“I told you you wouldn’t sleep to-night any more than you slept last night,” said Hanaud, clapping him on the shoulder.
Perrichet’s face split in a broad grin.
“Monsieur, I have never known you to be wrong,” he said, and for him Lydia Flight had more than one hand.
“I know that if I sleep to-night, it will be in safety because of you.”
She went into her bedroom. Hanaud and Ricardo returned into the parlour.
“We put ourselves into the night cap, eh?” said Hanaud.
“On the contrary. We put the night-cap into us,” returned Mr. Ricardo, and he rang the bell; and when the waiter presented himself he ordered a brandy and soda. “And for you?” he asked of Hanaud.
Hanaud smiled.
“I am not like you, a Continentalist. No, I have the English tastes. I will have a whisky and lemonade.”
Of all the ghastly forms of drink that Mr. Ricardo had ever heard, this was the very worst. But Hanaud seemed certainly to enjoy it. He smoked one of his black cigarettes to keep it company.
“Yes,” he said complacently, “the English know how to live.”
“And whilst you drink that abominable concoction,” said Mr. Ricardo, “I shall be glad to know how you guessed that Lydia was a prisoner on that houseboat.”
“This is very good,” said Hanaud, drinking out of his glass. He looked at Ricardo anxiously, a man not quite perfectly educated, but wanting always to do the right thing. “Would it be better with a straw?”
“It would not.”
Mr. Ricardo was quite decisive upon that problem.
“The only thing to do with a drink of that kind is to take it down in one gulp and try to forget all about it.”
“Meanwhile,” said Hanaud. “I answer your question. It is clear that Miss Lydia went back to the house-boat. No one who saw her face in the restaurant, who heard her say: ‘Je m’y oblige,’ could doubt it. She meant to go back, she forced herself to go back, but she went back in fear. Well then, I do the arithmetics. I saw two and two are four. Now you understand.”
“I don’t,” Ricardo answered stubbornly.
“Very well. I make two first. One, Lucrece Bouchette has fallen flop, as you say, for the beautiful Guy Stallard. Two, the beautiful Guy Stallard has fallen flop for Lydia Flight. So Lucrece Bouchette does not like Lydia Flight — no, not one little bit of liking, and being Lucrece Bouchette, she would be pleased to show her that she does not like her. Agreed? Yes, agreed. Then I take another two. One, it was not Lydia Flight who aquaplaned. We knew that because a fork clattered on a plate in a restaurant and because two men sat perplexed and dumb as fishes when I told them, at the Château. So already we knew that Lydia Flight did not, but someone else did go aquaplaning from the Marie-Popette the night after the theft. Then two, the second of my second two which make the four. I speak with lucidity. A little picture you made for me, my friend, which I did not like at all. It remained in the mind, yes, and every time I snatch a look at it, it seems to me a little more grim and unpleasant than before. Three women, on the after-deck of a house-boat, two pretending to make a big strong net, and one of them making it — the one for whom it is intended. I do not know as yet what use is to be made of it — no! I do not know that until to-night. But I am not easy. I think that Lucrece woman is dangerous and evil and means all the harm she can mean to that foolish little brave one who has gone to bed. So I make my four. I send Perrichet up to the house-boat to see that no harm comes to her. But I blame myself. I did not know the story which Mademoiselle Lydia had to tell us. Still, I should at once have taken the risk. All the world, newspapers, ministers, deputies make much trouble for us when we make the mistakes, and sometimes we are not brave.”
He got up from his chair and made a sweeping bow towards the door.
“Ah, mademoiselle, it is I, Hanaud, who was the coward last night,” he said remorsefully. “I should have gone through that Marie-Popette with my jeweller’s glass in my eye and no authority in my pocket, until I found you. I should not have left you all those hours fastened up in your net in the darkness, with despair for your lover at your heart and the terror of death beside you. Mademoiselle, I beg your pardon.”
And having spoken thus, he sprang erect. He was like a schoolboy who, having dutifully said his prayers, has made everything all right and can now turn to more amusing matters.
“We go to bed, yes? All of us except Perrichet. Let us not forget that we have still the important question to ask of Mademoiselle! Oho, when we ask that one! I tell you! We shall not be any longer with Moses. No!”
He nodded his head very sagely. For himself, Ricardo could not think of a question which had been left unasked.
“A question?”
“Yes, my friend, and of the gravest. How many suit-cases she possesses.”
Hanaud roared with laughter, but Mr. Ricardo thought it the poorest kind of joke he had ever heard.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE NET CLOSES
THE NEXT MORNING Major Burrows, the Governor of the convict prison on the Moor, sent a message across the road to the house of Dr. Holt, and Dr. Holt answered it in person.
“The French police want some information, and it looks to me as if we could give it,” said the Governor.
“Have a look!”
He handed a paper across the table to Dr. Holt, who sat down and studied it.
“The millionaire from Arizona sounds like George Brymer, doesn’t he?” said Holt. “Though where he got his money from and what this particular ramp is, I can’t think.”
“We don’t have to go into that, fortunately. That’s their pigeon. It’s Brymer all right. Do you remember a little man who got acquitted at the mutiny trial six months ago, and gate-crashed us for a night’s lodging? He was mighty anxious to get in for a night, and I think you and I came to the opinion that he had a message for someone.”
Holt thumped the table.
“Of course I remember. I got five bob apiece for him from you, the chaplain, and myself, and then I saw him in the London train smoking an Havana cigar. Mike Budden, the little rat.”
“It looks to me as if he might be Furlong, and that the message Mike had was for George Brymer. But it’s a bad case, apparently — murder — and we’ve got to be careful. I think I’ll send up Langridge to town, and he can cross over to Havre and identify them.”
“He had better take their fingerprints too,” said the Doctor.
“He can collect them at Scotland Yard,” the Governor agreed.
The net was closing upon those summer visitors. Lucrece Bouchette and her maid Marie were in prison. Elsie Marsh was detained in Paris. Guy Stallard and Major Scott Carruthers had been summoned by the Examining Magistrate, and their movements were watched. But Hanaud wanted the net to be as strong in all its meshes as that one which Lydia Flight had woven for her own distress and suffering. Whilst Langridge, the Dartmoor warder, was travelling to London, Hanaud quietly disappeared from Caudebec. He travelled to Paris with one of the coloured handkerchiefs which had been found in Furlong’s bedroom. At the Sûreté he was informed that it was one of a line specially manufactured for a great chain of shops known as Au Profit des Pauvres. He sought the head office of that institution in the Rue du Quatre Septembre, and learned that the handkerchiefs were made at Lille.
“I can, Monsieur Hanaud, telephone to our factory and get you all the details you want,” said the director whom he saw.
“I would rather, monsieur, have a letter of recommendation,” said Hanaud.
With that in his pocket he caught the five-twenty afternoon train to Lille, and in the office of the manager on the next morning he spread out his handkerchief upon the table.
“You have some complaint, Monsieur Hanaud?” The manager was a small round man, and he bristled visibly. His fine factory was not to be lightly impugned, even by the most illustrious detective in France.
“On the contrary,” said Hanaud, “I hope that I shall have reas
on to thank you.”
But the manager hardly heard him. He seized the handkerchief, and was sunk in confusion and shame.
“Ah, that one of those should have been sold to you! What a misfortune!” he cried.
“It was not sold to me, and it is not a misfortune. This is a case of the most serious. This change in the width of the stripe in the middle of the handkerchief — fourteen threads crimson, fourteen threads yellow, then suddenly eighteen threads crimson and ten yellow — it is part of the pattern?”
“No, Monsieur Hanaud, no! The pattern was regular, fourteen crimson, fourteen yellow, from top edge to bottom edge, and again from side to side. But this had been an error, a fault in a loom. In one piece of the fabric, and in only one, let Monsieur Hanaud believe it, the pattern had been marred. It had been soon discovered.”
“You can prove that only one piece shows this variation?”
The manager could certainly prove it.
“And how many handkerchiefs are there in a piece?” Hanaud asked.
“A gross,” the factory manager answered. “They are cut and separated afterwards. But a gross are woven in the one piece.”
“One hundred and forty-four handkerchiefs. That is all?”
“That is all.”
“And how do you sell them? Singly?”
This was the question which to Hanaud was the most critical of all in this matter.
“Oh, no, monsieur. We sell them by the dozen or the half-dozen. And we sell millions of them.”
“Yes. So I can rely upon it — and I beg you to be very sure — that of all the millions sold of this line of handkerchiefs, only twenty-four people at the outside can have bought one with this flaw in the pattern?”
“Only twenty-four.”
No one could have been more definite.
“Then I shall ask you for a list of your shops in Havre and Rouen,” said Hanaud.
There were only three, and he returned to Caudebec well contented. There could be no reasonable doubt that the handkerchief which was bound over Lydia’s eyes to hide from her the identity of her assailants, the handkerchief which was used to chloroform Oliver Ransom, and the four discovered by Durasoy in Furlong’s bedroom, belonged to the same set. They linked the theft and the murder together, with a chain which could not be broken. Followed a good deal of routine work. The Doctor de Viard testified that Oliver before he was chloroformed had been stunned by one of those weapons which leave no obvious mark, a sandbag or a rubber truncheon. Langridge the warder gave to George Brymer and Mike Budden their real names; and since they were possessed of false passports, they were held at once on that preliminary charge. There was enough presumption against Scott Carruthers to justify his arrest on the graver charge, and routine quickly made a certainty of the presumption. Hanaud had been sure from the beginning of the case that the great rope of pearls could not be far away. A receipt from the manager of the Hotel des Fontaines for a parcel locked up in the safe and dated the day after the murder was found amongst the Major’s papers. The parcel contained the Chitipur pearls, and the key of a compartment in a safe deposit at the back of Lower Regent Street in London. In the safe deposit was Monsieur Tabateau’s admirable copy. The net had closed in upon the chief actors in this queer crime; and pressed day after day by the most persevering of Examining Magistrates, Scott Carruthers, already on the edge of a nervous collapse, threw in his hand. He had hidden himself, whilst supper was being served, in Oliver Ransom’s bedroom. There George Brymer had joined him, after he had given the signal from the balcony of the gallery for the rocket to be let off.
The actual attack upon Oliver Ransom he had left to the ingenuity of Brymer, and no doubt that powerful piece of elegance was the better adept for such tactics; and in this respect the only instance of the kind in the affair, all had fallen out as it had been planned. Mike Budden slipping up the spiral staircase from the gallery had switched off the light in the top corridor, as Lydia’s door closed behind her. That was all he had to do, and he ran downstairs at once and out by the service door to the courtyard. Less than a second afterwards Brymer had struck down Oliver Ransom and caught him as he fell. They had carried him down the staircase into Brymer’s suite of rooms, quickly and quietly. Not one of the household was there to see. All were watching the performance of the rope-dancer. The only danger lay in the possibility of one of the men attending to the projectors coming out into the passage at the moment when Brymer and Scott Carruthers were carrying their victim the length of it. But the men were busy at their work and no such mischance occurred. A pad drenched with chloroform was then secured over Ransom’s nostrils and mouth by the coloured handkerchief and he was left to die. Later on, when all the guests had gone and the servants had retired to their wing, and the house was in darkness, Lucrece Bouchette had kept watch, and the three men had brought Ransom down to the postern door leading to the forest, wheeled him on a barrow into the forest, and buried him. Scott Carruthers had been in a panic lest Ransom should not be dead. He wanted to make sure. It would be too horrible, he declared to the Magistrate, if he were to wake up under that clay.
“Indeed at last we find real consideration,” said the Magistrate bitterly. “There has been a lack of kindness up till now. But you wanted to be sure that Monsieur Ransom was dead before you buried him. Yes, in effect most commodious and estimable!”
Scott Carruthers had no fine ear at that moment to catch a note or analyse a phrase of irony. He seized on the words. Yes, he had been careful. He would never have slept again with that doubt to torture him. Brymer, he was sorry to say, didn’t care, but he allowed Scott Carruthers to take the pad from Ransom’s mouth and make sure that he didn’t breathe.
“Then I covered his face with the handkerchief again. It was more decent,” said Scott Carruthers. “All that clay! No! No!”
The Magistrate was most sympathetic in his commendation of a sensitiveness so delicate. “So few murderers have it,” he replied. “Indeed, I have found them as a rule without delicacy at all.”
These examinations were conducted at Havre by the Magistrate and Hanaud had nothing to do with them. But he had not yet done with the case. What interested him, was not so much either of the two crimes themselves, but the way in which a cunning and perhaps over-subtle plot had been brought to nothing by the undisciplined people who were supposed to be step by step carrying it to its result. They just wouldn’t be chessmen. They wouldn’t move from square to square according to the player, and when they did move, they wouldn’t even remain within those limitations of movement which the rules prescribed. Lucrece Bouchette, George Brymer, even Nahendra Nao! Their passions ran backwards and forwards across the pattern of the Major’s scheme, altering it and spoiling it, betraying it, just as one refractory loom had spoilt a gross of cheap handkerchiefs, and drawn the keenest pair of eyes to the study of the pattern. Lucrece, Scott Carruthers, Mike Budden, George Brymer — Hanaud had them laced in the net. But there was another whose part in the affair was still something of a perplexity.
Elsie Marsh! Was she one of Scott Carruthers’s pieces, something less than a bishop, and something more than a pawn? Scott Carruthers said “No!” She had had nothing whatever to do with the affair. She was part of Lucrece Bouchette’s side-show, introduced, as it were, on to the board, when the player was concentrating on the next move. Hanaud, however, was not ready to believe all that Scott Carruthers told to him or to the Examining Magistrate. He talked his difficulty over with himself through the medium of Mr. Ricardo, one evening at Havre when they were dining late at the Restaurant du Sceptre and the oblong room was empty.
“Listen! It was Elsie Marsh who aquaplaned on the night after the murder. She admits it. She says that on her holidays it is her favourite amusement. The night was hot at Caudebec. She asked Lucrece to run the launch down the river, and the kind Lucrece was most commodious and obliging. If it fitted in with any secret plan of the Bouchette — that was the Bouchette’s blackbird.”
“That wa
s the Bouchette’s pigeon,” said Mr. Ricardo. “Proceed!”
Hanaud proceeded:
“It was Elsie Marsh who was to aquaplane again on the night when Lucrece and her maid tucked away mademoiselle in the net. That is clear, yes? She was the only one on board to do it. But this time our Elsie does not admit it. No, no! There was no thought of it. If the Bouchette meant a crime so hideous as to put the lovely Mademoiselle Lydia into a net and drown her under the launch, she would know better than to tell Elsie Marsh about it. Elsie very likely had her faults — yes. She was not a model, but she would not sit for it.”
“Or even stand,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“In fact, so far was the Bouchette from hinting that she should assist in a proceeding so ferocious, that she actually lent Elsie the car in which the lovely mademoiselle had returned to the Marie-Popette, that she might drive herself to Paris.”
At this point Mr. Ricardo had no corrections to make. “Good!” Hanaud continued. “And it is true that Elsie Marsh was off the house-boat and away to Paris, before Perrichet arrived in his dinghy. On the other hand, she rowed herself ashore, and left the house-boat’s dinghy to float whither it would. The Bouchette would have sent Marie with her to bring the dinghy back. I am puzzled. If Elsie Marsh is one of the Major’s platoon, why, she must stay here and stand her trial. But if she was one of the Bouchette’s side-show, and ran away rather than complete her job, we shall restore her to her native shores. You shall find out for me.” Mr. Ricardo shrank back in dismay.
“I?”
“You. You shall speak to her to-morrow.”
“But she is in Paris.”
“She is in Havre.”
“God bless my soul!” said Mr. Ricardo.
“It is not that we love Elsie Marsh. No!” Hanaud insisted. “But we consider the young Prince Nahendra Nao. He is a gentleman of dignity, and has shown a high spirit in this trouble. If his folly must, in the interests of law and order, be brought into the light, he makes no complaint. For his own sake we would spare him, and also because, as I told you, we have Princes of our own.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 146