“But what I actually mean, Monsieur Stallard,” Hanaud took him up pleasantly, “is that it’s high time we all had a look at whatever lies behind the locked door. Let us go!”
And still holding the key between his forefinger and his thumb, he got up from his chair, and with an amiable little bow, invited Stallard to lead the way.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE HANDKERCHIEF
THEY MOUNTED BY the broad staircase to the first floor, and by the spiral staircase at the opposite end of the passage to the second floor. Guy Stallard went first. Hanaud followed him immediately, Parcolet the Commissaire trotted behind Hanaud, Major Scott Carruthers pressed upon Parcolet, Mr. Ricardo came next and Durasoy the Brigadier last. At least so they started, but Mr. Ricardo walked slowly and Durasoy with an apology pushed past him. As has been stated, Mr. Ricardo was as curious as a giraffe, and being of a slight build, should have sprung up the steps in a desperate anxiety, lest some discovery of importance should be made without his presence. But he was occupied with a problem; how to reconcile the actual Major Scott Carruthers with the calm masterful character which Papa Tabateau had described to Madame de Viard.
“It can’t be done,” Mr. Ricardo reflected. “The Major is a creature of jerks and jumps. He’s on the edge of hysteria. He hardly knows what he’s saying. But a man of force — yes and of subtlety too — in an affair like this would measure his words and stand sentinel over his actions. We haven’t got the psychology of the Major at all, Hanaud, and I haven’t. We must keep our eyes open.”
But at that moment Hanaud’s voice speaking at the top of the spiral staircase came hollowly down and Mr. Ricardo bounded upwards like an elderly stag catching sight upon the moor of a young and attractive doe. Hanaud on the landing was playing with a light switch on the left of the top stair. As he pulled it down a line of bulbs in the roof of the corridor glowed bright, as he clicked it up the lights went out.
“It doesn’t operate in the bedroom, I suppose,” Hanaud was asking.
“No,” Stallard answered. “It doesn’t affect them. There’s a corresponding switch at the other end of the passage opposite to us.”
The detail seemed unimportant to Guy Stallard and not very interesting to Hanaud.
“You will show it to me, please, when we come to it.”
Hanaud was standing with his back to the spiral staircase. On his left were four widely-spaced doors. On his right a row of windows overlooked the forest. Facing him at the other end of the corridor was the door of the locked suite of rooms.
“Let me understand,” said Hanaud. “These four doors open into bedrooms overlooking the garden and the river?”
“Yes.”
“Each with a bathroom?”
“No, one and two share a bathroom and three and four another,” Stallard explained.
“And on the night of your ball how were these rooms occupied?”
“The first room, that is the room nearest to us, was kept for Major Scott Carruthers who didn’t come. So it was empty. Madame Bouchette had the second, her maid the third and Mr. Oliver Ransom the fourth. The door opposite to us is the door of the suite which Madame Bouchette arranged that Lydia Flight should use.”
“That’s all clear,” said Hanaud. He walked the length of the corridor to that door opposite. At his elbow in the panelling by his side was an electric light switch. Hanaud pulled it down and again the globes in the roof became incandescent. He clicked it up and they became glass and filaments.
Hanaud turned to Scott Carruthers.
“You see? It wasn’t necessary that the wires should fuse. A shoulder might rub against the panel by accident and the corridor’s in darkness.”
“Yes, but only the corridor,” Stallard objected. Hanaud stooped and fitted the key into the lock.
The door opened inwards and disclosed a small dark passage. Hanaud set the door back against the wall and stretching out an arm on each side barred the entrance.
“There is a switch just here, of course?” he asked.
“On the right hand side,” said Stallard.
“Thank you,” and the next moment a light glowed on the side wall of the passage. Two doors side by side faced Hanaud; at the end of the short passage on his left hand a third door was now visible.
“I want the lay-out of these rooms,” said Hanaud; and Stallard answered:
“Of the two doors facing you, the end one is the door of the bathroom. The other is the door of a dressing-room. It has a bed in it. This is really a suite for a married couple. The door at the end of the passage opens into the bedroom.”
“I see.”
But Hanaud did not move. From the doorway of the dressing-room across the passage to the doorway into the corridor, three small and slender footprints were quite clearly stamped on the brown carpet, a left foot, a right foot and a left foot again. They were marked out with pink powder. The pointed sole, then a gap for the arch of the instep, then the circle of the small heel. Hanaud looked over his shoulder.
“Yes, beyond the door the traces were swept away as the housekeeper told us,” he said. “I beg you gentlemen not to blur these marks,” he added, and stepping over them carefully himself, he opened the door at the end of the passage. At once a flood of daylight poured out from the room and made the electric bulb of no account. Mr. Ricardo found himself with the others in a large bedroom with two windows looking over the garden and the river to the hills beyond. But he was not concerned with views and prospects. There was a secret to be torn out of this room, and a concentration of thought of the highest intensity was required. Between the windows stood a dressing-table with two standard lamps to light up its mirror. Facing the windows the bed stood with its head against the inner wall. Beyond the bed was a door which must lead into the dressing-room. Between that door and the end window was a fireplace in the outer wall. On this side a large Empire wardrobe faced the fireplace. There was a chair facing the mirror at the dressing-table, a deep arm-chair by the fireplace, a cushioned seat in front of each window and a chair on each side of the wardrobe. The room was prettily decorated in pale blue and silver, and the carpet was of thick pile, a warm brown in colour, without a pattern.
Having observed so much, Mr. Ricardo said to himself:
“Now!” and he concentrated.
Tossed anyhow on to the big arm-chair was Octavian’s coat, waistcoat and breeches of white satin piped and ornamented with gold lace and sparkling with big paste buttons. On the dressing-table a queue of fair curls with a white satin knot which Lydia Flight had fixed to her shingled hair was lying, and by the side of it a pair of white gauntlet gloves. The cravat, the ballet shirt, and the silk stockings with the gold clocks had been flung on to the seat in the window near the arm-chair. A pair of white satin shoes with red heels and big paste buckles lay, one on its side one on its sole, one on the floor by the window-seat one under the dressing-table, as though they had been slipped off in a hurry and left where they had dropped. Beyond the dress, there were no signs of occupation. The bed had not been slept in. Lydia Flight had packed her own things together into her suit-case and gone.
“It doesn’t look as if there was very much to detain us here,” said Hanaud.
The remark so chimed with Mr. Ricardo’s observations that he found himself saying aloud:
“I agree, my dear Hanaud, I agree.”
As he heard his voice, his heart sank. He had broken his promise. He saw Hanaud’s eyes turn to him with amazement. He might be thrown out of the room. He would certainly have to writhe under the most humiliating sarcasms. And not only did Hanaud’s eyes reproach him. Everybody in the room was staring at him as if he had committed the most unpardonable of solecisms.
“But here,” Hanaud continued, crossing to the door of the dressing-room, “we may have better fortune.”
Mr. Ricardo was saved. Not even a rebuke from the master of rebukes. His heart resumed its normal beating, as Hanaud pulled the door open. But it almost stopped again. For a cry burs
t from the detective’s lips.
“Zut!” and he stood in the doorway as if he was dumbfoundered by what he saw.
The others crowded close behind him, trying to peer over his shoulders and round his elbows. Parcolet stood upon the tips of his toes, Durasoy breathed heavily behind Mr. Ricardo.
“The good God, but this is prodigious,” Hanaud murmured. “It’s of a significance which is startling.” His bulk filled the doorway. No one could get a view of that dressing-room whilst he stood there. But it seemed that he had an eye to spare. For he suddenly said in a quiet voice noticeably different from that which he had been using:
“I beg you, Monsieur Stallard, not to disarrange that satin suit on the big chair,” and he turned round as he spoke.
Stallard, who had a hand upon the back of the armchair, moved away at once.
“I am sorry. I don’t think that I touched it,” he said. But his face flushed red, and as Hanaud turned back again to the dressing-room Ricardo saw him shoot a glance at the detective’s shoulders which seemed to him murderous. “Is there after all more in this bedroom than I observed?” Ricardo began at once to ask. “Have I missed something? Had Octavian’s best party suit a message? Was Hanaud laying a trap when he told us there was nothing to detain us? Was the trap sprung when he uttered his cry? Has he caught Byron on the prongs?”
Ricardo was so dissatisfied with his own short-sightedness that he fell into a depression.
“Formidable! That was Hanaud’s word. But am I?”
A terrible question for a middle-aged gentleman who had looked upon his formidability as a justification for self-respect and a consolation for the long years of his old age. Happily before his doubts could acquire too unendurable a poignancy, he discovered that with the rest of that little company he was standing within the dressing-room. Behind him was the bedroom. On his right was the door which led into the passage, on his left was the window; and the window was wide open.
Ricardo forgot his merits and deficiencies. That open window was damnable. It was on the side of the house; the shrubbery was just beneath it. Anyone who stood at it could drop anything to someone else who was standing on the little winding path between the park wall and the house. And someone had stood at the window and that someone a woman. There could not be a doubt about that. For a big bowl of powder which had stood on a table close to the window under a mirror, had been upset upon the floor. The powder, faintly pink, was scattered under the window and the imprints of two feet side by side with the toes to the window and the heels to the room were as precise and as clear as photographs.
“Let no one move!” said Hanaud.
He ran back into the bedroom and reappeared again with the satin shoes of Octavian in his hand. He held them together in his left hand and turned them with the soles uppermost.
“Do you see?” he asked; and he was speaking to them all. To the edges of the soles, to the rims of the heels some particles of the pink powder were still clinging. He dropped upon his knees and placed with infinite care the shoes upon the imprints. They fitted exactly. Hanaud sat back, and though his eyes were upon the gay little pair of shoes with the red heels and the sparkling buckles, his face was blank, his thoughts seemingly far away. Then he came to life and looked along the floor. The feet had turned at the window and moved in a straight line across the room to the passage door, the marks losing with each step a little of their precise definition. Hanaud was very interested in that straight line. He handed the shoes to Durasoy and bade him set them carefully on the marks one after the other all the way to the door. Then he took them back and replaced them under the window. He looked up at Ricardo. His face was troubled, he shook his head in discomfort.
“The story these smart little shoes tell is clear,” he said reluctantly. “Someone wearing them runs into this room from the bedroom. She is in a hurry. She does not stop to switch on the light. Either she has closed the door behind her or she has turned out the light in the bedroom. She is in the dark. In the darkness she brushes against the bowl of powder on the table here, and it comes crashing on the floor. The glass lid rolls over to that corner and breaks” — he pointed to where the fragments lay like strips of quartz upon the carpet. “The powder puff falls by the table. The thick glass bowl bounces under that chair beyond the window. She is in the dark and she is in a hurry. She flings up the window. She stands there, close up to it. Why? Can we doubt? To drop something out to someone standing below—”
“Who gets his motor-car and bolts,” a voice interrupted, a voice shrill and a little boisterous — the voice which Nahendra Nao had once with surprise in a hotel at Paris heard Scott Carruthers use in a moment of relief. But Hanaud lifted a hand to check him.
“Let us keep to this room!” he said and resumed his story. “Having dropped this something, she turns. She is in the dark, she is in a hurry, she is excited. She goes out of this room, across the passage, into the corridor, she stumbles down the stairs and agitated, out of breath, she plumps into my friend Mr. Ricardo where and when she had expected to find no one. In her reaction — ought we to say in her sense of guilt? — she leans half swooning against the wall. All she can think of as an excuse is to gasp: ‘Where is Oliver. Find him!’ Is that how the story runs?”
But that was not how the story ran. Ricardo had been forbidden to interrupt. He had interrupted once and the interruption had not been well received. He was not going to interrupt again unless an irresistible need compelled him. Hanaud must make these unhappy mistakes of his and remain uncorrected until they were alone. He, Ricardo, had seen the little yellow car wheeled out of the garage and its chauffeur drive off, he had then had a short conversation with the little ostler man Furlong, he had then without any haste gone back to the lounge. Why, if Lydia Flight had dropped something out of the window to the driver of the yellow car, and had then run down the stairs in all this haste and agitation, she would never have plumped into Ricardo at the foot of them. For Ricardo would have been still in the courtyard watching the manoeuvres of the yellow car. But in a little while Hanaud seemed to reach, in another way, a suspicion that he had got his story wrong.
“Yet I am troubled,” he said, pursing up his lips in doubt. “For as I watched the Brigadier Durasoy spacing out those footsteps, it seemed to me there were no signs of agitation or hurry at all. The feet marched. They didn’t run. They went right, left, right, left, firmly planted, the heels as well as the ball of the foot. No, gentlemen, I am not satisfied.”
He was still sitting back and staring at the shoes as though he could pluck satisfaction out of them. But Ricardo had an impression that he was really listening, listening with every muscle in his big body held tense and absolutely still, for some little sound in this room, a whisper, perhaps, perhaps only a sigh. But the four who stood were as still as he who knelt. Hanaud tried again.
“A measured tread. A gendarme on patrol, not a thief in flight. No, the hurry and the agitation, we blot them out. No, the young lady in the dark who crossed this room was, as Monsieur Ricardo would say, a cold purchaser.”
Now here was one of those irresistible needs which compelled Ricardo to intervene.
“I should say nothing of the sort,” he observed tartly. “I might say that a young lady was a cool customer. I cannot see myself under any circumstances using such an idiotic phrase as a cold purchaser.”
But Hanaud gave no sign of having heard the just rebuke. He picked up the shoes, rose and set them on the table by the window; and the table interested him. He stood close against it. He took a folding measure from a pocket and, straightening it out, measured the distance between the top of the table and the floor.
“Eighty-one centimetres,” he said slowly. Was he acting, Ricardo wondered, or had he really some notion about that table in his head? He turned and looked at the window and back again from the window to the table. If the table was high, the sill of the window was low. Hanaud, straddling the heap of powder, stood close to the window as he had stood close to the table.
Hanaud leaned forward to look out of it and down to the path through the shrubbery below; and it appeared to Ricardo that he would pitch out of it. That window was dangerous.
“Take care,” cried Ricardo in a panic; and Hanaud looked over his shoulder with a smile.
“Yes,” he said, “you are right.”
He took now from another pocket a small morocco case and from the case the kind of magnifying glass which a jeweller screws into his eye. With this he examined the woodwork of the sill and the stone ledge outside the window. Then he stood erect again.
“Monsieur Ricardo,” he asked, “can you remember whether Mademoiselle Flight was wearing her gloves when the bottle of champagne was upset?”
Ricardo visualised the little scene. It had interested him enormously when it had taken place — Ransom dropping the bottle deliberately, Lydia springing to her feet, seizing up her napkin to dry the skirt of her coat. He had seen her hand, set off by the white ruffles of her coat sleeve, snatch the napkin from the table.
“She was not,” he answered.
“You are quite sure?” And he asked again with a special emphasis.
“Quite!”
“Thank you.”
Hanaud raised his head. He scrutinised now with the same attention the lower sash of the raised window. He lifted his hand and without touching the woodwork held it in the position it would take, if he were to lean out above the shrubbery path, whilst holding himself safe by means of the sash.
“This is very odd,” he said thoughtfully. “A young lady runs into this room in the dark, lifts the sash with her bare hands, leans out, drops her parcel, whatever it is, and neither on the sill nor on the stone ledge outside nor on the sash, leaves the smallest trace of her fingers. How shall we explain that?”
And he looked to Scott Carruthers and Guy Stallard for an answer. It was Scott Carruthers who answered.
“Her gloves are on the dressing-table in her bedroom. She went back into the bedroom and left them there.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 135