Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “I believe the back window on the first floor is open,” he whispered, and his voice was more troubled than ever. “We will go in and see.”

  He touched the wooden door and it swung inwards with a whine of its hinges.

  “Open,” said Hanaud. “Make no noise.”

  Silently they crossed the yard. The ground-floor of the house was low. Jim looking upwards could see now that the window above their heads yawned wide open.

  “You are right,” he breathed in Hanaud’s ear, and with a touch Hanaud asked for silence.

  The room beyond the window was black as pitch. The two men stood below and listened. Not a word came from it. Hanaud drew Jim into the wall of the house. At the end of the wall a door gave admission into the house. Hanaud tried the door, turning the handle first and then gently pressing with his shoulder upon the panel.

  “It’s locked, but not bolted like the door in front,” he whispered. “I can manage this.”

  Jim Frobisher heard the tiniest possible rattle of a bunch of keys as Hanaud drew it from his pocket, and then not a noise of any kind whilst Hanaud stooped above the lock. Yet within half a minute the door slowly opened. It opened upon a passage as black as that room above their heads. Hanaud stepped noiselessly into the passage, Jim Frobisher followed him with a heart beating high in excitement. What had happened in that lighted room upstairs and in the dark room behind it? Why didn’t Jean Cladel come down and open the door upon the street of Gambetta? Why didn’t they hear Nicolas Moreau’s soft whistle or the sound of his voice? Hanaud stepped back past Jim Frobisher and shut the door behind them and locked it again.

  “You haven’t an electric torch with you, of course?” Hanaud whispered.

  “No,” replied Jim.

  “Nor I. And I don’t want to strike a match. There’s something upstairs which frightens me.”

  You could hardly hear the words. They were spoken as though the mere vibration of the air they caused would carry a message to the rooms above.

  “We’ll move very carefully. Keep a hand upon my coat,” and Hanaud went forward. After he had gone a few paces he stopped.

  “There’s a staircase here on my right. It turns at once. Mind not to knock your foot on the first step,” he whispered over his shoulder; and a moment later he reached down and, taking hold of Jim’s right arm, laid his hand upon a balustrade. Jim lifted his foot, felt for and found the first tread of the stairs, and mounted behind Hanaud. They halted on a little landing just above the door by which they had entered the house.

  In front of them the darkness began to thin, to become opaque rather than a black, impenetrable hood drawn over their heads. Jim understood that in front of him was an open door and that the faint glimmer came from that open window on their left hand beyond the door.

  Hanaud passed through the doorway into the room. Jim followed and was already upon the threshold, when Hanaud stumbled and uttered a cry. No doubt the cry was low, but coming so abruptly upon their long silence it startled Frobisher like the explosion of a pistol. It seemed that it must clash through Dijon like the striking of a clock.

  But nothing followed. No one stirred, no one cried out a question. Silence descended upon the house again, impenetrable, like the darkness a hood upon the senses, Jim was tempted to call out aloud himself, anything, however childish, so that he might hear a voice speaking words, if only his own voice. The words came at last, from Hanaud, and from the inner end of the room, but in an accent which Jim did not recognize.

  “Don’t move! — There is something — I told you I was frightened — Oh!” and his voice died away in a sigh.

  Jim could hear him moving very cautiously.

  Then he almost screamed aloud. For the shutters at the window slowly swung to and the room was once more shrouded in black.

  “Who’s that?” Jim whispered violently, and Hanaud answered:

  “It’s only me — Hanaud. I don’t want to show a light here yet with that window open. God knows what dreadful thing has happened here. Come just inside the room and shut the door behind you.”

  Jim obeyed, and having moved his position, could see a line of yellow light, straight and fine as if drawn by a pencil, at the other end of the room on the floor. There was a door there, a door into the front room where they had seen the light go up from the street of Gambetta.

  Jim Frobisher had hardly realized that before the door was burst open with a crash. In the doorway, outlined against the light beyond, appeared the bulky frame of Hanaud.

  “There is nothing here,” he said, standing there blocking up the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “The room is quite empty.”

  That room, the front room — yes! But between Hanaud’s legs the light trickled out into the dark room behind, and here, on the floor illuminated by a little lane of light, Jim, with a shiver, saw a clenched hand and a forearm in a crumpled shirt-sleeve.

  “Turn round,” he cried to Hanaud. “Look!” Hanaud turned.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “That is what I stumbled against.”

  He found a switch in the wall close to the door and snapped it down. The dark room was flooded with light, and on the floor, in the midst of a scene of disorder, a table pushed back here, a chair overturned there, lay the body of a man. He wore no coat. He was in his waistcoat and his shirt-sleeves, and he was crumpled up with a horrible suggestion of agony like a ball, his knees towards his chin, his head forward towards his knees. One arm clutched the body close, the other, the one which Jim had seen, was flung out, his hand clenched in a spasm of intolerable pain. And about the body there was such a pool of blood as Jim Frobisher thought no body could contain.

  Jim staggered back with his hands clasped over his eyes. He felt physically sick.

  “Then he killed himself on our approach,” he cried with a groan.

  “Who?” answered Hanaud steadily.

  “Jean Cladel. The man who whispered to us from behind the window.”

  Hanaud stunned him with a question. “What with?” Jim drew his hands slowly from before his face and forced his eyes to their service. There was no gleam of a knife, or a pistol, anywhere against the dark background of the carpet.

  “You might think that he was a Japanese who had committed hara-kiri,” said Hanaud. “But if he had, the knife would be at his side. And there is no knife.”

  He stooped over the body and felt it, and drew his hand back.

  “It is still warm,” he said, and then a gasp, “Look!” He pointed. The man was lying on his side in this dreadful pose of contracted sinews and unendurable pain. And across the sleeve of his shirt there was a broad red mark.

  “That’s where the knife was wiped clean,” said Hanaud.

  Jim bent forward. “By God, that’s true,” he cried, and a little afterwards, in a voice of awe: “Then it’s murder.”

  Hanaud nodded. “Not a doubt.”

  Jim Frobisher stood up. He pointed a shaking finger at the grotesque image of pain crumpled upon the floor, death without dignity, an argument that there was something horribly wrong with the making of the human race — since such things could be.

  “Jean Cladel?” he asked. “We must make sure,” answered Hanaud. He went down the stairs to the front door and, unbolting it, called Moreau within the house. From the top of the stairs Jim heard him ask:

  “Do you know Jean Cladel by sight?”

  “Yes,” answered Moreau.

  “Then follow me.”

  Hanaud led him up into the back room. For a moment Moreau stopped upon the threshold with a blank look upon his face.

  “Is that the man?” Hanaud asked.

  Moreau stepped forward.

  “Yes.”

  “He has been murdered,” Hanaud explained. “Will you fetch the Commissaire of the district and a doctor? We will wait here.”

  Moreau turned on his heel and went downstairs. Hanaud dropped into a chair and stared moodily at the dead body.

  “Jean Cladel,” he said in a voice of
discouragement. “Just when he could have been of a little use in the world! Just when he could have helped us to the truth! It’s my fault, too. I oughtn’t to have waited until tonight. I ought to have foreseen that this might happen.”

  “Who can have murdered him?” Jim Frobisher exclaimed.

  Hanaud roused himself out of his remorse.

  “The man who whispered to us from behind the window,” answered Hanaud.

  Jim Frobisher felt his mind reeling. “That’s impossible!” he cried.

  “Why?” Hanaud asked. “It must have been he. Think it out!” And step by step he told the story as he read it, testing it by speaking it aloud.

  “At five minutes past ten a man of mine, still a little out of breath from his haste, comes to us in the Grande Taverne and tells us that Jean Cladel has just reached home. He reached home then at five minutes to ten.”

  “Yes,” Jim agreed.

  “We were detained for a few minutes by Maurice Thevenet. Yes.” He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and said softly: “We shall have to consider that very modest and promising young gentleman rather carefully. He detained us. We heard the clock strike half-past ten as we waited in the street.”

  “Yes.”

  “And all was over then. For the house was as silent as what, indeed, it is — a grave. And only just over, for the body is still warm. If this — lying here — is Jean Cladel, someone else must have been waiting for him to come home tonight, waiting in the lane behind, since my man didn’t see him. And an acquaintance, a friend — for Jean Cladel lets him in and locks the door behind him.”

  Jim interrupted. “He might have been here already, waiting for him with his knife bared in this dark room.”

  Hanaud looked round the room. It was furnished cheaply and stuffily, half office, half living-room. An open bureau stood against the wall near the window. A closed cabinet occupied the greater part of one side.

  “I wonder,” he said. “It is possible, no doubt — But if so, why did the murderer stay so long? No search has been made — no drawers are ransacked.” He tried the door of the cabinet. “This is still locked. No, I don’t think that he was waiting. I think that he was admitted as a friend or a client — I fancy Jean Cladel had not a few clients who preferred to call upon him by the back way in the dark of the night. I think that his visitor came meaning to kill, and waited his time and killed, and that he had hardly killed before we rang the bell at the door.” Hanaud drew in his breath sharply. “Imagine that, my friend! He is standing here over the man he has murdered, and unexpectedly the shrill, clear sound of the bell goes through the house — as though God said, ‘I saw you!’ Imagine it! He turned out the light and stands holding his breath in the dark. The bell rings again. He must answer it or worse may befall. He goes into the front room and throws open the window, and hears it is the police who are at the door.” Hanaud nodded his head in a reluctant admiration. “But that man had an iron nerve! He doesn’t lose his head. He closes the shutter, he turns on the light, that we may think he is getting up, he runs back into this room. He will not waste time by stumbling down the stairs and fumbling with the lock of the back door. No, he opens these shutters and drops to the ground. It is done in a second. Another second, and he is in the lane; another, and he is safe, his dreadful mission ended. Cladel will not speak. Cladel will not tell us the things we want to know.”

  Hanaud went over to the cabinet and, using his skeleton keys, again opened its doors. On the shelves were ranged a glass jar or two, a retort, the simplest utensils of a laboratory and a few bottles, one of which, larger than the rest, was half filled with a colourless liquid.

  “Alcohol,” said Hanaud, pointing to the label.

  Jim Frobisher moved carefully round on the outskirts of the room, taking care not to alter the disarrangements of the furniture. He looked the bottles over. Not one of them held a drop of that pale lemon-coloured solution which the professor, in his treatise, had described. Hanaud shut and locked the doors of the cabinet again and stepped carefully over to the bureau. It stood open, and a few papers were strewn upon the flap. He sat down at the bureau and began carefully to search it. Jim sat down in a chair. Somehow it had leaked out that, since this morning, Hanaud knew of Jean Cladel. Jean Cladel therefore must be stopped from any revelations; and he had been stopped. Frobisher could no longer doubt that murder had been done on the night of April the 27th, in the Maison Grenelle. Development followed too logically upon development. The case was building itself up — another storey had been added to the edifice with this new crime. Yes, certainly and solidly it was building itself up — this case against someone.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE WHITE TABLET

  WITHIN THE MINUTE that case was to be immeasurably strengthened. An exclamation broke from Hanaud. He sprang to his feet and turned on the light of a green-shaded reading lamp, which stood upon the ledge of the bureau.

  He was holding now under the light a small drawer, which he had removed from the front of the bureau. Very gingerly he lifted some little thing out of it, something that looked like a badge that men wear in their buttonholes. He laid it down upon the blotting-paper: and in that room of death laughed harshly.

  He beckoned to Jim. “Come and look!”

  What Jim saw was a thin, small, barbed iron dart, with an iron stem. He had no need to ask its nature, for he had seen its likeness that morning in the treatise of the Edinburgh professor. This was the actual head of Simon Harlowe’s poison-arrow.

  “You have found it!” said Jim in a voice that shook.

  “Yes.”

  Hanaud gave it a little push, and said thoughtfully: “A negro thousands of miles away sits outside his hut in the Komb country and pounds up his poison seed and mixes it with red clay, and smears it thick and slab over the shaft of his fine new arrow, and waits for his enemy. But his enemy does not come. So he barters it, or gives it to his white friend the trader on the Shire river. And the trader brings it home and gives it to Simon Harlowe of the Maison Grenelle. And Simon Harlowe lends it to a professor in Edinburgh, who writes about it in a printed book and sends it back again. And in the end, after all its travels, it comes to the tenement of Jean Cladel in a slum of Dijon, and is made ready in a new way to do its deadly work.”

  For how much longer Hanaud would have moralized over the arrow in this deplorable way, no man can tell. Happily Jim Frobisher was reprieved from listening to him by the shutting of a door below and the noise of voices in the passage.

  “The Commissaire!” said Hanaud, and he went quickly down the stairs.

  Jim heard him speaking in a low tone for quite a long while, and no doubt was explaining the position of affairs. For when he brought the Commissaire and the doctor up into the room he introduced Jim as one about whom they already knew.

  “This is that Monsieur Frobisher,” he said.

  The Commissaire, a younger and more vivacious man than Girardot, bowed briskly to Jim and looked towards the contorted figure of Jean Cladel.

  Even he could not restrain a little gesture of repulsion. He clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “He is not pretty, that one!” he said. “Most certainly he is not pretty.”

  Hanaud crossed again to the bureau and carefully folded the dart around with paper. “With your permission, Monsieur,” he said ceremoniously to the Commissaire, “I shall take this with me. I will be responsible for it.” He put it away in his pocket and looked at the doctor, who was stooping by the side of Jean Cladel. “I do not wish to interfere, but I should be glad to have a copy of the medical report. I think that it might help me. I think it will be found that this murder was committed in a way peculiar to one man.

  “Certainly you shall have a copy of the report, Monsieur Hanaud,” replied the young Commissaire in a polite and formal voice.

  Hanaud laid a hand on Jim’s arm. “We are in the way, my friend. Oh, yes, in spite of Monsieur le Commissaire’s friendly protestations. This is not our affair. Let us go
!” He conducted Jim to the door and turned about. “I do not wish to interfere,” he repeated, “but it is possible that the shutters and the window will bear the traces of the murderer’s fingers. I don’t think it probable, for that animal had taken his precautions. But it is possible, for he left in a great hurry.”

  The Commissaire was overwhelmed with gratitude. “Most certainly we will give our attention to the shutters and the window-sill.”

  “A copy of the finger-prints, if any are found?” Hanaud suggested.

  “Shall be at Monsieur Hanaud’s disposal as early as possible,” the Commissaire agreed.

  Jim experienced a pang of regret that Monsieur Bex was not present at the little exchange of civilities. The Commissaire and Hanaud were so careful not to tread upon one another’s toes and so politely determined that their own should not be trodden upon. Monsieur Bex could not but have revelled in the correctness of their deportment.

  Hanaud and Frobisher went downstairs into the street. The neighbourhood had not been aroused. A couple of sergents-de-ville stood in front of the door. The street of Gambetta was still asleep and indifferent to the crime which had taken place in one of its least respectable houses.

  “I shall go to the Prefecture,” said Hanaud. “They have given me a little office there with a sofa. I want to put away the arrow-head before I go to my hotel.”

  “I shall come with you” said Jim. “It will be a relief to walk for a little in the fresh air, after that room.”

  The Prefecture lay the better part of a mile away across the city. Hanaud set off at a great pace, and reaching the building conducted Jim into an office with a safe set against the wall.