The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “Please tell me…”

  “Well, you see… It all seemed so strange, I couldn’t sleep when I went back to bed, I lay awake, puzzled, uneasy. It was broad daylight before I noticed that the screen which stands in front of my safe was out of place. The safe is built into the solid wall, you know. I got up then, and found the safe door an inch or so ajar. Whoever opened it last night, closed it hastily and neglected to shoot the bolts.”

  “And your jewels, of course—?”

  She pronounced with unbroken composure: “They have left me nothing, monsieur.”

  Duchemin groaned and hung his head. “I knew it!” he declared. “No credit to me, however. Naturally, whoever stole my candle and knocked me out didn’t break into the house for the fun of it… I imagine that, what with finding me insensible, waking Jean up, and getting me back in my room, you must have been away from yours fully half an hour.”

  “Quite that long.”

  “It couldn’t have been better arranged for the thieves,” he declared. “If only I had stayed in my room—!”

  “If you had, it might possibly have been worse—mightn’t it? The burglar—or burglars—knew precisely the location of the safe. They were coming to my room, and if they had found me awake… I think it quite possible, my friend, that your appetite for cigarettes may have saved my life.”

  “There’s consolation in that,” he confessed—“if it’s any to you, who have lost so much.”

  “But perhaps I shall get my jewellery back.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “There’s always the chance, isn’t there? And I believe I have a clue, as they call it, an indefinite one but something to work from, perhaps.”

  “What is that?”

  “It seems to me it must have been what the police at home call ‘an inside job’; because whoever it was apparently knew the combination of the safe.”

  “You mean it wasn’t broken open. That signifies nothing. I’ve never seen yours, but I know something about safes, and I’ll undertake to open it without the combination within ten minutes.”

  “You, Monsieur Duchemin?”

  He nodded gloomily. “It’s no great trick, once one knows it; with an ordinary safe, that is, such as you’re apt to find in a private home. Have you looked for finger-prints?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Have you any idea how the thieves broke in?”

  “Through this very window, I imagine. You see, I was up early and, in my agitation, dressed hurriedly and came downstairs hours before I usually do. The servants were already up, but hadn’t opened the living rooms for the day. I myself found this window unlatched. The fastening is insecure, you see; it has been out of order for some time.”

  Duchemin was on his feet, examining the latch. “True,” he said; “but might not the wind—?”

  “There was no wind to speak of last night, monsieur, and what there was didn’t blow from that quarter.” She added as Duchemin stepped out through the window: “Where are you going?”

  “To look for footprints on the tiling. It was misting when I went to bed, and with the mud—”

  “But there was a heavy shower just before daybreak. If the thieves had left any tracks on the terrasse, the rain must have washed them clean away. I have already looked.”

  With a baffled gesture, Duchemin turned back to her side.

  “You have communicated with the police, of course.”

  She interrupted with an accent almost of impatience: “I have told nobody but you, monsieur, not even my mother and Louise.”

  “But why?”

  “I wanted to consult you first, and…” She broke off sharply to ask: “Yes, Jean: what is it?”

  The footman had entered to bring her cards over which Eve de Montalais arched her brows.

  “Show the gentlemen in, please.”

  The servant retired.

  “The men from Paris, madame?”

  “Yes. You will excuse me—?”

  Duchemin bowed. “But one word: You can hardly do better than put the case in the hands of these gentlemen. They are apt to be of a good order of intelligence when selected to serve bankers, you know.”

  “I understand,” she replied in her cool, sweet voice.

  She went to meet the men in the middle of the room. Duchemin turned back to the window, where, standing in the recess, with the light behind him, he could watch and reflect without his interest or emotions, becoming too apparent. And he was grateful for that moment of respite in which to compose and prepare himself. Within an hour, he knew, within a day or so at most, he must be under arrest, charged with the theft of the Montalais jewels, damned by his yesterday as much as by every turn of circumstantial evidence.…

  The men whom Jean ushered in proved to be, outwardly, what Duchemin had expected: of a class only too well-known to him, plain men of the people, unassuming, well-trained and informed, sceptical; not improbably shrewd hands in the game of thief-taking.

  Saluting Madame de Montalais with calculated ceremony, one acting as spokesman offered to present their credentials. Duchemin had a start of surprise to dissemble when he saw the woman wave these aside.

  “It is not necessary, messieurs,” she said. “I regret very much to have inconvenienced you, although of course it will make no difference in your bill; but I have brought you here to no purpose. The necessity for my contemplated journey no longer exists.”

  There were expressions of surprise to which she put an end with the words, accompanied by a charming smile: “Frankly, messieurs, I am afraid you will have to make allowances for the traditional inconsistency of my sex: I have simply changed my mind.”

  There was nothing more to be said. Openly more than a little mystified, the men withdrew.

  The smile with which she dismissed them lingered, delightful and enigmatic, as Eve recognised the stupefaction with which Duchemin moved to remonstrate with her.

  “Madame!” he cried in a low voice of wonder and protest—“why did you do that? Why let them go without telling them—?”

  “I must have had a reason, don’t you think, Monsieur Duchemin?”

  “I don’t understand you, madame. You treat the loss of jewels as if it must be a secret private to ourselves, to you and to me!”

  “Possibly that is my wish, monsieur.” He gave a gesture of bewilderment. “Perhaps,” she continued, meeting his blank stare with eyes in which amusement gave place to a look almost apologetic yet utterly kind—“perhaps I have more faith in you…”

  Duchemin bowed his head over hands so tightly knitted that the knuckles were white with strain.

  “You would not have faith,” he said in a low voice, “if you knew—”

  She interrupted in a gentle voice: “Are you sure?”

  “—What I must tell you!”

  “My friend,” she said: “tell me nothing that would distress you.”

  He did not immediately reply; the struggle going on within him was only too plainly betrayed by engorged veins upon his forehead and exceeding pallor of countenance.

  “If you had told those detectives,” he said at length, without looking up, “you must have known very soon. They must have found me out without too much delay. And who in the world would ever believe anybody else guilty when they learned that André Duchemin, your guest for three weeks, was only an alias for Michael Lanyard, otherwise the Lone Wolf?”

  “But you are wrong, monsieur,” she replied, without the long pause of surprise he had anticipated. “I should not have believed you guilty.”

  Dumb with wonder, he showed her a haggard face. And she had for him, in the agony and the abasement of his soul, still quivering from the rack of emotion that alone could have extorted his confession—she had for him the half-smile, tender and
compassionate, that it is given to most men to see but once in a lifetime on the lips and in the eyes of the woman beloved. “Then you knew—!”

  “I suspected.”

  “How long—?”

  “Since the night those strange people were here and tried to make you unhappy with their stupid talk of the Lone Wolf. I suspected, then; and when I came to know you better, I felt quite sure…”

  “And now you know—yet hesitate to turn me over to the police!”

  “No such thought has ever entered my head. You see—I’m afraid you don’t quite understand me—I have faith in you.”

  “But why?”

  She shook her head. “You mustn’t ask me that.”

  At the end of a long moment he said in a broken voice: “Very well: I won’t… Not yet awhile… But this great gift of faith in me—I can’t accept that without trying to repay it.”

  “If you accept, my friend, you repay.”

  “No,” said Michael Lanyard—“that’s not enough. Your jewels must come back to you, if I go to the ends of the earth to find them. And”—man’s undying vanity would out—“if there’s anyone living who can find them for you, it is I.”

  CHAPTER XI

  AU REVOIR

  Early in the afternoon Eve de Montalais made it possible for Lanyard to examine the safe in her boudoir without exciting comment in the household. He was nearly an hour thus engaged, but brought back to the drawing-room, in addition to the heavy magnifying glass which he had requisitioned to eke out his eyesight, only a face of disappointment.

  “Nothing,” he retorted to Eve. “Evidently a gentleman of rigidly formal habits, our friend of last night—wouldn’t dream of calling at any hour without his gloves on.… I’ve been over every inch of the safe, outside and in, and the frame of the screen too, but—nothing. However, I’ve been thinking a bit as well, I hope to some purpose.”

  The woman nodded intently as he drew up his chair and sat down.

  “You have made a plan,” she stated rather than enquired.

  “I won’t call it that, not yet. We’ve got too little to go on. But one or two things seem fairly obvious, therefore must not be left out of consideration. Assuming for the sake of argument that Mr. Whitaker Monk and his lot had a hand in this—”

  “Ah! you think that?”

  “I admit I’m unfair. But first they quarrel with my sense of the normal by being too confoundedly picturesque, too rich and brilliant, too sharp and smart and glib, too—well!—theatrical; like characters from the cast of what your American theatre calls a crook melodrama. And then, if their intentions were so blessed pure and praiseworthy, what right had they to make so many ambiguous gestures?”

  “Leading the talk up to my jewels, you mean?”

  “I mean every move they made: all too suspiciously smooth, too well rehearsed in effect. That stop to dine in Nant with the storm coming on, when they could easily have made Millau before it broke: what else was that for but to stage a ‘break-down’ at your door at a time when it would be reasonable to beg the shelter and hospitality of your roof? Then Madame la Comtesse de Lorgnes—whoever she is—must get her feet wet, an excellent excuse for asking to be introduced to your boudoir, so she may change her shoes and stockings and incidentally spy out the precise location of your safe. And when their ear is hauled into the garage, Mr. Phinuit must go to help, which gives him a chance to stroll at leisure through the lower part of the house and note every easy way of breaking in. Mr. Monk casually notes your likeness to the little girl he once met, he says, in your father’s office; something you tell me you don’t recall at all. And that places you as the veritable owner of the Anstruther jewels, and no mistake. Then—Madame de Lorgnes guiding the conversation by secret signals which I intercept—somebody recognises me as the Lone Wolf, in spite of the work of years and a new-grown beard; and you are obliquely warned that, if your jewels should happen to disappear it’s more than likely the Lone Wolf will prove to be the guilty party. At any rate, they will be ever so much obliged if you’ll believe he is, it’ll save so much trouble all around. Finally: when your ex-chauffeur—what’s his name—?”

  “Albert Dupont.”

  “A name as unique in France as John Smith is in England… When Albert Dupont tries to take my life, as a simple and natural act of vendetta—”

  “You really think it was that?”

  “I recognised the beast when he let off that pistol at my head. I was in his way here, and he owed me one besides for my interference at Montpellier that night.… When Dupont half murders me and I’m laid up on your hands for nearly a month, our friends with designs on your jewels thoughtfully wait before they strike till I am able to be up and about, consequently in a position to be accused of a crime which no one would put past the Lone Wolf. Oh, I think we can fairly count Mr. Monk and his friends in on this coup!”

  “I am sure of it,” said Eve de Montalais. “But Albert: is he one of them, their employee or confrère?”

  “Dupont? I fancy not. I may be wrong, but I believe he is entirely on his own—quite independent of the Monk party.”

  “But his attack on us at Montpellier, and later on you here, coming at about the same time as their visit—”

  “Coincidence, if you ask me. The weight of probability is against any collusion between the two parties.”

  “Please explain…”

  “Dupont is an Apache of Paris. The language he used to me when we fought in that carriage at Montpellier was the slang of the lowest order of Parisian criminal, used spontaneously, under stress of great excitement, with no intent to mislead. These other people were—if anything but poor misjudged lambs—swell mobsmen, the élite of the criminal world. The two castes never work together because they can’t trust each other. The swell mobsman works with his head and only kills when cornered. The Apache kills first, as a matter of instinct, and then thinks—to the best of his ability. The Apache knows the swell mobsman can outwit him. The swell mobsman knows the Apache will assassinate him at the first hint of a suspicion of his good faith. So they rarely if ever make use of each other.”

  “You say ‘rarely.’ But possibly in this instance?”

  “I think not. Dupont was employed as your chauffeur, you’ve told me, upwards of a month. He had ample opportunity to familiarise himself with the premises and pass the information on, if acting in connivance with those others. But we know he didn’t, or they would never have shown themselves here in order to secure information they couldn’t have got otherwise.”

  “I see, monsieur,” said the woman. “Then you think the thief may have been any one of the Monk party—”

  “Or several of them acting in concert,” Lanyard interrupted, smiling.

  “Or Albert.”

  “Not Dupont. Unless I underestimate him gravely he is incapable of such finesse. He is a thug first, a thief afterwards. He would have killed me out of hand if it had been he who had me at his mercy, down here, in the dark. Nor would he have been able to open the safe without using an explosive. That, indeed, is why, as I understand him, Dupont attacked you at Montpellier. If he could have disposed of you there, he would have returned here to work upon the safe and blow it at his leisure, fobbing the servants off with some yarn, or if they proved too troublesome intimidating them, killing one or two if necessary.”

  “But why has he made no other attempt—?”

  “You forget the police have been making the neighbourhood fairly warm for him. Besides, he wanted me out of the way before he tried housebreaking. If he had succeeded in murdering me that night, I don’t doubt he would have burglarised the château soon after. But he failed; the police were stirred up to renewed activity; and if Monsieur Dupont is not now safely back in Paris, hiding in some warren of Montmartre or Belleville, I am much mistaken in the man—a type I know well.”
r />   “Eliminating Albert then—”

  “There remains the Monk lot.”

  “You are satisfied that one or all of its members committed the theft last night?”

  “Not less than two, probably; say Phinuit, at a venture, and his alleged brother, Jules, the chauffeur, both Americans, adventurous, intelligent and resourceful. Yes; I believe that.”

  “And your plan of campaign is based on this conclusion?”

  “That’s a big name”—Lanyard’s smile was diffident, a plea for suspended judgment on his lack of inventiveness—“for a lame idea. I believe our only course is to let them believe they have been successful in every way, and so lull them into carelessness with a false sense of security.”

  A wrinkle appeared between the woman’s eyebrows. “How do you propose to accomplish that?” she asked in a voice that betrayed ready antagonism to what her intuition foresaw.

  “Very simply. They hoped to shift suspicion on to my shoulders. Well, let them believe they have done so.”

  The waiting hostility developed in a sharp negative: “Ah, no!”

  “But yes,” Lanyard insisted. “It’s so simple. Nobody here knows as yet that your jewels have been stolen, only you and I. Very well: you will not discover your loss and announce it till tomorrow morning. By that time André Duchemin will have disappeared mysteriously. The room to which he will retire tonight will be found vacant in the morning, his bed unslept in. Obviously the scoundrel would not fly the château between two suns without a motive. Inform the police of the fact and let them draw their own conclusions: before evening all France will know that André Duchemin is suspected of stealing the Montalais jewels, and is a fugitive from justice.”

  “No, monsieur,” the woman iterated decidedly.

  “You will observe,” he continued, lightly persuasive, “it is André Duchemin who will be accused, madame, not Michael Lanyard, never the Lone Wolf! The heart of man is in truth a dark forest, and vanity the only light to guide us through its mazes. I confess I am jealous of my reputation as a reformed character. But André Duchemin is merely a name, a nom de guerre; you may saddle him with all the crimes in the calendar if you like, and welcome. For when I say he will disappear tonight, I mean it quite literally: André Duchemin will nevermore be heard of in this world.”