When the three men appeared in the ill-lit entrance of The Hotel of the Three Roses, a tall, sturdy man in a grey hat came from inside the lobby to open the glass door. His overcoat was done up and he had a stick in his right hand. He waited for them.
“Good evening, De Vincenzi.”
“Good evening, Bianchi.”
Inspector Bianchi shook his colleague’s hand and then Sani’s; he nodded at Cruni. De Vincenzi entered the lobby; it was deserted. A plainclothes officer stood at the door to the dining room, two others at the bottom of the stairs. Through the dining room windows one could see a few alert faces, eyes shining, and the reflections of a blonde woman’s hair. But nothing was stirring in there. Someone, however, was coming downstairs from a long way up, and the sound of their heels rang out on the steps.
De Vincenzi stopped to listen as he looked about. One might have said the entire house shook with those steps. A heavy man, he thought, with all his weight on his heels as he descends. Obese, perhaps. Why was he so focused on this sound? He noticed a fibre suitcase on the chair in front of the table; a wicker armchair was overturned near the sofa in the large halo of light coming from the pink lampshade. He stood still in the midst of that vast lobby, while Sani and Cruni, perplexed, remained at the door. Bianchi came forward.
“Would you like to see the body?”
“Suicide?”
“No.” A sharp negative.
De Vincenzi nodded. How had anyone thought it was suicide? The heels continued to clatter over the floor of the landing and a short, round, obese man appeared at the top of the stairs, just as De Vincenzi had imagined him.
“The doctor,” said Bianchi. “He lives just opposite. He’s the first one I could find.”
The doctor’s fat, rosy face still showed his shock, and his bulging eyes were moving every which way as if he were looking for some way out. But he finally stopped in front of De Vincenzi and Bianchi.
“I haven’t touched him,” he sighed. “It was easy enough to see he was dead. Certainly the first thing to do now is to lay him out on a bed like a good Christian. But I wouldn’t have been able to take him down from that rope on my own. The autopsy is tomorrow morning. It’s all guesswork without it.”
“What are you saying?” De Vincenzi’s voice shook with anger. “What if he was still alive? Maybe with artificial respiration…”
The doctor’s eyes nearly leapt out of their sockets. “What do you take me for? That man has been dead for at least ten hours and maybe even more. Didn’t you know that his dead body is already showing the first signs of secondary flaccidity? The rigor mortis is over.”
The athletic Bianchi stared down at the little man. He bent over and took him by the elbows, as if to bring him up to his own level, to look him in the face, as one does with children.
“But Doctor, that man died by hanging! His corpse was actually hanging in the middle of the landing. He must have been hanged only an hour or two ago at the most, or else anyone who went by today or this evening would have seen him. How can you say he’s been dead ten hours or more?”
The doctor freed himself and took a step backward. At any other time the situation would have been laughable. He looked like a rubber toy.
“So who are you? Who are you!” he spluttered, practically choking with indignation. “Leave me alone! Didn’t you order me to leave my home, come here and climb up to the top floor only to find myself face to face, all on my own, with a corpse? What do you want to know? You’re not a doctor!”
De Vincenzi’s voice was calm and clear. “Calm down, Doctor. Inspector Bianchi had no intention of offending you. We’re here to listen to you—and naturally to accept what you say. But you’ll need to explain things to us.”
The other man panted furiously for a few more minutes, and then seemed to calm down.
“He did not die by hanging,” he uttered slowly and softly, and De Vincenzi felt a quick shiver pass beneath his skin. “Someone hung him up after he was dead.”
There was silence.
“Oh!” De Vincenzi finally said. “So, how did he die?”
“I don’t know. There’s no sign of any wounds, at least obvious ones. He may have been poisoned. We need the autopsy. When they identify the poison, if it was poison, they’ll also be able to determine the time of death with greater precision.” He rummaged in his pockets and drew out a pair of woollen gloves. He slid them on, pulled up the collar of his overcoat and put on his hat. “I’ve done my duty… that is, I’ve done what I can. Now, call the medical officer. Goodnight.”
He left quickly, walking between Sani and Cruni, who stood perfectly still, not even offering to open the glass door for him. He practically ran out, and disappeared immediately into the fog in the streets.
“Come on,” said De Vincenzi as he started for the stairs.
“I got here half an hour ago, not even that,” said Bianchi. “I had the doctor called and I put everyone I found in the hotel into that room. The doors are being guarded, including the one at the back. I haven’t questioned anyone. Two officers are posted on the first-floor corridor to guard the doors to the rooms. There’s reason to believe they’re empty, because I think all the guests are in there—” and he pointed again to the glass wall of the dining room “—though I can’t be sure. There’s one more officer upstairs, right up at the top. So it’s not true that the doctor was alone with the corpse.”
De Vincenzi listened. “Good. You couldn’t have done any more, of course. If you want to go, I won’t keep you. I’ll need you tomorrow, though. Maybe you’ll be able to tell me something about—all these people. Something that will help me.”
“Uh—” A thought made Bianchi jump. “But didn’t you ask me just yesterday for a list of all the guests at the Three Roses?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you do that? What a strange coincidence.”
“It wasn’t a coincidence. I’ll tell you why, but not now. It’s too soon and… too late. Sani, come with me. Cruni, you stay on guard here. No one must leave, and if someone comes in, keep them here.”
Bianchi turned up his coat collar just as the doctor had, thrust his hands in his pockets and left by the door Cruni was holding open for him, waving him off. De Vincenzi climbed the first flight of stairs with Sani following behind him. He went through the small door and then headed up the steep attic stairway. A dusty lamp on every landing gave out a reddish light, only deepening the shadows in the corners and on each flight of stairs. They counted three landings with whitewashed walls, and no doors on any of them, but a window on every landing. De Vincenzi tried looking through the windows. He saw nothing but fog.
They came to the final landing. Right away they saw the black corpse hanging from one of the ceiling beams. A shadow appeared at the door to the left.
“How long have you been here?”
“An eternity, Inspector,” said the officer. He wasn’t joking. Small and slight as he was, his whole body was shaking, and one could see that it took all his effort to silence the chattering of his teeth.
“Where were you hiding?”
“In there…” and he indicated the corridor, which made a sharp turn. He’d clearly tried to keep out of sight of the hanged man.
De Vincenzi went down the corridor and noticed that the first door was closed, as well as the one at the other end.
“Are these guest rooms?”
“I believe so.”
“Did you look to see if they were empty?”
He pushed open the door to the first one: darkness. He went in and lit a match in order to find the light switch, which was next to the bed. The room was empty, but De Vincenzi stood still, staring at the bed. Incredible. Oh! Who was actually living in the room? Sitting on the bed in a gauzy pink dress, her shoulders against the pillow and her pudgy little legs weirdly twisted at the knees was a flaxen-haired doll, her arms reaching out for a hug, her eyes glassy and bright and her chubby cheeks vividly spotted with red. A porcelain doll.
“I don’t know, sir.”
Sani came in, pushing the officer aside. He jumped when he saw the doll.
“A woman must live here.”
De Vincenzi looked around and pointed to the dresser. On the shelf, perfectly aligned on top of a towel, were a shaving brush, a safety razor, half a dozen blades and a tub of shaving cream. Neither of them said a thing. De Vincenzi looked at the doll again. Sani started to walk around the room. A suitcase was lying open on a small table and he read out the name printed on the card inside the leather tag hanging from the handle: Vilfredo Engel. The room at the other end of the corridor was similarly empty; the two inspectors looked at the prints by Vernet.
They found themselves before the hanged man once more. It was awful. That he’d been hanged after his death seemed clear even to someone who knew nothing about medicine: someone had put a rope around his neck without bothering to make a noose. It was his chin that kept him hanging up there. De Vincenzi noted that care had been taken to wind the rope around his ears so that he wouldn’t fall out, and the ends of the rope were knotted to an iron rod that stretched from one of the walls on the landing to the other, a hand’s breadth from the ceiling. The work could easily have been carried out by a single person, someone who wasn’t even that strong. First they’d have knotted the rope, letting it dangle, and then they’d have lifted up the corpse so they could put the head through that wide, makeshift noose. The feet were more than a metre from the floor. So they would have had to climb onto a chair or some such—if not actually a ladder—in order to lift him up.
De Vincenzi looked around. Nothing. He opened the two doors on the right, Mario’s room and the two maids’ room: empty. In that one, two beds, and in the first room, only one. A few chairs, of course. They could have used any one of those and replaced it later.
They had to take the dead man down now.
“He couldn’t have been much more than twenty,” Sani murmured.
“Go downstairs and wait for me there,” De Vincenzi said to the officer. He turned to Sani. “You go down too, and phone for the emergency medical service to send a doctor and a nurse.”
“You’re staying up here alone?”
“Send Cruni up here.”
Sani practically ran. Halfway down the stairs one could hear him lose his footing and slide down five or six steps.
De Vincenzi slowly turned to look at the hanged man’s face. How did he find the strength? He was calm now. The dead man was young, with a fine and delicate profile, a sweet, childish aspect. His open lips showed pure white teeth; he seemed to be smiling.
Why had he been hung up by that rope? Certainly not to make anyone believe he’d hanged himself. Not a soul in the world would have been taken in by it, even for an instant. Or maybe an instant, but only coming upstairs that evening in the dim light and being faced with the corpse. Anyone with a weak heart would have received a dangerous shock. Was that the killer’s intention? To use the dead man to kill someone else? But how had they managed to get the body all the way up there? And where had it come from? Meanwhile, everyone was downstairs. Actually everyone? The four rooms were empty. Surely the frightening spectacle of that body was meant for someone living here in these rooms. But for whom? If one excluded the maids and Mario, there were only two guests left. He heard Cruni’s quick, heavy step.
“Oh! Help me get him onto the bed. I’m in here.”
The two of them took down the corpse. The empty noose was left dangling from the iron bar.