The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 1 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  For some minutes, it seemed to me, I plied the knocker at Number 23, with hideous noise. Nothing stirred. Finally, one part of the door swung open a little, as for an eye. Whereupon I heard the shifting of a floor bolt, and both doors were swung open.

  Need I say that facing me stood the woman whom we have agreed to call Mlle Jezebel?

  She said to me: “And then, M. Armand?”

  “Mme Thevenet!” cried I. “She is still alive?”

  “She is alive,” replied my companion, looking up at me from under the lids of her greenish eyes. “But she is completely paralyzed.”

  I have never denied, Maurice, that Mlle Jezebel has a certain attractiveness. She is not old or even middle aged. Were it not that her complexion is as muddy as was the sky above us then, she would have been pretty.

  “And as for Claudine,” I said to her, “the daughter of madame – ”

  “You have come too late, M. Armand.”

  And well I remember that at this moment there rose up, in the mournful street outside, the tinkle of the banjo played by the street musician. It moved closer, playing a popular catch whose words run something thus:

  Oh, I come from Alabama

  With my banjo on my knee;

  I depart for Louisiana

  My Susannah for to see.

  Across the lips of mademoiselle flashed a smile of peculiar quality, like a razor cut before the blood comes.

  “Gold,” she whispered. “Ninety thousand persons, one hears, have gone to seek it. Go to California, M. Armand. It is the only place you will find gold.”

  This tune, they say, is a merry tune. It did not seem so, as the dreary twanging faded away. Mlle Jezebel, with her muddy blonde hair parted in the middle and drawn over her ears after the best fashion, faced me implacably. Her greenish eyes were wide open. Her old brown taffeta dress, full at the bust, narrow at the waist, rustled its wide skirts as she glided a step forward.

  “Have the kindness,” I said, “to stand aside. I wish to enter.”

  Hitherto in my life I had seen her docile and meek.

  “You are no relative,” she said. “I will not allow you to enter.”

  “In that case, I regret, I must.”

  “If you had ever spoken one kind word to me,” whispered mademoiselle, looking up from under her eyelids, and with her breast heaving, “one gesture of love – that is to say, of affection – you might have shared five million francs.”

  “Stand aside, I say!”

  “As it is, you prefer a doll-faced consumptive at Paris. So be it!”

  I was raging, Maurice; I confess it; yet I drew myself up with coldness.

  “You refer, perhaps, to Claudine Thevenet?”

  “And to whom else?”

  “I might remind you, mademoiselle, that the lady is pledged to my good friend Lieutenant Delage. I have forgotten her.”

  “Have you?” asked our Jezebel, with her eyes on my face and a strange hungry look in them. Mlle Jezebel added, with more pleasure: “Well, she will die. Unless you can solve a mystery.”

  “A mystery?”

  “I should not have said mystery, M. Armand. Because it is impossible of all solution. It is an Act of God!”

  Up to this time the glass-fronted doors of the vestibule had stood open behind her, against a darkness of closed shutters in the house. There breathed out of it an odor of unswept carpets, a sourness of stale living. Someone was approaching, carrying a lighted candle.

  “Who speaks?” called a man’s voice; shaky, but as French as Mlle Jezebel’s. “Who speaks concerning an Act of God?”

  I stepped across the threshold. Mademoiselle, who never left my side, immediately closed and locked the front doors. As the candle glimmer moved still closer in gloom, I could have shouted for joy to see the man whom (as I correctly guessed) I had come to meet.

  “You are M. Duroc, the lawyer!” I said. “You are my brother’s friend!”

  M. Duroc held the candle higher, to inspect me.

  He was a big, heavy man who seemed to sag in all his flesh. In compensation for his bald head, the grayish-brown mustache flowed down and parted into two hairy fans of beard on either side of his chin. He looked at me through oval gold-rimmed spectacles; in a friendly way, but yet frightened. His voice was deep and gruff, clipping the syllables, despite his fright.

  “And you” – clip-clip; the candle holder trembled – “you are Armand de Lafayette. I had expected you by the steam packet today. Well! You are here. On a fool’s errand, I regret.”

  “But why?” (And I shouted at him, Maurice.)

  I looked at mademoiselle, who was faintly smiling.

  “M. Duroc!” I protested. “You wrote to my brother. You said you had persuaded madame to repent of her harshness toward her daughter!”

  “Was that your duty?” asked the Jezebel, looking full at M. Duroc with her greenish eyes. “Was that your right?”

  “I am a man of law,” said M. Duroc. The deep monosyllables rapped, in ghostly bursts, through his parted beard. He was perspiring. “I am correct. Very correct! And yet – ”

  “Who nursed her?” asked the Jezebel. “Who soothed her, fed her, wore her filthy clothes, calmed her tempers and endured her interminable abuse? I did!”

  And yet, all the time she was speaking, this woman kept sidling and sidling against me, brushing my side, as though she would make sure of my presence there.

  “Well!” said the lawyer. “It matters little now! This mystery . . .”

  You may well believe that all these cryptic remarks, as well as reference to a mystery or an Act of God, had driven me almost frantic. I demanded to know what he meant.

  “Last night,” said M. Duroc, “a certain article disappeared.”

  “Well, well?”

  “It disappeared,” said M. Duroc, drawn up like a grenadier. “But it could not conceivably have disappeared. I myself swear this! Our only suggestions as to how it might have disappeared are a toy rabbit and a barometer.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I do not wish to be discourteous. But – ”

  “Am I mad, you ask?”

  I bowed. If any man can manage at once to look sagging and uncertain, yet stately and dignified, M. Duroc managed it then. And dignity won, I think.

  “Sir,” he replied, gesturing the candle toward the rear of the house, “Mme Thevenet lies there in her bed. She is paralyzed. She can move only her eyes or partially the lips, without speech. Do you wish to see her?”

  “If I am permitted.”

  “Yes. That would be correct. Accompany me.”

  And I saw the poor old woman, Maurice. Call her harridan if you like. It was a square room of good size, whose shutters had remained closed and locked for years. Can one smell rust? In that room, with faded green wallpaper, I felt I could.

  One solitary candle did little more than dispel shadow. It burned atop the mantelpiece well opposite the foot of the bed; and a shaggy man, whom I afterward learned to be a police officer, sat in a green-upholstered armchair by an unlighted coal fire in the fireplace grate, picking his teeth with a knife.

  “If you please, Dr. Harding!” M. Duroc called softly in English.

  The long and lean American doctor, who had been bending over the bed so as to conceal from our sight the head and shoulders of Madame Thevenet, turned round. But his cadaverous body – in such fashion were madame’s head and shoulders propped up against pillows – his cadaverous body, I say, still concealed her face.

  “Has there been any change?” persisted M. Duroc in English.

  “There has been no change,” replied the dark-complexioned Dr. Harding, “except for the worse.”

  “Do you want her to be moved?”

  “There has never been any necessity,” said the physician, picking up his beaver hat from the bed. He spoke dryly. “However, if you want to learn anything more about the toy rabbit or the barometer, I should hurry. The lady will die in a matter of hours, probably less.”

  And he stood t
o one side.

  It was a heavy bed with four posts and a canopy. The bed curtains, of some dullish-green material, were closely drawn on every side except the long side by which we saw Madame Thevenet in profile. Lean as a post, rigid, the strings of her cotton nightcap tightly tied under her chin, Madame Thevenet lay propped up there. But one eye rolled towards us, and it rolled horribly.

  Up to this time the woman we call the Jezebel had said little. She chose this moment again to come brushing against my side. Her greenish eyes, lids half-closed, shone in the light of M. Duroc’s candle. What she whispered was: “You don’t really hate me, do you?”

  Maurice, I make a pause here.

  Since I wrote the sentence, I put down my pen, and pressed my hands over my eyes, and once more I thought. But let me try again.

  I spent just two hours in the bedroom of Madame Thevenet. At the end of the time – oh, you shall hear why! – I rushed out of that bedroom, and out of Number 23 Thomas Street, like the maniac I was.

  The streets were full of people, of carriages, of omnibuses, at early evening. Knowing no place of refuge save the saloon from which I had come, I gave its address to a cabdriver. Since still I had swallowed no food, I may have been lightheaded. Yet I wished to pour out my heart to the friends who had bidden me return there. And where were they now?

  A new group, all new, lounged against the bar-counter under brighter gaslight and brighter paint. Of all those who smote me on the back and cheered, none remained save the ancient giant who had implied friendship with General Washington. He, alas, lay helplessly drunk with his head near a sawdust spitting box. Nevertheless I was so moved that I took the liberty of thrusting a handful of bank notes into his pocket. He alone remained.

  Wait, there was another!

  I do not believe he had remained there because of me. Yet M. Thaddeus Perley, still sitting alone at the little table by the pillar, with the open gas jet above, stared vacantly at the empty glass in his hand.

  He had named himself a foreigner; he was probably French. That was as well. For, as I lurched against the table, I was befuddled and all English had fled my wits.

  “Sir,” said I, “will you permit a madman to share your table?”

  M. Perley gave a great start, as though roused out of thought. He was now sober: this I saw. Indeed, his shiver and haggard face were due to lack of stimulant rather than too much of it.

  “Sir,” he stammered, getting to his feet, “I shall be – I shall be honored by your company.” Automatically he opened his mouth to call for a waiter; his hand went to his pocket; he stopped.

  “No, no, no!” said I. “If you insist, M. Perley, you may pay for the second bottle. The first is mine. I am sick at heart, and I would speak with a gentleman.”

  At these last words M. Perley’s whole expression changed. He sat down, and gave me a grave courtly nod. His eyes, which were his most expressive feature, studied my face and my disarray.

  “You are ill, M. de Lafayette,” he said. “Have you so soon come to grief in this – this civilized country?”

  “I have come to grief, yes. But not through civilization or the lack of it.” And I banged my fist on the table. “I have come to grief, M. Perley, through miracles or magic. I have come to grief with a problem which no man’s ingenuity can solve!”

  M. Perley looked at me in a strange way. But someone had brought a bottle of brandy, with its accessories. M. Perley’s trembling hand slopped a generous allowance into my glass, and an even more generous one into his own.

  “That is very curious,” he remarked, eying the glass. “A murder, was it?”

  “No. But a valuable document has disappeared. The most thorough search by the police cannot find it.”

  Touch him anywhere, and he flinched. M. Perley, for some extraordinary reason, appeared to think I was mocking him.

  “A document, you say?” His laugh was a trifle unearthly. “Come, now. Was it by any chance – a letter?”

  “No, no! It was a will. Three large sheets of parchment, of the size you call foolscap. Listen!”

  And as M. Perley added water to his brandy and gulped down about a third of it, I leaned across the table.

  “Mme Thevenet, of whom you may have heard me speak in this café, was an invalid. But (until the early hours of this morning) she was not bedridden. She could move, and walk about her room, and so on. She had been lured away from Paris and her family by a green-eyed woman named the Jezebel.

  “But a kindly lawyer of this city, M. Duroc, believed that madame suffered and had a bad conscience about her own daughter. Last night, despite the Jezebel, he persuaded madame at last to sign a will leaving all her money to this daughter.

  “And the daughter, Claudine, is in mortal need of it! From my brother and myself, who have more than enough, she will not accept a sou. Her affianced, Lieutenant Delage, is as poor as she. But, unless she leaves France for Switzerland, she will die. I will not conceal from you that Claudine suffers from that dread disease we politely call consumption.”

  M. Perley stopped with his glass again halfway to his mouth.

  He believed me now; I sensed it. Yet under the dark hair, tumbled on his forehead, his face had gone as white as his neat, mended shirt frill.

  “So very little a thing is money!” he whispered. “So very little a thing!”

  And he lifted the glass and drained it.

  “You do not think I am mocking you, sir?”

  “No, no!” says M. Perley, shading his eyes with one hand. “I knew myself of one such case. She is dead. Pray continue.”

  “Last night, I repeat, Mme Thevenet changed her mind. When M. Duroc paid his weekly evening visit with the news that I should arrive today, madame fairly chattered with eagerness and a kind of terror. Death was approaching, she said; she had a presentiment.”

  As I spoke, Maurice, there returned to me the image of that shadowy, arsenic-green bedroom in the shuttered house; and what M. Duroc had told me.

  “Madame,” I continued, “cried out to M. Duroc that he must bolt the bedroom door. She feared the Jezebel, who lurked but said nothing. M. Duroc drew up to her bedside a portable writing desk, with two good candles. For a long time madame spoke, pouring out contrition, self-abasement, the story of an unhappy marriage, all of which M. Duroc (sweating with embarrassment) was obliged to write down until it covered three large parchment sheets.

  “But it was done, M. Perley!

  “The will, in effect, left everything to her daughter, Claudine. It revoked a previous will by which all had been left (and this can be done in French law, as we both know) to Jezebel of the muddy complexion and the muddy yellow hair.

  “Well, then! . . .”

  “M. Duroc sallies out into the street, where he finds two sober fellows who come in. Madame signs the will, M. Duroc sands it, and the two men from the street affix their signatures as witnesses. Then they are gone. M. Duroc folds the will lengthways, and prepares to put it into his carpetbag. Now, M. Perley, mark what follows!

  “‘No, no, no!’ cries madame, with the shadow of her peaked nightcap wagging on the locked shutters beyond. ‘I wish to keep it – for this one night!’

  “‘For this one night, madame?’ asks M. Duroc.

  “‘I wish to press it against my heart,’ says Mme Thevenet. ‘I wish to read it once, twice, a thousand times! M. Duroc, what time is it?’

  “Whereupon he takes out his gold repeater, and opens it. To his astonishment it is one o’clock in the morning. Yet he touches the spring of the repeater, and its pulse beat rings one.

  “‘M. Duroc,’ pleads Mme Thevenet, ‘remain here with me for the rest of the night!’

  “‘Madame!’ cried M. Duroc, shocked to the very fans of his beard. ‘That would not be correct.’

  ‘“Yes, you are right,’ says madame. And never, swears the lawyer, has he seen her less bleary of eye, more alive with wit and cunning, more the great lady of ruin, than there in that green and shadowy and foul-smelling room.


  “Yet this very fact puts her in more and more terror of the Jezebel, who is never seen. She points to M. Duroc’s carpetbag.

  “‘I think you have much work to do, dear sir?’

  “M. Duroc groaned. ‘The Good Lord knows that I have!’

  “‘Outside the only door of this room,’ says madame, ‘there is a small dressing room. Set up your writing desk beside the door there, so that no one may enter without your knowledge. Do your work there; you shall have a lamp or many candles. Do it,’ shrieks madame, ‘for the sake of Claudine and for the sake of an old friendship!’

  “Very naturally, M. Duroc hesitated.

  “‘She will be hovering,’ pleads Mme Thevenet, pressing the will against her breast. ‘This I shall read and read and read, and sanctify with my tears. If I find I am falling asleep,’ and here the old lady looked cunning, ‘I shall hide it. But no matter! Even she cannot penetrate through locked shutters and a guarded door.’

  “Well, in fine, the lawyer at length yielded.

  “He set up his writing desk against the very doorpost outside that door. When he last saw madame, before closing the door, he saw her in profile with the green bed curtains drawn except on that side, propped up with a tall candle burning on a table at her right hand.

  “Ah, that night! I think I see M. Duroc at his writing desk, as he has told me, in an airless dressing room where no clock ticked. I see him, at times, removing his oval spectacles to press his smarting eyes. I see him returning to his legal papers, while his pen scratched through the wicked hours of the night.

  “He heard nothing, or virtually nothing, until five o’clock in the morning. Then, which turned him cold and flabby, he heard a cry which he describes as being like that of a deaf-mute.

  “The communicating door had not been bolted on Mme Thevenet’s side, in case she needed help. M. Duroc rushed into the other room.

  “On the table, at madame’s right hand, the tall candle had burned down to a flattish mass of wax over which still hovered a faint bluish flame. Madame herself lay rigid in her peaked nightcap. That revival of spirit last night, or remorse in her bitter heart, had brought on the last paralysis. Though M. Duroc tried to question her, she could move only her eyes.