A Mystery in Ten Parts. The performance staged under the direction of M. Henri Bencolin, prefect of police of Paris.
The Cast of Characters:
M. HENRI BENCOLIN.
M. ALEXANDRE LAURENT, scholar, former husband of—
LOUISE DE SALIGNY, the wife of—
RAOUL, fourth Duc de Saligny, eminent sportsman.
M. EDOUARD VAUTRELLE.
SIGNOR LUIGI FENELLI, maestro of several enterprises.
JACQUES GIRARD, jockey.
MR SID GOLTON, late of Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.
FRANÇOIS DILLSART, operative of the prefecture.
M. LE COMTE DE VILLON, juge d’instruction,
and others.
The Place: Paris.
The Time: 1927.
The action covers a period of twenty-four hours.
‘Le jeu est fait, ’sieurs et dames; rien ne va plus.’
The voices stopped. It was so quiet that from anywhere in the room you could hear the ball ticking about in the wheel. Then the shrill, bored voice chanted:
‘Vingt-deux noir, ’sieurs et dames …’
One man got up from the table stiffly, with an impassive face. He made a defiant gesture at lighting a cigarette, but the flame of the briquet wobbled in his hand; he smiled in a sickly way, and his face glistened when he looked from side to side. A woman laughed. There was the booming of an English voice, swearing triumphantly.
Paris has many such miniature casinos, which attract the most mixed throng of any places in that mixed city. This was a long red room, in a walled house of a discreet neighborhood at Passy. A harsh colour scheme of red and crystal; a harsh sound of voices, and bad ventilation; a harsh jazz orchestra downstairs mangling tunes already execrable; poor cocktails supplied by the house, and a clientèle at once fashionable and dowdy—above everything, a gloomy tensity of thousands being played across the table. The hard light showed worn places on faces and furniture. The women used too much perfume; men took an enormous delight in shaking out two-thousand-franc notes like tablecloths.
At a lounge near one of the windows, from which you could see the Citroën advertisement spraying coloured lights up the side of the Eiffel Tower, I sat with my friend Bencolin. He idly twirled the stem of a cocktail glass; with the points of his hair whisked up, and his black beard clipped to a sharp point, he looked even more Mephistophelian than usual. The wrinkles round his eyelids contracted in amusement, and he smiled sideways when he pointed out each newcomer round the clicking wheel.
They were interesting. There was Madame That and the Marquise This, octogenarian crones whose faces were masks of enamel and rouge, dyed hair piled like a scaffolding; they smirked and ogled at their gigolos, smooth-haired pomandered young men whose gestures were like a woman’s, but with manners and evening dress flawless. A crone’s hand would shoot out like a claw after a new pile of banknotes; then the gigolo applauded politely, and smiled in a glittering way at the leering woman. There was a Russian lady with a Japanese face and a pearl collar—not beautiful, flourishing skinny arms like wings—but several men were eager to back all her bets. There were loud Argentines, the deepest plungers, and an American too drunk to follow the play, but falling over everybody’s chair and demanding to know who wanted to start a poker game. An attendant led him suavely away to the bar … Gestures were shriller, bolder; the hard light drew lines and wrinkles, and showed up splotches of powder on bare backs; no fog of smoke could eliminate the wet odour of the bar, or any amount of music blat down that insistent song of the wheel.
‘They are fools,’ said Bencolin idly, ‘to play against a double zero.’ He glanced over as another burst of laughter came from the tables. ‘And the foreigners will play nothing else. Baccarat, chemin-de-fer—never. It must be quick, like a drink of whisky, voilà!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Their only system is the martingale, doubles or quits, and they do not last long.’
‘Is the game straight?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes. Cheating is quite unnecessary, and too dangerous … Well,’ he added, smiling, ‘am I not showing you Paris, my friend Jack?’
‘And much obliged. Except that I had hoped to go slumming. This is as dull and decorous as the Latin Quarter.’
‘Yes, but wait,’ Bencolin remarked softly. ‘I seldom go anywhere for pleasure. I think you will find that this is no exception.’
‘A case?’
He shrugged his shoulders. For a time he sat staring with blank eyes at the crowd; then he took out a black cigar, and rolled it about in his fingers. Absently he continued:
‘It has been in the past my good or bad fortune to be concerned only in cases of an outlandish nature; cases whose very impossible character admitted of just one solution. Cast your mind back. There was one way, and only one, in which the smuggler Mercier could have been strangled[1]; there was one way for La Garde to have been shot[2], and one way for Cyril Merton to have accomplished his “disappearance”[3]. Is a person, then, to evolve a philosophy that there is but one way for any crime to be committed? Hardly; and yet—’ He scowled across the room.
‘The Duc de Saligny,’ he went on abruptly, ‘is good-looking, wealthy, and still young. He was married at noon today to a charming young woman. There, you will say, is a perfect cinema romance. The bride and groom are both here tonight.’
‘Indeed? Aren’t they going on a wedding-trip?’
‘To the modern marriage,’ mused Bencolin, ‘there seems to be something slightly indecent about privacy. You must act in public as though you had been married twenty years, and in private as though you had not been married at all. That, however, is not my affair. There is a deeper reason for it.’
‘They don’t love each other, then?’
‘On the contrary, they seem to be violently in love … Have you ever heard of the bride?’
I shook my head.
‘She was Madame Louise Laurent. Three years ago she was married to a certain man named Alexandre Laurent. Shortly afterwards, her husband was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.’ He was silent a moment, thoughtfully blowing smoke at the ceiling.
‘Laurent was examined in a psychopathic ward. I was present at the time, and I give you my word that Cesare Lombroso would have been delighted with the case. He was a mild-appearing young man, soft-spoken and pleasant. The black spot on his brain was sadism. Usually lucid, he would have intervals in which the temptation to kill and mutilate became overpowering; and none of his crimes ever became known until after his marriage. Of course, such a neurosis could have no normal marriage, and culminated in what is known as “lust-murder”. He attacked his wife, with a razor. She contrived to lock him in his room, for she is strong, and summoned help. By that time the frenzy had spent itself, but his secret was out.’
Bencolin spread out his hands.
‘A genius, Laurent, a scholar, a prodigy in the languages. He spent his days in the asylum very quietly, at study. The marriage, naturally, was annulled.’ Bencolin paused, and then said slowly, ‘Six months ago, he escaped from the asylum. He is at large today, and the confinement seems only to have unbalanced him more completely.
‘What did he do? He set out to find a perfect disguise. In these days, my friend, they are childish who seek to disguise themselves with any stage-trappings: paint, or false hair, or anything of the kind. Even an unpractised eye, such as your own, could penetrate such subterfuges without difficulty … No, Laurent did the only perfect thing. He put himself under the care of Dr Grafenstein, of Vienna, the greatest master of plastic surgery. He had himself remade entirely, even to his fingerprints. When this had been done, he quite coolly killed Dr Grafenstein—the only person who had ever seen his new face. Even the nurse had never laid eyes on the patient: in the first stages, he was swathed in bandages; when he began to heal, he concealed himself in his own room. Yes, he killed Grafenstein. He is now in Paris. Two days ago, he wrote a letter to the young Duc de Saligny. It said simply, “If you marry her, I will kill you.” And I very much fear, my friend, that he will.’
I do not believe that I was ever in my life struck with so much horror as at this unemotional recital. Bencolin had never raised his voice. He smoked meditatively, watching the crowd; out of his words there grew in my mind a distorted picture of a lunatic, a Grand Guignol madman stepping through green dusk. Bencolin turned his sardonic face, shook his head, and remarked as though in response:
‘No, we are not dealing with the conventional killer or the blood-curdler, who betrays himself in public. Have I not said that Laurent is mild-mannered and pleasant?—only with that clot on his brain. And what does he look like? The good God knows. He may be that fat banker over at the roulette table; he may be the young American, or the croupier, or any of them, or he may not be (and probably is not) here at all. But I shall not forget the Duc de Saligny’s face when he brought that letter to me. A tall swaggerer with bloodshot eyes and an excitable manner: he kept biting his lips, and looking round until you could see the whites of his eyes. He was frightened, but he refused to admit it. Yes, he would go through with the wedding, and so would Louise. But you will see that he longs for public places now, until my men can step out and lay their hands on Laurent.’
That was the beginning of the nightmare drama. It seemed to me that the voices had grown more shrill, the gestures more elaborate; and that some force of Bencolin’s words had penetrated to everybody in the room. It was not possible for them to have heard him, and yet you would have said that everyone was conscious of it, and was looking over towards us, furtively.
‘Is he always dangerous?’ I asked.
‘Any man who has committed one murder is always dangerous. And Laurent especially, for our pathological case has discovered how pleasant it can be.’
‘How does madame—madame la duchesse take all this?’
Bencolin was regarding a very oily and effusive gambler, who proclaimed his losses at the top of his voice; then the detective laid his hand on my arm.
‘You will see for yourself. Here she comes now … You notice? No emotion or agitation; she looks as though she were in a drug-fog.’
A woman was crossing the room towards us; she moved in a rather vague way, with expressionless eyes and a slight smile. She was beautiful, but she was more than this. Even her hair had a cloudy look. The eyes were heavy-lidded and black, with not too much mascara, the lips of a sensual fullness which just escaped being coarse. In dress she was perfect, the black gown accentuating the invitation of shoulder and breast. She twisted her pearls vaguely. There was a little silver anklet under the grey stocking … She came straight up to Bencolin. When he bent over her hand she was negligent, but, closer, you could see a vein pulsing in her throat.
Bencolin introduced me, and added, ‘A friend of mine. You may speak freely.’ She looked towards me, and I had a sense of veils being drawn away. It was a look of scrutiny, not unmixed with suspicion.
‘You are affiliated with the police, monsieur?’ she asked me.
‘Yes,’ said Bencolin unexpectedly.
She sat down, refused one of my cigarettes, and took her own from a little wrist-bag. Leaning back, she inhaled deeply; her hand trembled, and her lips stained the tip of the cigarette as though with blood. She wore some kind of exquisite perfume; one was conscious of her nearness.
‘Monsieur le Duc is here?’ asked Bencolin.
‘Raoul? Yes. Raoul is getting nervous,’ she answered, and laughed shrilly. ‘I don’t blame him, though. It is not a pleasant thing to think about. If you had ever seen Laurent’s eyes—’
Bencolin raised his hand gently. She shivered a little, looked slowly over at me, and then said. ‘There goes Raoul now, into the card-room.’ She nodded towards a broad back disappearing through a door at the far end of the room. I saw no more than that, for I happened to be looking at my wristwatch. I looked at it twice, absently, before I noticed that the hour was eleven-thirty.
‘Orange blossoms!’ she said, and laughed again. ‘Orange blossoms, lace veils. A lovely wedding, lovely bride, with even the clergyman staring at us and wondering if there were a madman in the church. Orange blossoms, “till death do you part”—death! Very possibly!’
This was sheer hysteria. The sights and sounds of the casino blended in with it; the banging of the jazz band became nearly unbearable. That voice of the croupier rose singing over it, like the bawling of the man who announces trains. Louise, Duchesse de Saligny, said abruptly,
‘I want a cocktail. Don’t mind me if I seem upset. I keep thinking of Laurent crawling about … M. Bencolin, you’re here to see that no harm comes to Raoul, do you hear? “Till death do you part”—’ She shivered again.
There was silence while Bencolin looked round for the boy with the cocktail tray, a silence, and none of us intruded on each other’s thoughts. A man and woman walked past us, almost stumbling over madame’s feet; and I recall that the man was saying heatedly in English, ‘Five hundred francs is entirely too damn much!—’ The voices trailed away.
Somebody had come up in front of us, and coughed discreetly. It was a tall man; dapper, blond, with an eyeglass and an almost imperceptible moustache.
‘Your pardon if I’m intruding,’ he remarked. ‘Louise, I don’t believe I know—’ He took out his handkerchief unnecessarily, wiped his lips, and stood fidgeting.
‘Oh … yes,’ she murmured; ‘these are gentlemen from the police, Edouard. Allow me to present M. Edouard Vautrelle.’
Vautrelle bowed. ‘Very happy … Raoul’s gone to the card-room, Louise; he’s been drinking too much. Won’t you play?’
‘That music—’ she suddenly snapped; ‘damn that music. I can’t stand it! I won’t stand it. Tell them to stop!’
‘Doucement, doucement!’ Vautrelle urged, looking round in a nervous way. With an apologetic nod at us he took her arm and led her towards the table; she seemed to have forgotten our existence.
Bencolin picked up the cigarette-stub she had left in the ashtray. He was juggling it in his palm, when suddenly he looked up. Madame and Vautrelle were in the centre of the room directly under one of the large chandeliers; they stopped. We all heard the crash of breaking glass, and saw the white-coated servant leaning against the door of the cardroom. He had let fall the tray of cocktails, and was staring stupidly at the wreckage.
Everyone turned to look. With the cessation of voices, the jazz band had stopped too. The manager, his fat stomach wobbling, was hurrying across the room. But most distinctly emerged the drawn, shiny face of the servant—who had seen something, and was desperately afraid.
Bencolin did not seem to hurry, but he was across the room immediately. I was directly behind him; he extended in his palm, for the manager’s gaze, the little card with the circle, the eagle, and the three words, ‘prefecture of police’. Together we went through the door of the cardroom.
My sensations were the same as those I had experienced once at a sideshow when I had seen some mountebank swallow a snake. The room was not well lit; its leprous red walls were hung with weapons, and a red-shaded lamp burned beside a divan at the far end. A man had fallen forward before the divan, as though in the act of kneeling—but the man had no head. Instead there was a bloody stump propped on the floor. The head itself stood in the centre of the room, upright on its neck; it showed white eyeballs, and grinned at us in the low red light. A breeze through an open window blew at us a heavy, sweet smell.
With the utmost coolness, Bencolin turned to the manager.
‘Two of my men,’ he said, ‘are on guard at your door. Summon them; all the doors are to be locked, and nobody must leave. Keep them playing, if it is possible. In the meantime, come in yourself and lock this door.’
The manager stammered something to an attendant, and added, ‘Nobody is to know about this, understand?’ He was a fat man, who looked as though he were melting; a monstrous moustache curled up to his eyes, which bulged like a frog’s. Tumbling against the door, he stood and pulled idiotically at his moustache. Bencolin, twisting a handkerchief over his fingers, turned the key in the lock.
There was another door in the wall to our right, at the left side of the dead man as he lay before the divan. Bencolin went over to it; it was ajar, and he peered outside.
‘This is the main hall, monsieur?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said the manager. ‘It—it—’
‘Here is one of my men.’ Bencolin beckoned from the door, and held a short consultation with the man outside. ‘Nobody has come out there,’ he observed, closing the door. ‘François was watching. Now!’
All of us were looking about the room. I tried to keep my eyes off the head, which appeared to be gazing at me sideways; the wind blew on my face, and it felt very cold. Bencolin walked over to the body, where he stood and peered down, smoothing his moustache. Beside the neck-stump I could see projecting from the shadow a part of a heavy sword—it had come, apparently, from a group on the wall, and though the edge was mostly dulled with blood, a part near the handle emerged in a sharp, glittering line.
‘Butchers’ work,’ said Bencolin, twitching his shoulders. ‘See, it has been recently sharpened.’ He stepped daintily over the red soaking against the lighter red of the carpet, and went to the window at our left. ‘Forty feet from the street … inaccessible.’
He turned, and stood against the blowing curtains. The black eyes were bright and sunken; in them you could see rage at himself, nervousness, indecision. He beat his hands softly together, made a gesture, and returned to the body, where he avoided the blood by kneeling over the divan.
‘Jack,’ he said suddenly, looking up, ‘pick up the head and bring it over here.’
No doubt about it, I was growing ill.
‘Pick up—the head, did you say?’
‘Certainly; bring it here. Watch out, now; don’t get the blood on your trousers …’
In a daze, I approached the thing, shut my eyes, and picked it up by the hair. The hair felt cold and greasy, the head much heavier than I had thought. While I was going towards Bencolin, I recall that the jazz band started playing again downstairs, dinning over and over, ‘Whe-en ca-res pur-suoo-yah, sing hal-le-looo-jah—’
‘I shouldn’t tamper with this,’ Bencolin observed, ‘but nobody can give me orders; and I don’t think we need a coroner’s report about the manner of his death.’ He fitted the head against the trunk and stood back, frowning. I sat down heavily on the divan.
‘Come here, monsieur,’ said Bencolin to the proprietor. ‘This sword: it comes from the room here?’
The manager began talking excitedly. His syllables exploded like a string of little firecrackers popping over the room; the almost unintelligible clipped speech of the Midi. Yes, the sword belonged here. It had hung with another, like itself, crossed over a Frankish shield on the wall near the divan. It was an imitation antique. Oh, yes, it was razor-sharp; this lent such a semblance of reality, and the patrons like reality.
‘The handle,’ remarked the detective, ‘is studded with round brass nail-heads; we shall get no clear fingerprints from it, I fear … Do you ever use this room, monsieur?’
‘Oh, yes; frequently. But we haven’t used it tonight. See, the card tables are folded against the wall. Nobody wanted to play. It was all that roulette.’ Volubly eager, the manager waggled his fat hands. ‘Do you think it can be hushed up, monsieur? My trade—’
‘Do you know this dead man?’
‘Yes, monsieur; it is M. le Duc de Saligny. He often comes here.’
‘Did you see him go in here tonight?’
‘No, monsieur. The last I saw him was early in the evening.’
‘Was he with anybody then?’
‘With M. Edouard Vautrelle. The two were great friends—’
‘Very good, then. You may go out now and inform madame la duchesse; be as quiet about it as possible—better take her out in the hall, in case she makes a scene. Tell M. Vautrelle to step in here.’
He went out by the hall door, leering over his shoulder with tiny wrinkled eyes. Bencolin turned to me.
‘Well, what do you make of it?’
I could not collect my thoughts, and blurted dully, ‘They were fortunate to keep it from the crowd out there—’
‘No, no: the murder?’
‘It was a terrific blow. It must have taken a madman’s strength.’
‘I wonder!’ said Bencolin, beginning to pace up and down. ‘Not necessarily, my friend. It was a two-handed blow, but, as our manager says, that sword is razor-sharp. I do not think that such gigantic strength was essential. You could have done it yourself. Look at the position of the body; does it convey nothing to you?’
‘Only that there seems to have been no struggle.’
‘Obviously not. He was struck from behind. We may assume that he was sitting on the divan before he was struck; but he got to his feet. Mark that: he got to his feet also before he was killed—you note that he is some distance out from the divan …’
‘Well?’
‘Yes, there are a number of pillows on the divan.’
‘Pillows?’
‘Certainly. Great God! Where are your wits? Don’t you understand?’
‘It suggests nothing except—except an amorous implication.’
‘Amorous the devil!’ snapped Bencolin. ‘There was nothing amorous about the situation here.’ He laughed wryly, and added, ‘Our madman is now in these gaming-rooms. Nobody has left, unless my agents were asleep.’
‘By the hall door?—’
‘François has been there since eleven-thirty. Do you know what time Saligny came in here?’
‘I recall exactly, because when madame pointed him out I was looking at my watch. It was eleven-thirty.’
Bencolin looked at his own watch. ‘Just twelve; it should be easy to check alibis … How do you account for the fact that the head lies at some distance from the body, standing up?’
‘It certainly couldn’t have rolled to that position.’
‘Well, stranger things have happened, but it didn’t—you can see that there is no blood trail between the head and the body. No, the murderer put it there.’
‘Why?’
‘You forget that this is no sane mind. Can’t you imagine it? The murderer triumphantly holding up the head of his victim; mocking it, addressing words to it while he walked round shaking it by the hair—’
‘What a cheerful imagination you have!’
‘But it is necessary,’ he murmured, shrugging. Then he bent down gingerly and started to go through Saligny’s pockets. Presently he straightened up and indicated a pile of articles on the divan. There was a queer smile on his face.
‘The crowning touch … his pockets are filled with pictures of himself. Yes. See?’ He ran his hands through clippings and pasteboards. ‘Newspaper pictures, and a few cabinet photographs. Photographs of himself, every conceivable sort; pictures where he looks handsome, pictures where he looks ghastly … here is one on horseback; another at the golf links … Hm. Nothing else except some banknotes, a watch, and a lighter. Why these photographs at all? And especially why are they carried in evening clothes?’
‘Conceited ass!’
Bencolin shook his head. He was squatting by the divan, idly turning over the clippings. ‘No, my friend, there may be another reason—which is the peak of all this odd business. Cabinet photographs. Diable!’
We were suddenly startled by a tearing, rattling sound. The door to the hall was pushed open despite a protesting officer in plain clothes; there lurched into the room a short, pudgy, wild-eyed young man with a paper hat stuck on the back of his head. He grinned foolishly, his clothes were awry, and the noise was being made by one of those wooden twirlers they give as favours at night-clubs. He gave that sort of drunken leer very popular at weddings, shook the rattler at us, and smirked at the silly sounds it emitted.
‘Party here,’ he said in English, ‘’scort couple home. Always do’t ’scort to the home to, as it were. Let’s have a drink. Got any liquor?’ he demanded interestedly of the plain-clothes man.
‘Mais, monsieur, c’est défendu d’entrer—’
‘Cutta frog talk. No comprey. Got any liquor? Hey?’
‘Monsieur, je vous ai dit!—’
‘N’lissen! Gotta see m’friend Raool. He’s married; hellva thingta do!—’
The young man was pleading and persistent. I went over hurriedly and spoke in English:
‘Better go out, old top. You’ll get to see him—’
‘By God, you’re m’friend!’ crowed the young man, opening his eyes wide and thrusting out his hand. ‘Got any liquor? I’ve been drinkin’,’ he confided in a low tone, ‘but gotta see Raool. He’s married. Let’s have a drink.’ Suddenly he sat down in a chair near the door and fell into a half-stupor, still twirling the rattle.
‘Monsieur!’—cried the policeman.
‘I’m gonna pop you,’ said the newcomer, opening his eyes again and pointing his finger at the policeman with a curiously intense look, ‘sure’z hell I’m gonna pop you ’fyou don’t getaway! C’mon, get back, ’m gonna pop ’im!’ He relapsed again.
‘Who is this?’ I asked Bencolin.
‘I have seen him before, with Saligny,’ the detective replied. ‘His name is Golton, or something of the sort: an American, naturally.’
‘We had better put him—’
Again there was an interruption. We heard a woman moaning, ‘I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!’ and other feminine tones urging her to be quiet. It was Madame Louise’s voice. The door to the hall opened, and Edouard Vautrelle entered. He was very pale, but supercilious; he polished the eyeglass on his handkerchief, and looked round coldly.
‘Was this necessary?’ he said.
Supported by a little wizened woman attendant, Madame Louise came after him. She glanced at the thing on the floor; then she stood stoically, upright and motionless, with the rouge glaring out on her cheeks. Her eyes were dry and hot.
There was a space of silence, so that we could hear the curtains rustling at the window. Suddenly Golton, the American, looked up from a glassy contemplation of the floor, and saw her. He emitted a crow of delight. Never noticing the body, he rose unsteadily, made a flamboyant bow, and seized madame’s hand.
‘My heartiest congratulations,’ he said, ‘on this, the happiest day of your whole life!—’
It was a ghastly moment. We all stood there frozen, except Golton, who was wabbling with hand extended in his bow. Golton’s eyes travelled up to Vautrelle, and he added waggishly:
‘Sorry you got the gate, Eddie; Raool’s got more money’n you, anyhow …’
Vautrelle snarled, ‘Get that drunken dog out of here!’ and made a movement that was restrained by Bencolin.
‘Take him out,’ the detective whispered to me, and added under his breath: ‘Learn what you can.’
Golton was more easily led away by one of his nationality; besides, at that moment he gave signs of becoming unwell. The policeman passed us out into the hall, and I supported him down its length to the men’s lounging room, which was equipped with deep chairs and many ashtrays. Stoutly denying the need of assistance, he disappeared for a time and presently emerged looking pale but considerably more sober.
‘Sorry to be such an inconvenience,’ he said, sinking into a chair. ‘Can’t hold it. All right now.’ After a time of staring at the floor he said irritably: ‘What’s alla fuss about?’
‘Your friend, Raoul.’
‘Yeah; he’s been married.’
I adopted the easy camaraderie of Americans in a strange country. ‘Known him long?’
‘Two’r three months. Met him when I was on a trip to Austria.’
‘He and his wife have been engaged a long time, haven’t they?’
‘I’ll say! Must be two years. I don’t know what’s been delaying ’em. Ever since I’ve been in France, I guess … Say, lemme introduce myself. Sid Golton’s the name, from Nebraska. I think I could stand a drink.’
‘You were an intimate of his, then?’
‘Not exactly, but I knew him pretty well. Way I met him, I saw his picture in the papers—great horseman; so’m I. Walked up on the train and says, “I’m Sid Golton. I wanta shake your hand”.’
‘That was very tactful.’
‘Sure. Well, he spoke English all right. But I never got a chance to go riding with him. Useta drop round to his house. It was a swell wedding they had …’ It suddenly penetrated Golton’s mind that something was wrong. His face was assuming normal lines after a squashed-clay appearance, and resolved into pudgy, reddish features under thinning hair. He demanded: ‘What’s all this about, anyhow?’
‘Mr Golton, I am sorry to say that the Duc de Saligny has been murdered—’
Golton’s eyes turned as glassy as marbles. He was halfway out of his chair when the door to the hall opened, and Bencolin entered with Edouard Vautrelle. The ensuing few minutes showed Golton, maudlin and fearful, grotesque with his scared features under the paper cap, insisting that he ‘didn’t know a damn thing about it, and if he wasn’t let out of there right away there’d be trouble, because he was a sick man’.
‘You are at liberty to go, of course,’ Bencolin said. ‘But please leave your address.’
Golton blundered out the door, loudly declaring that he was headed for Harry’s New York bar. His address he gave as 324 Avenue Henri Martin.
‘Sit down, please, M. Vautrelle,’ Bencolin requested.
Vautrelle was the essence of coolness. His shirt-front did not bulge when he sat down, the wings of his white tie were exactly in line; even the colourless face had no wrinkles, but the movements of his eyes jarred it in quick darts. He crossed one leg over the other in a bored way
‘A few questions, please, monsieur. You understand that this is necessary …’ (Vautrelle inclined his head) … ‘May I ask the last time you saw M. de Saligny alive?’
‘I can’t recall the exact hour. It may have been ten o’clock.’
‘Where was he then?’
‘He had just left Louise with some of her feminine friends. He was going towards the tables. He seemed in high spirits. “I’m going to play the red, Edouard,” he cried; “red is my lucky colour tonight …”’
I could have sworn that there was a faint smile on Vautrelle’s face.
‘Then,’ Vautrelle continued, ‘he turned to me as though with an afterthought. “By the way,” he said, “what was that cocktail you were describing to me: the one the man makes in the American Bar at the Ambassador?” I told him. “Well, then, do me a favour, will you?” he said. “Get hold of the bar steward here and tell him to mix me a shaker of them, will you? I’m expecting a man on something very important tonight. And, oh, yes! While you’re there, you might tell him to bring it to the card-room when I ring. I expect the man about eleven-thirty o’clock. Thanks.” I rejoined some friends—’
‘One moment, please,’ interposed Bencolin. He pulled the bell-cord at his elbow. Presently there entered the white-coated servant who had dropped the tray on entering the room of the murder. He was freckled and ill at ease and his huge hands tugged at the bottom of his jacket.
Bencolin, standing with one elbow on the mantelpiece, extended his hand.
‘Steward, you were the person who discovered the dead man?’ he asked
‘Yes, monsieur. Monsieur there,’ he nodded towards Vautrelle, ‘had told me to expect a ring around eleven-thirty from the card-room and I took in the cocktails monsieur had ordered. I saw …’ His eyes wrinkled up, and he protested: ‘I could not help breaking those glasses, monsieur! Really, I could not! If you will speak on my behalf to—’
‘Never mind the glasses. You heard the bell ring, then? At what time was this?’
‘At about half-past eleven; I know, because I was watching the clock for it. M. de Saligny always tips—tipped—well.’
‘Where were you at the time?’
‘In the bar, monsieur.’
‘Where is the bell-cord in the card-room?’
‘By the door into the main hallway, monsieur. You may see for yourself.’
‘You came immediately?’
‘Not immediately. The bar-steward took his time about mixing the cocktails, and insisted that I wash some sherbet-glasses. It must have been ten minutes before I answered the ring.’
‘By which door did you enter?’
‘By the door into the hallway; it is closer to the smoking room on which the bar gives. The light in the card-room was bad, and when I entered (I got no reply to my knock)—’ He began to speak very fast, and shift his glance from side to side, ‘I did not at first perceive the—that anything was wrong. I … mère de Dieu! I walked across, and almost stumbled over the head. I cried out; I reached the door of the main salon, and I could hold my tray no longer. That is all, monsieur! I swear to you before all—’
He fidgeted, and backed towards the door. Abruptly, not at all muffled by the closed door, the orchestra downstairs commenced again on another ancient tune which had just come to Paris; a throaty voice warbled in English:
‘Pack up all my care and woe
Here I go, singing low—’
Bencolin turned his back and stood for a time looking out of the window. Then he motioned the steward to go. He returned to the table beside which Vautrelle sat bolt upright with an amused smile.
‘Here,’ he said, sketching rapidly and tearing out a leaf of his notebook, ‘is a rough plan of the floor. I have consulted the clocks in the smoking room and on the staircase. They agree with my watch that it is now … What hour have you, M. Vautrelle?’
Vautrelle turned over a thin silver watch in his palm. He consulted it with great deliberation, and announced: ‘Exactly twenty-five minutes past twelve.’
‘To the second,’ agreed Bencolin. He turned to me. ‘You have—?’
‘Twenty-four and a half minutes, to the second.’
Bencolin scowled at the plan.
‘Very well. To proceed, M. Vautrelle, can you tell me your whereabouts at half-past eleven, when M. de Saligny entered the card-room?’
‘Within a few seconds, monsieur, I can.’ Vautrelle hesitated; then, startlingly, he burst into a roar of laughter. ‘I was speaking to your detective on guard at the end of the hall, and I stayed with him for over five minutes, when I walked into the main salon under his observation and was introduced to you.’
Bencolin nearly lost his temper. After an interval of silence, during which he stared at Vautrelle, he yanked the bell-cord. François, the plain clothes detective, came in with an air of importance, rubbing his large nose.
‘Why, yes, monsieur, the gentleman there was with me,’ he replied. ‘I was sitting in a chair reading La Sourire, when he came up to me, and offered me a cigarette, and said, “Can you by any chance tell me the right time? My watch seems to be slow.” “I am positive,” said I, “that my watch is right—eleven-thirty—However, we can consult the clock on the staircase.”’
François refreshed himself with a glance at all of us. He resumed:
‘We walked to the head of the stairs, and, as I knew, the clock confirmed my watch. He set his own, and we stood there talking—’
‘So,’ interrupted Bencolin, ‘that you were directly before the hall door into the card-room within a minute after M. de Saligny entered the room from the gaming-salon?’
‘Yes. We stayed there over five minutes, and then monsieur there walked down the hall and entered the main salon. I remained at the head of the stairs … Incidentally, I saw the boy go in with the tray.’
‘You are positive, then, that nobody left by the hall door.’
‘Positive, monsieur.’
‘That is all.’
Bencolin sat at the table with his chin in his hands. After a time Vautrelle remarked: ‘Of course, you are at liberty to imagine that there has been tampering with clocks.’
‘There has been no tampering with the clocks, nor with my friend’s watch, nor with mine. I have made certain of that.’
‘Then I suppose that I am at liberty to go? I dare say madame needs attention, and I shall be glad to take her home—’
‘Where is madame now?’
‘In the ladies’ room, I believe, with an attendant.’
‘I presume,’ observed Bencolin, with a crooked smile, ‘that you will not take her to the home of M. de Saligny?’
Vautrelle appeared to take the question seriously. He put the glass in his eye and answered: ‘No, of course not; I shall take her to the apartments she occupied previously in the Avenue du Bois. In case you want my own address,’ he extracted a card case, ‘here is my card. I shall be pleased to present you with a duplicate at any time in the future you feel called on to be as insulting as you have tonight.’
He preened himself as he rose, and his manner said, There’s no reply to that! Standing in the doorway, he called for his wraps. Bencolin, thoughtfully turning the card over in his fingers, looked up with wrinkled forehead.
‘Saligny was a great swordsman, too, I take it,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me, M. Vautrelle: did he speak English?’
‘Raoul? That is the most amusing question yet. Raoul was essentially a sportsman, and nothing else. Yes, he was a swordsman, and a spectacular tennis-player—he had a serve that nearly stopped Lacoste—and the best of steeplechase riders. Of course,’ Vautrelle added smugly, ‘he did sustain a fall that nearly paralysed his wrist and spine, and had to see a foreign specialist about it; but yes, he was a fine athlete. Books he never opened. Tiens, Raoul speaking English! The only words he knew were “five o’clock tea”.’
A servant had brought in Vautrelle’s coat—long and dark, with a great sable collar, and hooked with a silver chain, it was like a piece of stage-property. He pulled down on his head a soft black hat, and the monocle gleamed from its shadow. Then he produced a long ivory holder, into which he fitted a cigarette. Standing in the doorway, tall, theatrical, with the holder stuck at an angle in his mouth, he smiled.
‘You will not forget my card, M. Bencolin?’
‘Since you force me to it,’ said Bencolin, shrugging, ‘I must say that I would much prefer to see your identity card, monsieur.’
Vautrelle took the holder out of his mouth.
‘Which is your way of saying that I am not a Frenchman?’
‘You are a Russian, I believe.’
‘That is quite correct. I came to Paris ten years ago. I have since taken out citizenship papers.’
‘Oh! And you were?’
‘Major, Feydorf battalion, ninth Cossack cavalry in the army of his imperial majesty the Czar.’
Mockingly Vautrelle clicked his heels together, bowed from the hips, and was gone.
Bencolin looked across at me and raised his eyebrows.
‘Alibi Baby!’ I said. ‘I don’t see how you’re going to shake it, Bencolin.’
‘For the present, it is not necessary that I should. Question: where does this species of fire-eater get the income to go about with a millionaire like Saligny?’
‘You suspect that he is our madman?’
‘Frankly, I don’t. But I very much suspect that he has been in the habit of supplying madame la duchesse with drugs.’
‘Drugs?’
‘When she came over to us this evening,’ went on Bencolin, hunching up in the chair, ‘I remarked that she looked as though she were in a drug-fog. I did not know it at the time, but that was the literal truth. Did you see me pick up the cigarette she left in the ashtray near us?’ He fished it out of his vest pocket. ‘It is very thoroughly doctored; with what, I can’t say until our chemists analyse it. It is either marijuana, the Indian hemp-plant—the Mexicans use its dried leaves as a cigarette-filler—or the Egyptian hashish. She is a confirmed user, or it would have made her violently ill. You noticed the expression of her eyes and the wildness of her conversation: she is no novice in its use. Some say it kills, you know, within five years. Somebody is most earnestly trying to do away with her.’
He was silent, tapping the pencil against the table; and because I was busy forming a theory I made no comment. He viewed the case with sardonic eyes, sour and unsurprised.
‘Well, I want to speak to one other person,’ he said at length. ‘Then we shall have to go on a little errand I have in mind. François!—Send the proprietor in.’
The gentleman came in wild-eyed, his moustache drooping like a dog’s ears. ‘Monsieur,’ he cried, before his stomach had preceded him through the door, ‘I beg of you, you must countermand that order that nobody is to leave! Several have tried to go, and your men downstairs stopped them. They demanded to know why. I said it was a suicide. There are reporters—’
‘Sit down, please. You need not worry; a suicide will enhance the reputation of your establishment. Is the medical examiner here?’
‘He has just arrived.’
‘Good. Now … Before coming here this evening, I consulted the files for some information about you—’
‘It is a lie, of course.’
‘Of course,’ agreed Bencolin composedly. ‘Chiefly I want to know if there are any patrons here tonight who are unknown to you?’
‘None. One must have a card to enter, and I investigate them all: unless, of course, it is the police. I should be grateful if my compliment to you were returned.’ He was drawn up in offended dignity, rather like a laundry bag attempting to resemble a gold-shipment.
Bencolin’s pencil clicked regularly against the table.
‘Your name, I am informed, is Luigi Fenelli; not a common patronymic in France. Is it true that some years ago the good Signor Mussolini objected to your running an establishment for the purpose of escorting weary people through the Gate of the Hundred Sorrows? Briefly, monsieur, were you ever arrested for selling opium?’
Fenelli lifted his arms to heaven and swore by the blood of the Madonna, the face of St Luke, and the bleeding feet of the apostles that such a charge was infamous.
‘You give good authority,’ said the detective thoughtfully. ‘Nevertheless, I am inclined to be curious. Does it require a card, for example, to be admitted to the fourth floor of this establishment? Or is the soothing poppy dispensed, like the cocktails, by the courtesy of the house?’
Fenelli’s voice raised to a shout; Bencolin’s hand silenced him.
‘Please!’ said the detective. ‘The information was mine before I came here. I give you twelve hours to throw into the Seine whatever shipment you have on hand. This leeway I grant you on one condition: that you answer me a question.’
‘Even the illustrious Garibaldi,’ said the other dramatically, ‘was sometimes forced to compromise. I deny your charge, but as a good citizen I cannot refuse to assist the police with any information at my command.’
‘How long has M. le Duc de Saligny been a user of opium? Don’t deny it! He has been known to come here.’
‘Well, then, within the last month, monsieur. I was shocked and grieved that such a fine young man—’
‘No doubt, no doubt. Did the woman who is now his wife contract any charming habits here also?’
‘Each,’ replied the manager loftily, ‘was very much concerned about concealing it from the other.’
‘Ah, yes. Who instigated this?’
‘You asked for one question, M. Bencolin, and I have answered you two. That is all I will tell you if they subject me to torture!’
‘Such a contingency is hardly likely. At any rate, I advise you become busy turning your fourth floor into a bar or a bagnio or something equally harmless … That is all, Fenelli.’
When the manager had gone, I looked up from an ostentatious studying of the floor plan, and said: ‘May I ask how much of your information you’re concealing, Bencolin? This was the first mention of that angle: Saligny as a drug-taker.’
‘Ah, but that’s another pair of sleeves completely. I was not sure it had any bearing on the case. Now I am morally certain it has.’
‘How did you learn about Fenelli’s private parlour on the fourth floor?’
‘Saligny told me about it.’
‘Saligny told you about it?—You don’t mean Saligny, do you?’
‘Yes.’ With an injured and virtuous air. ‘Jack, find me a person in this whole affair who is acting rationally, and I’ll make you chief of detectives! Now in a moment we shall be invaded by the whole horde—I hear screamings and protestings out there—and I want you to accompany me on an expedition I have in mind. But first let us argue the case a bit. I am curious to get a layman’s reaction.’
He rose and began to pace about, hands clasped behind his back, head bent forward. Mephistopheles smoking a cigar, several of him reflected in the mirrors around the walls as he passed up and down; a queer and absurd little figure in motion, but Paris’s avenger of broken laws.
‘You want me to name the man I think is Laurent?’ I inquired.
‘Hm … that would be deducing from insufficient evidence, at this stage of the game. You have not seen everybody here, nor one-fifth of the people who might be Laurent. I imagine that all our characters have not yet appeared … But proceed. You think you know the man who killed Saligny?’
‘The chances are I’m wrong, naturally. But I’ll have a guess.’
‘Well?’
‘The American, Golton.’
Bencolin stopped abruptly and removed the cigar. ‘Tiens, this is interesting! Why? Do you have reasons, or are you guessing detective-story fashion?’
‘I give them to you for what they’re worth. Reason number one: Golton’s behaviour. It doesn’t ring true; it is overdone; it is a little too American. That byplay in the card-room, for example. It doesn’t seem possible that any man, no matter how drunk, should fail to notice such a shambles directly before him.’
‘An American should be the best judge of that, I confess. Still, the servant seems to have walked halfway across the room without … I wonder … No matter; go on.’
‘His behaviour, then. He sobered up remarkably fast, too, after telling that bit about Vautrelle being cut out by Saligny in madame’s affections. Reason number two: He says he met Saligny when he was returning from Austria. I may point out that it was from Vienna that Laurent escaped.’
‘If he is Laurent, he would be a lunatic indeed to tell you that voluntarily. Austria, moreover, has several cities besides Vienna.’
‘Reason number three: According to every bit of evidence we have, Saligny could not speak English. Yet according to what Golton told me, we have him speaking English quite well. More than that, we have Golton, who says he speaks no French, going about constantly with a man who speaks no English! How is that to be explained?’
‘Touch!’ said Bencolin, snapping his fingers. ‘You score there, certainly. Golton seems to have slipped up in that respect. However, it is hardly an indication that he is the murderer.’
‘You yourself have told me that Laurent is a genius as a linguist. Certainly, if Golton is Laurent, he is amazingly adept with the idiom.’
‘Now let us carry this on. What is Golton’s procedure? How has he contrived to kill Saligny?’
‘Let me ask a question. Do you subscribe to the theory that Laurent, in whatever guise, killed Saligny?’
‘Most emphatically yes … Proceed.’
‘He might very well have been the man whom Saligny proposed to entertain.’
‘He might, of course. Which way did he go into the card-room?’
‘By either door. He might have been there early.’
‘Yes. Now let me ask you,’ Bencolin suddenly leaned across the table and pointed his cigar—‘which way did he go out?’
During the silence, while the detective stood motionless, I realized the significance of that remark, and I swore at myself for dropping into the trap. But there was a chasm at our feet much wider than this.
‘The murderer,’ I said slowly, ‘did not go out by the hall door—’
‘Because my detective was standing directly before it a few seconds after Saligny entered the room from the salon-side, and he did not leave it until after the murder was committed!’
‘And the murderer did not go out by the other door into the salon—’
‘Because I myself was watching it from the time Saligny entered to the time we ourselves went in! In other words, we have a locked-room situation worse than any I have ever encountered, since I myself can swear nobody came out one door, and one of my most trusted men swears that nobody came out the other!’
Still he did not move, but he looked as haggard as a man crucified.
‘I wondered,’ he said in a low voice, ‘how long it would take you to see that situation. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to these people even now. I examined the window immediately, you remember: forty feet above the street, no other windows within yards of it, the walls smooth stone. No “human fly” in existence could have entered or left that way … No place in the room for a cat to hide; I searched for that, too. No possibility of false walls, for you can stand in any door and see the entire partition of the next room. Tear open floor or ceiling, and you find only the floor or ceiling of another room; that way is blocked. Yet we know, in this of all cases, that the dead man did not kill himself … It is the master puzzle of them all.’
He turned round, and slouched across to the window, bent shoulders silhouetted against a faint glow from the street. There was a clamour of excited voices in the hall. Hands thudded at the door.
I cried, ‘Bencolin!’ and leaped up. ‘Bencolin, do you realize—the boy who brought the cocktails! The only one who could have been in the room—alone with Saligny—hired by Fenelli to kill the informer!—’
I was so excited that I did not at first understand his wry smile …
‘Likewise impossible, Jack,’ he answered softly. ‘Did you not hear him, how he protested that he could not help dropping the tray? How he kept his hands along the bottom of his jacket; did you not notice? The fingers of his right hand were amputated long ago.’
It was two o’clock when Bencolin and I left the house. Sounds threw sharp, brittle echoes in the cul-de-sac of the rue des Eaux; there was a thin mist, and a wind blew from the river in the raw spring moonlight. The tops of apartment-houses were drawn against the sky as on glass, and a few windows were alight against their black walls. The rumble of a metro train swelled out of its tunnel and passed on the trestle over the rue Beethoven … distantly you could hear the motor of a cruising taxi.
Bencolin’s car was parked not far from the Avenue de Tokyo. He had not spoken for some time, and when he climbed in at the wheel I asked:
‘Incidentally, where are we going?’
‘Put your hand down in the pocket of the door there,’ he said. ‘What do you find?’
‘It appears to be the handle of a rather heavy pistol.’
‘Precisely; put it in your pocket … Do you still want to go?’
‘Delighted, if I can contrive to hit anything.’
‘That was all I wanted to know; the thing isn’t loaded. Put it back where you found it.’ When he had got the engine started, he tapped his breast-pocket. ‘This one,’ he added absently, ‘is loaded.’
We turned into the Avenue de Tokyo, a vast plain, with the parapet-lamps of the river marching away in curved lines to the right. Beyond them the high fretwork of the tower was printed spider-black against the moonlit sky. The river-breeze smelled of rain. Bencolin’s big Voisin roared past the Pont d’Iena, and one had a sensation as of wings.
At length he volunteered, ‘We are going to the home of the Duc de Saligny.’
‘Oh … then why the gun-parade? That isn’t dangerous, is it?’
‘I have reason to believe that there are things in his house which a certain somebody will be very anxious to remove—if that person doesn’t get there before us. The address, by the way, is number 326 Avenue Henri Martin. Which means—’ He looked sideways.
‘That our friend Golton lives next door. But you have pretty well exploded my theory of the murder.’
‘Pardon, I didn’t say you were wrong. I said we must examine the evidence from all sides.’
He relapsed into silence. I sat back and closed my eyes. From Paris you can get no distant vibration, no far heavy rumble of traffic such as one hears in London. When the siren of the flying car screamed, horns picked it up and answered as from a gulf. There was the rattle of a late tram in the pale glitter of the Place de l’Alma. We swerved to the left up the hill, and presently the grey Arch dawned among hooting taxis. A few drops of rain blurred the windshield … and the head of Saligny floated against the dark …
The wan sheen of thoroughfares dwindled away; we were in a street of trees where the headlights showed flashes of budding green, but a black arch devoid of movement.
Before the gate of 326 we stopped. Twin globes of light burned yellow on either side, and shone on the dark windows of the concierge’s lodge. Bencolin’s fingers clicked a tattoo against the glass.
‘’Sieur et dame!’ said a sleepy voice inside, ‘my felicitations—’
When the iron gate swung back, we were looking into the sleepy face of a woman in curl-papers. The concierge was about to dart back in alarm when Bencolin intervened:
‘Prefecture of police. I must ask you to admit us.’
He received the key from the babbling woman, and ordered her back into the lodge. We could hear her wailing, ‘Murdered! Murdered! I knew it—wake up, Jules!—’
‘Be silent!’ Bencolin snarled over his shoulder.
Fitting the key into the lock of the house-door, he whispered: ‘There are no servants here. If I find anybody prowling, it will be necessary to shoot.’
We entered a dark hallway which smelled of flowers. I could hear Bencolin’s steady breathing. He guided my arm across towards the vast curve of a stairway, down whose railing moonlight shone from a window. A rug slipped under my foot on the hardwood floor … We reached the top of the staircase; Bencolin turned, cloaked and weird against the moonlight. He nodded towards a door at the other end of the second floor. There was a thread of light under the sill.
When he put his right hand softly on the knob of that door, his left was inside his breast-pocket. He threw the door back.
A man sprang round to face us. He was standing in the middle of a room fully lighted, though the shutters were up. There was a great canopied bed nearby, and you noticed at its head a woman’s blue fur-trimmed slippers … The man was small, with thick red hair, and when his mouth opened in surprise it disclosed many missing teeth. He had the cut of an overweight athlete. Bencolin closed the door.
‘Hello, Girard,’ he said. ‘I had hardly expected to find you here. Turn out those lights, and lower your voice—’
‘M. Bencolin!’
‘Quite; what are you doing here?’
‘I am the monseigneur’s most personal servant,’ said the man called Girard. He wagged his head, and grinned proudly. ‘I have been with him for over a month. I was preparing the bridal—’ he leered and rubbed his hands.
Bencolin whistled. He gestured towards Girard. ‘Formerly,’ he explained, ‘the hero of Auteuil; a jockey I have put my money on in preference to the horse … Dame de Trefles, three to one, Girard up …’
‘But overweight, monsieur. I have been out of the game for some time. See …’ He lifted a tawdry affair of red roses, shaped like a horseshoe, and inscribed in white roses with the legend, ‘Bonne chance’ …
‘My tribute; it brings good luck.’
Bencolin stared at him speculatively.
‘You’re up late, Girard.’
‘Yes, but—monsieur, why are you here?’
‘I want you to turn out those lights; then tell me about your new position.’
The room went dark. The puzzled, suspicious Girard hung the wreath around his neck and stood gesturing in a vague glow from over the transom.
‘Why—monsieur, I do not understand this. But whatever M. Bencolin says, I will do without question. I used to know M. de Saligny in the old days; once I rode his filly Drapeau Bleu. But then, you know how it is, I could not make the weight; rubber suits, blankets, diet, roadwork, still I could not make forty-six; you know—no, no! … I went to Marseilles. At last, in that despair, you know, I returned. I sought out M. de Saligny, but of course he did not remember me. “A bit of work round the stables, monsieur,” I pleaded. “Ah, Girard,” he said, “you speak like a man of education, though not of intelligence. Can you use a typewriter? And give my stable a workout if I am not able to do so?” “But certainly, monseigneur,” I say. “I have hurt myself,” he explained, and I went into a frenzy of grief—monseigneur, the great horseman! “I cannot use my hand well; therefore I shall dictate my correspondence—” Et puis voilà!’
He drew a long breath. ‘And this lady that he has married, I would die for her! She is so lovely; if anyone sought to—’
The sentimental soul paused. Bencolin inquired:
‘Monseigneur had much correspondence?’
‘Oh, yes; he is very prominent. And he receives many things—that trunk—you can see how everyone likes him—’
‘What trunk?’
‘Why, the trunk that arrived two days ago. It was comical, you know. He had been in Vienna, and when he sent on his trunks one was misdirected. It wandered about from one address to another, and was returned to his hotel in Vienna. It had no name on it, but they recognized it, like that!’ There came a snapping of Girard’s fingers. ‘And they sent it on to him—’
‘Where is it now?’
‘Why, in his study—’
Bencolin said very slowly, ‘Is—it—possible? …’ There was a silence, among the night-creakings of the house. The horror of an unknown thing jumped back to a vital force when we heard the tone of his next words.
‘Girard, don’t ask any questions. Do exactly as I tell you. Go to your room now, and whatever happens don’t stir out of it! There is, or will be, somebody in this house—’
‘Who, monsieur?’
‘A killer,’ said the detective. He opened the door softly. Against the faint moonlight I could see that he had a pistol in his hand.
I felt a sickly empty sensation around my stomach when we went up another flight of stairs towards Saligny’s study, whose location Bencolin seemed to know very well.
‘Stand in the door,’ he whispered; ‘I want to see that the shutters are up …’ There was a space when I stood with my back to the hallway and heard Bencolin lightly trying the windows. The study smelled stuffy, and there was another queer odour … He returned presently, took off his cloak, and when he closed the door behind him he laid the cloak along the bottom of the door.
‘Now turn on that lamp at your elbow. Keep your hand on the button, and if you hear any movement anywhere, shut it off.’
It was a dull lamp, with a globed shade set in green glass, and its light made crooked shadows in a small room hung with pictures. Beside the door was a large trunk, on which I sat down to watch the detective.
‘Hm,’ he muttered, talking fast and in a low voice: ‘Dozens of sports pictures—himself with silver cups—Ascot, Longchamps, Wimbledon—amateur fencing team—fine stag’s head, that—yes, and big game—gun-case—Manchurian leopards—that racquet needs re-stringing—’
He was walking about, glancing at this and that, picking up articles and laying them down; powerful, imbued with terrific wiry energy. The table in the middle of the room claimed his attention.
‘Typewriter … What’s this? Books. Open here; drawers are filled with them. The works of Edgar Allan Poe. Barbey D’Aurevilly; Diaboliques. Odd fare for a sporting man … Baudelaire, Hoffmann; La Vie de Gilles de Rais—’
He closed one book with a snap. ‘That settles it.’
The idea I had in mind seemed too outlandish and appalling; but I suddenly got up. We stood face to face, and by the expression of his eyes I could see we both knew …
‘The man,’ I said slowly, ‘who for the past two months has been posing as the Duc de Saligny is in reality—’
‘Laurent himself,’ supplied Bencolin. ‘Laurent, a master of irony! Laurent, with an eye to what he thinks is poetic justice. Over a year ago the engagement of the Duc de Saligny to Madame Louise was announced in every newspaper of Europe. There were a hundred pictures of Saligny to draw from. He had the plastic surgeon make him into such a perfect image of Saligny that Madame Louise herself does not even now know the difference. I have never encountered such an artistic cutthroat!—he planned and succeeded in marrying her a second time, and tonight, in that room downstairs, he would have avenged himself, if somebody had not discovered it—’
In one blinding glare every piece of contradiction showed up as one perfect whole. Bencolin, leaning across the desk, checked off the points on his fingers:
‘First, we have Saligny taking a trip to Vienna two months or so ago. When he leaves, he is the master sportsman: rider, swordsman, hunter, tennis-player, but a not over-bright individual who rarely reads a printed line and speaks no language but his own. When he returns, he has unaccountably acquired an excellent knowledge of English, such that one of his closest companions is an American who speaks no French. His whole character changes. He does not ride, play tennis, or indulge in any sports whatever—even sports where his injury would not prevent him. He refuses: because he no longer knows how—he is another man. Instead, he takes to opium-smoking! He hires a jockey—whom he does not recognize, although that jockey formerly rode his best horse—to inspect his stables for him. He hires this man to take dictation, because otherwise his handwriting would be recognized as not that of the man he is impersonating. He cultivates a new circle of friends (witness Golton), and goes in for the life of the boulevards. Yet here, as the marked books of this man who “never reads”, we have volumes in three languages and of a sort which shows an entire change of mind.’
The detective shrugged. ‘Yes, that is the way I read it. He intended, of course, to come to Paris and do away with Saligny here; but by a circumstance fortunate for him Saligny did go to Vienna, where somehow Laurent got into his hotel—and I very much suspect that the trunk on which you are sitting contains the body of the real Saligny.’
I was no longer sitting on it. I had backed away, and in the weird green light the thing explained possibly that odour …
‘Bencolin,’ I said, and with a calm not very convincing, ‘the trunk is unlocked.’
‘Chance tripped him up … Yes, you see what he did?’ the detective was rambling on. ‘He sent the trunk to a false address; to be rid of it, he thought, and make another “trunk murder” to baffle the police. But the trunk came back, and the manager of the hotel recognizing it, shipped it on to—’
‘The trunk is unlocked,’ I repeated monotonously. And then I reached down and threw open the lid.
Bencolin came over swiftly. It was nearly full of sawdust, sawdust tossed about as though something very heavy had been removed from its packings. There were brown stains streaked through the mass.
‘Laurent removed the body before he was married!’ I said, ‘but … what are you doing?’
The detective’s head was bent down into the trunk.
‘No, Jack. This sawdust on top is damp and fresh; it came from the bottom of the trunk. The body was disturbed more recently than that. Probably—tonight.’
For a moment he let the sawdust run through his fingers. ‘Don’t you see? We are dealing with a man much more dangerous than Laurent himself, whom this man killed. We have found out about Laurent, but we are still at the beginning of the riddle. It is even less explicable now than it was before, for we have no madman on which to saddle a motiveless crime.’
‘Who is the man, then? You seem to—’
‘Turn off that light!’
I reached over, fumbling, and switched it off. For a time there was absolute silence; then a faint creak as Bencolin eased open the door. Against the lesser darkness I could see his dim shape, motionless in the aperture. From the chasm below I thought I could hear a faint rasping noise, as of a shovel scraped over stone …
Bencolin’s figure moved forward, soundlessly. I edged out beside him, planting my steps to avoid creaky boards. Again he stopped; somewhere, a person was treading on stairs. There was the pale oblong of the window at the stairhead, and dull moonlight on the pattern of a carpet. So slowly we edged towards those stairs that the window grew on one’s vision, like a scene viewed through shortening opera glasses. He bent down when we reached the window, bent down and peered around the newel post, and I through the balustrades. Darkness … But the footsteps were coming up the second flight of stairs. They hesitated on the second floor, and crept round to the third. Suddenly switched into our faces was the glare of a flashlight.
‘Haut les mains!’
Bencolin fired two shots, very deliberately, into the beam of light. Their flat bang was like the burst of an explosion. The light vanished, and the footsteps thudded in leaps down the other flight of stairs. I stumbled, brought my hand in numbing contact with the stair-wall, and blundered down into the dark. Down to the first floor … there was a crash as a door was flung open, and other running footsteps joined the first. We heard a blubbering cry.
Somehow I found myself, trembling, unable to speak, leaning on a table in the lower hall. When the lights came on I blinked; the lights swam, and came into slow focus. Bencolin stood near the switch, the fingers of his hand crooked before his face, breathing heavily … In the centre of the Aubusson carpet, Girard lay on his back with a knife driven through his side. His oyster-eyeballs rolled, and he gurgled through brimming lips when he tried to move his head. His arms were thrown wide, fingers picking at the carpet, and one leg was drawn up as though in an attempt to rise. Around his neck was still a crumpled horseshoe of red roses, and framed his head with the white inscription, ‘Good luck …’
At four o’clock a.m. the events of this amazing night were over, at least so far as the butcheries were concerned. But for Bencolin the work was just beginning. I never saw him so upset as at this latest development, the murder of Girard by the prowler; his hand shook when he telephoned the prefecture, he cursed himself in a low bitter monotone, like a man praying, and he cursed Girard for not following his advice. As nearly as it could be reconstructed, Girard had retired to his room on the ground floor. When he heard the shots he came from the back of the house, saw the intruder running down the stairs, and interfered at the cost of his life. Bencolin’s bullets had apparently taken no effect. Both were buried in the floor, one having shattered the flashlight and the other nicking the newel post about three feet from the floor. From the remnants of the flashlight, a long Tungsten with a head much broader than the barrel, it was clear that the bullet had pierced the reflector without even grazing the hand of the man who had held it … In the cellar we found the reason for the sound we had heard. Fresh mortar between the bricks behind a pile of debris, and a trowel concealed under some straw, led to the discovery of a hollow. Inside a body was doubled up, horribly decomposed but recognizable as that of Saligny; Laurent, it seemed, was not the only person in the case who had read well in the works of Poe. The knife with which Girard had been stabbed had first been used to pry out the loose bricks; bits of dust and mortar still clung to the underside of the haft. After the murder, the assassin had gone out of the cellar door by which he had entered … To this day I can see Bencolin, holding up a lantern as he looked into the ghastly hollow behind the bricks. The chill damp of the cellar, the wind banging the open door, the rat that scurried past my foot: they are details indelible.
When we left the house at four o’clock in possession of the police, Bencolin gave his last instructions: ‘Above all, give nothing out to the press. I do not think you will find fingerprints, for the handle of the knife is dusty and has prints of what seem to be gloves—but make the test. I will ’phone in an hour.’ And then he said to me:
‘We will go to my rooms and get coffee. Do you mind driving? I want to study this … Avenue George V; if you’re not sure of the way, get back to the Champs Elysées and then you can’t miss it.’
On the return drive he sat strained forward, head between his hands, staring at nothingness.
‘We know hardly more than before—’ I murmured. He turned savagely.
‘Yes? You say that to me? I tell you I know the whole devilish plan. I know the height of the murderer, and that he wore evening clothes; I know when he came and why he came; I know the reason he tried to come upstairs, and what his connection was with Saligny; in short, I can draw you a picture of Girard’s assassin. But—well, that is to be seen. Our organisation is a devil-fish, which can extend a thousand arms—’
‘And, according to natural history, it can throw out from itself a quantity of dense black liquid to obscure the view—’
‘Peste, you needn’t snap! And your hands are trembling on that wheel; well, it’s an ordeal to turn anyone’s stomach. We shall both need brandy … Turn to the right here.’
Between weariness and the horror of recollection, we exchanged no more words. Bencolin’s rooms were in an apartment-building not far from the American church. He kept such irregular hours that he had his own key, and we did not rouse the concierge at the front door. The automatic elevator made a slow ascent to the sixth floor.
‘My servant,’ Bencolin explained, ‘never knows when I shall be here; there is always coffee on the stove, and a fire in the study.’
It was a formal apartment, stiff and luxurious in a stereotyped fashion, with the customary mirrors and Louis Quinze furniture—all except the study … A tiny balcony, books to the ceiling, and a fire. Certainly the most untidy room I have ever seen. There were great padded chairs with inclined backs before the fireplace. A letter had been thrown down carelessly on the hearth, beside a tabouret with brandies and cigars; and the first sentence of the letter caught my eye, ‘De la part de sa majesté, le roi d’Angleterre—’
‘Clean off that chair and sit down,’ said Bencolin. He began to sweep a pile of debris from the neighbourhood of the hearth; a flutter of red fell from it, and I said,
‘My Lord, man, be careful! That’s the ribbon of the Legion of Honour.’
‘I know it,’ he returned irritably. ‘Make yourself comfortable …’
Presently I fell into a doze, and vaguely heard him fuming at something in the kitchen. The prospect of the evening danced in my brain; became linked with a crazy jingle, ‘Heads and knives, swords and wives, how many are going to St —’ and there swam across it the vision of Vautrelle polishing his monocle, of the flashlight in our faces … I stirred, and opened my eyes. Bencolin was sitting across the hearth in one of the great chairs, with the firelight on his sardonic face. He pointed to a cup of coffee at my elbow.
‘In a moment,’ he said, ‘you are going to hear the prefecture in action. This,’ he tapped a telephone beside him, ‘is my private wire. There is another ’phone on that table at your left—push the books away—there. Listen to them, now.’
Both of us picked up the ’phones. ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Bureau centrale. Bencolin speaking.’
There was a prolonged clicking. ‘Bureau centrale,’ a voice answered.
‘Dulure’s laboratory, please … I want the reports on the Saligny case. Have they finished?’
‘Two-eleven speaking,’ said another voice. ‘Report as follows: There are no clear fingerprints, due to the brass nail-heads on the handle of the sword; an identification is impossible. There are several prints on the glass of the window, but they do not correspond to any in our files. The dust of the carpet and that of the cover on the divan has been swept up; the glass here sifts out nothing but cigarette ashes, mud-traces, and a few grains of candy.’
‘Have these been analysed?’
‘Not yet. There will be a report by morning as to whether the ashes are of the same quality as those of the cigarette submitted. This cigarette contains hashish.’
‘Very good. Shift me to the general office; one-thirteen … One-thirteen speaking? You followed the American, Golton, from Passy?’
‘Yes. He took a taxi to Harry’s New York Bar, Boulevard des Italiens. He remained there half an hour; on emerging, spoke to two women but went with none; walked to the opera and there took another taxi. He returned to his home, 324 Avenue Henri Martin, arriving there at one forty-five.’
‘You looked him up in the files?’
‘Resident of Paris for two years, no occupation, reputable account at Lloyd’s bank. I have a list of his associates.’
‘It will keep. I will speak to one-eleven now … One-eleven?’
‘Edouard Vautrelle,’ said still another voice, ‘left the house in Passy at twenty minutes to one. In his own car he escorted Madame de Saligny to her home, 144 Avenue du Bois. He left there in five minutes, returned to his car, and drove downtown to Maxim’s, rue Royale. I lost him, monsieur; he apparently left through a door into a neighbouring shop. I questioned the proprietor, but he will say nothing. Very sorry.’
‘No matter … His antecedents?’
‘Came to Paris in 1917, during the Russian revolution. Enlisted for military service; army of occupation until 1922. Gives his occupation as that of playwright—’
‘Questions to the theatres?’
‘The managers of all theatres in Paris are being sent a blank form asking if any plays by a person of that name have been submitted.’
‘Good. Now forty-six, please … Luigi Fenelli? What of him?’
‘To the best of my knowledge, he has not left his establishment tonight. Seventy-one is still at the corner; no ’phone message yet. Fenelli came to Paris a year ago, and sent circulars of his new house to prominent people. Twice arrested in Italy, but never imprisoned. Charges: peddling opium in Naples; aggravated assault and battery.’
‘That is all … Head central! ’Phone me if any report comes from the laboratory. Instruct them to examine Saligny’s fingernails. I want fingerprint samples from all these people. Post a man at the concierge’s box in the Fenelli house.’
‘Any further instructions?’
‘None until tomorrow. Make me an appointment with the juge d’instruction.’
Slowly Bencolin replaced the ’phone.
‘You see,’ he remarked, ‘the octopus reaching. It is a gigantic system. I can, at this hour, ascertain the whereabouts of any man in Paris. And you also note how it fails!’ He slapped the chair-arm; his eyes were bright, and he knocked over a glass with a nervous arm when he reached for a cigar. ‘They do not sleep, these men. I have my hands on all Paris as on a map; a finger moves across streets, up squares, and pauses at a house—a few words into this ’phone, and the police trap snaps like a deadfall. But the brain of one man opposing us renders all this organization useless. You can fight him only with the brain.’ He brooded, head in his hands. Then he growled: ‘Drink your coffee. It’s getting cold.’
This was another person from Bencolin the suave and mocking, the Voltaire of detectives and the Petronius of the boulevards: the man himself, in carpet slippers. I sipped the coffee, but it gave only a whirling sensation to my drowsiness. He sat there in the chair, motionless, with the smoke thickening about him and the ash sliding down his shirt-front. As though slow curtains were drawn, it faded—the gaunt face with its pointed beard, staring blindly into the red firelight. Somewhere a clock chimed. The glow of the fire played on the ceiling, made deep shadows round his chair, glimmered on the nickelled telephone …
When I roused out of confused dreams, dawn was creeping up the opposite wall. The whole room had turned to grey and shadows, and it was deadly cold, coloured like ashes, the whole litter, and shivered with the rattling of the window. The fire was out. Dimly I could see Bencolin’s figure detach itself from the gloom of the tall chair across the hearth. He had not altered his position, though the hearth was strewn with cigar-stumps and an empty bottle of brandy hung from his hand. He still sat, chin in his fist, staring into the empty fireplace.
Others have written of the finale to this case; my own account can have no virtue except that of an eyewitness. There were wild accounts in most of the papers, and what irritated us all most was Le Figaro’s smug assertion that ‘it is amazing that the only person to see the truth was M. Bencolin, since all the details were before the eyes of the witnesses from the first.’ Whatever the general public may think of that, it will probably agree with me that the reason why Bencolin staged his dénouement in the fashion he employed was rather for a psychological vengeance on his adversary than any real desire to extract a confession. You shall judge.
Around eight in the morning, I went to my rooms in the Square Rapp for a bath and a change of clothes. My charitable landlady drew her own conclusions, and solicitously inquired after the health of ‘my little girl’. Then she found a couple of blood-spots when I sent my dinner clothes out to be pressed, and became sympathetic to such an extent that I hesitated to tell her they had been caused by a severed head. Madame Hirondelle is prone to hysterics.
Unquestionably, I thought when I was drinking chocolate by my own fire, it had been a Night. In retrospect, which is the best way to enjoy excitement anyhow, I contemplated it with entire satisfaction. I had had my murder. ‘We will forget the matter until this evening. I am going to have you all as my guests at the central office,’ Bencolin had said. ‘In the meantime, I suggest you call up some girl and go to an afternoon dance as an antidote against the future.’
When I did use the telephone to suggest this—it is a hall-phone, and Madame Hirondelle’s door is always open—my astonished landlady inquired after this and that, and fell to dietary suggestions of more theoretical than real usefulness.
Paris was preening its finery that day; the gigolos were all a-cackle on the Champs Elysées, there was a warm wine-like air made luminous around the green of the Tuileries, whose aisles were in bloom with the early-spring crop of artists painting the vista towards the Arc de Triomphe. It was all highlights and watercolour, with the grey face of the Madeleine peering down her street at the obelisk from the Nile. I very nearly forgot the black business of last night in mingling with the whirligig life in the company of my friend Marguérite (she was a demi, which is the word customarily used with tasse), until we entered one of those dancing-places where the extra charge is put on the champagne instead of the cover, and the cover is therefore permitted to be dirty. There the inspired orchestra played ‘Hallelujah’, and followed it up with ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird’ … then, over in a corner, I saw Mr Sid Golton. He had just neared that mild state of happiness wherein flipping water in a spoon seems highly humorous, and this he was doing to calculate his range when he should begin in earnest. I saw him look at me, seem puzzled, and then he waved in recognition. His shiny cheeks were freshly shaven and blooming as a baby’s; his thin hair was plastered down, and the blue eyes far less bloodshot. A smile dawned. He waddled over, after an appraising glance at the lady beside me.
It was the stage for an experiment. I rose, and thrust out my hand deliberately. He responded.
Now I have normally anything but a strong grip, yet under the pressure when he shook hands Mr Golton perceptibly winced.
‘Geez, go easy!’ he protested. ‘Got a sore hand; fell on it last night—it’s no fun.’
‘Nor is the sensation pleasant,’ said I, ‘when a bullet hits a flashlight.’
‘You’re drunk,’ observed Mr Golton casually. ‘Wouldn’t have thought it, but you are. Well, order ’em up. Hey, garsong, oon Marteeni, see?’
The afternoon passed somehow. I was a bit preoccupied, and Golton took care of the amusement of my companion, reciting droll stories of his adventures as a ranger in Yellowstone until somebody had discovered on his property an oil gusher spouting—he illustrated the spouting of the gusher with appropriate pantomime—and delivered to him what he described as bokoo dough. Various parlour-tricks served to keep the company at the nearby tables interested in life.
We separated at six-thirty, and Marguérite, being philosophical, was content to regard one’s mood and one’s friends as just another of those things. Golton said that he had got a message from Bencolin to ‘be on hand, pronto, at nine o’clock, at the police station’. Undoubtedly there hung over us the shadow of that night …
When I returned to my rooms, I found Madame Hirondelle in possession of the afternoon paper; she had even violated an ancient French custom and bought two. All such ladies being embryo tabloid-sheets, there is no reason for the tabloid in French life. She brought me in a special tray of tea and croissants in order to dilate on broken romances, which particularly reminded her of the case of her cousin by marriage, who had blue eyes and lived in Bordeaux, and was (figure to yourself, monsieur!) only the bride of a night when, etc. … I pondered the etiquette of wearing evening clothes to Bencolin’s party, which seemed rather like debating the correctness of a morning coat to attend a guillotining. Then, upstairs, somebody’s insufferable gramophone started to scratch through ‘Hallelujah’ …
Everything made a person’s thoughts all out of proportion. I gagged at the thought of food, but something was necessary to take one’s mind off a killer. A taxi took me to the grand boulevards, already flowering with pink lights, and I dropped into a cinema. The player-piano rang with a flat stereotyped sound, like a newspaper editorial, and the peanut shells … then the picture leaped out at me, and I was struck with the extraordinary resemblance of the star to Bencolin. Except for the latter’s beard, the likeness was perfect. Nor could I imagine Bencolin plunged in the amorous intrigue whose chief purpose seemed to lead the hero as many times as possible into the wrong bedroom. But there was no getting away from that likeness. The piece was called ‘La Blonde ou la Brune?’ and featured Mr Adolphe Menjou. Presently, in one of the feminine leads, who bore the flamboyant name of Miss Arlette Marchal, I began to see a resemblance to Madame Louise de Saligny. This is a state called nerves, and is not at all pleasant.
It was eight-thirty when I arrived at the vast Palais de Justice. You cannot imagine the size of this Palace, which resembles a pictureless Louvre; so I naturally wandered into the department whose purpose, I learned, was inquiring into the whereabouts of lost dogs. This was laudable but uninteresting. I penetrated three or four corridors before I was found at last by a clever detective and escorted through a maze of rooms to the office of Bencolin.
It was a small room panelled in dark wood and lighted by green-shaded lamps. Bencolin stood behind the desk in no way like the man I had seen the night before. His suavity was a mask, his voice low and clear, his beard freshly barbered. In a chair beside his desk sat a great lump of a man, like a bald Buddha, with flabby hands folded in his lap; his eyes blinked slowly, automaton fashion, and his jaw was buried in his collar.
‘M. le Comte de Villon, the juge d’instruction’, Bencolin introduced.
The judge looked me over craftily, so that I had an uncomfortable idea he would ask for my fingerprints. He grunted, and closed his eyes. Bencolin indicated a pair of closed folding doors behind him.
‘The room of my entertainment,’ he said.
That was all, except for a faint glittery smile. I sat down, and for many minutes there was no sound except a deep humming from somewhere in the building. A watch on the table ticked audibly.
‘M. Luigi Fenelli,’ a voice suddenly announced. I jumped around and saw Fenelli being escorted in. He was very haughty; he fingered his curled moustache, and his hair positively bubbled with oil, so that some of the oil seemed to be spread over his fat face. Tiny eyes darted round.
‘Me, I am here,’ he proclaimed, and thrust his hand under the breast of his coat. Cloak and hat he offered to the escorting detective.
‘Sit down, please,’ requested Bencolin.
Again that silence, and the ticking of the watch … Presently Golton came in like a landslide, exuding geniality. But the atmosphere of the room awed him before long. He demanded to know ‘why they didn’t have magazines here, like any good dentist’s office’, but his facetiousness trickled away; he sat down and shifted his feet nervously. François, the detective who had been on duty in the hall the night before, entered and stood in one corner.
Bencolin began to click a pencil against the table, just as he had the night before when he was questioning …
‘Madame Louise de Saligny and M. Edouard Vautrelle.’
The circle was complete. Madame wore a black wrap with a collar of ermine. From this collar she looked out lazily, and her face was like a lovely photograph slightly out of focus. But her black hair was bound back to a knot tonight, which seemed to make the countenance thinner, and her mouth slashed with lipstick. Only the dark speculative eyes were the same. She greeted Bencolin without the slightest semblance of interest … Vautrelle, ostentatiously cool, ran the tip of his finger along the thin line of his moustache. His colourless eyebrows were raised.
‘We are all present,’ Bencolin said. ‘M. Vautrelle, will you be so good as to tell me the time?’
‘Your questions seldom vary, do they, monsieur?’ asked the other. ‘Again subject to confirmation it is five minutes past nine.’
Bencolin contemplated the watch on his desk.
‘Yes. But for the purpose of this meeting,’ he remarked softly, ‘I prefer that the hour be fifteen minutes to eleven. François, will you be so good as to open those double doors?’
The distant humming died away. The demonstration had begun.
Bencolin asked us all to enter the room disclosed when the double-doors were opened. It was very large, the walls and floor covered with white tile, so that it resembled an operating-room in a hospital. Four lamps with green shades hung from the ceiling, immediately above six chairs ranged in two lines in such a way that the chairs of the second row were in the open spaces between those of the first, all of them three feet apart. The first row was about fifteen feet from the opposite end of the room. There were no windows.
‘We have often been asked,’ Bencolin continued, ‘why the prefecture has no psychological laboratory such as that suggested many years ago by Professor Münsterberg of Harvard. I wish to show you now that we have our own conception of a psychological laboratory. It is eminently a practical one, and, so far as I know, there is no duplicate of it in the world. I am going to ask you to assist me in a parlour game which has often caused much amusement. I am going to ask you all,’ he continued after a silence, ‘to be secured firmly in these chairs, and also gagged, for all the world as though you had been kidnapped by a cinema-inspired villain. I promise that the fastenings will not chafe you, and that you will suffer no annoyance from the gag. I should prefer that everyone accede in this, including you,’ he turned to me, ‘François, and Madame de Saligny—although madame will be excepted, if she prefers.’
I looked round at the group. Vautrelle laughed.
‘It is obvious,’ he remarked, ‘that children’s games are not confined to the nursery. Well, I have no objection, if you don’t mean to rob us while we are helpless. Hein, Louise? I—’
‘This is an outrage!’ bellowed Fenelli. His coat rose on his back like feathers. ‘To such proceedings—’
‘You are, of course, at liberty to refuse,’ said Bencolin carelessly. Fenelli worked his mouth a moment, and added, ‘But if the others agree—’ Bowing, Bencolin turned to Golton and rapidly translated his words into English.
‘Sure, it’s all right with me. But no funny business, mind!’ Golton amended. He stared at the detective, and whispered to me, ‘Wise guy, that one!’
Madame de Saligny showed no more agreement or disagreement than before. She simply shrugged, ‘I do not care.’
Manacles, felt-lined, were on the arms and legs of the chairs. Bencolin left us all to the selection of our chairs, standing before the group like a professor before his class. There was hesitation; we all glanced at each other, and it was madame who first sat down in the end chair of the first row to our left. Vautrelle took the one beside her, then Fenelli. Golton took the end chair to the right in the second row; then François, finally myself. Two attendants appeared out of a door I had not previously seen, and went about fastening the manacles on our wrists and legs with snap-locks. They produced half a dozen gags, like moustache-smoothers, with cotton for the covering of the mouth.
‘Before these are fastened,’ said Bencolin, ‘I should like to ask one question … M. Fenelli, how should you describe the late Saligny?’
I could see Fenelli’s profile partly turned in astonishment.
‘Why—why, monsieur—he was tall, and good-looking, and blond; he was—’ the manager hesitated, and chewed at his moustache. ‘I don’t know that I can make it clearer—he was—’
‘Can you make it any clearer; describe Saligny?’ Golton was asked next.
‘Why—sure—big fellow, always wore mighty fine clothes …’
‘M. Vautrelle?’
‘Precisely six feet tall,’ responded Vautrelle amusedly, ‘weight, 70 kilos; eyes, brown; nose, convex; teeth, perfect; mole on right eyebrow … is this detailed enough for you?’
‘You may apply the gags, messieurs.’
The gags did not make one uncomfortable, but the helpless feeling these and the manacles engendered caused uneasiness. It was final; no matter what happened, you stayed; a murderer could … Suddenly the lights went out, all except a drop-lamp over Bencolin’s head where he stood immediately at our left, causing us all to turn our eyes. He stood weird and inscrutable in that spot of light, which showed the hollows in his face. The face became Satanic; he smiled, and for some reason I felt a shiver of nervousness. Darkness, tied and gagged in one’s chair. There was not a sound in that vast building until Bencolin spoke.
‘The last light. Please …’
We were in total darkness now. My heart was beating heavily … Fully ten minutes passed …
‘The first thing which enters one’s mind,’ Bencolin continued in a low monotone which drifted from another corner as though he were no longer there, ‘is the idea of a church …’
Was somebody talking? A mass of people? I heard a deep but very faint humming of voices, broken with tinny laughter; the sounds of people shuffling. An auto horn honked; two of them. Distinctly I could smell the scent of banked flowers, hear a rustling. The blackness whirled before one’s eyes, resolved into shapes and twistings; those tiny voices made a laughing, rising blur. Suddenly, there crashed through the room the sweep of an organ swelling the Wedding March from Lohengrin …
The organ died away. There was a faint, rasping sob. The darkness assumed gigantic and horrible shapes, wove and broke like foam on water. After a silence Bencolin’s voice drifted dully:
‘Certain people have discovered that this man who stands as bridegroom at the altar is not the true Saligny. No, the true Saligny—’
That sound, far away in the dark; the bumping of a trunk being hauled upstairs. Thump … thump … the wheeze of panting breath.
‘It was six months ago, in another city, that something came to that trunk—’
At first it seemed an illusion, and yet the darkness changed colour, shifted with a weird green light as against gauze; the sound of lapping water … violins in the waltz of the Blue Danube … a shadow shot across this light before our eyes, the monstrous shadow of a man upreared in profile. Something sprang at it, and there lashed down a knife; a thud from sudden darkness again, and a faint groan. Then I no longer heard lapping water but a slow drip, as of thick fluid. The violins pulsed, were joined by other instruments …
‘The people have discovered all this before the marriage. But the marriage takes place … Night comes to Paris—’
Now that distant muted music blew faster, a hysterical note that swung to ‘Hallelujah’. The song beat against one’s ears in tinny resonance. Over it drifted a hum of conversation, the high laughter, the shrill chant of a croupier, the clicking dance of the ball in the wheel. The air was overpoweringly hot, and dense with a smell of powder; and the orchestra-beat shook against it like a madman on a cage.
‘It is not loud,’ said Bencolin’s far voice, ‘because you are in the card-room. The clock—’
Yes, the clock was striking. It tinkled with eerie chimes; then it sounded clear notes. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven, with maddening deliberation.
‘Already,’ Bencolin’s voice was becoming more swift, ‘the assassin is preparing. The sword has been taken down from the wall, and hidden beneath a row of pillows on the divan for use later. Look! The assassin is closing the door!’
It had been so vivid that I had a mental picture of the card-room before me. Then it was that I realised it was no mental picture at all. Staring into the dark, eyes growing used to it, I could see the inside of the card-room. I looked at it from the side on which the window would be. There were the leprous red walls. There was the door to the salon at my right; in the wall directly ahead the door to the hall. There at the left was the divan, dull old rose with its pillows, and the red-shaded lamp on the table throwing a subdued light over it. But I saw that scene as through a faint mist, hazy and unreal, a stage for ghosts, and yet with those sounds and that human laughter pulsing around … Yes, and the door into the hall was being softly closed, so softly that it hardly swayed the bell-rope beside it; the knob turned, the latch clicked, and was still. Just a few minutes after eleven. The murderer had planted his sword, and left the room …
Faint music in a long interval. The knob was turning again! I could feel that the gag against my mouth was drily rubbing my teeth; the scene whirled. The dead man walked into the room; Saligny—or, rather, Laurent posing as Saligny—vital, alive, carrying on his shoulders that head I had seen grinning from the floor. Behind him came the woman who was his wife, Louise, languorous, feverish-eyed. Not a word was spoken. The two moved like phantoms. They stopped in the middle of the room, and the horrible marionettes kissed.
Kissed … he seemed to be speaking inaudible words, and she was replying. She lighted a cigarette, inhaled deeply a few moments, and laughed soundlessly; you could see him smirking sideways at you now. She ground out the cigarette against an ashtray. Her eyes moved towards the place where the window should be, and I stared into them. Then she pointed to the button of her slipper, which had become unfastened; she advanced almost to the divan, and put out her left foot. While he knelt over the slipper, she threw her weight to the right, as though leaning against the divan … Catlike, she leaped aside. In her hands the great sword flashed aloft and fell.
His head seemed to leap like a grisly toy, springing out on wires … The scene went dark. Somewhere the orchestra banged into the last bar of ‘Hallelujah!’
‘It is not yet eleven-fifteen,’ Bencolin’s voice snapped. ‘See, she looks around. She shakes the head aloft in triumph. She picks up the head and gestures like Salomé—this man, who would have killed her, she has killed. Then she becomes tense, ready, watchful. She has left a cigarette; that must be destroyed. She drops it into her wrist-bag. There are some ashes on the rug; she grinds them into the nap with her heel. Then she leaves again by the hall door, having raised the window to let the smoke out.
‘And why has she done this? Why has she not denounced this man, whom she knows to be an impostor, to the police? So that the world will never know he is not the real Saligny; so that she, having married him, will inherit his fortune—which she can enjoy with her confederate … Vautrelle! Now, the murder committed, Vautrelle, who planned all this, must supply her with an alibi …
‘She knows that the detective Bencolin is sitting in the main salon, down at its far end. Very soon she joins him. To all outward appearances, Saligny (or Laurent) is not yet dead; she talks of him. At precisely eleven-thirty, according to a prearranged signal, a man walks through the door of the card-room from the salon. His back is turned, and he is thirty feet away from the people she has joined, but he is tall and blond. She says, “There goes Raoul now …” But that man was Vautrelle.’
(As one puzzles at a cryptogram, and slowly sees the letters click into place, one by one, fewer gaps and fewer) …
‘Vautrelle simply walked through the card-room, pulling the bell-cord deliberately as he went, walked out into the hall. But he turned to his left and entered the smoking room by the door in the projection of the wall which conceals the card-room door from the eyes of the detective seated at the end of the hall. Vautrelle walks out the door of the smoking room into the hall, and speaks to the detective. The whole process, by time-tests, consumes just twelve and one-half seconds. His own alibi was now complete, as well as that of his colleague. He has summoned the boy with the cocktails, by pulling the bell, so that the body may be discovered and he can possess this alibi.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bencolin cried out of the dark, ‘there will be no more pictures, no more stage-effects. You see now that these two were working together to gain control of Saligny’s fortune; Mr Golton blurted out the truth about their affair. That was why it was necessary to go through with the marriage.
‘But the body of the real Saligny must be disposed of. This body was then in a trunk at the home of Saligny, and Vautrelle must have known of it. He left the gambling-house, took madame home, and then (knowing that he was followed) he eluded my shadower at Maxim’s and drove to the back door of Saligny’s house, arriving there around one-thirty. He carried the body downstairs, having wrapped it in a blanket; then he walled it up in the cellar. By that time my companion and I had arrived. He did not know of our presence, and tried to come upstairs—probably to get rid of the bloodstained sawdust or dispose of the trunk by carrying it away. The intervention of Girard led him to murder. He escaped by the cellar door, having stolen a bunch of keys on a previous visit to Saligny. Just when he learned that Saligny was the madman Laurent we shall have to ask him to tell us himself …’
The single drop-light appeared over Bencolin’s head, but the rest of us were in shadow. I leaned back limply, and I was exhausted.
‘And now,’ said Bencolin, ‘before turning on the lights over you, I may tell you the purpose of this experiment. I venture to predict that M. Vautrelle’s chair is empty. If you will examine your manacles, you will see that with a little easy manipulation you could have slid them off without difficulty. None of you has tried to slip them off, I venture to assert; this was because you were innocent. The crux of our practical psychology, and the reason why this test was tried, is that the guilty person always does.’
The room appeared in a flood of light. There was a nervous, exhausted calm, and a strained silence. The sweated hair clung to Golton’s forehead and I could hear him wheezing behind his gag. Fenelli seemed about to melt. Madame lay back in her chair, head lolling, one wrist free. Vautrelle’s chair was empty.
Bencolin walked to the middle of the room, but he did not speak. The tile walls lent that room the chill semblance of a morgue. Laboriously madame worked herself free. She rose, swayed a little; tried to untie the gag, and finally ripped it off. Her ermine collar lay back from her throat, and she was panting. The face was sunken, a Madonna out of which peeped a vulture, and the dry lipstick cracked on her mouth. Her eyes, as she turned her head from side to side, were empty and frightening; a ruin.
Hard, harsh light … then the sound of steps on the tile floor. Two gendarmes appeared, escorting Vautrelle between them. He carried his coat over his arm, and he had casually lighted a cigarette.
‘You weak-knees!’ Louise de Saligny said, with sudden shrillness. ‘You left, did you?—Damn you.’ She leaned crookedly against the chair. The beauty and languor peeled away from her. ‘Well, tell them—go on—frightened at a lot of stage-traps—tell them!—’
Vautrelle was breaking. He tried to keep his mouth straight, but his forehead was a glitter of sweat; he tried to be contemptuous, but the ivory cigarette-holder trembled.
‘You fixed up that story about ordering the cocktails,’ madame said, giggling. ‘I knew it—wouldn’t go. You wanted me to kill him; you hadn’t the nerve … in a public place where we could prove an alibi … if you’d listened to me,’ she smirked. ‘Yes. I’ll tell them! Do you think I care about my precious neck? Or do you want to kiss my neck now—as you used to? “Ah, that divine neck”—you goat of a Russian!—well, go on; it will be your last chance before the guillotine hits it.’ She drew her hand across her throat, and her laugh echoed against the walls.
Vautrelle’s face was ghastly. The coat slid from his arm, and the cigarette spilled fire down his chin. With a terrific gritting of his nerves, he drew himself up. In a clear, defiant voice he sneered at Bencolin:
‘Why, yes, I left your performance. I thought I would go up and see the Grand Guignol. If your men hadn’t interfered, I should have been just in time for the second act.’
He essayed a bow towards the detective; then he lurched, and slid down in a dead faint. High and shrill against the tiles rang the laughter of Louise de Saligny.
‘You will want some explanations, I take it,’ said Bencolin. ‘Well, there were certain features of the case which were clear from the moment I entered the room of the murder, and others which baffled me for the extraordinary time of nearly twelve hours.’
Again we were sitting in his littered study, before a fire which looked a great deal more cheerful than that of the night before. He had mellowed under the influence of an appalling quantity of Veuve Cliquot, and I was far from taciturn myself. He lighted a cigar luxuriously, and leaned back to blow thoughtful rings at the firelight.
‘Let us take it from the beginning. Before Madame Louise was supposed to know about the murder, when we were all sitting there in the salon, you remember that I salvaged her cigarette, as I told you. Possibly the implication of much hashish has not occurred to you. It is the killer’s drug. If you doubt it, look up the origin of the word “assassin”, which is a direct derivation. A confirmed user is at any time liable to go amuck—we get that phrase from the drug, too. It makes them nearly as insane as our first trouble-maker, Laurent.
‘Then we were called into the room of the murder. You probably noted that heavy, sweet odour; if you ever dabble with this case in fiction, be sure to include it. It suggested hashish. She smoked before us, in the other room, but the overpowering collection of other smells made it confused with powder and perfume. Now that room was perfectly clear, and it appeared quite distinctly. The window was up, which might or might not have been an indication that it was raised to drive out the odour. At any rate, it created a strong suspicion that madame had been there a short time before. A short time, or the odour would have been entirely dissipated.
‘Next we examined the position of the body. It was in a grotesque kneeling position; showed no sign of a struggle, and indicated that he had been hit from behind, as I pointed out. The body of a decapitated man, as we discover at the guillotine, has a habit of freezing into its position. Now imagine to yourself the only way in the world it would have been possible to get him into that position, so that he could be struck from behind! Why, attending to the fastening of a lady’s slipper! It is not normally necessary to demand masculine attention to the stocking or the garter—well, or the roll, if you insist. My comment about pillows, which seems to have puzzled you, was perfectly simple. It might surprise the victim to see a sharp sword lying in full view on the divan, and pillows in a line would very effectually conceal it.
‘Thus far, it was a woman’s crime; and I thought I could name the woman. Strength? Remember that once before Madame Louise had overpowered a madman, as I told you; and so it was no very far stretch of the imagination to conceive of her wielding that sword.
‘Was it possible,I thought, that the time of the crime might have been before half-past eleven? I would pigeonhole the idea with the question, Who was the man who actually entered, and why?
‘Before I came there, I already had a suspicion that the man posing as Saligny was Laurent. When we found the pictures of himself in his pockets, it suggested not so much conceit as an endless studying of his prototype; especially since some of the pictures were not at all flattering. Find me the beau who preserves pictures that make him look hideous! Then that question of a weapon in his pockets—it was curious—’
‘But we found no weapon in his pocket!’ I protested.
‘Ah, that was the curious thing. Put yourself in the place of a man who fears for his life from an unknown assailant. Would you go around entirely unarmed, particularly if you were one of the finest pistol-shots in Europe? Now, I thought to myself, is it possible that Madame Louise knew this too? Might she have killed him because of it? If so, why in the devil’s name does she not speak and exonerate herself? Hold that idea in mind, please. Remember that Laurent is a cunning villain, who sends notes to himself and, when he knows he is being shadowed at the opium-house, voluntarily tells the police so that we shall believe he has merely been collecting evidence.
‘Then came the crux: that outlandish business of the bell being rung. The question is, Who rang it; the false Saligny or the murderer? If Saligny rang it, the murderer certainly was insane, for, after his victim has rung a bell which will summon a witness quite soon, he coolly kills Saligny anyhow! If the murderer rang it, the same rule applies: he blithely rang for a witness to see him commit the murder, since he could not have known that the boy would be delayed in answering the bell. The only tenable hypothesis, however, is that the man whom we saw enter the room rang the bell. If it was not Saligny, who was it; and (here is the locked room) where did that man go?
‘I now switch back to the idea that when the bell was rung the victim had already been killed, and the evidence points to Louise de Saligny. Who could have been the man who entered the room? By his size and the colour of his hair, only Vautrelle! Well, then, Vautrelle knew about the crime; and madame knew it was he who entered, if she had just left her husband without a head. It was pretty evidence of collusion, when coupled with Golton’s drunken assertion about a possible affair there.
‘Collusion, why? The answer is obvious. They know about the false Saligny, but they must keep the world thinking it was Saligny, or there would be no fortune. But how could they have known this? The probability was that the false Saligny’s refusal to indulge in sports had aroused Vautrelle’s suspicions, and he investigated Saligny’s house—indicated by the fact that he stole the cellar keys.
‘When he learned about the trunk we shall not know until the juge d’instruction gets his confession, but clearly he had to hurry to Saligny’s house and destroy that damning evidence that an impostor was about. The house would have been gone over by the attorneys and the appraisers of the estate, and a conspicuous trunk in the study would assuredly have been opened.
‘Having already proved an alibi for madame and for himself, Vautrelle would return to Saligny’s home as soon as he could. I did not, naturally, know about the trunk until we ourselves reached the premises; but it seemed probable that there was in that house some evidence of a false Saligny which Vautrelle would wish destroyed. I shall be very much surprised if the executors do not unearth a diary, some letters in Laurent’s handwriting, or other suspicious material. That Vautrelle had visited Saligny’s home on the day before the murder is fairly clear since he knew about and suspected the trunk. This was probably when he stole the keys of the cellar door … So after the killing of Laurent he gave my shadower the slip (recall the operative’s report over the telephone), and went back to hide the body of the real Saligny. Fresh mortar does not ordinarily lie about loose in cellars, and presents another indication that not only was the prowler familiar with the house, but that he had prepared for his work on that or the preceding day.
‘The intruder was, then, a close friend of Saligny—’
‘But why didn’t Golton fit in as well? He lived next door, too.’
‘Zut alors! That Golton hypothesis of yours is an idée fixe!’
I narrated the experiment of the handshake in the café, and added, ‘That was why I suspected him to the very last minute—’
Bencolin chuckled. ‘Well, some of our evidence hinges round the flashlight; let us take that into consideration. Golton’s bad hand was no evidence at all that he was guilty. Have you ever had anything knocked out of your own hand by a pistol bullet?’
I confessed to no such charming experience.
‘A light object would cause no more disastrous result than a momentary jar. Something very heavy, of course, might numb one’s hand; but certainly not an electric torch. Did you think for a moment that I was trying to hit the intruder with my shots?’
‘Since you fired point-blank at him, it seemed highly probable.’
‘Why? I knew who the intruder was and I also was morally certain he carried no pistol—why should he? He expected to find the house deserted. But remember above all that we ourselves were fully as guilty of house-breaking as he. I hardly wanted to complicate matters by unnecessary shooting. Had I known that Girard was in danger I would have dropped him, but I cannot lay claim to omniscience. What I was doing—sound as it may like the master detective of fiction—was estimating his height … How? Well, if you are holding an electric torch, what is the natural position of your hand? Try it. You see—waist-high. Now I took good aim—I couldn’t have had a better target—and put two bullets through the flashlight firing from the stairs. One of the bullets nicked the newel post at the precise height of the electric torch, and then entered the floor. Calculating from my own position on the stairs, and estimating the mark on the newel post as indicating the man’s waist, it was not too difficult to estimate his height at about six feet.’
‘It is without doubt a unique, if somewhat too spectacular, method of taking a man’s measurements. But it seems to this hard-headed person that it would have been much simpler neatly to put those bullets through both legs—’
‘My dear fellow, you are saturated with traditions of American gunplay! In France the police shoot only as a last resort. Besides, a sense of drama prevented me from pouncing too soon on my victim.’
‘And thereby cost a man’s life. But proceed.’
‘So the height of the murderer,’ went on Bencolin expansively, ‘excludes definitely your candidate, M. Golton. Your last remarks indicate why I did not give you a loaded pistol. Had you been in my place, you would have felt an overwhelming urge to clutter up the premises with bullets on the slightest provocation. You would have caught the machine-gun urge of New York and Chicago—in which cities, I am told, under the beneficent American government, a man has no personal liberties except the full and free right to commit murder.’
‘Thereby,’ I said, ‘causing French detectives to talk like United States senators …’
‘It is true!’ he protested. ‘That is the philosophy of your great country. It is even so bad that every time I see in the newsreels a picture of your president M. Coolidge, he is either wearing a cowboy suit or indulging in rifle-practice. Diable! The crime-situation must be terrible.’
‘It is certainly a branch of crime,’ I said, ‘sponsored by the W.C.T.U.[4] and kindred producers of nausea … You were saying?’
‘About the murder. When you add the evidence of the cigarette ashes in the card-room containing hashish, the fingerprints on the window being those of madame, you add a couple of details which never interested me, but which would be highly valuable in a court of law. A search of Vautrelle’s house tonight produced the gloves he had worn to bury Saligny and kill Girard—’
‘What is the evidence in a pair of soiled gloves? I have a pair myself.’
‘I would warn you never to discount the efforts of our tireless laboratory. Did you know that the fibres of certain fabrics, impressed on a receptive surface, will print their individual weave exactly like fingerprints? And that no two weaves, even on a machine-made article, are precisely similar under a microscope? No, Jack, it is no longer safe even to use gloves. The fibreprints on the dust of the knife that stabbed Girard correspond with the soiled gloves Vautrelle had neglected to throw away.’
‘Is there any more of this scientific evidence?’
‘All the evidence which will convict those two is scientific. You recall my request to examine the false Saligny’s fingernails. Clinging to the inside of the nail on the first finger of his right hand was a bit of silk, about a sixteenth of an inch long, scratched from madame’s stocking when he fell. Of course, I could not see it; I did not know it was there. But I trusted to the laboratory to discover anything that might be there. The octopus has eyes, too …’
‘You neglect nothing, do you? … Then all that mummery of reproducing the crime was unnecessary!’
‘Oh, well, I had to have a little personal satisfaction,’ he explained, somewhat apologetically. ‘I am inherently a mountebank. It is our national weakness as constant gunplay is yours. When I can be aided by dummy tile walls, pleasing musical effects, shadowgraphs, and certain actors expertly made up (one with a wax head, which will fall at the application of a tin sword), I cannot resist the temptation to become a disciple of Hollywood. Besides, I am fond of sticking pins in my fellow-mortals to see how they will react … I studied Vautrelle, and I fancied he would break before madame. It was a test …’ He sat a long while silent in the firelight, so motionless that the ash did not fall from his cigar. ‘Examine closely, my friend,’ he said at last, ‘the extremely contained person who never cuts loose; who never indulges in a good, healthy, plebeian brawl; who affects indifference and boredom—that man is the extreme in self-consciousness. He is never sure of himself, and at the climax he will crack. Madame, on the other hand, was the opposite; you recall how she was willing to speak so freely and personally before you, a stranger. I rather imagined she would outlast him. And I was curious about both Golton and Fenelli.’ He chuckled. ‘Again I guessed correctly. The American had nothing on his mind; it scared him to a shadow, and thus he enjoyed it thoroughly. And, at least, it will furnish a better subject for conversation than Yellowstone Park. As for Fenelli, it was almost necessary to escort him home in an ambulance …
‘And now,’ he concluded, reaching over to take the champagne bottle from its cooler, ‘we have finished. I give you a wish, the conclusion of all cases—’
The broad glasses clicked together in the firelight. Then, at Bencolin’s elbow, the telephone rang. The pieces of his overturned glass lay shattered on the hearth, and, as he picked up the ’phone eagerly, the spilled champagne crawled and sizzled about the burning logs.