Hanaud sat for a little while with a smile upon his face. Morning and evening he was in the habit of warning himself, “You have to deal with people, not with marionettes,” and it was a very definite pleasure to him, when he was led to the truth out of a very jungle of mystery by some curiously illuminating little sidelight thrown by a variation in conduct and character, which at first sight might seem of no more importance whatever. Mr. Ricardo, however, was not content to leave him long in this contented muse.
“And in the big way I helped you too?”
“To be sure. This Brie is excellent, isn’t it? At the Chapon Fin, whether it be an aquarium or a rock-garden, one eats well. So! Some coffee and some fine de la maison? Yes? And one of those big fat cigars which spoil the fit of your fine tourist suit. Good. I light him, and I tell you quick what you want to know. Else the next time you give me a cigar, I find a ninety-per-cent dose of prussic acid waiting for me within it. Yes, my friend, in the big things you help me. For if you had not seen the lights blazing in the conference room of the Chateau Mirandol at two o’clock in the morning, we should all still be adrift in the mist you speak of, and the adorable Joyce Whipple would be lying still and silent under the clay of the Rue Gregoire instead of sauntering in with the pretty nonchalance of her kind in her smart blue frock, her taupe silk stockings and her shining little decorative shoes, to take luncheon with her lover at the Chapon Fin.”
A very pleasant and friendly look lit up his face as he spoke, and Mr. Ricardo turned about in his chair. Joyce Whipple was standing just within the doorway of the restaurant, heeding no one except Bryce Carter, who was asking the head waiter for a table. The newspapers had not as yet any further developments of the crime of Suvlac to offer to their readers. No one in the restaurant, except Hanaud and Ricardo, had a suspicion that the very trim and pretty girl standing by the door was the one whose disappearance was supposed to be utterly baffling the police. Though there were signs to Mr. Ricardo’s eyes of the ordeal she had been through in the pallor of her cheeks and the shadows about her big eyes, and in a certain gesture and look of wonder when she took her seat at her table, as though she could not believe that she was alive and free. But her eyes very quickly returned to her companion’s face.
“We shall take no notice of them, eh?” said Hanaud. “Not a glance! Not even at those slim young legs. No! We leave them to talk, and I tell you they will not talk about dead kings. No, Gorblimey!”
Julius Ricardo let the uncouth phrase pass without a reprimand. If Hanaud had the ambition to talk like a chauffeur, that was his affair. Ricardo would not interfere. He was suddenly in pain. He had been pierced by the injustice of his friends.
There was Joyce Whipple at the table across the restaurant, her eyes shining, dimples coming and going in her cheeks, and not a thought for him. Had she or had she not told the story of her adventures that morning? Yes, she had. And Hanaud knew that story? He did. He had no doubt taken some action upon it? He had. Well, then! Here was the man who had helped kept in the dark. What a scandal!
“I do not even know who killed Evelyn Devenish,” he exclaimed, spreading out his hands.
“To that I can answer,” Hanaud replied gravely, “this: Robin Webster was arrested at eleven o’clock this morning on a charge of murder.”
“And Diana Tasborough?” Mr. Ricardo asked.
“Oh, no, no, my friend. That young lady had nothing to do with it.”
“In spite of that obsession?”
“Because of that obsession,” replied Mr. Hanaud, and Mr. Ricardo was conscious of an immense relief.
“And the old lady on the throne?” he pursued.
“Still on the throne,” answered Hanaud, and Mr. Ricardo, to his shame, had no feelings of relief or otherwise.
But at last he had persuaded Hanaud into a mood of disclosure, and his questions tumbled out of him, leaping and clashing and swirling like a mill- race through a half-opened sluice.
“Why did Robin Webster kill Evelyn Devenish? And where? And what did Joyce Whipple mean when she cried, ‘It is not I who dispense the cold’? And why did the Abbe Fauriel cross himself and creep about so furtively afterwards? And what was it that you, Hanaud, discovered in Diana Tasborough’s room? And where was Diana when Joyce Whipple snapped off the light and I rapped upon the glass door? And how did the mask come to be caught up in the tree? Yes, and a word about that tumbled bed, if you please. And how, in spite of your fine cordon of police, was Joyce brought to the Rue Gregoire? And how did you learn of her coming? And why did you seal up an empty cupboard, and a room with nothing in it but for a few chairs and tables? Yes, and since we are talking of the Chateau Mirandol, who spread the mustard gas upon the gate, and why? Give me an answer to some of these perplexities and then I have a hundred other questions for you. For instance, how did Joyce Whipple’s bracelet find itself in the basket? And how—”
But at this point Hanaud clutched his forehead with his hands in so desperate a frenzy that Mr. Ricardo faltered.
“If you continue,” Hanaud warned him, “in one minute I go blah-blah.”
“Blah, one word,” Mr. Ricardo corrected, the habit of accuracy reasserting its authority.
“Well, blah, then, if you insist — though I should have said — well, let it go. More of your questions and I am blah. Yes, for just at this moment I cannot answer half of them. In two days’ time, perhaps. Oh, you shall know all, my friend, never fear, but first let me get smooth and straight the history of this dark and lawless business.”
He sat and smoothed out the white tablecloth with gentle sweeping movements of his palms, as if he were wiping away the creases and folds in the record of the amazing crime. Then he smiled a little and raised his eyes to his companion’s face.
“Meanwhile I give you an answer to two questions you have not asked. Why was there something familiar and precise and pedantic in the utterance of Robin Webster? Aha! You jump. Yes, you had forgotten. And why was the flyleaf torn from some of the volumes in that queer little collection at the head of his bed? Aha! You jump again. Good! You do well to jump. The answer to both those questions is the same: Robin Webster is a renegade priest.”
If Ricardo had jumped a little at the questions, he rose clean out of his chair at the answer. For a moment he felt his hair stirring upon his scalp. Then he slowly let himself down again.
“Of course,” he said in a whisper. Then he lifted his eyes in a piteous appeal. “When I read a book, I must first of all look at the last page. I cannot bear it unless I do.”
Hanaud smiled. “You have only, I think, to look across the room to see the last page of this book,” he said. But he started as he spoke, and directed a warning glance at his companion. For Joyce Whipple and Bryce Carter were crossing to their table. Joyce held out a hand to each of the two men.
“I have only this instant seen you. How shall I thank you?” she asked in a low voice, but tears sprang into her eyes, and to both of them they were thanks enough.
“I shall tell you how,” Hanaud replied. “You shall sit down and take your coffee with us.”
But Joyce shook her head. “We hurried over our coffee, because I want to get back to my bed. I could sleep for two days,” and though she laughed, she delicately yawned. It was as much as she could do to keep her eyes open.
“I have an idea,” cried Hanaud. “You shall sleep for two days, mademoiselle. That is the time I want. And in two days’ time we dine together, the four of us, at my little hotel on the Place des Quinconces, and then we tell, each in turn, what each one knows, and then this poor Mr. Ricardo will be able to sleep too, Gorblimey!”
Joyce Whipple looked a little puzzled, but as Mr. Ricardo was delighted to observe, she was too well bred to pass any comment on the unexpected ejaculation.
CHAPTER 24
MEANING OF THE CONFERENCE ROOM
A FORTNIGHT PASSED, however, before routine had finished its work and placed the woven pattern of the crime in the great detective’s hands. Hanau
d then sought out once more Mr. Ricardo and his fine Rolls-Royce car, and an hour afterwards the two men stood at the top of the staircase outside the conference room. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, the sunlight pouring in through every window and lying in great splashes of gold upon the floor; and the house as still as a tomb. For the Vicomte, still at provisional liberty, had gone to his lodging in Bordeaux, and only the police occupied this chateau on the Gironde. The broad linen bands with the official seals had been removed, but the door was still locked, and Hanaud, in his most vexatiously dramatic mood, took a portentous time to discover the key in his pockets.
“It was within this room, then, that Evelyn Devenish was murdered,” said Mr. Ricardo in a voice of awe.
“It was here,” said Hanaud. “Perhaps at — the very moment when you were looking out towards the lighted windows from your bedroom.”
“I heard no cry,” said Mr. Ricardo, shaking his head. He had not forgotten the distance between the two houses, but he could not believe that so direful a crime had been committed in that bright room without some message floating across the night’s dark silence to call him out of his indifference.
“There was no cry,” Hanaud replied. From his sombre certitude he might have assisted at the scene. “A moan perhaps, a rattle in the throat, hardly even that—” and turning the key he threw open the door.
Like a good stage-manager he had prepared his effects. The long room was no longer a conference room though more than ever it was a place of assembly. For the leaves of the long table had been removed, and the table itself, dwarfed into insignificance, barely occupied a corner. On the other hand, the chairs which had lined the side wall were now ranged in orderly rows facing the dais, with a straight passage from the door dividing them like an aisle. But it was the aspect of the dais itself which riveted Mr. Ricardo’s attention and set his eyes blinking. The table had been set forward from the wall, and in place of the green baize it was draped now with a black coffin-pall bordered with white. Upon the pall were laid out three great books with broad markers of crimson silk and gold clasps which locked, a chalice and a box of gold inlay, and two big golden candelabra, each with six branches, and each branch holding a tall black candle compounded of sulphur and pitch. The candles were lit, and burned with a blue flame and an evil stench. And a great crucifix of ebony with an ivory Christ stood upside down. Mr. Ricardo realized with a shock of repulsion that he was gazing at a horrid parody of an altar.
He lifted his eyes above the dais. The cupboard was open, its doors rounded at the top lay flat on either side against the wall, and the white paint, so fresh and thickly bedaubed over the recess on his last visit, had now with infinite care been scraped away. He was gazing at an altar-screen painted by a degenerate who had dipped his brush in nightmares. On one panel nude figures holding hands danced wildly back to back; on the other, deformities with white fat human faces to turn the heart sick, crawled and swarmed in a house of pain. The rewards here, the tortures there, and between them on the wall of the recess, a youth, a figure of sheer beauty, slender, erect, and white as a girl, with a face too delicate for a man’s, and blue lustrous eyes which seemed to claim all other eyes and burned with an unutterable sadness. With a shiver Ricardo averted his gaze. He turned to the windows and saw the good sunlight lying broad on green vines and brown river and the white sails of ships. But, even so, he felt those blue eyes intolerably bright burning into his back, and bidding him turn and share their immitigable misery.
“The room, then, was in this array that night when I looked across from my window in the Chateau Suvlac?” he asked in a low voice, as a man speaks in a chapel. But he spoke still looking from the window to the Gironde, and though he was unaware of it, his hands clung to the frame.
“There was one great difference,” said Hanaud behind him, and for once Mr. Ricardo’s curiosity was stilled. He shrank even from a guess as to wherein that difference had lain. With a movement of real violence, he unlatched and flung open the window and leaning out drank in the clean, fresh air. He was afraid now to know what had happened in that room. He had a glimpse into an abyss where loathsome creatures pullulated in a slime. He heard Hanaud move down the room and blow out the candles.
“Those three books?” he asked.
Hanaud answered with some pride, like a man who has just learnt a new thing. “They are ‘The Grimoire of Honorius,’ ‘The Lemegeton or Lesser-Key of Solomon Rabbi,’ and ‘The Grand Grimoire.’”
Mr. Ricardo was no wiser. “What do they contain?”
“Conjurations, rituals. This,” he said, touching ‘The Grand Grimoire’, “evokes the supreme Fly-the-Light by means of the Blasting Rod which drove Adam and Eve from Paradise. This,” and he touched ‘The Lesser — Key’, “sets out the prayers by which the evil spirits can be conjured to harm one who is hated, and this,” his hand rested on ‘The Grimoire of Honorius’, “has been held to advocate murder.”
He had begun upon a satirical note, but it did not carry him beyond the first of the volumes. For the other two he had only scorn and anger, knowing the deed which they had been ranged upon that table to set off.
“And the youth painted on the altar-screen?” Mr. Ricardo asked.
“The lord of all evil,” Hanaud replied. “Lucifer, Satan — another name too, Adonis” — and, as Mr. Ricardo started— “yes, Adonis.”
He seated himself by the side of Ricardo in the recess of the window. “My friend, it is not always as a goat that the devil is worshipped. Even in the old days he was supposed to appear in silken habiliments, the young man, beautiful and cold as ice, who gave nothing in return for worship but disappointment. Adonis is one of his names.”
Mr. Ricardo, however, was not thinking of that queer identification of the Devil with the shepherd of the legends. He was recalling the scene at the dinner-table on the night of his arrival at the Chateau Suvlac, when Joyce broke out in a little crescendo of hysteria to Evelyn Devenish: “You needn’t look at me. It’s not I who dispense the cold.” Mr. Ricardo turned himself about now and faced the picture of the marvellous youth, his sandals laced about his legs, his leopard skin girdled about his waist and his long spear in his hand. Wherever he turned the blue eyes seemed to follow him, unutterably sad, commanding his allegiance.
“So Joyce knew,” he said, forcing himself from the contemplation of the appealing figure upon the wall. “Already on that night she knew of this room!”
“Something of this room,” Hanaud corrected.
“And understood its rites.”
“Again, something of its rites.”
“As you did — at once. Yes,” and Mr. Ricardo marvelled as he recollected here a detail, there another which had been, which still was, a mystery to him, and yet from the beginning had been lucid as glass to his companion.
But Hanaud was quicker to read Mr. Ricardo’s mind than he had been any of those mysteries. ““No, my friend,” he urged. “You may turn Adonis into the Devil if you like, but you mustn’t turn me into a God. I understood not the first little least thing about that saying of Joyce Whipple’s. I was as puzzled as you — yes, until that hour when you saw me coming out of the Archiepiscopal Palace at Bordeaux.”
“But I never told you that I saw you,” Mr. Ricardo exclaimed.
“No, but you did see me. I saw that you saw me. There were you in the centre of the square standing with the mouth open and the eyes all poppy, saying to yourself ‘Gorblimey!’”
“Never,” Mr. Ricardo interrupted energetically. “Nor are my eyes poppy. On the contrary. In moments of agitation they recede.”
“Gorblimey, or the words to that effect,” Hanaud continued calmly. “I had spent an hour, then, with his Grace’s librarian and I had learnt some things, I can tell you. Oh! Oh! Oh! Very disappointing, the Devil. Even the meat at those old Sabbaths was offal, and he himself spreading the cold of the glaciers about him.” Suddenly he stretched out a hand towards the left-hand panel of the ingenious altar-screen. “No wo
nder they danced furiously, those poor people in their forest glades. No wonder the first in favour was the one who danced faster than the others. They had to keep warm,” and again the note of satire died away. “Yet let us not forget. All these ludicrous mad fancies led to a great crime — committed here — in this sunlit room in which we sit — as in other places they have often done before.”
He looked about the room, reconstructing in his thoughts the succession of events, and resumed:
“I have brought you here not to tell you what happened. That Joyce Whipple can do far better than I, for with her own eyes she saw. But I prepare you for it. I made nothing of her cry, ‘It is not I who dispense the cold.’ No, but certain other things perplexed me. The fact that the Abbe Fauriel secretly crossed himself. Eh? I was interested. Then his vestments had been stolen — curious? — and the next morning, or the same night, returned. Aha! I begin to smell a skunk. Yes! Then in the room of Mademoiselle Tasborough I come across a remarkable thing.”
“Yes,” said Ricardo. “I am there. A picture of the Doge’s Palace on the Grand Canal, though for the life of me I could not see anything remark able in it at all.”
“There was nothing remarkable in it,” Hanaud observed. “No. What I did see was that,” and again his hand darted out towards the altar. “A crucifix with an ivory figure of the Christ hung above her writing-table against the wall with its head down, the feet up. I didn’t move it.”
“I agree,” said Ricardo. “You touched nothing.”
“You and I went on to Villeblanche, and whilst we were away the Abbe Fauriel called.”
Again Mr. Ricardo agreed, but he was able to add a trifle to their common store of recollections. “We found when we got back that he was with old Mrs. Tasborough.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 111