“Did she?” Hanaud asked sharply. “Then what of that straight line of footsteps from the window to the door there? And why is there no powder from her shoes between here and the dressing-table, where the gloves are lying?”
“She might have slipped off her shoes,” Scott Carruthers replied quickly.
“Oh! Then she came back and slipped her feet into them again? Then she wished to leave these impressions across this room. They were made deliberately? So that we might make no mistake when we came to examine them?” and Hanaud took a couple of swift steps and stood face to face with Carruthers. He had been speaking in a very gentle, smooth voice, with a pleasant smile upon his face. “What do you say to that, Major Scott Carruthers?”
“No doubt I was a fool,” said the Major savagely. “I was wrong.”
“Yet...yet...” said Hanaud thoughtfully, “we must keep it in the backs of our minds that those footprints may have been made deliberately for us to see. It is an idea. I thank you for it;” and suddenly he shut his eyes and some strong emotion shook him. He moved his shoulders uneasily. He shivered.
“I would like to know what happened in this room,” he said, in a tone which was little higher than a whisper. “For I have in my mind some pictures which I do not like at all.”
Hanaud certainly was not acting now. He was sincere and simple as Ricardo had often seen him; distressed as Ricardo had seldom seen him. He was no longer the impersonal creature with the rotating glass lottery globe for a mind, which he had made himself out to be on the drive from Havre to Caudebec. He was a man moved by the very spirit of justice, timid lest anyone should suffer wrong, bold lest the criminal walk unpunished. For the moment whilst he stood doubtful and alarmed, he put a spell upon the small company which surrounded him, upon their mouths, their limbs, almost their breathing. Even when he moved, no one stirred. He went slowly back into the bedroom; and very quickly the others slipped in behind him.
He drew up a chair by the side of the big arm-chair on which the Octavian dress was thrown. He had warned Guy Stallard not to meddle with that dress. He became at once busy with it himself. There was a little fob pocket at the top of the knee-breeches. He turned it inside-out. It was empty, and Hanaud tossed the breeches on the bed. He took up the waistcoat. There were embroidered flaps to cover pockets, but there were no pockets beneath them. It followed the knee-breeches on to the bed. He took up the coat with both his hands, turned it this way and that, so that the satin rippled, and the embroidery flashed, and the stiffened skirts swung from side to side, and then stretched it out at the shoulders, so that it hung as if someone wore it. At once it became evident to all — all were watching him curiously — that under the side flaps there were real pockets. For one of them bulged.
“Let us see!” said Hanaud, and he felt in the other of the two pockets, the pocket which was flat. He raised his eyebrows. “Aha!” he exclaimed, “what have we here?” He drew out something gleaming which he concealed in the palm of his hand, and before he made any show of examining it, he carefully laid the coat back over the armchair. He was as careful as a tailor with a new suit.
“We shall see what we have here,” he said. He was acting now; Mr. Ricardo knew the signs. A kind of jauntiness sat on him. He was saying: “Watch this clever dog of a detective! He’ll show you something. But don’t fancy that he’s to be hurried. He’ll keep you all guessing at the pretty trick he’s going to show you.” Hanaud opened his hand suddenly. On the palm was lying a small flat gold case, oval in shape.
He bent over it, with difficulty found and touched a spring. The case flew open, and there was disclosed a tiny mirror, a tiny powder puff and a tiny store of powder.
“Aha!” said Hanaud with a wink. Oh! He can be common! The conviction, so often felt, returned to Mr. Ricardo’s delicate mind. “The magic which averts the terrible catastrophe of the shiny nose!” and Hanaud flourished the tiny powder puff in the air. Perhaps he saw Mr. Ricardo’s expression. But he put the tip of his tongue out at him and grimaced in the most vulgar way.
“This is not one of the moments when that poor Hanaud is at his happiest, eh, my friend? No! Assuredly it is not. We are agreed? Perfectly!”
Very neatly he replaced the powder puff in the case and closed the case. He handed it to Durasoy. “You will wrap this up and you will wrap up the shoes on the table in the next room, my Brigadier. And you will see that they are handed to Monsieur Parcolet in his office for safe keeping. So! Very well! We see now what is in the other pocket.”
He lifted up the coat again, and felt in the bulging pocket. A look of perplexity overspread his face. Was he still acting? For the life of him Mr. Ricardo could not have told. His hand fumbled in the pocket and the voice of Scott Carruthers, hoarse and passionate and loud, broke in a second time.
“Can’t you stop play-acting? If there’s anything in that pocket, out with it and let’s see!”
“Harvey!” Guy Stallard remonstrated, and Hanaud smiled amiably at the new Byron.
“Monsieur, I am not offended. Major Scott Carruthers has all his world to lose. It is natural that he should be even as explosive as he is.”
Scott Carruthers with an effort as visible as it was violent, controlled himself. He took out his handkerchief and dabbed his forehead. But he was a man on the rack and near to the limit of endurance. Suppose that he snapped and crumbled altogether, before Hanaud ceased to torment him? Ricardo found himself wondering how he would behave — this masterful and resolute person! And whether Hanaud was deliberately driving him to the snapping point?
“There is something,” said Hanaud, and he drew out of the pocket a corner of some fabric coloured gaudily. “But this is astounding,” he cried. “It opens the mouth. It makes one stare. For a young lady of elegance. How strange an item of the toilette!”
He drew it out altogether — a large cotton handkerchief, thick and coarse and as vulgar as a cheap taste could invent. It was woven in parallel strips and in two colours, crimson and yellow. It was a duster rather than a handkerchief. Mr. Ricardo was affronted by the gaudy thing. “Oh!” he murmured, and he retreated from it in disgust. He saw for the first time a sign of real discomfort in Guy Stallard, who gave a little gasp and for the fraction of a second bared his teeth like an animal. Scott Carruthers was as white as paper.
“It does not match with this fine coat, no,” Hanaud resumed. He held it against the white gold-embroidered satin, so that all might make their own comparison. “And look!” He plunged a hand down the side of the armchair and held up a tiny wisp of delicate lawn edged with lace. “Here is the little handkerchief that did match.”
Then he tossed the coat on to the bed, and laying the lace handkerchief on the seat of the arm-chair, he spread the other across his knees. He pointed to two of the four corners.
“Do you see?”
They were twisted, as though they had been tied in a knot. Hanaud sat and stared at the handkerchief, lost in perplexities.
“I can make neither head nor tail of it,” he cried suddenly, and his voice now betrayed passion in the cry.
But that mood did not last with him. His face changed as he stared at the handkerchief. He was no longer away amongst guesses and speculations. He was aware of it outspread upon his knees. He bent his head down to it. He sat up again with a jerk and whipped out of his pocket the case with the magnifying lens. Fixing the glass in his eye, he bent again, and then lifted his head with a smile upon his lips.
“You have seen something — which helps you?” Guy Stallard asked, carelessly enough; but there was a little break in the division of the sentence.
“Yes — something which helps me,” Hanaud repeated.
Durasoy had returned to the room with a parcel under his arm, and Hanaud called to him.
“Brigadier, you will find in the rack of the writing-table in the lounge some large square envelopes. You permit me, Monsieur Stallard? I thank you. Brigadier, fetch me one!”
The others waited in an uneasy silence w
hilst Durasoy, his parcel still held tightly under his arm, went off upon his errand. Parcolet the Commissaire broke the silence after a few seconds. He whispered to Ricardo with a nod towards Hanaud:
“But he is marvellous! A lesson, Monsieur Ricardo He is disconcerting!” The whisper was overheard by Scott Carruthers.
“Why?” he asked, impolitely, and Parcolet could not answer that one.
So the silence began again, and was only ended by the heavy tread of the Brigadier with the envelope in his hands. Hanaud folded the big handkerchief and placed it with the small one inside the envelope, and tucked the envelope into the inside pocket of his coat. He stood up.
“We can go now. Monsieur Stallard, I beg your pardon if I put you to an inconvenience. I shall ask Monsieur the Commissaire to fix his seal upon the door of this set of rooms.”
“That is as you wish.”
“It certainly must be done,” said Parcolet. He had brought a little black bag with his bands of linen and his seal and his sealing-wax. The brigadier fetched it up from the hall, and in the corridor the door was locked up again, and the seals affixed.
“So,” said Hanaud, and he handed the key to the Commissary. He looked at his watch. It was past eight o’clock, and the light was waning. There were shadows now in the corridor.
“Yes, we can go,” Hanaud repeated.
But before they had crossed half the distance to the staircase, a gun was fired in the forest, and the noise of it brought them all to a stop.
CHAPTER XIX
THE VAGARIES OF LYDIA
THE WINDOWS OF the corridor were open and it may have been that Mr. Ricardo’s imagination was working overtime. Or again it is possible that the high background of hills which made a hollow about this tract of the forest gave to the explosion a particular reverberation. But to him the noise was startlingly loud. He could have believed that the shot had been fired close to his ear. “Really!” he exclaimed, and made a little jump in the air. Parcolet the Commissaire waved a hand and laughed indulgently:
“The bad ones! It is Saturday evening.”
“Poachers?” Stallard asked.
Parcolet the Commissaire winked. He raised an imaginary gun to his shoulder.
“Bang! Bang!” he said, firing both barrels. It was as obvious that he would have liked to have been among the poachers himself as that he never expected to kill his bird with the first barrel. Durasoy suggested another explanation.
“Monsieur, it may have been the forest guard. He lives at La Vacquerie, the village just below.”
Hanaud was standing in one of the embrasures with his face to the forest, and he did not turn his head.
“So there is a forest guard living at La Vacquerie?” he asked.
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Oho!”
He was quite indifferent, it seemed, as to whether a poacher or a guardian fired the shot. Ricardo fancied that his mind was still occupied by the riddle of the rooms which they had just left; his voice sounded far away.
“Shall we go down?” Guy Stallard asked with a touch of impatience.
“To be sure,” Hanaud answered absently.
“Very well, then,” and with a friendly gesture Stallard ventured to take the detective by the arm. Hanaud turned away from that embrasure at once with the obedience of a good pupil in the presence of his master. But Guy Stallard had moved, in his impatience, and moving had uncovered Major Scott Carruthers. Scott Carruthers was leaning against the wall between Hanaud’s window and the next one, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, his face distorted as by some spasm of the heart. To Ricardo it looked as if he was on the point of swooning like a girl; and Hanaud drew back from Stallard and stopped in front of him.
“I am afraid that that shot startled your friend,” he said to Stallard.
“He has had, as you acknowledged yourself, Monsieur Hanaud, a good deal to unnerve him during these last two days.”
“Yes, the poor man,” Hanaud agreed, purring with sympathy. “He has not slept.”
Hanaud’s sympathy, however, was not one of the Major’s needs at this moment. He opened his eyes.
“I’m all right,” he said sullenly, and to prove that he was all right, he stood away from the wall, and walked shakily towards the head of the stairs.
“A glass of brandy in the lounge, a comfortable chair, and the Major will be ready to charge the Light Brigade.”
Hanaud was winking and blinking at Stallard and digging him in the ribs with the affection of a foster-brother. Mr. Ricardo was not very pleased with this exhibition. Apart from its vulgarity the spirit which engendered it was reprehensible. Mr. Ricardo himself was anti-Stallard. He did not wish Hanaud to adopt his point of view, but certainly nothing had occurred since he had entered this house which should have made him so violently pro-Stallard. He should not be winking and nodding and nudging — that was all wrong. It was ignominious and Mr. Ricardo in due course would have to point it out. That was not the way grave problems of crime were solved.
Meanwhile they had all reached the lounge, and Guy Stallard was ordering the brandy, and Hanaud was speaking quietly to Durasoy out of earshot at the foot of the stairs. He took Durasoy’s indelible pencil from him, and the Brigadier went off by the door into the dining-room, as the brandy and soda was brought into the lounge. Hanaud sat down at the writing-table.
“We agreed, Monsieur Stallard, since your housekeeper insisted, that an examination of the servants’ trunks and belongings should be made. I have sent Durasoy to make it;” and he began to write.
Stallard rather roughly pushed Scott Carruthers’s glass with his hand.
“I had better join him, then.”
He was already moving when Hanaud said:
“I think not. It is, after all, the routine work of his profession. Let us leave him to it!”
There had been so much quiet authority in the voice of the Inspecteur Principal that Guy Stallard found it difficult to insist.
“I think that I can save time, perhaps, if I help him,” he said, nevertheless, and he took a step or two towards the door.
“You can save much more time, Monsieur Stallard, if you will stay here with us,” said Hanaud; and the words were now an unmistakable order.
Guy Stallard shrugged his shoulders and sat down, and Hanaud continued to write. Parcolet, the Commissaire, and Ricardo drew chairs near to the table. And still Hanaud wrote, but not very much and that very slowly.
“You are making a resume no doubt of your investigation, monsieur,” said Stallard. “If you will read it to us we can check it with our own recollections.”
Hanaud finished his writing and put the pencil in his pocket with a flourish.
“My investigation — it is here!” he cried, slapping his forehead with the flat of his hand.
“Very, very transpontine! He is in his Châtelet mood,” Mr. Ricardo murmured under his breath, and he prepared to suffer.
“But I am in difficulties,” Hanaud resumed. “Yes. Where was Moses when the light went out? It is an old English saying which I learnt from my friend here. In the dark. Well, where Moses was, Hanaud is.”
Ricardo noted the dejection which overspread his actor’s face and seemed to shrivel his body. The young girl had left the old homestead for the maelstrom of Paris, and here was the father after reading her heartless message of farewell. It was excellently done, if you liked that sort of thing, but for himself, Ricardo didn’t.
“In the dark,” Hanaud whispered.
Two voices encouraged him with the same question. Guy Stallard’s and Scott Carruthers’s.
“Can’t we help you?”
Hanaud hardly dared to hope that that was possible. But one never knew. He sat up, he came to life, he felt in his side pocket for the blue packet of cigarettes. He lit one of the atrocious things.
“It’s possible. I put my embarrassments in front of you. Please to draw your chairs up! So! We are better. You listen? Good! I find the movements of this Lydia Flight during
the last two days very erratic — if I were young and inexperienced, I should say almost too erratic to be believed.”
The Major looked as if he were sorry that he had brought his chair up to the circle; into Guy Stallard’s face there crept a wariness and an attention which Ricardo was beginning to associate with Guy Stallard, expressions all the more noticeable in that they were totally unsuited to anyone Byronic. Such an one should be full of fire and impetus.
“But her movements aren’t known,” he said.
“That’s exactly what troubles me,” said Hanaud.
Guy Stallard pointed to the sheet of paper on which Hanaud had been writing.
“But in that case, what have you been putting down?”
“Oh, the few details which I did know,” Hanaud answered easily.
“May we hear them?”
This time it was Scott Carruthers who asked the question. There was suspense in his voice, and in the very attitude of his body.
“Certainly. You may correct them. Perhaps you may add to them.” He held the paper up. “At seven in the morning, then, she left this Château in the small purple car which you had lent to her,” and he looked towards Stallard for confirmation.
“Yes.”
“From here to Trouville, sixty kilometres, and in the early morning. Half-past eight then, she arrives, Major?”
“A little before,” returned the Major.
“Good!” and Hanaud added a word or two to his sheet. “You saw her — when?”
“A little after nine.”
“And she tells you the absurd story which you repeated to me?”
“Perfectly.”
“And you send a telegram to his Highness at Goodwood?”
“Yes.”
“When, Major, did you send that telegram? It had not arrived before the house-party left for Goodwood?”
“No,” replied Scott Carruthers. “I tried at first to telephone, but I could not make the connection. When that was impossible, it took me a little while to draft the wording of the telegram. We had to be careful, you see, Monsieur Hanaud, to make sure that whilst we made the disaster clear to His Highness, we were keeping it secret from every one through whose hands it passed.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 136