He carried off his defeat with an admirable assurance. Mr. Ricardo did him that justice. But it was a defeat. There was no longer any question of ringing up the Commissaire at Villeblanche upon the telephone and countermanding Hanaud’s directions. He rose from his chair.
“You have this gentleman’s car at your disposal, I understand?”
Hanaud bowed. “Mr. Ricardo is very kind to me,” he said politely, and opened the door of the room. Moreau in the passage stood to attention. “Moreau, Monsieur Le Juge wishes to return with us. Will you direct him to the car? I follow.”
For the fraction of a second Tidon hesitated on the threshold of the room. Did he realize that though the formal words were not spoken, he, the ambitious magistrate of the district, was really under arrest? Or was he already deep in some subtle argument which would clear him from all participation in the crime? Mr. Ricardo could not tell. He set his hat upon his head with his left hand, adjusted it even with jauntiness, and went out of the room. A moment afterwards Ricardo heard his footsteps and those of Moreau upon the pebbles of the drive. Inside the room Hanaud had turned to the Vicomte de Mirandol.
“Sir,” he said, “whether the law can touch you or not I don’t yet know. Or whether it must leave public opinion to scourge you to the bone, as without doubt it will do. For the moment you are at provisional liberty.”
Hanaud turned on his heel and went out of the house. He took Mr. Ricardo by the arm and led him towards the gate.
“I have one more anxious moment,” he said. “We shall see.”
The examining magistrate was already seated in the car when Hanaud and his friend passed through the gate. They mounted in their turn, Ricardo seating himself by the side of Tidon and Hanaud facing him upon the opposite seat.
“Switch on the headlights, Moreau, and look out,” he said, and he himself, turning in his seat, watched the road between the shoulders of Moreau and the chauffeur. The car slid down the hill, crossed the pasture-land and passed the garage before the thing for which Hanaud waited occurred. A man stepped forward from the side of the road carrying a suit-case. The car stopped, the suitcase was handed up to Moreau, and Hanaud leaned out of the window.
“Did no one hear you?” he asked anxiously.
“No one. The ladies were still in the drawing-room when I went upstairs. I am sure.”
“Good!”
The car went on again, swept round by the rose-pink arch of the Chateau Suvlac, and almost like some living person, conscious of a prolonged and strenuous task, settled to a swift, steady and regular progress along the road to Bordeaux.
The examining magistrate spoke with a mild interest in his voice. “That was a suit-case, I think, which was handed into the car?”
“Yes,” Hanaud answered.
“From the Chateau Suvlac, then?”
“Yes,” said Hanaud. “I asked the inspector upon the road to secure it for me as quietly as he could.”
Then followed a few moments of silence, and then the magistrate remarked: “That is curious. It contains, no doubt, some pieces of important evidence.”
“No,” said Hanaud. “I shall tell you, Monsieur Le Juge, about that suit- case. It was very important that I should get it without the household of Suvlac knowing anything whatever about it. I cannot myself move until tomorrow. For I shall not know until tomorrow the whole truth of this affair. I may have my suspicions, but they are not enough. Now if it were known in the chateau that that suit-case has been packed and taken secretly away — it is very possible that the Law’s work might be taken out of the Law’s hands.”
The magistrate was silent for a little while, and as still as he was silent. It was not indeed until the car had flashed through Pauillac that he spoke again.
“I should be obliged, Monsieur Hanaud, if you could find it possible to be more explicit about that suit-case.”
“But certainly,” he replied cordially. “Amongst us three there is no need for concealments. The suit-case contains some clothes for Mademoiselle Joyce Whipple.”
From the darkness of the car Tidon asked quietly: “That young lady has been found, then?”
“Happily, yes,” Hanaud returned. “One of those strokes of chance, by which it is my business to profit, led me to the house of the widow Chicholle in the Rue Gregoire. I was just in time.”
“She is alive, then?”
“Yes. She has been roughly treated. But she is young. She has found, I think, tonight some compensations, so that tomorrow we shall know all that happened two nights ago at the Chateau Mirandol.”
“That is the best of news,” said the magistrate. “I had hardly dared to hope for it.”
“You can understand, therefore, my relief,” Hanaud continued, dwelling upon this matter of the suit-case with what seemed to Mr. Ricardo a needless particularity, “that it was secured without the knowledge of the household. Were it known there that Joyce Whipple was safe and that the whole truth must be known no later than tomorrow — why, as I say, the Law’s work of punishment might be taken out of the Law’s hands—”
In other words, there would be a suicide — perhaps two — perhaps even three, reflected Mr. Ricardo. For who knew how many of the household of Suvlac were implicated in the mystery?
“I understand you very well,” said the magistrate, and again he relapsed into silence.
But as the loom of light began to show in the sky above Bordeaux, he said: “I shall smoke,” and he felt in his pocket for his cigarette case.
Hanaud laughed with a very evident note of relief. “I have been longing to hear you say that,” and a rustle of paper informed Mr. Ricardo that the bright blue packet of Maryland cigarettes was in Hanaud’s fingers.
“I have a match here. You will allow me,” he said. A scratching, a spurt of fire, for a few seconds a tiny creeping blue light and then the yellow flame; and the dark interior of the limousine became a place of wavering shadows with two faces brightly lit. Hanaud held the light to Tidon’s cigarette, then he lighted his own; and for a few momenta the two men looked at each other with a steady gaze.
“I thank you,” said the magistrate quietly.
The match burnt out and once more darkness fell. The two men smoked in silence, the glow of their cigarettes waxing and waning; and then Tidon’s cigarette fell to the floor, and as Hanaud stamped upon it a smell as of bitter almonds filled the car. Hanaud let down the windows.
“Your mouth to the air, my friend,” he cried, and Ricardo obeyed, squeezing himself away from the thing which now, shaking and swaying with every jolt of the car, lay behind him in the corner of the carriage. Already, however, they were traversing the city. A few minutes and the car stopped at the hotel in the Cours de L’Intendance. It was half-past two in the morning, and not a light was in any window, not a wayfarer in the street.
“Moreau shall ring for the night porter,” — said Hanaud; “You will say nothing of this. I am a servant of the law. I will not have it shamed more than need be.”
“You executed him,” said Mr. Ricardo with a shiver of horror.
“Better I than the man with the guillotine,” Hanaud answered sombrely. He helped Mr. Ricardo out of the car and steadied him across the pavement. He placed him in a chair in the hall and bade the porter fetch a tumbler full of brandy, and stood by whilst Ricardo drank it.
“Shall I help you to your room?” he asked solicitously, but Mr. Ricardo shook his head. Holding by the balustrade he walked, his legs trembling beneath him, up the stairs. Hanaud returned to the car, and a minute later the street was empty again.
CHAPTER 23
MR. RICARDO LUNCHES
JULIUS RICARDO HAD spent a wearing day which would have taxed even a younger and more adventurous person; and such a shock had befallen him at the end that his sensibilities were quite stunned. It was not to be wondered at, then, that he slept like a log. Tidon the magistrate, the Vicomte de Mirandol, Evelyn Devenish, Robin Webster, Hanaud, the old, throned captious lady of Suvlac, the Abbe with
the furtive walk, Diana Tasborough, even Joyce Whipple, who occupied the tenderest corner of his heart, thinned to the texture of gossamer. Away they went, carrying their questions and perplexities with them. Not one ghost haunted his pillow, not a question plagued him with dreams. He slept as boys sleep after a football match. Neither the brightness of the morning nor all the clocks of Bordeaux could awaken him. The hour of noon had struck before he passed in a fraction of a second through one of those excruciating nightmares which at times precede the actual awakening. Excruciating, because he could neither cry out nor move, but must lie like another Merlin under a perpetual spell. He dreamed that he lay in an inferno of acrid smoke, and that while Tidon, the magistrate, held his hand and pointed and said, “There! That is the place,” old Mrs. Tasborough, delicately and without effort, severed his arm at the wrist with a fruit-knife. He sat up with a cry upon his lips and his heart racing. Hanaud was sitting by his bedside, with a black cigarette between his teeth and his fingers on Mr. Ricardo’s pulse.
Mr. Ricardo, aware as he swam upwards into consciousness that he had cried out in alarm, eyed his visitor with disfavour.
“I may be old-fashioned,” he said, flapping a hand up and down in the air like the fin of a fish, “but I cannot endure any but the mildest of Turkish tobacco in my bedroom.”
“Good!” Hanaud answered cordially, without, however, letting him off one single puff. “Then the more I blow the Maryland, the sooner you will rise from your bed.”
The events of yesterday crowded back into Ricardo’s mind. “You will want me,” he cried. “I must give my evidence. A judge died by his own hand in my Rolls-Royce car. It is all most important. I beg you to retire.”
Already Mr. Ricardo had flung back the bedclothes and rung the bell for Elias Thomson. He was on his way to the Prefecture within the hour, where, indeed, he had little on that day to do but corroborate Hanaud’s narrative. He learnt, however, the actual mode of Tidon’s death. He had carried a cigarette in his case of an especial thickness. At each end there was a tiny wad of tobacco, but the case was really filled by a glass tube containing a ninety-per- cent dose of prussic acid.
“I told you that he was a very clever man,” said Hanaud as he sat down afterwards to luncheon with his friend in the restaurant of the Chapon Fin. “He was ready, you see.”
“And you knew that he was ready,” said Mr. Ricardo.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. “I suspected it, and — I shall be frank with you — I was glad when he took the way out that he did. He was of the magistracy. The scandal will be enormous as it is when all the truth is known, as it must be at the next assizes. It would have been dangerous, had Monsieur Tidon lived to have received the sentence of the court.”
“He would have been sentenced for the murder of Evelyn Devenish?” Mr. Ricardo exclaimed in bewilderment, and Hanaud hastened to interrupt him.
“Oh, no, no, my friend!”
Mr. Ricardo threw up his hands. “I am adrift in a mist,” he cried. “I hear sirens and fog-horns on this side and that telling me my position, but the more I hear the more the mist thickens, and less and less am I sure of my position.”
“Try this smoked salmon,” said Hanaud, and looking round the great room. “On the rare occasions when a wealthy friend has taken me to lunch with him at the Chapon Fin I am never quite sure whether I am lunching in a rock-garden or at the bottom of an aquarium.”
Mr. Ricardo was familiar with these disconcerting moods of this officer of the Surete, when, knowing everything, he would play the man of mystery. In a sort of desperation he cried out: ; ;”You shall tell me one thing. You shall tell me how you came to know that Tidon had damaged his hand.”
“Yes, that will interest you,” Hanaud answered with a laugh. He filled his companion’s glass and his own with a Lafite of 1899. “First I had a little idea. Then your chauffeur strengthened it. Then you very wonderfully confirmed it.”
Mr. Ricardo drew himself up. He spoke with a good deal of dignity.
“A certain amount of raillery, I expect from you. More! When you are hot upon the trail and I interrupt you, I know that I shall be leapt upon and gibbeted. I may not like it, but I don’t resent it. I know that I am merely an elderly gentleman of no consequence, who has had the good fortune to become the friend of a very interesting personage. But when the whole affair is, as you tell me, over, and you are at your ease whilst I am dancing upon hot plates, I should prefer, I admit it, to obtain some relief from my perplexities.”
At once Hanaud’s big face clouded with remorse. “But, my dear sir,” he cried, “no one could value a friendship more than I value this one I have the honour to share with you — I do not play with you. No! I tell you the truth!” He was pleading earnestly, a man very much moved. “Listen! We — you and I — we go to the Prefecture at Villeblanche. Good! We meet Monsieur Tidon and he takes us into his room.”
“Yes,” Ricardo agreed.
“He lays down his hat and his cane on a side-table. Good! But he keeps on his gloves. All through that interview he keeps on his gloves. Now I tell you. On the stage — yes, they keep on their gloves. Why, I don’t know. And Monsieur Clemenceau — yes, he too. But apart from the actors and Monsieur Clemenceau, people in a room take off their gloves. So I wonder. Then a moment came whilst you were telling your story, a very curious moment. You speak of that room at the door of which you knocked in the dead of night. You say, ‘It is Diana Tasborough’s room,’ and in an exasperation at the difficulty of the problem, he strikes his right hand flat upon his table. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“At once he turns his back upon us and his face to the window.”
“Yes.”
“He lifts his left arm and plays with the bolt.”
That scene in the magistrate’s room was growing clearer and clearer to Ricardo’s recollections under the stimulus of Hanaud’s narrative.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“But to me, it seemed that he was holding himself up by that bolt. His body swayed a little. I had the clearest impression of a man about to faint. Then he spoke, and in a voice so weak and feeble that I cannot but pity him. And it was a long while before he turned round and showed us his face again. So I wonder all the more. And I remember that Robin Webster has a wounded hand. And when we reach the Chateau Suvlac I make an excuse to send you on and I speak privately with your chauffeur. Aha, you did not like it that I converse with your chauffeur. No, but it was well I converse with him. I learn two things — yes, first an idiom, which I will use in due time, and next an important confirmation of my idea. I say: ‘When that gentleman hangs himself by the left hand to the bolt of the window, what air had he?’ I ask him that, and he answer — now let me get it right — he answer: ‘Gorblimey, he was all in. He looked for it.’ Gorblimey — yes, that was good — I make a note to remember him, but the rest, ‘He was all in. He looked for it’ — that I found, even with my knowledge of your tongue, a little difficult. So I have to do the examination, and I find the chauffeur means just what I expected. Tidon was about to faint. He had dashed his hand down upon his desk and was in such pain that he must hang himself to the window bolt to save himself from falling. There, then, are I and the chauffeur. Now for you.”
“Yes, now for me,” said Mr. Ricardo, leaning forward with enjoyment, all his dignity and indignation quite forgotten. He was to hear what a fine part he had played in this investigation. He was not very sure about it himself. But he was going to be told now.
“We were on the terrace of Suvlac, you and I. You look through the window and you see in the shadow of that room a man with his back to you.”
“Yes.”
“And you cry out in a voice of great certainty; ‘The Examining Judge.’”
“Yes.”
“But it was not the examining judge at all. No, it was Robin Webster. Now those two men, they are not so unlike one another. No! On the other hand, they are not so like one another, either. So I ask myself, indeed
I ask you, if you remember, why you make this mistake with so much conviction. You cannot tell me. Nevertheless, I wonder. There must be some reason. And then I see. That poor man supports his right hand between the buttons of his jacket, just as Robin Webster supports his right hand in a sling. That little fact opens a world to me of conjectures and possibilities. The injury done to Webster by the wine-press — it may be — yes, no doubt. But I think it more likely that both the examining judge and Webster receive their hurt at the same place and in the same way. You see, I begin to ask myself, have I an enemy in that excellent examining judge? Oh, you help me — all through this case you help me very much.”
“How? How?” Mr. Ricardo asked greedily as he helped himself to a filet mignon. “For instance?”
“In the little things and the big things,” Hanaud replied. “For the little things you tell me of the great change in Mademoiselle Tasborough — how she, who had queened it in her small set, was now the submissive poor companion and did not seem to notice the alteration in her position. To me that was very interesting. The old lady of no account for years, suddenly finding herself in authority, seizing upon it, presuming upon it, becoming captious and petulant — that I understand easily. But the young queen with her fine clothes and her money and her houses, submitting to orders and reprimands — in these days — and untroubled by them — no, that puzzled me. The little pinpricks, the continual finding fault — they get on the nerves. One resents them more and more instead of ceasing to notice them at all. It was significant, that curious detail — much more significant than the fact that she had given up London in the season for Biarritz out of it. You suggested to me some very strange revolution in that Miss Tasborough’s character, the coming of a great obsession. Yes.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 110