Hanaud was the first to break it. “Ahaha! There are other points of difference in this room, Marianne, besides the clothes,” he cried, looking about him; and indeed where all had been tidiness in Evelyn Devenish’s room, here all was disorder. The silver dress which Joyce Whipple had worn was flung carelessly across a chair; her silver slippers lay one kicked into one corner, another in the middle of the room; her stockings had been tossed in a bundle on to a second chair. It was clear that upon coming up from the drawing-room Joyce had changed her dress even to her shoes and stockings in a great haste.
Hanaud opened a wardrobe which stood against the right-hand wall of the room. It was full of dresses and tailored suits all hanging orderly.
“There are others in the lowest drawer,” said Marianne, pointing to a tall chest of drawers against the back wall by the side of the door. Hanaud stooped and drew it open. Certainly some other skirts and coats lay there, but they were all neatly folded. Hanaud turned to Marianne and spoke abruptly and with authority.
“You have been very amusing, Marianne, no doubt. But we are not here to amuse ourselves. You will now tell me plainly, whether to your knowledge any dress is missing from the wardrobe or the drawer.”
“I do not know,” Marianne replied without budging an inch.
“Or any cloak.”
“I do not know. Mademoiselle has been at the Chateau Suvlac for a fortnight, and once or twice she has put on a wrap in the evening when she has been out of doors on the terrace.” She went to the wardrobe and examined the clothes hung up there. “Yes, it has always been this one,” and she touched a glittering cloak of gold lame.
“Thank you,” said Hanaud. “I need not keep you any longer from your service.”
Marianne closed the door of the wardrobe and went out of the room. Hanaud walked over to the bed which stood against the wall opposite to the wardrobe with the foot of it stretching out into the room. The bed-clothes were tumbled, the pyjamas crumpled up, the pillow flung aside. Hanaud threw the bed-clothes back. The lower sheet was flat and tightly stretched over the mattress without a wrinkle on its surface.
“Yes, it is clear,” said the Commissaire. “Nobody has lain in that bed since it was made.”
Hanaud called Mr. Ricardo to his side.
“Let us now put quite clearly, my friend, the question you approached. Madame Devenish retires to her room. She stops for a moment at her dressing- table to touch her hair, powder her face, and repair the little disorders of the evening. She puts on her cloak of brown satin, opens her window and slips out. Whither she is bound we do not know. But she does not tumble her bed. No! Why should she? If she does not mean to come back, there is no reason why she should pretend to have slept in it. If she does, there is still less reason, for she means to sleep in it on her return. That is clear, eh?”
“Yes,” Mr. Ricardo agreed.
“But now consider the case of Joyce Whipple! She, too, retires to her room. She changes her clothes in a great haste, and then—” he flung his arms out wide— “she, too, is gone. But her bed is tumbled. If she meant to come back and sleep in it, again I ask you, why should she tumble it? If she did not mean to come back, what is the use of pretending that she has slept in it? There is a notice on the door— ‘Do not wake me, Marianne!’ If she does not mean to come back, she has taken her precautions. She will not be missed until the hour of luncheon. Why should she tumble her bed any more than the unhappy Madame Devenish? So you see your question, plain and clear now.”
Mr. Ricardo had not one idea of the nature of the famous question which he was supposed to have put, but he nodded his head vigorously and sagely.
“Of course,” he said.
“Did Mademoiselle Whipple go out of this room of her own accord?” Hanaud went on, to Ricardo’s amazement. “Yes, that is the question.”
“But there was no noise,” Ricardo objected.
“No, there was no noise that anyone could hear, and yet I ask myself that question. She meant to go somewhere — that is clear from the fact that she changed her clothes in so much haste. Oh, there are a hundred questions. Did she mean to go with the woman Devenish? Did she mean to follow her? Was it by an accident that she meant to go where she meant to go on the same night that Evelyn Devenish went? But more important than all these questions is this one. Did she actually in the end go of her own accord? Suppose that she was taken away—”
“By force?” interrupted Mr. Ricardo.
“And by some persons who had not noticed that writing on the door, because they are in the dark and in a hurry. If they tumble the bed they may win some hours before it is discovered that the young lady has disappeared. Marianne finds the bed in disorder. Very well. Then mademoiselle has risen early. She may be amongst the vines.” He suddenly turned to his companions and cried:
“Let someone explain that tumbled bed to me in some other way. I shall be very glad.”
There was a note of anxiety, of deep feeling in Hanaud’s voice which troubled everyone in that room. He was setting no trap now to parade his cleverness. He looked from face to face, eager for a convincing interpretation other than the only one he discovered for himself.
“Can you, Monsieur Le Commissaire?”
“No.”
“Come, Moreau! You!”
“No, Monsieur Hanaud.”
“And you, Mr. Ricardo, I hardly ask, since it was you who first of all of us detected the significance of this manufactured disorder.”
He turned sombrely away from the bed and then swooped upon a writing- table which stood in front of the window, but a little way back from it. A leather blotting-book lay closed upon it. Hanaud opened it and at once half a sheet of the blotting-paper fluttered down to the floor. He picked it up. Its inner edge was jagged. Hanaud compared it with the other sheets.
“Half of this has been torn away,” he said, “but we shall not find it.”
There was a waste-paper basket beside the table, but it was empty. There was a drawer in the table. It held no torn sheet of blotting-paper, but on the other hand it did hold a jumble of letters opened and pushed back into their envelopes. Hanaud sat down in the chair in front of the table and with his face to the window and his back to the room set himself quickly to read them.
“Aha! She has friends, this young lady,” he said more to himself than to any of those behind him. And after another moment or two, “Who is a certain Bryce Carter?”
Mr. Ricardo started as he heard the name, and without so much as turning his head Hanaud exclaimed:
“So you know him, my friend.”
“No. I know a little of him,” Mr. Ricardo returned. “He was at one time engaged to Diana Tasborough,” and Hanaud swung round in his chair.
“What is this you tell me?” he said slowly, with a letter open in his hand. Mr. Ricardo remembered very clearly the information which Joyce Whipple had given to him about this young man, in London, but he remembered still more clearly the confusion with which she had given it.
“Bryce Carter is a young man who was in the Foreign Office, but he left it to go to the City and make money, since he did not wish to be the poor husband of a rich wife. But a few months ago he crashed.”
Ricardo remembered the graphic word and reproduced it.
“Crashed? “Hanaud repeated. “Crashed? That is an idiom,” and he was utterly surprised that here was an idiom with which he was unacquainted.
“I mean that Diana Tasborough broke off her engagement.”
“Oh!”
Hanaud turned back to the drawer. He searched amongst the litter of envelopes and found another of the same handwriting and then another; and he read them all through. He looked over his shoulder at Ricardo with a grin.
“I make you a prophecy. That young man will make money in the City. He wastes no time, the scamp,” and with a little mimicry of burnt fingers he dropped the letter he was holding and took it up again gingerly. “They are live coals, these letters of Bryce Carter. Oh, oh, they boil” — h
e put his fingers ridiculously into his mouth and blew upon them — and suddenly all his play- acting ceased. Some quite new thought had smitten him, and he sat, his body arrested, a man changed into stone.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes,” and now very soberly he continued his examination of the drawer. For a little while he found nothing to interest him, and then he leaned back in his chair staring at a sheet of paper.
“It is not easy to read, this signature. Do you know a name Brever?”
Ricardo shook his head.
“There is a name Brewer.”
“Yes? Then that is it. Brever. Henry Brever, and he has a pharmacological laboratory at Leeds.”
“Oh!”
Mr. Ricardo jumped.
“You know him?” asked Hanaud.
“Again, I know of him. Sir Henry Brewer. He is a renowned physician devoted to research.”
“A curious friend for a young lady of fashion,” said Hanaud.
Mr. Ricardo as a citizen of the world was in a position to put his friend right in matters of the social order.
“We don’t live in our categories and departments as much as you do in France,” Ricardo explained with a trifle of condescension. “No, we have the habit of a wider life. Our actresses dine in high company and eminent physicians run around with the girls.”
Hanaud bowed his head meekly. “It must be very pleasant for the eminent physicians,” he said. Mr. Ricardo, curious as to the character of the letter, drew nearer to the table. But before he could get so much as a glimpse of it, Hanaud folded it, replaced it in its envelope, ;and put the envelope in his pocket. It was to the credit of science that he didn’t have to blow upon his fingers to cool them, afterwards. He rose up from the table and as he closed the drawer he said: “I keep this one letter, and I beg of you that no one shall mention it. We forget the name of Brever! So!” He closed his eyes for a moment and opened them again. “It is done. And there — is no Leeds. So!” He repeated his performance with his eyelids and to Mr. Ricardo who was staring at him with a certain disfavour. “Ah! I am a comical, eh? Yes, but I do not always live in my category and department, either. In that I am like — the one I have forgotten. Let us go!”
He took a final glance about the room. The dressing-table stood against the same wall as the wardrobe opposite to the bed. The window and the writing- table were between. A cluster of light globes was fixed in the centre of the ceiling. There was a standard lamp by the bed, two upon the dressing-table and in the back wall two sconces were set, fitted with electric bulbs. Hanaud took all these details in and led the way down the stone staircase into the angle of the corridor.
“And this,” he said, seizing the handle of the door close by, “this is the room of Mademoiselle Tasbruff.”
“Tasborough,” Ricardo corrected him.
“That is what I say, ‘Tasbruff.’”
He remained with his hand upon the knob, measuring with his eyes the distance between the two doors.
“This something,” he asked of Ricardo, “which flicked past you last night outside upon the terrace — it was a person? It could not have been a bat or an owl?”
“Oh, no. It was a person. I am sure.”
“But you had no suspicion who it was?”
“None.”
“And it vanished through the window of this room, at the door of which I am standing?”
“Yes.”
“At half-past two in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Good! We have that clear,” and Hanaud turned the handle and for a second time entered Diana Tasborough’s bedroom.
Mr. Ricardo had been awaiting this moment in a fever. He almost pushed Hanaud out of the way in his anxiety to get to that picture on the wall above the bed and pluck its secret from it. He suffered one of the great disappointments of his life. For he found himself staring at one of a myriad copies of Tintoretto’s picture of the Grand Canal of Venice. The gondolas, the pale mass of the Doge’s Palace, the dome of Santa Maria del Salute — Mr. Ricardo had seen them a hundred times on the walls of a hundred bedrooms, had slept under them, he too. There was no secret to be plucked out of that picture, no mystery by its mute agency to be laid bare. Mr. Ricardo gazed reproachfully at the detective who hurried to his side.
“You see nothing there?” Hanaud asked.
“Nothing.”
“It must be, then, that there is nothing to see.”
Nothing there — no! But there was that curious brightness in Hanaud’s eyes, that curious alertness in his manner, which Ricardo had noticed before in this very spot. Even his voice was vibrant with excitement. Once more this room had had some vital information to give to him. The picture — a joke and not in the best taste. But jokes in bad taste played upon you delightedly were part of the price which you had to pay for the thrills which his friendship was apt to provide. Mr. Ricardo swallowed his grievance and gazed with a frowning brow about the room for just that changed thing which had so encouraged Hanaud. Alas! He could not find it. There was the mirror, the writing-table with the crucifix, the same bottles of perfume on the dressing- table — no, Mr. Ricardo was at a loss. He detected Hanaud watching him with the shadow of a grin upon his face.
“It is peculiar, isn’t it?” said Hanaud quickly.
“Very. Very peculiar,” replied Mr. Ricardo, who was not going to be made a mockery and derision if he could help it.
“If you are satisfied, there is one more room which we should visit before our hostess and her manager return. It is not pleasant to find the police poking their noses into little intimate secrets which have nothing to do with them. Yet that, alas, in their wide search the police must do. So let us cause as little annoyance as we can. Moreau, you will ask Monsieur Le Commissaire to post someone to watch the road and give us warning of the car’s return.”
Monsieur Le Commissaire, however, was disinclined to withdraw the dignity of his tricoloured sash from Hanaud’s investigation. He nodded to Moreau.
“You will find Andrieu Biche in the room we are using. You shall post him at the spot which is most convenient.”
Moreau went reluctantly upon his errand.
“Andrieu Biche has his wits about him,” said the Commissaire to Hanaud. “We are safe from interruption.”
Mr. Ricardo knew Hanaud well enough to realize that he was now in a great hurry. He led the way on to the terrace by the long window in the bow of the turret, passed swiftly along the face of the house, crossed the avenue of trees and came out into the open space of grass upon which the chalet was built. On the edge of this space he halted just for a second. But there was not any movement visible within the chalet, and a screen of trees sheltered the onlookers from the observation of the labourers about the chais and the vats. Nevertheless Hanaud crossed the plot of grass at a run, flung open the white gate and was at the door of the chalet with a speed which his bulk altogether belied. The door was latched but unlocked. It gave upon a narrow passage with a door on either side, a staircase beyond, and beyond the staircase, through an open doorway, the party caught a glimpse of a kitchen. Hanaud stopped in the passage again for a second with his finger to his lips. But not a sound could be heard.
“The service of the chalet is done from the chateau,” Hanaud said with a note of relief. “It is empty.”
A hurried step sounded on the gravel behind him. He turned round. The new- comer was Moreau back from his errand to the Commissaire. “A man is posted on the road,” he said.
“Good!” Hanaud replied. He paid not the slightest attention to the rooms on the ground floor, but sprang quickly up the stairs. A bathroom and a dressing-room stood upon one side, a long bedroom upon the other with a window at either end. Hanaud went at once to the window, which looked out across the grass on the avenue of trees.
“It was here that you saw the light burning?” he asked of Mr. Ricardo.
“Yes.”
The room was lit at night by electricity. A standard lamp stood upon a table by the
bed and a couple of brackets were fixed in each of the walls.
“Yes,” Hanaud repeated. But he was not satisfied. A table stood in the centre of the room but in a line with the window. He ran his eyes over the articles upon it — a book, a fountain-pen, a case for note-paper and envelopes, a blotter, a bottle of ink, a pencil — but he was looking for something, and the thing he looked for was not there. Some cupboards were let into a wall side by side. Hanaud opened them in their order. In one, clothes dangled upon hangers; in the second, Robin Webster’s linen was arranged upon shelves. In the third, which was fitted with shelves too, his ties and collars and socks and handkerchiefs were grouped. But they only took up two shelves and there were three. The third was given over to odds and ends — a leather collar-box, a few bottles, a Thermos flask, and a saucer. Hanaud closed the door and swung round, he clapped his hands and rubbed the palms together while a smile slowly overspread his face. Oh, he had found what he was looking for — not a doubt of it. But Mr. Ricardo was not paying any great attention to him. He had found something too. Yes, he had — an idea.
“Hanaud, I have an idea,” he cried as he stood by the window. In a moment Hanaud was shaking him by the elbow with every sign of admiration and excitement.
“An idea! Actually! That thing so rare! Speak it! Don’t keep me on the tent-hook! Put the idea so priceless into priceless words!”
“You will not laugh at me?”
“My friend!” The two words breathed a whole world of reproach.
“Very well, then. I measure the length of the wing of the chateau with my eyes.”
“I had not thought of it! Now I do,” said Hanaud.
“On the left at the end of the wing, obliquely from us, is my window.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 97