave Carliens.

  But the chief thing was that either by chance or because his spyings were not sufficiently guarded, Letoque himself had spotted Rionne. Then there was a game of the watcher being watched, and it was Rionne who ended up with a knife in his back. Mme Perthus heard the news next morning and at once must have been in a condition that was almost beyond panic. She must have guessed that all that Rionne told her was the truth and at once she was fleeing to Toulon where Letoque should never again clap eyes on her. Then she read the news of his death and the same day was indiscreet enough to telephone her bank manager that she had changed her mind about her securities.

  “To complete the dossier there remains one thing,” Gallois said, and his knuckles rapped the note-book. “Here we shall write down the name of the killer of Bariche. That alone is necessary to vindicate myself in Paris.”

  Travers was suddenly frowning. Surely the dossier could never be really completed unless Aumade knew the whole truth? After all he was in charge of the inquiry into the murders of both men. And that was a prospect which Gallois was finding decidedly unattractive. Having begun with necessary prevarication and concealment, he would cut a remarkably poor figure in the eyes of Aumade if the whole truth had finally to come out.

  “You will pardon the suggestion,” said Charles in his careful English, “but is it our affair to discover who it was that killed Bariche? Is it not sufficient for you to prove to certain ones in Paris that what they pleased to call fantastic was after all the truth?”

  Gallois looked horrified. His hands rose quiveringly, then fell. The eyes that he turned on Travers were full of pain.

  “Consider this Charles. Him I endeavour to make a someone. Now I demand of you, where is the honour and the pride?” Then he was whipping round at Charles. “So, what you once begin it is not necessary to finish. You leave things in the air because perhaps you desire yourself to return to Paris.” He made a gesture of the profoundest contempt. “You, if you wish, return to Paris and leave this country of which you have already expressed a distaste. For me there remains the assassin of Bariche. Moi, je suis Gallois. Je reste.”

  “Et moi, aussi,” said the unruffled Charles. “Tout de même—” He broke off. “Nevertheless as one says in English, he is not an assassin, this one who kills Bariche. He does not merit the guillotine. He merits instead the reward for which Rionne was himself so anxious.”

  “For my part,” said Gallois with enormous patience, “I am two men, but two men who do not make intrusion upon themselves. When I am a philosopher I am not the law, and when I am the law I am not a philosopher or indeed a philanthrope. At the moment I am Gallois and I demand the assassin, no matter who that assassin is.”

  The shrug of Charles’s shoulders admitted all that. Nevertheless, he said, it was a problem that sooner or later would present itself to the law. Suppose, for example, he himself, or even M. Travers, had killed Bariche. Then what would be the views of Gallois on the matter?

  “Parlous d’autre chose,” Gallois told him with cold finality. Travers once more cut placatingly in.

  “Enough of the present. Why not celebrate the past and drink to the future?”

  In a couple of minutes the three were at a table on the veranda of the hotel. The clouds had gone from the brow of Gallois and he was his old mournful self again.

  Two o’clock came, which was the hour for the examination of the widow, Natalie Perthus. There were to be tremendous surprises, the chief of which was the enormous change in her attitude. The previous afternoon on her return to the Villa Vézac she had avoided awkward questioning by taking refuge in tears. Now, while still somewhat nervous, she was a woman with a story that had been well rehearsed.

  Aumade had anticipated a most profitable afternoon. He would ask her how she came to have discovered in Carliens that morning that the aunt at Toulon was ill. Then having received that repetition of false information he proposed to tell her with all the terrifying accompaniment of mystery just what she had written to that relative. Then, of course, would come the old game of threats of arrest only to be avoided by a complete confession and the absolute truth.

  But all his guns were spiked well ahead, and Aumade himself was to some extent responsible, for the specious courtesy and warmth of his greeting and his renewed sympathies made Mme Perthus at once lose much of the nervousness that she had felt on entering the room. She had something to confess, she said, and she hoped she might be forgiven. In the stress of the previous afternoon she had given wrong information and she had been ashamed of herself ever since. The truth was this. She had all at once grown tired of Carliens and on that Tuesday morning made up her mind to spend a few days in Toulon with her relative. But Marthe was always exasperatingly curious and began asking if the relative was ill, and out of annoyance she had fed the curiosity with anything that occurred on the spur of the moment. But once she had let Marthe imagine she was going to a sick aunt, the same story had to be repeated on the return in the presence of both Marthe and the police.

  “Then,” said Mme Perthus, “I was afraid of what I had told the police, who might perhaps find out it was a lie, so I wrote a letter to my cousin asking her to support me in this lie, but my cousin, who is a good woman and very scrupulous by nature, insisted that I confess the truth.”

  So flabbergasted was Aumade that all he could do was to stammer a mild reprimand for the deception. But the biggest of his guns to be spiked was the cousin herself, who had been brought from Toulon and was waiting in the adjoining room for the anticipated confrontation. Something, he knew, had gone badly wrong. The letter that had been opened must have been clumsily resealed. The two women had had their suspicions and had concocted their story.

  “We will leave it at that,” he said. “Will you inform us, however, of the exact relationship between yourself and M. Gustave Rionne?”

&nb
sp; She was wary at once and leaned forward with a curious gesture of deafness.

  Aumade repeated the question and she shook her head.

  “I have never heard of this M. Rionne.”

  “As you wish,” said Aumade with a slight impatience. “But will you tell us your exact whereabouts on the afternoon of last Thursday week?”

  A kind of tranquillity came over her at once, though she had to frown in thought before she could suddenly remember. Thursday week was a long time ago and yet—of course!—she had spent the afternoon with her cousin at Toulon.

  “Then perhaps someone was impersonating you,” Aumade said ironically. “Unless perhaps you got off the autobus at Furolles and waited there. We have here, for instance, a gentleman who claims to have seen you that afternoon at Furolles.”

  “But it is impossible,” she said.

  “Nevertheless you will permit that we bring in this gentleman?” said Aumade, and almost at once Cippe was in the room.

  “Have you ever seen this lady before?” he was asked.

  Cippe looked, looked again and then was shaking his head.

  “Have the goodness to stand, madame,” Aumade said.

  But Cippe had seen enough. It was not the lady he said, and if madame would pardon the remark, it had been a much younger lady than herself.

  Gallois was smiling ironically. The veil that Mme Perthus had worn at Furolles had magnificently performed its work. Aumade should have made her dress as she had been at Furolles, and the last thing Cippe should have been allowed to see was her face.