In a complete silence Waberski took his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. The game was up. He had hoped to make his terms, but his bluff was called. He had not one atom: of faith in his own accusation. There was but one course for him to take, and that was to withdraw his charge and plead that his affection for his sister-in-law had led him into a gross mistake. But Boris Waberski was never the man for that. He had that extra share of cunning which shipwrecks always the minor rogue. He was unwise enough to imagine that Hanaud might be bluffing too.
He drew his chair a little nearer to the table. He tittered and nodded at Hanaud confidentially.
“You say ‘if I tell you’,” he said smoothly. “Yes, but you do not tell me, Monsieur Hanaud — no, not at all. On the contrary, what you say is this: ‘My friend Waberski, here is a difficult matter which, if exposed, means a great scandal, and of which the issue is doubtful. There is no good in stirring the mud.’”
“Oh, I say that?” Hanaud asked, smiling pleasantly.
Waberski felt sure of his ground now. “Yes, and more than that. You say, ‘You have been badly treated, my friend Waberski, and if you will now have a little talk with that hard one your niece—’” And his chair slid back against the bookcase and he sat gaping stupidly like a man who has been shot.
Hanaud had sprung to his feet, he stood towering above the table, his face suddenly dark with passion.
“Oh, I say all that, do I?” he thundered. “I came all the way from Paris to Dijon to preside over a little bargain in a murder case! I — Hanaud! Oh! ho! ho! I’ll teach you a lesson for that! Read this!” and bending forward he thrust out the paper with the official seal. “It is the report of the analysts. Take it, I tell you, and read it!”
Waberski reached out a trembling arm, afraid to venture nearer. Even when he had the paper in his hands, they shook so he could not read it. But since he had never believed in his charge that did not matter.
“Yes,” he muttered, “no doubt I have made a mistake.”
Hanaud caught the word up. “Mistake! Ah, there’s a fine word! I’ll show you what sort of a mistake you have made. Draw up your chair to this table in front of me! So! And take a pen — so! And a sheet of paper — so! and now you write for me a letter.”
“Yes, yes,” Waberski agreed. All the bravado had gone from his bearing, all the insinuating slyness. He was in a quiver from head to foot. “I will write that I am sorry.”
“That is not necessary,” roared Hanaud. “I will see to it that you are sorry. No! You write for me what I dictate to you and in English. You are ready? Yes? Then you begin. ‘Dear Sirs.’ You have that?”
“Yes, yes,” said Waberski, scribbling hurriedly. His head was in a whirl. He flinched as he wrote under the towering bulk of the detective. He had as yet no comprehension of the goal to which he was being led.
“Good! ‘Dear Sirs,’ “Hanaud repeated. “But we want a date for that letter. April 30th, eh? That will do. The day Madame Harlowe’s will was read and you found you were left no money. April 30th — put it in. So! Now we go on. ‘Dear Sirs, Send me at once one thousand pounds by the recommended post, or I make some awkwardnesses—’”
Waberski dropped his pen and sprang back out of his chair.
“I don’t understand — I can’t write that — There is an error — I never meant—” he stammered, his hands raised as if to ward off an attack.
“Ah, you never meant the blackmail!” Hanaud cried savagely. “Ah! Ha! Ha! It is good for you that I now know that! For when, as you put it so delicately to Mademoiselle, the moment comes for the extenuating pleas, I can rise up in the Court and urge it. Yes! I will say: ‘Mr. the President, though he did the blackmail, poor fellow, he never meant it. So please to give him five years more!’” and with that Hanaud swept across the room like a tornado and flung open the door behind which Frobisher was waiting.
“Come!” he said, and he led Jim into the room. “You produce the two letters he wrote to your firm, Monsieur Frobisher. Good!”
But it was not necessary to produce them. Boris Waberski had dropped into a chair and burst into tears. There was a little movement of discomfort made by everyone in that room except Hanaud; and even his anger dropped. He looked at Waberski in silence.
“You make us all ashamed. You can go back to your hotel,” he said shortly. “But you will not leave Dijon, Monsieur Waberski, until it is decided what steps we shall take with you.”
Waberski rose to his feet and stumbled blindly to the door. “I make my apologies,” he stammered. “It is all a mistake. I am very poor — I meant no harm,” and without looking at anyone he got himself out of the room.
“That type! He at all events cannot any more think that Dijon is dull,” said Hanaud, and once more he adventured on the dangerous seas of the English language. “Do you know what my friend Mister Ricardo would have said? No? I tell you. He would have said, ‘That fellow! My God! What a sauce!’”
Those left in the room, Betty, Ann Upcott, and Jim Frobisher, were in a mood to welcome any excuse for laughter. The interdict upon the house was raised, the charge against Betty proved of no account, the whole bad affair was at an end. Or so it seemed. But Hanaud went quickly to the door and closed it, and when he turned back there was no laughter at all upon his face.
“Now that that man has gone,” he said gravely, “I have something to tell you three which is very serious. I believe that, though Waberski does not know it, Madame Harlowe was murdered by poison in this house on the night of April the 27th.”
The statement was received in a dreadful silence. Jim Frobisher stood like a man whom some calamity has stunned. Betty leaned forward in her seat with a face of horror and incredulity; and then from the arm-chair by the door where Ann Upcott was sitting there burst a loud, wild cry.
“There was someone in the house that night,” she cried.
Hanaud swung round to her, his eyes blazing. “And it is you who tell me that, Mademoiselle?” he asked in a curious, steady voice.
“Yes. It’s the truth,” she cried with a sort of relief in her voice, that at last a secret was out which had grown past endurance. “I am sure now. There was a stranger in the house.” And though her face was white as paper, her eyes met Hanaud’s without fear.
CHAPTER 8
THE BOOK
THE TWO STARTLING declarations, one treading upon the heels of the other, set Jim Frobisher’s brain whirling. Consternation and bewilderment were all jumbled together. He had no time to ask “how,” for he was already asking “What next?” His first clear thought was for Betty, and as he looked at her, a sharp anger against both Hanaud and Ann Upcott seized and shook him. Why hadn’t they both spoken before? Why must they speak now? Why couldn’t they leave well alone?
For Betty had fallen back in the window-seat, her hands idle at her sides and her face utterly weary and distressed. Jim thought of some stricken patient who wakes in the morning to believe for a few moments that the malady was a bad dream; and then comes the stab and the cloud of pain settles down for another day. A moment ago Betty’s ordeal seemed over. Now it was beginning a new phase.
“I am sorry,” he said to her.
The report of the analysts was lying on the writing-table just beneath his eyes. He took it up idly. It was a trick, of course, with its seals and its signatures, a trick of Hanaud’s to force Waberski to a retraction. He glanced at it, and with an exclamation began carefully to read it through from the beginning to the end. When he had finished, he raised his head and stared at Hanaud.
“But this report is genuine,” he cried. “Here are the details of the tests applied and the result. There was no trace discovered of any poison.”
“No trace at all,” Hanaud replied. He was not in the least disturbed by the question.
“Then I don’t understand why you bring the accusation or whom you accuse,” Frobisher exclaimed.
“I have accused no one,” said Hanaud steadily. “Let us be clear about tha
t! As to your other question — look!”
He took Frobisher by the elbow and led him to that bookshelf by the window before which they had stood together yesterday.
“There was an empty space here yesterday. You yourself drew my attention to it. You see that the space is filled today.”
“Yes,” said Jim.
Hanaud took down the volume which occupied the space. It was of quarto size, fairly thick and bound in a paper cover.
“Look at that,” he said; and Jim Frobisher as he took it noticed with a queer little start that although Hanaud’s eyes were on his face they were blank of all expression. They did not see him. Hanaud’s senses were concentrated on the two girls at neither of whom he so much as glanced. He was alert to them, to any movement they might make of surprise or terror. Jim threw up his head in a sudden revolt. He was being used for another trick, as some conjurer may use a fool of a fellow whom he has persuaded out of his audience on to his platform. Jim looked at the cover of the book, and cried with enough violence to recall Hanaud’s attention:
“I see nothing here to the point. It is a treatise printed by some learned society in Edinburgh.”
“It is. And if you will look again, you will see that it was written by a Professor of Medicine in that University. And if you will look a third time you will see from a small inscription in ink that the copy was presented with the Professor’s compliments to Mr. Simon Harlowe.”
Hanaud, whilst he was speaking, went to the second of the two windows which looked upon the court, and putting his head out, spoke for a little while in a low voice.
“We shall not need our sentry here any more,” he said as he turned back into the room. “I have sent him upon an errand.”
He went back to Jim Frobisher, who was turning over a page of the treatise here and there and was never a scrap the wiser.
“Well?” he asked. “Strophanthus Hispidus.” Jim read aloud the title of the treatise. “I can’t make head or tail of it.”
“Let me try!” said Hanaud, and he took the book out of Frobisher’s hands. “I will show you all how I spent the half-hour whilst I was waiting for you this morning.”
He sat down at the writing-table, placed the treatise on the blotting-pad in front of him and laid it open at a coloured plate. “This is the fruit of the plant Strophanthus Hispidus, when it is ripening,” he said.
The plate showed two long, tapering follicles joined together at their stems and then separating like a pair of compasses set at an acute angle. The backs of these follicles were rounded, dark in colour and speckled; the inner surfaces, however, were flat, and the curious feature of them was that, from longitudinal crevices, a number of silky white feathers protruded.
“Each of these feathers,” Hanaud continued, and he looked up to find that Ann Upcott had drawn close to the table and that Betty Harlowe herself was leaning forward with a look of curiosity upon her face— “each of these feathers is attached by a fine stalk to an elliptical pod, which is the seed, and when the fruit is quite ripe and these follicles have opened so that they make a straight line, the feathers are released and the wind spreads the seed. It is wonderful, eh? See!”
Hanaud turned the pages until he came to another plate. Here a feather was represented in complete detachment from the follicle. It was outspread like a fan and was extraordinarily pretty and delicate in its texture; and from it by a stem as fine as a hair the seed hung like a jewel.
“What would you say of it, Mademoiselle?” Hanaud asked, looking up into the face of Ann Upcott with a smile. “An ornament wrought for a fine lady, by a dainty artist, eh?” and he turned the book round so that she on the opposite side of the table might the better admire the engraving.
Betty Harlowe, it seemed, was now mastered by her curiosity. Jim Frobisher, gazing down over Hanaud’s shoulder at the plate and wondering uneasily whither he was being led, saw a shadow fall across the book. And there was Betty, standing by the side of her friend with the palms of her hands upon the edge of the table and her face bent over the book.
“One could wish it was an ornament, this seed of the Strophanthus Hispidus,” Hanaud continued with a shake of the head. “But, alas! it is not so harmless.”
He turned the book round again to himself and once more turned the pages. The smile had disappeared altogether from his face. He stopped at a third plate; and this third plate showed a row of crudely fashioned arrows with barbed heads.
Hanaud glanced up over his shoulder at Jim. “Do you understand now the importance of this book, Monsieur Frobisher?” he asked. “No? The seeds of this plant make the famous arrow-poison of Africa. The deadliest of all the poisons, since there is no antidote for it.” His voice grew sombre. “The wickedest of all the poisons, since it leaves no trace.”
Jim Frobisher was startled. “Is that true?” he cried.
“Yes,” said Hanaud; and Betty suddenly leaned forward and pointed to the bottom of the plate.
“There is a mark there below the hilt of that arrow,” she said curiously. “Yes, and a tiny note in ink.”
For a moment a little gift of vision was vouchsafed to Jim Frobisher, born, no doubt, of his perplexities and trouble. A curtain was rung up in his brain. He saw no more than what was before him — the pretty group about the table in the gold of the May morning, but it was all made grim and terrible and the gold had withered to a light that was grey and deathly and cold as the grave. There were the two girls in the grace of their beauty and their youth, daintily tended, fastidiously dressed, bending their shining curls over that plate of the poison arrows like pupils at a lecture. And the man delivering the lecture, so close to them, with speech so gentle, was implacably on the trail of murder, and maybe even now looked upon one of these two girls as his quarry; was even now perhaps planning to set her in the dock of an Assize Court and send her out afterwards, carried screaming and sobbing with terror in the first grey of the morning to the hideous red engine erected during the night before the prison gates. Jim saw Hanaud the genial and friendly, as in some flawed mirror, twisted into a sinister and terrifying figure. How could he sit so close with them at the table, talk to them, point them out this and that diagram in the plates, he being human and knowing what he purposed? Jim broke in upon the lecture with a cry of exasperation.
“But this isn’t a poison! This is a book about a poison. The book can’t kill!”
At once Hanaud replied to him: “Can’t it?” he cried sharply. “Listen to what Mademoiselle said a minute ago. Below the hilt of this arrow marked ‘Figure F,’ the Professor has written a tiny note.”
This particular arrow was a little different from the others in the shape of its shaft. Just below the triangular iron head the shaft expanded. It was as though the head had been fitted into a bulb; as one sees sometimes wooden penholders fine enough and tapering at the upper end, and quite thick just above the nib.
“‘See page 37’,” said Hanaud, reading the Professor’s note, and he turned back the pages. “Page 37. Here we are!”
Hanaud ran a finger half-way down the page and stopped at a word in capitals.
“Figure F.” Hanaud hitched his chair a little closer to the table; Ann Upcott moved round the end of the table that she might see the better; even Jim Frobisher found himself stooping above Hanaud’s shoulder. They were all conscious of a queer tension; they were expectant like explorers on the brink of a discovery. Whilst Hanaud read the paragraph aloud, it seemed that no one breathed; and this is what he read:
“‘Figure F is the representation of a poison arrow which was lent to me by Simon Harlowe, Esq., of Blackman’s, Norfolk, and the Maison Grenelle at Dijon. It was given to him by a Mr. John Carlisle, a trader on the Shire River in the Kombe country, and is the most perfect example of a poison arrow which I have seen. The Strophanthus seed has been pounded up in water and mixed with the reddish clay used by the Kombe natives, and the compound is thickly smeared over the head of the arrow shaft and over the actual iron dart except at the
point and the edges. The arrow is quite new and the compound fresh.’”
Hanaud leaned back in his chair when he had come to the end of this paragraph. “You see. Monsieur Frobisher, the question we have to answer. Where is today Simon Harlowe’s arrow?”
Betty looked up into Hanaud’s face. “If it is anywhere in this house. Monsieur, it should be in the locked cabinet in my sitting-room.”
“Your sitting-room?” Hanaud exclaimed sharply.
“Yes. It is what we call the Treasure Room — half museum, half living-room. My Uncle Simon used it, Madame too. It was their favourite room, full of curios and beautiful things. But after Simon Harlowe died Madame would never enter it. She locked the door which communicated with her dressing-room, so that she might never even in a moment of forgetfulness enter it. The room has a door into the hall. She gave the room to me.” Hanaud’s forehead cleared of its wrinkles. “I understand,” he said. “And that room is sealed.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen the arrow, Mademoiselle?”
“Not that I remember. I only looked into the cabinet once. There are some horrible things hidden away there”; and Betty shivered and shook the recollection of them from her shoulders.
“The chances are that it’s not in the house at all, that it never came back to the house,” Frobisher argued stubbornly. “The Professor in all probability would have kept it.”
“If he could,” Hanaud rejoined. “But it’s out of all probability that a collector of rare things would have allowed him to keep it. No!” and he sat for a little time in a muse. “Do you know what I am wondering?” he asked at length, and then answered his own question. “I am wondering whether after all Boris Waberski was not in the street of Gambetta on the 7th of May and close, very close, to the shop of Jean Cladel the herbalist.”
“Boris! Boris Waberski!” cried Jim. Was he in Hanaud’s eyes the criminal? After all, why not? After all, who more likely if criminal there was, since Boris Waberski thought himself an inheritor under Mrs. Harlowe’s will?
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 37