H. de Vere Stacpoole
Henry de Vere Stacpoole (1863–1951) was born in Ireland, but his chronic bronchitis led to his family moving to Nice in the hope that his health might improve. He studied medicine in London before working as a ship’s doctor during the course of extensive travels overseas. Later he became a GP in Somerset, and drew on his time in the South Pacific when writing The Blue Lagoon (1905). This was his most successful novel, spawning several film adaptations, one of which, screened in 1980, starred Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins.
Stacpoole’s tales of intrigue and adventure often benefit from exotic settings. His work has occasionally drawn comparison with that of W. Somerset Maugham, and although Stacpoole’s prose was not quite as compelling as Maugham’s, he was a capable storyteller; Arthur Conan Doyle was among those who rated his fiction highly. Stacpoole was not primarily a crime writer, but he enjoyed making occasional forays into the genre, and this is probably his best mystery story; it first appeared in Munsey’s Magazine in 1926.
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Of all places in the modern European world Monte Carlo is the most fascinating. It is most beautiful when seen from a distance as I see it now from my window in Bordighera with the sun full upon it; as I will see it this evening after dark, a spray of coloured lights, winked at by the far revolving light of Cap Ferrat.
Monte Carlo, as I sit smoking at night, sometimes reminds me of a beautiful woman—perhaps because of the necklace effect of the lights—and Cap Ferrat of the attitude of the world to her. The world winks at Monte Carlo and her doings; she is beautiful, she is fascinating, she makes men lose their heads; like all the great loved women of the past she has her private graveyard; she is detestable, which is part of her charm, and she ought long ago to have come under the hands of Monsieur Diebler, or whoever it is that has taken his place.
But there is no Diebler who deals with cities or towns; a town may be a murderer, like Monte Carlo, and a State a confederate, like Monaco, but there is no law to bring them to book, no punishment as yet, not even the mild punishment of reform.
Of course you will understand that I am writing of the tables, that conglomeration of roulette basins—little whirlpools that are yet capable of sucking a man’s soul down into the drain-pipes of perdition.
To show you the power exercised by this suction I am going to tell you the story of Madame Bertaux, and that the powder of instruction may be properly balanced by the jam of amusement I am going to give it to you in its full detective dress as it was told to me by one of the international detectives who are always hunting this coast for international crooks. He was an elderly man with a Kalmuck type of face, yellow as old ivory from cigarette smoking, and he told me the yarn to exhibit the powers of M. Henri, of the Paris Sûreté—and for another reason.
Have you ever heard of the case of Madame Bertaux? he asked. Ah, well, she was an old lady who lived in the house of a M. Jacob in the Rue Paradis at Monte Carlo. The house was too large for M. Jacob, so he let the upper part as a flat to Madame Bertaux, a wealthy woman who had kept the old Phocée, a restaurant on the Rue de la Cannebière, of Marseilles. The lady never went out; she was afflicted with some malady of the back that prevented her from walking, and also an eczema that was most disfiguring; she had neither the power nor the desire to go into society, and yet she had the woman’s craving for dress and adornment quite unimpaired.
She was very proud of her jewels, which were, in fact, very fine and worth a considerable sum of money. She was never happier than when dressing herself in them—rings, bracelets, brooches, ear-rings and so on—and when she was not wearing them she had the box containing them by her bed or couch so that she could touch them and see them. She also kept in her possession a good deal of loose cash.
All this exercised the mind of M. Jacob, and several times he pointed out to her the danger of valuables kept in a house in such a manner.
‘Oh, nobody knows,’ said she, ‘only Rosalie, and she is safe. Who would bother coming to rob an old woman like me? Besides, I’d be able to defend myself against them if only by screeching for help. And,’ she said, ‘they amuse me, which they wouldn’t if they were locked up in the bank; and I don’t want to be told my business, not even by you, M. Jacob.’ In fact, they might have fought, only that he knew her queer ways and that she was an invalid, and refused to get angry with her.
Well, one evening Madame Bertaux was found with her head battered in and her jewels gone. The case was left.
The window was open. There were marks on a drain-pipe close to the window showing where a man had evidently crawled up; otherwise there were very few marks at all, and the room was not disturbed, though from a drawer in an escritoire by the door ten louis in gold had been taken, pre-war money treasured by the old lady and tied in a handkerchief. She had in her possession a roll of notes of the value of ten thousand francs; they had not been touched.
There were no finger-marks anywhere. I was at déjeuner in the Hotel de Paris with M. Henri that morning when the Chief of Police of Monaco was shown in to us. He came about a certain person who has no connection with this story, and when he had done his business he mentioned the murder in the Rue Paradis. You know the police mind thinks in the form of reports, and this good gentleman, once he had set his speech machine going, gave us a complete précis of the details of the business, everything but the exhibits, in fact.
‘We arrested a young man, Coudoyer, lover of the servant Rosalie, this morning,’ he finished. ‘We found in his pockets very little money, but in his box at the inn where he is employed, an old-fashioned watch which belonged to the dead woman, and which he said had been given to him long ago by the servant Rosalie, who had it as a present from Madame Bertaux. It’s all pretty plain.’
He went into more details about M. Jacob, the owner of the house, Madame Bertaux, and so forth, till Henri cut him short.
‘Did you find any finger-marks?’ asked Henri.
‘No,’ said the Chief.
‘And this young man, Coudoyer, what is he like?’
‘Oh, quite a simple person,’ the Chief answered him. ‘Just a waiter, and with a good record, the last person in the world you’d suspect of doing a thing like this.’
‘There were no finger-marks, which shows an expert was at work,’ said Henri, ‘and you have arrested Coudoyer?’
‘On suspicion,’ said the other, ‘and on finding that watch in his trunk.’
‘Yes,’ said the Paris man; ‘but the thing you didn’t find was finger-marks, yet a woman had been murdered and furniture handled by the murderer. Your judgment must be wrong about Coudoyer; he must be no simple person, but an expert criminal; either that, or you have arrested the wrong man.’
That seemed pretty conclusive, but the Monaco man didn’t get enthusiastic over it; he seemed rather to resent Henri’s deductions, which cast a shadow on his own intelligence.
‘We must go by what we find,’ said he. ‘We searched very thoroughly for finger-marks on all surfaces possible, even to the table legs, even to a ten-franc Casino counter lying on the floor by the bureau. We may not be equal in intelligence to Paris, but we are thorough.’
That was a hit at Henri, for it was after the botching of the Jondret affair in Paris, which, however, wasn’t Henri’s doing; however, the little man took it up and swelled out his chest. You’ve never seen Henri? Well, he’s a little man with a pointed beard, and when he gets in a temper he puffs himself out—like that…
‘Yes, you seem to be thorough,’ said he. ‘You actually find a ten-franc Casino counter on the floor, and then you arrest a resident of Monte Carlo, or at least an employee, for you know well that employees are not allowed in the Casino. Now, tell me,’ said Henri, ‘didn’t it hit you at once that the ten-franc counter must have been dropped by the murderer and no one else?’
‘How do you mean?’ said the other.
‘This way. It wasn’t the old lady’s if your statement about her is correct, for she never went out; it isn’t Rosalie’s, and it isn’t Coudoyer’s, for they are employees and can’t use the Casino; it isn’t M. Jacob’s, because he is, as you said, a resident engaged in business, and can’t use the Casino. It must evidently have belonged to a person who was neither of these people, who was neither Madame Bertaux nor M. Jacob nor Rosalie nor Coudoyer, some person other than any of these people who are known to have used Madame Bertaux’s room or been connected with it; it most evidently belonged to a stranger, a fifth person, and a person, moreover, who has or had the entry to the Casino.’
‘A moment,’ said the Chief. ‘That argument seems tempting; but suppose Coudoyer had that counter in his possession at the time of the murder and dropped it by accident? It is not impossible for a waiter to acquire a Casino counter; it might have been given to him, it might have been picked up by him, it might have come into his possession in several different ways.’
‘Just so,’ said M. Henri; ‘but the most probable way for it to come into his possession would be through the Casino. In these cases we must move in the direction pointed out by the finger of Probability; in our work there is no certainty, otherwise there would be little work for us to do. I take it, then, the probability is that a person who had been playing at the Casino, and who had a counter left over, forgotten in his or her pocket—a thing that often happens, I assure you—paid a visit to the rooms of Madame Bertaux, and through accident dropped and left behind the counter.
‘Now, what does that prove? Very little, you will say, yet to me it seems that here is evidence not without value.
‘We can say, to begin with, that it is highly probable the counter was dropped neither by Coudoyer nor Rosalie nor M. Jacob, none of whom have the entrée to the Casino, nor Madame Bertaux, who was an invalid, but by someone else. Madame Bertaux had no friends. I understand from you that neither M. Jacob nor Rosalie knew of any visitors. Therefore the counter must have been dropped by a visitor who came in secret, or at least in a manner which drew the attention of no one in the house.
‘A curious thing for anyone to pay a visit like that. Now, when we come across anything strange or curious in this world, time or common sense will often put in our hands a solution quite simple.
‘There would be something curious in the secret conduct of this stranger if he came for a good and not for an evil purpose. We, in fact, find the old lady murdered, and we say to ourselves: “Here is the fruit of the purpose that inspired our stranger—there is nothing curious in the matter at all. He came in secret to murder her.”
‘“There is nothing curious in the matter at all.” That is the motto that every detective ought to take; every baffling crime seems at first sight to have something curious in its texture or make-up; but that is not so; in nearly every case the seeming strangeness is an illusion due to scanty or muddled evidence.’
‘Well,’ said the Chief of Police, ‘what you say seems just, and if we could find the man who owned the counter your argument would bear heavily against him. We fancy we have found him in Coudoyer. Well, seeing you have taken an interest in this business, why not give us the benefit of your experience? Come and examine the chief parties in the affair for yourself, and look at the room.’
‘I will do that with pleasure,’ said M. Henri.
We left the hotel and went straight to the Rue Paradis. The body had been removed, but the room was in just the same state as when the tragedy was discovered. It was a pleasant, sunlit room on the first floor, with a window opening upon a small balcony. M. Henri went first to the balcony and inspected the drain-pipe by which the assassin had climbed; then he returned and stood with his hands behind his back looking at the room. Opposite the window there was a sofa, and by the window was the armchair in which the invalid had been sitting when she was attacked.
Small objects of furniture stood about, including a fragile table bearing a vase of flowers; on another table stood the jewel-box, empty.
M. Henri, having inspected all these things individually, asked that Rosalie, the maid, should be called. The girl, when she came into the room, did not strike me very favourably. She was pretty, but pert-looking, shallow, just the tool one might fancy a scoundrel would easily handle. I confess, when I saw her, my belief in the innocence of Coudoyer was not increased.
‘Tell me,’ said M. Henri, ‘what were you doing last night at nine o’clock?’
‘I have already told Monsieur the Inspector,’ replied she. ‘I was with a friend.’
‘She was with Coudoyer,’ put in the Chief. ‘Several people saw them together at twenty minutes to nine; after that no one saw them together. Her story is that they walked about together. She returned at half-past nine, after the crime had been discovered.’
‘That will do,’ said M. Henri, and he dismissed Rosalie. Then he turned to the Chief. ‘Give me the girl’s story,’ said he, ‘as she told it to you.’
‘There was very little more,’ replied the other. ‘She parted, so she said, with Coudoyer at the corner of the Rue Marcell at twenty minutes past nine. He went for a walk by himself and returned home at ten.’
‘And the murder was committed at nine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who discovered the body?’
‘M. Jacob. He was seated downstairs, reading, at nine o’clock, when he fancied he heard a cry. He thought it was from the rooms above, and then he fancied it was from the street. He went on reading, but felt, somehow, uneasy, went upstairs and knocked at the old lady’s door, got no answer, and opened the door. Then he telephoned for the police.’
‘Tell me,’ said M. Henri, ‘why haven’t you arrested that girl as well as Coudoyer?’
‘She’s as good as arrested,’ replied the other; ‘she can’t escape, and we are just letting her play about for a few days. Coudoyer had accomplices. None of the jewellery has been recovered, with the exception of that old watch which he swore was given him by Rosalie, who had it as a present from the old lady.’
‘Let’s have a talk with M. Jacob,’ said Henri.
We went to the flat below, and found M. Jacob in. A middle-sized, prosperous-looking, elderly person, greatly disturbed by the tragedy of the night before. He told us all he knew. He had never heard of the gift of the watch to Rosalie, though, indeed, as he pointed out, it was little likely that he should have heard of it, for though he was on good terms with the old lady and often went up to have a chat with her, a little affair of that sort would scarcely be mentioned between them.
‘You never saw or heard of a Casino counter in her possession?’ asked Henri.
M. Jacob was greatly astonished at the question: the police had not told him of the finding of the counter. No, he had never seen one in the possession of the old lady, it was the most unlikely thing for her to have, and no one else in the house would possess such a thing. Then we took our departure, to visit Coudoyer, who was held at the police department under arrest.
He was a pale-faced individual, with restless, shifty eyes. He did not impress me favourably; but, still, I would never judge a man by his appearance.
He told a tale substantially the same as that given by the servant Rosalie. He protested that his character was good, that his employers could speak well of him, that he was engaged to be married to Rosalie—and would a man about to marry commit a crime like that?
He said that he had never been even on the steps of the Casino.
He admitted that it was possible to pick up a counter dropped by some gambler in the café where he served, or in the street, but stated emphatically that he had not done so.
Yes, the watch, that was the only thing they had against him, but it had been given him by the girl; he could not prove this, because Madame Bertaux was dead, but it was a fact. Then, half unwillingly, but evidently speaking the truth, he said that he believed, or had strong suspicion, that Rosalie was not faithful to him; that she had a ‘young man’ other than himself. But he could give no name; the thing was a suspicion based on something she had mentioned.
That was what he had to say both on his own account and in answer to questions. When he was removed, the Chief turned to M. Henri.
‘Now,’ said he, ‘you have seen all the important people in connection with this case, and here is a diagram showing the position in which the body was when found. What’s your opinion?’
‘I haven’t any fixed opinion just yet,’ said M. Henri, ‘but from what I have seen I believe that man will be convicted. Monte Carlo never guillotines, so he will not pay the extreme penalty, and after a while it is possible he may regain his freedom.’ A strange sort of speech, to which the Chief listened with a half-smile.
‘And what about Rosalie?’ he asked.
‘I can’t say anything about her,’ replied Henri. ‘I’m only telling the fortune of Coudoyer.’
‘You would make your fortune as a fortune-teller,’ said the Chief; ‘you speak so convincingly.’
‘I believe I could make money at that business,’ replied the other; ‘and legitimately, for my fortune-telling would be based on circumstance and character. I say Coudoyer may regain his freedom, for the simple reason that in my belief Coudoyer is innocent. Mind you, that is only a belief.’
‘And you base it—?’
‘On the ten-franc counter, and on Rosalie’s “young man,” the existence of whom I half believe in.’
‘That eternal counter!’
‘Yes, that eternal counter—and other things that it seems to have revealed to me.’
‘What are they?’
‘I cannot tell you; you would say, “Oh, this is nonsense!” and besides, to let daylight in on half-formed ideas tends to shrivel them; and besides, to talk is fatal in a case like this: walls have ears, ideas have wings. I believe the murderer is now walking about Monte Carlo; I believe this climber of drain-pipes and assassin of old ladies fancies himself secure, but that, at a whisper, a breath of air, he would take measures which would prevent him ever from being caught. But this I will do if you like: I will lend you Malmaison, of the Paris Sûreté; he is not in very good health, and a change to the sunny South will do him good. He will come here, of course, as a private individual; nobody knows him here; and if he is successful the credit will go to you, for he is not longing after notoriety.’
You may be sure the Chief did not hesitate to accept this offer; it was all to the good and nothing to pay, for Paris and Monte Carlo are very necessary to one another and often lend mutual assistance without the exchange of a franc.
So it was settled.
After that and for a long time I heard nothing more. My business took me to Vienna and Rome. I heard, indeed, that Coudoyer and the girl had been condemned, both to imprisonment, and for life. Henri had prophesied truly, though he had not included the girl in his forecast. Then one day, and in pursuit of my business, I returned to Monte Carlo, only to find that the man on whose tracks I had been travelling had doubled back and been arrested at Milan. I was pretty much disgusted. I had committed a fault; he had got wind of me, and my reputation would suffer.
Being what you call at a loose end that evening, I went to the Casino. I don’t care for music or plays, but people always interest me, especially the Casino crowd, and there I went; and scarcely had I made the tour of the rooms when whom should I find but Malmaison.
He was dressed to represent the part of a well-to-do business man, but I could not mistake him. I must tell you about Malmaison—that he is the most self-obliterating person in the world. In Paris he adopts a disguise; his name is unknown, never published in the papers; that is why he is so deadly. Here in Monte Carlo his best disguise was to be his real self.
I knew him, but then I am in the inner circle. Our eyes met, and I saw at once that I was not to speak. Then he turned from the table, and as he turned I saw the hand which was behind his back close twice.
I followed him slowly as he walked away, followed him through the room, stopping occasionally to look at the play, followed him outside, past Ciro’s, and along a road leading to the Rue Paradis. Here he stopped, and we spoke to each other. Henri must have told him of my knowledge of the Bertaux affair, for he began to speak of it at once.
‘And it is fortunate I met you to-night,’ said he, ‘for things have come to a crisis. I believe I have got my man; indeed, I could have pointed him out to you in the room where he was playing. He did not see me, I only got a glimpse of him, but to-night I expect he will re-visit the house where the murder took place and where I have taken rooms.’
‘Taken rooms?’ said I.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Madame Bertaux’s flat was to let; people weren’t anxious to rent it just after the crime, so M. Jacob, who owns the place and lives below, let it to me. I have been there a good while watching the Casino and the strangers who have come to Monte Carlo. I had to wait a good while, but I found my man—and my woman.’
‘Who was the woman?’
‘Rosalie—she was justly condemned.’
‘And the man—?’
‘Was her young man, a rival to Coudoyer.’
‘And to-night,’ I said, ‘you expect him to re-visit the scene of the crime. What bait have you put out for him?’
‘You’ll see,’ said Malmaison.
We had reached the door, and he opened it with a latch-key. The door of M. Jacob’s flat was closed.
‘You haven’t told M. Jacob?’ said I.
‘Not a word,’ he replied. ‘I believe in Henri’s motto, which is “Be dumb.” He believes I am just a prosperous rentier, and as I pay my rent in advance he doesn’t bother about anything else. Why should I tell him?’
He led the way up, and I found myself again in Madame Bertaux’s room; but very different it looked now, with cigar and cigarette boxes about and glasses and other signs of good cheer.
Malmaison made me take the arm-chair, then he opened the window and left it standing half open.
‘You expect him to come through the window?’ said I.
‘Let us expect nothing,’ said he. ‘I believe in Henri’s idea that not only ought one to be dumb, but that, given a true theory, too many brains in the know may set up ether vibrations warning the criminal. However, a sketch of how the case stands up to a certain point will do no harm.’
He offered me a cigar and went on:
‘I came here on seemingly an impossible task, but M. Henri had given me an idea of how to set to work. It was only during the last few days, however, that the truth became quite evident. The criminal is first of all and above everything else a gambler; the crime was committed to recoup his gambling losses. He has a cousin who runs an hotel here. A very shady man, this cousin. He it was, I suspect, who turned the stolen jewellery into money; a worse man, perhaps, than the actual murderer, who was urged by Play and the Devil to commit his crime.’
As Malmaison talked and as I looked at him, noticing his good clothes, his large watch-chain and the rings on his fingers, the idea came to me that the bait he had put down to catch the assassin was himself, and it gave me a very queer sensation, the thought that through that open window the tiger might suddenly appear. However, I said nothing, and he went on:
‘The criminal has two addresses here. One is the hotel owned by his cousin. He doesn’t stay there; he has a house of his own, a pleasant little house which he picked up cheap and where he lives free of taxes, the only drawback being that when he wants to play at the Casino he can’t, owing to the fact that he’s a resident employed in a bank. He is also a man with a certain power over women, and so it came about that Rosalie fell under his spell.
‘Now you will see how things conspired to bring this man to his undoing. He has a brother very like himself who travels in wine for Meyer and Capablanca, of Bordeaux.
‘This brother, when he visits Monte Carlo, stops at the cousin’s hotel and plays at the Casino, and one fine day it occurred to the criminal, who was then only a bank cashier, to drop into the Casino under the brother’s name and giving the address the brother had always given. The chief difference between the two men was the fact that the brother wore glasses. So you see it was quite an easy matter to buy a pair of glasses, and, handing the brother’s card over the counter, gain admittance—or use his ticket for the season.
‘Well, there you are: a man well-to-do and comfortable, yet sucked by the whirlpool of the tables—drawn into the net. Most likely the first time he went in under the guise of his brother he thought it would be the last; he just went in to see the play and have a flutter. Then the passion grew. Or it may be that he was a gambler at heart with a passion full grown to be satisfied—who knows? One can only say that the tables took him and turned him into a murderer, and that Henri jumped to the fact that the man who dropped that ten-franc counter might be a resident who played at the Casino under disguise.’
Malmaison rose and held up a finger.
‘Here he is,’ said he.
I could hear a far-away step in the silent street outside.
Malmaison closed the window.
‘Why do you close the window?’ I asked.
‘I only left it open to let in a footstep,’ said he. ‘Come, this gentleman will enter boldly by the front door, if I am not mistaken. Quick!’
I took my hat and followed him downstairs to the hall, where we stood waiting while the footsteps paused outside. The hall light was on. We heard the noise of the key in the latch; the door opened, and a man entered. It was only M. Jacob.
I pitied Malmaison. I felt like a man watching a play which has suddenly broken down, a hunter who hears the footsteps of a tiger and finds them to be the footsteps of a lamb.
‘Good evening, monsieur,’ said Jacob when he saw Malmaison.
‘Good evening,’ replied the other. ‘I was just going to show my friend out. How fortunate we have met, for my friend wished to ask you some questions concerning real estate in Monte Carlo.’
‘Come into my room,’ said M. Jacob, ‘and we can talk.’
He opened the door of his flat and we entered the sitting-room, where he put on the light and offered us cigarettes, which Malmaison refused.
‘Monsieur Jacob,’ said he whilst we took seats, ‘excuse my asking, but how much money did you make playing at the Casino to-night?’
The murderer rose to his feet at this terrible question, the full weight of which he had not quite realised. He knew he was caught, but not how seriously.
‘Ah!’ said he—‘a spy of the bank!’
‘No,’ said Malmaison, ‘I have nothing to do with the bank of which you are cashier. I am a police officer in search of a certain ten-franc counter which was dropped—’
He did not finish the sentence. Jacob had made a dash for the door.
The struggle did not last a minute.
It wasn’t much, for I had managed, seeing the truth, to seize Jacob from behind. We found the glasses in his pocket and a large number of banknotes which he had won that night. At the Bureau of Police, where we brought him, he was told that his cousin, the hotelkeeper, had confessed to the whole business; this was an untruth, but it served, for in his anger he rounded on the cousin and told how he had disposed of the jewels. Both men received life sentences. He rounded on Rosalie, the girl who had begun by stealing the antique watch as a present for Coudoyer and ended by assisting M. Jacob in his plans, the girl who had not given him away simply because she would have had to give herself away too, and who took her condemnation and sentence without a word, knowing she would do herself no good through freeing Coudoyer; feeling perhaps jealous that Coudoyer should escape whilst she had to suffer. Women are strange things.
I have told you the story for two reasons. First of all, it is interesting as it shows the methods of M. Henri. He seized directly on the really essential thing, the counter. When he mentioned the counter to M. Jacob he saw at once what I did not see, that Jacob was the man who had dropped it, saw it by some subtle signal in the man’s manner. Also, it seemed to him that the drain-pipe by which the assassin was supposed to have climbed was too fragile to support a grown man, and that the marks on it were ‘artificial.’
When he sent Malmaison to Monte Carlo he told him to watch Jacob and, if possible, to secure the rooms left vacant by the death of Madame Bertaux.
Now, if Jacob had been a really clever man he would never have gone to the Casino again after the finding of that counter by the police, but, lulled to security by the conviction of Coudoyer and the girl, and little dreaming how that counter had talked to Henri, instead of destroying those fatal glasses he put them on and walked into the trap.
It was the finding of those glasses on him that really broke him down and saved a long trial by inducing him to confess.
The other reason for my telling you this story is to show you the pull of the tables and exhibit to you the men who run them as what they are, men who for the sake of profit sacrifice men to the Demon of Play.
The Demon kills a man every day on an average at Monte Carlo, kills him by his own hand and sends his soul to perdition. And what shall we say of the men who do not commit suicide yet are ruined; of their wives and children?
I am no priest; my business in life is the taking of criminals—criminals—criminals, but what shall we say of the men who are licensed by society to kill for gain?
Are they so much better than M. Jacob?
He crossed and put another cigarette-end on the pile in the ash-tray.
I did not answer his question. I was looking through the open window and the balmy night at the jewelled necklace of Monte Carlo, and the far-off light of Cap Ferrat winking across the sea.