“Now,” said Hanaud. “We have heard the story. All that remains is for me to — as you would say” — and he inclined his head towards Bryce Carter— “to dot the T’s.”
“Quite so,” Bryce Carter agreed, but Mr. Ricardo was not so lenient.
“Cross the T’s, my friend!”
Hanaud threw up his hands. “You hear? He calls me his friend, yet always he makes a mocking of me. But tonight I forbid. No, no! I am an inspector of the Surete, I think the best inspector, and I know my way about the English language. One crosses the C’s, it is the habit of the English, but one dots the T’s. Let it be understood, and I keep my biggest dot for the end.”
He challenged Mr. Ricardo with a glare, but confronted with the monstrosity of a man who said the English crossed the C’s, he was without reply.
“Good! I have silenced him. So! In the first place the gabare should have sailed with the tide at six in the morning. Yet when Miss Joyce runs to take refuge upon it, between two and three of the clock, it is gone. It puts out into the river to anchor there, or to drift farther and farther from its destination. There is no sense in the patron’s action, eh? Well, let us hear what he says! He says that shortly after two he was waked by hearing someone step lightly from the dock on to his deck. He pushed his head and shoulders out of his cubby, and at once Robin Webster stooped down to him and said in a whisper:
“‘Don’t make any noise, but come ashore!’
“Webster led him into the grove of trees and showed him the basket, already corded. He thinks that a little way off two other men were standing, but he cannot he sure. He was not told what was in the basket. But he was offered the gabare with its sails and ropes and furniture, just as it lay in the harbour, if he put out now at once and sank that heavy basket with a weight attached to it in the middle of the Gironde. The patron says that he is a poor man, and that to own that fine gabare, the Belle Simone, was the dream of his life. He roused his two sons, carried on board the basket, which was, after all, not suspiciously heavy, pushed out into the river, and sank it weighted as he had been directed. But he had been told to be very quick, and no doubt, therefore, had tied the weight on carelessly. But that was now seen to be the will of the good God who brings the crimes to the light of day. And for himself he is very glad, for he is naturally of a religious nature, etcetera, etcetera. That is the patron’s story, and it fits in with the facts as we know them. The Belle Simone cannot have left its little harbour more than a few minutes before Miss Joyce came to a sudden stop at the foot of the avenue and left the clear imprints of her shoes in the soft grass.” Hanaud turned towards Joyce with a serious look upon his face. “You had a moment of despair then, yes, mademoiselle, but I am inclined to congratulate you upon missing the gabare, in spite of the patron’s very religious nature. After all, a fine gabare with all its equipment — eh?” and he shrugged his shoulders. Mr. Ricardo, however, was not disposed to accept the patron’s story. It was a defect perhaps pardonable in a character otherwise so white, that whenever that gentleman got a setback from Hanaud, he found it necessary afterwards to doubt his statements, his efficiency, the suitability of his age for his work, his sense of humour and his presentation of his case. So now:
“I have a little difficulty in believing that the basket could have been conveyed to the gabare within so short a time,” he said, stabbing the table delicately with the tips of his fingers and smiling a trifle offensively.
“You would have, my friend,” Hanaud agreed. “Yet, after all, though you merely wish to trip me up, you put a question. Let us consider the time.
In the first place, Miss Joyce runs down the hill. It is a kilometre. Then she undresses Mademoiselle Diana and puts her to bed. Ah, ah! Not so easy! Not to be done while you say: ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bedpost!’ No!”
“Only a lunatic would make such a remark,” said Mr. Ricardo acidly.
“After the undressing, Miss Joyce goes up to her room and, already overtired, does the breakdown. Good! Then she feels stifled, and only then does she think of the gabare. Now look at the other side! Tidon, with his ambitions and his wits about him, and as mademoiselle then noted, with his habit of command, Robin Webster, his black beast out of his way — both will hurry, hurry, for the morning somewhere beyond Bordeaux comes hurry, hurry too. They have a little preparation to make. They make it. They put the basket on de Mirandol’s car. They come down past the offices and out on to the Bordeaux road. Half a kilometre from the main entrance to Mirandol, a gate leads into the plantation of Suvlac. They drive the car into the plantation. They are now close to the avenue of trees. That basket is not so heavy for three men, as the captain of the gabare very truly said. There was time and to spare — even with that little preparation taken into account.”
It did not need the slight emphasis with which Hanaud stressed the words to make clear to anyone at that table exactly what he meant. Joyce Whipple shivered and her face contracted with a spasm of pain.
“Yes, not pretty, mademoiselle, but what will you? There was the smear upon that poor woman’s palm. Already the palms of Robin Webster and Tidon were tingling and burning. Already the flesh was raw. That good magistrate was taking no risks except those which he needs must take. He had seen crimes brought to light because the last necessary little precaution had been forgotten or despised. Suppose that, in spite of all, that body was discovered with a little wound on the palm which matched the wounds on the palms of Robin Webster and Monsieur Tidon — there might be some awkward talk, eh? So” — and Hanaud chopped the side of his hand sharply down upon the table, so that even the men jumped, and Joyce uttered a little cry. “Not pretty, eh? What became of that hand? Who shall say? The furnace or the earth. But it is curious about that bracelet, eh? It was disturbing to discover it — Miss Whipple’s gold bracelet in that basket. Very odd, very disturbing. But it is plain now, eh? The hand was chopped on the edge of the basket. Very likely no one noticed the wound until a moment before. Then—” He raised his hand again edgewise to cut the air, and Joyce Whipple leaned swiftly across her lover and arrested it.
“Please! Please!” she pleaded.
“Well, I omit the chops,” Hanaud conceded rather reluctantly, “but there was a chop and the gold bracelet — he slips into the basket. Why should they bother about it, with all that necessity to hurry, hurry? They did not know that it was the bracelet of Miss Whipple borrowed by a superstitious woman as a charm. So there is one T dotted.”
“Crossed,” Mr. Ricardo protested in an undertone.
“Dotted,” said Bryce Carter quite loudly. “And mind you, I was in the Foreign Office, where we know almost as much about the English language as Monsieur Hanaud himself. Go on, Monsieur Hanaud! I beg you to dot a T for me.”
Hanaud was magnanimity in person. He refused to trample upon a prostrate foe. Perhaps one little look of triumph, and he turned to Bryce Carter.
“Perfectly. Your T, I dot him.”
“How was it that Joyce survived during those two days at Mirandol? They ran such risks, those three. You had but to search the house.”
“Oh, but I have no right yet to search the house,” Hanaud interrupted. “I must have authorities, permissions, and who to grant them but the excellent Tidon? He make me some annoyances, I can tell you, if I ask him. Also some annoyances, perhaps, for mademoiselle there. No, I take another way. Oh, I ensure that mademoiselle shall keep her life in the house of Mirandol, never fear!”
Mr. Ricardo sniggered.
“I do that. Yes, I! No one else! Just I!”
Mr. Ricardo smiled across the table at Joyce. “Monsieur Hanaud is not at his best on these occasions. As he would say, modesty is not his summer suiting. And how do you do it?”
“I warn them. You hear me warn them, my friend,” Hanaud replied with a gravity which quite disconcerted Mr. Ricardo. “I tell them that they cannot rid themselves of the dead. Oh, Tidon knows it, but I remind him. I have a cordon round the house. What can they do? There are just two
ways — the earth or the stove. For the earth, they are sure I mean to go through that house like a repairer of the roads. For the stove? All that black evil smoke from the chimney — no, no—” And suddenly he caught himself up. “But, mademoiselle, I beg the pardon. On both the knees. It was not nice what I said. No, we blame Mr. Ricardo, who drives me on with snickerings.”
He was speaking very remorsefully to Joyce, who was watching him with a strained white face and such a look of horror in her eyes as put them all to shame for their eager questions.
“You forgive? Yes. We are rough people, without the suitable delicacies. But we love you — even the indescribable Mr. Ricardo. So you forgive?”
But Joyce seemed for the moment not to hear nor to be aware of the real tenderness which underlay the absurdity of his words. With a shudder which shook her from her head to her feet, she buried her face in her hands.
“Oh, oh!” she moaned in a low voice. “The black evil smoke! Me!” and she swayed forwards so that but for Bryce Carter’s clasp she would have fallen across the table. Consternation seized upon the little group. Hanaud filled a glass with Evian water.
“She drink this quick.” He gave it into Bryce Carter’s disengaged hand. “You make her drink it, or I say you are not her man and forbid the bands.”
“Banns,” came feebly from the lips of Mr. Ricardo. Bryce Carter gently drew the girl’s hands from her face and held the glass to her lips.
“You are very kind — all of you,” she said, smiling wanly. She drank from the glass, and reaching out a small white hand, laid it very prettily upon Hanaud’s big paw.
“That is better, eh? I come to the rescue once more. So! now, mademoiselle, listen to me! I dot the last T with a big, neat, pleasant dot, and we all go home to bed.”
He gazed round the table, gathering attention, beaming with satisfaction.
“Listen! I have had it in my mind that all this fine courage of mademoiselle, her devotion to her friend, and her terrible distress, must not miss their fulfilment. It was to save her friend, Diana Tasborough, that she ran these risks. Well, we of the police shall do our part too. That Robin Webster planned to lure Diana into his spider-web of wickedness, that Joyce Whipple took her place — yes, that must be told. But the tale shall end there. Robin Webster and the Vicomte de Mirandol are on their trial for the murder of Evelyn Devenish and the attempt upon Joyce Whipple — and, believe me, they have more upon their hands than they can manage. You shall trust to us, mademoiselle.”
He rose from the table, discharged the account, and walked back with his little party into the town. Or, rather, he walked with Julius Ricardo. For the other pair lagged behind. Hanaud drew Ricardo’s attention to their slow progression with a good many chuckles, and digs with his elbow, and playful archnesses; all of which were quite detestable to one of Mr. Ricardo’s nicety. But Hanaud’s manner changed altogether when the four of them stood together in the street under the lamp of the hotel. He took off his hat as Joyce thanked him in warm and trembling tones, and with a great simplicity he said to her:
“Mademoiselle, I have served.”
THE END
They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen (1934)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER I
THE GATE CRASHER
A SMALL WIZENED man stood on the top step of the Prince Town Cinema and watched the raindrops bounce up from the pavement like steel beads. It was an afternoon late in January, and growing dark. The little man wore a suit of threadbare shoddy so much too big for him that it was drapery rather than clothes, and his rusty billycock hat would have hidden the bridge of his nose but for the protuberant flaps of his ears. The rain was tropical, a sheet of glistening filaments with the patter of innumerable small feet, and the cold had the raw creeping chill which eats the hope out of the heart. The little man shivered.
Behind and above him the lights in the Cinema Hall went out, when they should have gone on. Big men, bearded and moustached and clean-shaven, but all of them muscle and bone and trim with the trimness of disciplined officials, slipped on their mackintoshes and tramped off behind the screen of water. Not one of them had a word for the small scarecrow on the top of the steps. But the last of them, a burly giant, stopped to button the collar of his raincoat about his throat. The little man spoke with an insinuating whine.
“Mr. Langridge, sir, I don’t know what I’m going to do for to-night.”
All the good humour went out of Mr. Langridge’s face. “You, Budden?” he answered grimly. “You do just what you like. You’re a gentleman at large. You’ve the key of the street.”
“Without the price of a fag,” said Mr. Budden bitterly.
During the last few days the Prince Town Cinema had become a Court of Assize. A savage mutiny had broken out during November of the last year in the great convict prison up the road. The offices had been burned to a shell. An effort had been made to hang the Governor. This afternoon the long trial of the mutineers had come to an end, and of all of them just one had been acquitted — Mike Budden, the pitiable little man in the outsize clothes shivering on the top of the steps.
Nicholas Langridge, the big warder, reluctantly pulled a packet of Woodbines from his pocket.
“Here’s one,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Langridge,” declared Budden. “I always said—”
“You’re a liar,” Langridge interrupted. “Here’s a light.”
“Thank you, Mr. Langridge.”
Mike Budden took off his hat to shield the match from the rain, but he would have done better to have kept it on. Before, he had been little and squalid, a figure of fun for schoolboys and a reproach to men beyond their teens. But with his hat off he became definitely significant, and evil as a toad. He had a broad, flat and furrowed face, the colour of yellowish clay, and his bald head was seamed with red scars and the white lines of a surgeon’s stitches. A pair of small, black, quick eyes were sunk deep between reddened eyelids, and he had the strong teeth of a rodent. In olden days he would have been matched against a rat with his hands tied behind his back, and he would have carried the big money.
Nicholas Langridge, however, was now too used to his face to be afflicted by it any more. He looked down at Mike Budden’s clothes and laughed.
“They rigged you up proper at Exeter,” he said.
Budden’s sentence had expired when he was on remand for his share in the mutiny, and he had spent the intervening weeks in the prison at Exeter.
“Yus, they was cruel to me, Mr. Langridge,” he whined. “Fairly sniggered at me in these old slops. Not English, you know, Mr. Langridge, no, not English. Now you, Mr. Langridge...”
“I’m a foreigner too,” said Langridge drily. “Why, you old rascal, you ought to go down on your knees in a puddle and thank ’em all at Exeter for their kindness. You had your head shaved, too, I see, so as you could pretend all those old scars were Christmas presents from us. What with the cheek of that lie and your age and your concertina trousers, you made the jury laugh so that they hadn’t got enough breath left to convict you. Fairly put it over them, didn’t you?”
Mike Budden grinned for a moment and then thrust out his under-lip.
“I overdone it, Mr. Langridge, sir. Th
at’s the truth.”
“Overdone it?” the warder cried sharply. “What do you mean by that?”
Mike Budden turned a blank face and a pair of expressionless eyes upon the warder. For half a minute he stood silent. Then he answered in an even, white voice which matched the vacancy of his face:
“What I mean, Mr. Langridge — look at that there rain. Torrentuous, I call it. It’s all very well for you, but I ain’t used to it, am I?”
And Mike was right. Nearer to seventy years of age than sixty, he had spent nearer to forty of them than thirty in the dry retirement of his country’s prisons. Langridge the warder might tramp backwards and forwards between his cottage and the gaol in weather torrentuous or otherwise. Mike Budden kept his feet dry.
“Well, I can’t help you,” said Langridge abruptly, and shouldering the curtain of rain aside, he swung off down the steps. The lights in the Hall windows were by now extinguished, the hammering had ceased, the makeshift Court of Assize was dismantled, and finally the one big lamp above the entrance and the steps went out with a startling suddenness There was now darkness, the unchanging roar of the rain, and one little old shivering scarecrow on the top of a steep flight of steps.
Mike Budden made a small whimpering noise. Within his limits he was a very good actor. He had just twopence in his pocket. He could not make a dash for the inn. No house, however mean, in this small town of the Moor, would offer him a shelter for the night. Very well, then, there was nothing for it but the old home. Mike ran down the steps and sidled along the walls of the cottages up the road. Here and there a lighted window and the leaping glow of a fire spoke of comfort and warmth. Mike’s boots let in the water. Mike’s clothes became a pudding; the cottages came abruptly to an end. There were big trees now along the left-hand side of the open road, ghostly, whispering, unpleasant things. Budden took to the middle of the road. Beyond a bend on the left-hand side once more lights shone from windows. The Doctor’s house. A little farther along, more lights. The Governor’s house, and on the far side of the Governor’s house towards the stone arch, the iron gates of the old homestead.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 117