Parcolet the Commissaire remained upon the launch, which was now hauled ahead until only the stern was visible from the saloon windows. “I shall open a window,” said Hanaud. “Madame permits? One stifles in this cabin. Also Monsieur le Commissaire will be able to hear.” As Hanaud suited his action to his words, Ricardo saw the intelligent Perrichet climb from his dinghy to Parcolet’s side.
“So! This is more commodious,” said Hanaud, and he turned back into the room. “Madame Lucrece Bouchette.”
She has been up all night, Mr. Ricardo reflected with disgust. It was against his code that women should be seen even in a demi-toilette after the sun was up.
“Madame Lucrece Bouchette,” Hanaud repeated.
“That is my name,” she answered. “And this is my house-boat on which you are trespassing. Be off!”
“Come, come, come, Madame Bouchette, this is no way to talk to Monsieur le Commissaire de Police of Caudebec,” said Hanaud chidingly.
“I am talking to you,” said Lucrece Bouchette.
“Good,” said Hanaud, and he sat himself down in front of her. “We can spare Monsieur Parcolet the necessity of waiting. That is a kindness, for no man is more busy.”
To Mr. Ricardo’s surprise, his launch was again warped forward and disappeared altogether from the windows of the saloon. But this, no doubt, Ricardo reflected, was the moment when the Commissaire was to exercise his authority and display the greatness of his character.
“We can talk then, you and I, madame,” Hanaud continued. “Where is Miss Lydia Flight?”
Marie interrupted sullenly.
“She has gone.”
Hanaud turned on her a pair of baleful eyes.
“I invite you, the yellow one, to hold your tongue, else I put the gag on it. I repeat to Madame. Where is Miss Lydia Flight?”
“Marie has told you.”
“She has told me nothing. Listen, madame, this affair is of the most serious. Yesterday, Miss Lydia Flight, in the Restaurant of the Sceptre at Havre, made an appointment with me at the hotel of Caudebec. She did not keep that appointment at the hour she gave. But she stopped her car at the hotel and asked for me as it was getting dark.”
A smile of contempt glimmered on the mouth of Lucrece. She could not have said more clearly in words: “You simpleton!”
“She left a message that she would return. She did not return.”
“You, I believe, are Monsieur Hanaud?”
“I am.”
“Of the Sûreté Generale?”
“Yes.”
“To be sure.”
Lucrece Bouchette nodded her head. No wonder crimes went unpunished. Nothing impolite was said. But that was obviously what she would have said, if her good manners had not forbidden it.
“You mean, madame, that she made a fool of me?” Hanaud asked sweetly.
“Oh, Monsieur Hanaud, would that be possible?” Lucrece asked in reply, and with so nasty an intonation that it was indicated that Hanaud could not possibly be made more of a fool than he actually was. Mr. Ricardo, indeed, regretted that his friend should be cutting a figure so unimposing, but Hanaud himself was undisturbed.
“After leaving the message for me at the hotel, Lydia Flight drove along to the house-boat,” he said.
Lucrece Bouchette hesitated. But her maid Marie had declared that she had gone. Therefore she had arrived. Yes, that was arranged. It was, perhaps, a weakness in the story of Lucrece. She saw that now. It would have been better could she have declared that Lydia had never come to the house-boat at all. But it was too late for her to take that line. She answered:
“For a moment. She came to pack up a suitcase.”
It occurred to Mr. Ricardo that Lydia seemed to have spent the greater part of her days lately in packing up suit-cases.
“And then?” asked Hanaud.
Lucrece shrugged her shoulders.
“She went on.”
“Where to?”
“Monsieur, I think you did not know Lydia Flight very well. She did not welcome questions. She was independent. She had not forgotten that she had sung the big rôles in the great Opera Houses of Europe. She was not to be cross-examined. She did not tell me where she was going.”
“Yes, yes,” Hanaud agreed. “These ladies of the Opera, they have crochets. It is understood.”
And Lucrece Bouchette inclined her head.
“But I am wondering, madame,” said Hanaud pleasantly, “whether when she came on board to pack her suit-case, she got her quavers too.”
Lucrece smiled indulgently.
“I thought we were serious,” she murmured, and Mr. Ricardo commended her. Hanaud’s jest was one to be ashamed of, even in one’s lighter moments.
“Madame, I am as serious as an agent of the law in the presence of crime can be,” said Hanaud, suddenly direct. “You do not know whither Miss Lydia Flight went when she left this house-boat with her suit-case?”
“No, Monsieur Hanaud, I do not, although—”
“Yes?”
“I can guess.”
“Madame, you shall tell me your guess.”
Lucrece Bouchette explained with a sneer.
“Lydia Flight hurried off to join her accomplice, Oliver Ransom.”
“I hope not, madame,” said Hanaud slowly, and for the first time during this interview a look of disquietude crept into Madame Bouchette’s eyes. Her cheeks were suddenly tinged with colour, and suddenly pale again. She did not answer for a little while, and in the silence Mr. Ricardo heard the engine of his launch throb and the lash of its propeller in the water. They seemed to do what they liked with his launch. First Hanaud owned it, now Parcolet annexed it. “All that I do is to pay for it,” he reflected ruefully.
Meanwhile Lucrece got a word or two together to answer Hanaud.
“We must all hope not, monsieur. We must hope, however improbable it looks to be, that Lydia Flight is innocent of this theft.”
“Who rowed her ashore when she had packed her suit-case?” asked Hanaud abruptly.
“Marie.”
“The other servants had gone?”
“Yes.”
“The cook too?”
“I had dined. I did not expect Lydia.”
“Quite so. Then Marie will know how she went away,” he said, turning to the maid.
“But in her car, monsieur.”
“The small car with the purple body?”
Marie shrugged her shoulders.
“It was dark, monsieur.”
“The car with the number 7964R.F.6?” said Hanaud, consulting his pocket-book.
“I don’t know,” Lucrece returned. But the mention of the colour of the car and of its number had increased her anxiety. Her voice even shook a little. Her hands were clasped together on the table in front of her, and Mr. Ricardo noticed her fingers tighten so that the flesh on which they pressed was white. She must have seen the direction of Ricardo’s eyes, for she took her hands from the table with a jerk and hid them in her lap.
“Madame, I have asked you many questions,” Hanaud continued. “I shall now have the honour to give you some news.”
“Yes, Monsieur Hanaud.”
“The small purple car 7964R.F.6 is a Citroen car, which was lent to Lydia Flight early on the morning of his ball by Guy Stallard...” Bouchette’s face flushed a dark and stormy red at the mention of that name, but she did not interrupt.
“Lydia Flight drove it to the Restaurant of the Sceptre yesterday morning when she lunched with Mr. Ricardo and myself.”
“I heard that she had lunched with you,” said Lucrece.
“She drove away in it after luncheon. She stopped it at the door of the hotel in Caudebec when she asked for me in the evening. And it arrived in Paris at one o’clock in the morning.”
Mr. Ricardo leaned forward. So this was the message which Parcolet’s secretary, Lestrelin, had brought down to the quay. After all, then, Lydia Flight had run away. Ricardo was distressed. He was disappointed. The radiant
vision of the cathedral was, after all, a criminal. He began to be sorry that he had ever come to Caudebec at all. The odd circumstance to him was that Lucrece Bouchette seemed to be as distressed and disappointed as he was himself, and he could not reconcile that solicitude with the murderous glances he remembered her to have directed towards Lydia from the lounge of the House of the Pebble.
“Now one o’clock in the morning at Paris would fit in very well with the time the car left the quay here.”
“Very likely. I have never driven from Caudebec to Paris,” said Lucrece.
“Yes,” said Hanaud, making a calculation. “One o’clock from here to the Avenue Matignon.”
Some comment was expected from Lucrece, and she made it. She had her voice now under consummate control. Curiosity and a little bewilderment were audible, but nothing more.
“The Avenue Matignon?”
“Yes.”
“So Lydia drove to the Avenue Matignon?”
“No, madame.”
“But you said—”
“That the car was driven to the Avenue Matignon.”
Lucrece Bouchette threw up her hands. If this man Hanaud liked to talk in conundrums, that was his affair. For herself, she was not amused.
“I don’t understand. And my bath is waiting. Monsieur will excuse me.”
She stood up, but not so lightly as she would have liked it to appear; and once upon her feet, she held the edge of the table with both her hands to keep herself from swaying.
“But Lydia Flight did not drive it,” continued Hanaud. “No! It was driven by Elsie Marsh, of the Casino de Paris, who still has a month or two of her apartment in the Avenue Matignon, before her tenancy runs out.”
He waited for any observation which Lucrece Bouchette might care to make. But Lucrece was occupied in standing on her feet, and Hanaud had to speak his piece without a cue to help him.
“Elsie Marsh seemed to have driven a long way, madame. She was covered with dust, and very tired. So tired, indeed, that she did not give our people the slightest trouble.”
Elsie Marsh in the car! Then Lydia Flight had not run away. But then, if so, why had she not kept her appointment with Hanaud? Mr. Ricardo was in a quandary, and he objected to being in a quandary. He must get this matter settled up. Some subtle and probing question was needed. A moment’s thought, and he had it ready.
“Madame Bouchette,” he cried sternly. “I beg you to answer me a question.”
Lucrece Bouchette gazed at him with amazement, blinking her eyes in the most disconcerting fashion.
“You ask me a question!”
Surely she could not have heard aright. But Mr. Ricardo was not to be bluffed so easily.
“Yes, madame. I ask you how many suit-cases did Miss Lydia Flight possess!”
Lucrece Bouchette opened her mouth and closed it. She wrinkled her forehead in an effort to comprehend. She was in a saloon full of lunatics. Hanaud, on the other hand, was delighted with the question. He chuckled over it. He repeated it. He turned it backwards and forwards, as it were, to have a close look at it.
“Aha! There is a question! It has its points, that question. Would Hanaud have thought of it? Madame, he would not. But it is an admirable question, for it brings us back to the beginning of our conversation.” He launched his enquiry now in a voice authoritative and hard as steel.
“Where, Lucrece Bouchette, is Lydia Flight?”
But an interruption occurred which seemed to drive it altogether out of Hanaud’s head. Parcolet the Commissaire walked in by the forward door, and closed it behind him. Did he make a sign to Hanaud? Lift his cigar, as it were, with his left hand or his right? Ricardo did not notice. He was suddenly boiling with indignation for a reason of his own.
“There, madame,” said Hanaud, “I leave you to Monsieur the Commissary. And these good fellows” — he indicated the two gendarmes— “who have used a spade so successfully this night in the forest of Brotonne that they will be obliged no doubt if your maid would brush a little of the clay off their clothes.”
Lucrece Bouchette slipped down again upon her seat, her face as haggard as an old woman’s, her body shaking. Hanaud turned to Ricardo.
“I will row you ashore in the dinghy. The launch will come back for Monsieur Parcolet.”
“Oh, will it?” said Mr. Ricardo, as he stepped down after Hanaud into the stem of the dinghy. “I am glad to know that. And might I ask who is in control of it now?”
“The admirable Perrichet,” said Hanaud, and Mr. Ricardo came as near to an explosion as he could.
“Really, really,” he cried. “This is excellent! Hanaud lends my launch to Parcolet, when he has done with it. Parcolet when he has done with it lends it to Perrichet, and Perrichet, after a trip on the river, lends it back to Parcolet. I find this a little bizarre.”
“Yes, it is amusing,” Hanaud replied placidly as he drove the sculls through the water. Then he began to gurgle, and the gurgle rose into a roar of laughter loud enough to wake the town, and was accompanied by such a shaking of the shoulders as threatened to upset the boat.
“But it is not as amusing as your question. Oho! That was a stinger! And how many suit-cases does Miss Lydia Flight possess?” He gave the most ridiculous imitation of Mr. Ricardo with his nose in the air. “Oh, the poor woman! The stroke of the hammer! How many suit-cases? Oho! That was a ring in the breadbasket, I can tell you.”
Mr. Ricardo declined to untwist the convolutions of that tangled phrase. A man might ring the bell; another might get one in the bread-basket. He was offended, and he was very tired. He sat in the stern of the dinghy, quite silent. They landed at the steps on the embankment, and Hanaud made the boat fast to a ring. They had still half a mile or so to walk before they could reach the hotel, and the sun was hot, although the morning was young. They walked slowly, Hanaud a little concerned about his friend’s fatigues and shortening his great stride to conform with his step. When they arrived at the door of the hotel, a tall, well-set-up man of certainly no more than thirty-five years, with a brown spade beard which had obviously never been shaved, was coming out.
“Ah! Monsieur de Viard!” exclaimed Hanaud, and he darted forward.
“All goes well,” cried Monsieur de Viard. “But my friend, the forest of Brotonne is not my affair. No, no! The affair of Pont Audemer, yes; of Trouville, perhaps. But you may dig up as many corpses as there are trees, I shall remain calm.”
So that was Monsieur de Viard, the Doctor of the Department. Mr. Ricardo, as a student of humanity, smiled. Madame de Viard née Tabateau was now as easy to read as a printed book. A fine, youngish, upstanding man with a beautiful brown beard, and an official position. She and the Tabateau money between them would send him bowling along from department to department like a hoop. But the basilisk had not reckoned how completely she, née Tabateau, would counterbalance the Tabateau money. The Doctor, Andre de Viard, marched on to that fine house of yellow stone a few yards away. Mr. Ricardo and Hanaud mounted the stairs of the hotel.
“I shall order some coffee, I shall take a hot bath, and I shall go to bed until the hour of luncheon,” said Mr. Ricardo a little stiffly. His question might not have been perhaps quite so devastating as he had thought it to be, but Hanaud had been forced to admit that there were points in it. It was not to be ridiculed.
“You are annoyed with me?” said Hanaud. “Yes, I take the liberties with the launch, and I laugh at the wrong places...”
Ricardo cut short these apologies. He was on the landing leading to his bedroom and his sitting-room and his bathroom. He wanted with as little discussion as possible to enter into the full use of them; and he had on the tip of his tongue a question so crushing that Hanaud must quit the field.
“You are greatly amused by my questions,” he said with dignity. “So I put to you one of your own, and I challenge you to answer it if you can. Where is Lydia Flight?”
For answer, Hanaud put a finger to his lips. He turned the handle of a door, opposite to
the suite of Mr. Ricardo, and turned it very gently, and looked in He faced Ricardo with a real smile of pleasure on his face. He winked, and made a gesture that Ricardo should take his place. Ricardo did. He looked into a pleasant bedroom with its window open and birds piping on the branches of the trees, and in the bed with her gold curls tossed upon the pillow, Lydia Flight was asleep.
“She will not wake for some hours,” Hanaud whispered. “De Viard has given her a sleeping-draught.”
He suddenly pointed to the floor.
“You see, she has one of them here. Oh, what a question you asked, and how right you were to ask it.”
He was pointing to a leather suit-case. Mr. Ricardo in a queer revulsion of feeling began to twitter. In a moment he would laugh aloud. Hanaud drew him back out of the room and ever so gently latched the door.
“We laugh,” he said, “over our foolish little jokes. As I once said to you, we have got to laugh if we are to keep our souls alive. But that poor girl, she will have a grim story of cruelties and terrors to tell us when she wakes, and we, my friend, shall have one more cruel still to tell to her.” He broke off. “You to your bath and your coffee, I to my telephone. We lunch together here at the hour of one.”
And he ran down the stairs.
CHAPTER XXIV
HANAUD ANALYSES
HANAUD SPENT A long and tiresome morning. He rang up the Prefect of Police at Havre. The affair extended far beyond the point at which it could be strangled. To the theft of the great chaplet were now to be added murder and attempted murder. “They are bad cases, and cannot be suffocated,” he said. “They have reached a stage where the Examining Magistrate is demanded. And I put myself at his disposal.” A draft of extra police was required; a guard must be set at once on the Château du Caillou, and its inhabitants warned that they must stay where they were. As soon as possible, the enquiry should be transferred to Havre, since there were no facilities in Caudebec. From the Prefect of Police Hanaud switched on to Nahendra Nao. He begged His Highness to come to Caudebec. It was impossible now to avoid publicity. Whatever consideration could be exercised, certainly would be. But murder could not be a crime which one suppressed. Nahendra Nao took the bad news with a quiet dignity which won Hanaud’s heart.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 142