“I am wondering whether he was not doing that very thing which he attributed to you, Mademoiselle Betty,” Hanaud continued.
“Paying?” Betty cried.
“Paying — or making excuses for not paying, which is more probable, or recovering the poison arrow now clean of its poison, which is most probable of all.”
At last Hanaud had made an end of his secrecies and reticence. His suspicion, winged like the arrow in the plate, was flying straight to this evident mark. Jim drew a breath like a man waking from a nightmare; in all of that small company a relaxation was visible; Ann Upcott drew away from the table; Betty said softly as though speaking to herself, “Monsieur Boris! Monsieur Boris! Oh, I never thought of that!” and, to Jim’s admiration, there was actually a note of regret in her voice.
It was audible, too, to Hanaud, since he answered with a smile: “But you must bring yourself to think of it, Mademoiselle. After all, he was not so gentle with you that you need show him so much good.”
A slight rush of colour tinged Betty’s cheeks. Jim was not quite sure that a tiny accent of irony had not pointed Hanaud’s words.
“I saw him sitting here,” she replied quickly, “half an hour ago — abject — in tears — a man!” She shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of distaste. “I wish him nothing worse. I was satisfied.”
Hanaud smiled again with a curious amusement, an appreciation which Frobisher was quite at a loss to understand. But he had from time to time received an uneasy impression that a queer little secret duel was all this while being fought by Betty Harlowe and Hanaud underneath the smooth surface of questions and answers — a duel in which now one, now the other of the combatants got some trifling scratch. This time it seemed Betty was hurt.
“You are satisfied, Mademoiselle, but the Law is not,” Hanaud returned. “Boris Waberski expected a legacy. Boris Waberski needed money immediately, as the first of the two letters which he wrote to Monsieur Frobisher’s firm clearly shows. Boris Waberski had a motive.” He looked from one to the other of his audience with a nod to drive the point home. “Motives, no doubt, are signposts rather difficult to read, and if one reads them amiss, they lead one very wide astray. Granted! But you must look for your signposts all the same and try to read them aright. Listen again’ to the Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh! He is as precise as a man can be.”
Hanaud’s eyes fell again upon the description of Figure F in the treatise still open upon the table in front of him.
“The arrow was the best specimen of a poison arrow which he had ever come across. The poison paste was thickly and smoothly spread over the arrow head and some inches of the shaft. The arrow was unused and the poison fresh, and these poisons retain their energy for many, many years. I tell you that if this book and this arrow were handed over to Jean Cladel, Herbalist, Jean Cladel could with ease make a solution in alcohol which injected from a hypodermic needle would cause death within fifteen minutes and leave not one trace.”
“Within fifteen minutes?” Betty asked incredulously, and from the arm-chair against the wall, where Ann Upcott had once more seated herself, there broke a startled exclamation.
“Oh!” she cried, but no one took any notice of her at all. Both Jim and Betty had their eyes fixed upon Hanaud, and he was altogether occupied in driving his argument home.
“Within fifteen minutes? How do you know?” cried Jim.
“It is written here, in the book.”
“And where would Jean Cladel have learnt to handle the paste with safety, how to prepare the solution?” Jim went on.
“Here! Here! Here!” answered Hanaud, tapping with his knuckles upon the treatise. “It is all written out here — experiment after experiment made upon living animals and the action of the poison measured and registered by minutes. Oh, given a man with a working knowledge of chemicals such as Jean Cladel must possess, and the result is certain.”
Betty Harlowe leaned forward again over the book and Hanaud turned it half round between them, so that both, by craning their heads, could read. He turned the pages back to the beginning and passed them quickly in review.
“See, Mademoiselle, the time-tables. Strophanthus constricts the muscles of the heart like digitalis, only much more violently, much more swiftly. See the contractions of the heart noted down minute after minute, until the moment of death and all — here is the irony! — so that by means of these experiments, the poison may be transformed into a medicine and the weapon of death become an agent of life — as in good hands, it has happened.” Hanaud leaned back and contemplated Betty Harlowe between his half-closed eyes. “That is wonderful, Mademoiselle. What do you think?”
Betty slowly closed the book.
“I think, Monsieur Hanaud,” she said, “it is no less wonderful that you should have studied this book so thoroughly during the half-hour you waited for us here this morning.”
It was Hanaud’s turn to change colour. The blood mounted into his face. He was for a second or two quite disconcerted. Jim once more had a glimpse of the secret duel and rejoiced that this time it was Hanaud, the great Hanaud, who was scratched.
“The study of poisons is particularly my work,” he answered shortly. “Even at the Sûreté we have to specialize nowadays,” and he turned rather quickly towards Frobisher. “You are thoughtful, Monsieur?”
Jim was following out his own train of thought. “Yes,” he answered. Then he spoke to Betty. “Boris Waberski had a latchkey, I suppose?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“He took it away with him?”
“I think so.”
“When are the iron gates locked?”
“It is the last thing Gaston does before he goes to bed.”
Jim’s satisfaction increased with every answer he received. “You see, Monsieur Hanaud,” he cried, “all this while we have been leaving out a question of importance. Who put this book back upon its shelf? And when? Yesterday at noon the space was empty. This morning it is filled. Who filled it? Last night we sat in the garden after dinner behind the house. What could have been easier than for Waberski to slip in with his latchkey at some moment when the court was empty, replace the book and slip out again unnoticed? Why—”
A gesture of Betty’s brought him to a halt. “Unnoticed? Impossible!” she said bitterly. “The police have a sergent-de-ville at our gates, night and day.”
Hanaud shook his head.
“He is there no longer. After you were good enough to answer me so frankly yesterday morning the questions it was my duty to put to you, I had him removed at once.”
“Why, that’s true,” Jim exclaimed joyfully. He remembered now that when he had driven up with his luggage from the hotel in the afternoon, the street of Charles-Robert had been quite empty. Betty Harlowe stood taken aback by her surprise. Then a smile made her face friendly; her eyes danced to the smile, and she dipped to the detective a little mock curtsy. But her voice was warm with gratitude.
“I thank you, Monsieur. I did not notice yesterday that the man had been removed, or I should have thanked you before. Indeed I was not looking for so much consideration at your hands. As I told my friend Jim, I believed that you went away thinking me guilty.”
Hanaud raised a hand in protest. To Jim it was the flourish of the sword with which the duellist saluted at the end of the bout. The little secret combat between these two was over. Hanaud, by removing the sergeant from before the gates, had given a sign surely not only to Betty but to all Dijon that he found nothing to justify any surveillance of her goings out and comings in, or any limitations upon her freedom.
“Then you see,” Jim insisted. He was still worrying at his solution of the case like a dog with a bone. “You see, Waberski had the road clear for him last night.”
Betty, however, would not have it. She shook her head vigorously.
“I won’t believe that Monsieur Boris is guilty of so horrible a murder. More,” and she turned her great eyes pleadingly upon Hanaud, “I do
n’t believe that any murder was committed here at all. I don’t want to believe it,” and for a moment her voice faltered.
“After all, Monsieur Hanaud, what are you building this dreadful theory upon? That a book of my Uncle Simon was not in his library yesterday and is there today. We know nothing more. We don’t know even whether Jean Cladel exists at all.”
“We shall know that, Mademoiselle, very soon,” said Hanaud, staring down at the book upon the table.
“We don’t know whether the arrow is in the house, whether it ever was.”
“We must make sure, Mademoiselle,” said Hanaud stubbornly.
“And even if you had it now, here with the poison clinging in shreds to the shaft, you still couldn’t be sure that the rest of it had been used. Here is a report, Monsieur, from the doctors. Because it says that no trace of the poison can be discovered, you can’t infer that a poison was administered which leaves no trace. You never can prove it. You have nothing to go upon. It’s all guess-work, and guess-work which will keep us living in a nightmare. Oh, if I thought for a moment that murder had been committed, — I’d say ‘Go on, go on’! But it hasn’t. Oh, it hasn’t!”
Betty’s voice rang with so evident a sincerity, there was so strong a passion of appeal, for peace, for an end of suspicion, for a right to forget and be forgotten, that Jim fancied no man could resist it. Indeed, Hanaud sat for a long while with his eyes bent upon the table before he answered her. But when at last he did, gently though his voice began, Jim knew at once that she had lost.
“You argue and plead very well, Mademoiselle Betty,” he said. “But we have each of us our little creeds by which we live for better or for worse. Here is mine, a very humble one. I can discover extenuations in most crimes: even crimes of violence. Passion, anger, even greed! What are they but good qualities developed beyond the bounds? Things at the beginning good and since grown monstrous! So, too, in the execution. This or that habit of life makes natural this or that weapon which to us is hideous and abnormal and its mere use a sign of a dreadful depravity. Yes, I recognize these palliations. But there is one crime I never will forgive — murder by poison. And one criminal in whose pursuit I will never tire nor slacken, the poisoner.” Through the words there ran a real thrill of hatred, and though Hanaud’s voice was low, and he never once raised his eyes from the table, he held the three who listened to him in a dreadful spell.
“Cowardly and secret, the poisoner has his little world at his mercy, and a fine sort of mercy he shows to be sure,” he continued bitterly. “His hideous work is so easy. It just becomes a vice like drink, no more than that to the poisoner, but with a thousand times the pleasure drink can give. Like the practice of some abominable art. I tell you the truth now! Show me one victim today and the poisoner scot-free, and I’ll show you another victim before the year’s out. Make no mistake! Make no mistake!”
His voice rang out and died away. But the words seemed still to vibrate in the air of that room, to strike the walls and rebound from them and still be audible. Jim Frobisher, for all his slow imagination, felt that had a poisoner been present and heard them, some cry of guilt must have rent the silence and betrayed him. His heart stopped in its beats listening for a cry, though his reason told him there was no mouth in that room from which the cry could come.
Hanaud looked up at Betty when he had finished. He begged her pardon with a little flutter of his hands and a regretful smile. “You must take me, therefore, as God made me, Mademoiselle, and not blame me more than you can help for the distress I still must cause you. There was never a case more difficult. Therefore never one about which one way or the other I must be more sure.”
Before Betty could reply there came a knock upon the door. “Come in,” Hanaud cried out, and a small, dark, alert man in plain clothes entered the room.
“This is Nicolas Moreau, who was keeping watch in the courtyard. I sent him some while ago upon an errand,” he explained, and turned again to Moreau.
“Well, Nicolas?” Nicolas stood at attention, with his hands at the seams of his trousers, in spite of his plain clothes, and he recited rather than spoke in a perfectly expressionless official voice.
“In accordance with instructions I went to the shop of Jean Cladel. It is number seven. From the Rue Gambetta I went to the Prefecture. I verified your statement. Jean Cladel has twice appeared before the Police Correctionelle for selling forbidden drugs and has twice been acquitted owing to the absence of necessary witnesses.”
“Thank you, Nicolas.”
Moreau saluted, turned on his heel, and went out of the room. There followed a moment of silence, of discouragement. Hanaud looked ruefully at Betty. “You see! I must go on. We must search in that locked cabinet of Simon Harlowe’s for the poison arrow, if by chance it should be there.”
“The room is sealed,” Frobisher reminded him.
“We must have those seals removed,” he replied, and he took his watch from his pocket and screwed up his face in grimace.
“We need Monsieur the Commissaire, and Monsieur the Commissaire will not be in a good humour if we disturb him now. For it is twelve o’clock, the sacred hour of luncheon. You will have observed upon the stage that Commissaries of Police are never in a good humour. It is because—” But Hanaud’s audience was never to hear his explanation of this well-known fact. For he stopped with a queer jerk of his voice, his watch still dangling from his fingers upon its chain. Both Jim and Betty looked at once where he was looking. They saw Ann Upcott standing up against the wall with her hand upon the top rail of a chair to prevent herself from falling. Her eyes were closed, her whole face a mask of misery. Hanaud was at her side in a moment.
“Mademoiselle,” he asked with a breathless sort of eagerness, “what is it you have to tell me?”
“It is true, then?” she whispered. “Jean Cladel exists?”
“Yes.”
‘And the poison arrow could have been used?” she faltered, and the next words would not be spoken, but were spoken at the last. “And death would have followed in fifteen minutes?”
“Upon my oath it is true,” Hanaud insisted. “What is it you have to tell me?”
“That I could have hindered it all. I shall never forgive myself. I could have hindered the murder.”
Hanaud’s eyes narrowed as he watched the girl. Was he disappointed, Frobisher wondered? Did he expect quite another reply? A swift movement by Betty distracted him from these questions. He saw Betty looking across the room at them with the strangest glittering eyes he had ever seen. And then Ann Upcott drew herself away from Hanaud and stood up against the wall at her full height with her arms outstretched. She seemed to be setting herself apart as a pariah; her whole attitude and posture cried, “Stone me! I am waiting.” Hanaud put his watch into his pocket. “Mademoiselle, we will let the Commissaire eat his luncheon in peace, and we will hear your story first. But not here. In the garden under the shade of the trees.” He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Indeed I too feel the heat. This room is as hot as an oven.”
When Jim Frobisher looked back in after time upon the incidents of that morning, nothing stood out so vividly in his memories, no, not even the book of arrows and its plates, not Hanaud’s statement of his creed, as the picture of him twirling his watch at the end of his chain, whilst it sparkled in the sunlight and he wondered whether he should break in now upon the Commissaire of Police or let him eat his luncheon in quiet. So much that was then unsuspected by them all hung upon the exact sequence of events.
CHAPTER 9
THE SECRET
THE GARDEN CHAIRS were already set out upon a lawn towards the farther end of the garden in the shadow of the great trees. Hanaud led the way towards them.
“We shall be in the cool here and with no one to overhear us but the birds,” he said, and he patted and arranged the cushions in a deep armchair of basket-work for Ann Upcott. Jim Frobisher was reminded again of the solicitude of a doctor with an invalid and again the parall
el jarred upon him. But he was getting a clearer insight into the character of this implacable being. The little courtesies and attentions were not assumed. They were natural, but they would not hinder him for a moment in his pursuit. He would arrange the cushions with the swift, deft hands of a nurse — yes, but he would slip the handcuffs on the wrists of his invalid, a moment afterwards, no less deftly and swiftly, if thus his duty prompted him.
“There!” he said. “Now, Mademoiselle, you are comfortable. For me, if I am permitted, I shall smoke.”
He turned round to ask for permission of Betty, who with Jim had followed into the garden behind him.
“Of course,” she answered; and coming forward, she sat down in another of the chairs.
Hanaud pulled out of a pocket a bright blue bundle of thin black cigarettes and lit one. Then he sat in a chair close to the two girls. Jim Frobisher stood behind Hanaud. The lawn was dappled with sunlight and cool shadows. The blackbird and the thrush were calling from bough and bush, the garden was riotous with roses and the air sweet with their perfume. It was a strange setting for the eerie story which Ann Upcott had to tell of her adventures in the darkness and silence of a night; but the very contrast seemed to make the story still more vivid.
“I did not go to Monsieur de Pouillac’s ball on the night of April the 27th,” she began, and Jim started, so that Hanaud raised his hand to prevent him interrupting. He had not given a thought to where Ann Upcott had been upon that night. To Hanaud, however, the statement brought no surprise.
“You were not well?” he asked.
“It wasn’t that,” Ann replied. “But Betty and I had — I won’t say a rule, but a sort of working arrangement which I think had been in practice ever since I came to the Maison Grenelle. We didn’t encroach upon each other’s independence.”
The two girls had recognized from their first coming together that privacy was the very salt of companionship. Each had a sanctuary in her own sitting-room.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 38