I now ask you to pay the closest possible attention to what I am about to recount.
Day dawned. From outside came the sounds of the waking population. From the noise made by the cart wheels, I could tell that the street was unsurfaced. Nor was it a wide street, because the rattle of the carts was loud and, apparently, very close. I could hear the cries of streetsellers too, but no carriages.
The masked man had remained motionless in that pose of utter prostration, his head in his hands.
The man who had given his name as A.M.C. was lying on the sofa, his eyes closed as if he were sleeping.
I opened the shutters. It was daylight. The lace curtains and the blinds were drawn. A gloomy, greenish light filtered in through the window panes, which were frosted like the glass of gas lamps.
‘It’s morning, my friend,’ I said to the masked man. ‘Be brave! We need to examine the room, one piece of furniture at a time.’
He rose and drew back the door-curtain at the far end of the room. Behind it I saw a small bedroom containing a bed and a round bedside table covered with a green velvet cloth. The bed had not been slept in and was covered by a red satin eiderdown. It had a single wide, high, soft pillow, of a kind not commonly found in Portugal; on the table was an empty box and a vase of faded flowers. There was also a washstand, with brushes, soap, sponges, folded towels and two slender bottles of Parma violets. A sturdy swordstick was propped against the wall in one corner.
There was nothing particularly significant about the way in which the objects in the room had been arranged. In fact, our examination reinforced the idea that the house was rarely inhabited, perhaps only visited now and then as a meeting-place, but not used as someone’s home.
The dead man’s frock coat and waistcoat were draped over a chair; one of his shoes was on the floor beside the sofa; his hat lay on one corner of the carpet, as if thrown there. His overcoat had been flung down near the bed.
We searched all the pockets of the dead man’s clothing and found neither wallet, letters or papers of any kind. In his waistcoat pocket was his plain gold watch and a small gold mesh purse containing a few coins. We did not find a handkerchief. The question of how the opium had been brought into the room remained unanswered; there was no sign of any phial, bottle, packet or box in which it might have been brought in liquid or in powdered form, and that, to my mind, was the first firm indication that this was not a case of suicide.
I asked if there were other connecting rooms that we ought to visit.
‘Yes, there are,’ replied the masked man. ‘This building has two entrances and two staircases. Now, when we arrived, we found that the door communicating with the other rooms was locked from the other side. So the man did not leave this room after coming in from the street and before dying – or being murdered.’
How had he carried the opium, then? Even if it was already in the room, the phial or whatever must be here somewhere. It seemed unlikely that it would have been destroyed. After all, the glass with the dregs of diluted opium was still there. A further fact that seemed to militate against the idea of suicide was that we had not found the dead man’s cravat. He would hardly have taken it off, let alone destroyed or discarded it. And it was equally improbable that he would have come into this room, dressed as if for a formal visit, but without a cravat. Someone, then, had been in this house, either shortly before the death or at the same time. And that person, for whatever reason, had taken the dead man’s cravat.
The idea that someone else had been there in the room with the alleged suicide put paid to the idea that it had been a suicide at all and led one to presume, instead, that the man had been murdered.
We went over to the window and made a minute examination of the sheet of paper on which the suicide note had been written.
‘It’s definitely his writing, there’s no doubt about it,’ mused the masked man, ‘and yet there’s something not quite right about it!’
He studied the paper meticulously; it was a half sheet of writing paper. I immediately noticed at the top of the page the faint trace of a mark consisting of a signature and a crown, which must have been embossed on the missing half of the sheet. It was clearly paper of a superior quality. The masked man was surprised and startled when I pointed this out. In the room there was neither paper, ink or pens. The suicide note must have been composed and written elsewhere.
‘I know the kind of paper he used at home,’ said the masked man, ‘and this isn’t it. There was no mark like that. And he had no other kind to hand.’
The mark was not clear enough for us to be able to identify it. It was, however, becoming increasingly obvious that the note had not been written in his own house, where that particular paper did not exist, nor in this room, where, as I have said, there was no paper, no inkwell, not even a book, an ink blotter, or a pencil.
Could it have been written outside, in the street somewhere? In someone else’s house perhaps? This seemed unlikely since he had no close friends in Lisbon and knew no one whose writing paper was likely to be embossed with a crown.
Could it have been written in a stationer’s shop? No, the paper sold in shops would never be embossed with a crown.
Could the note have been written on the blank half page torn from an old letter he had received? That, too, seemed improbable because the paper had been folded down the middle and there were no other creases to indicate that it had ever been inside an envelope.
Furthermore, the page bore the same odour of marechala face powder that pervaded the room in which we were sitting.
And when I held the paper up to the light, I was able to make out the print left by a damp or sweaty thumb, besmirching the paper’s smooth, satiny whiteness. That thumb-print looked small, slender and female. This was a somewhat vague clue, but the masked man had, at the same time, come up with another far more trustworthy one.
‘This man,’ he observed, ‘always and invariably abbreviated the word “that” to two t’s separated by a hyphen. No one else did this, it was entirely personal and original to him. And yet in the note, which, by the way, sounds most un-English, the word “that” is written in full.’
He turned to A.M.C. and asked: ‘Why did you not show us this note at once? This statement is a forgery.’
‘A forgery!’ exclaimed the other, springing up in either alarm or surprise.
‘Yes, a forgery,’ the masked man repeated, ‘intended to cover up a murder. It bears all the hallmarks. But the one overwhelming piece of evidence is this: Where are the £2,300 pounds in notes that the man had in his pocket?’
A.M.C. looked at him, bewildered, like a man waking from a dream. The masked man went on:
‘They are nowhere to be found because you stole them. You killed this man in order to steal them and forged this note to cover up the crime.’
‘Sir,’ observed A.M.C. gravely, ‘I give you my word of honour that I have no idea what you are talking about.’
Then, fixing my eyes on the young man, I said very slowly:
‘This note is patently false, but I don’t see what this other business is all about, this £2,300. What I do see is that this man was poisoned. I don’t know if it was you or someone else who killed him, but I do know that the accomplice to the murder was a woman.’
‘Impossible, doctor!’ cried the masked man. ‘What an absurd idea!’
‘Absurd? But consider this house, this highly perfumed, silk-lined room, all these fabrics, the subdued lighting filtered through frosted glass, the carpeted staircase, the banister fashioned from a silken rope. Over there, the bearskin rug next to the Voltaire chair seems still to bear the imprint of a man’s body. Can’t you see the woman in all this? Isn’t this clearly a house intended for romantic assignations?’
‘Or for some other purpose.’
‘And this notepaper,’ I went on, ‘it’s the kind of dainty stuff known as Empress paper that women buy in Paris at the Maison Maquet.’
‘Plenty of men use it too!’
‘But they don’t perfume it with the same aroma that fills this house. This paper belongs to a woman who verified the forgery, saw it being written, took an intense interest in the perfection of the forgery, and whose damp fingertips left a clear mark on the paper!’
The masked man said nothing.
‘And what about the bunch of withered flowers in there? It consists of some roses tied with a velvet ribbon. The ribbon is impregnated with the scent of a pomade, and there’s a small groove, like a scratch made with a fingernail, with a tiny hole at either end. It’s obviously the mark left by a hairpin!’
‘The flowers could have been given to him; he himself might have brought them here from somewhere else.’
‘And what about the handkerchief I found yesterday under a chair?’
I threw the handkerchief down on the table. The masked man eagerly snatched it up, examined it and put it away.
A.M.C. was staring at me in astonishment, apparently overcome by the harsh logic of my words. The masked man remained silent for a few moments, then in a humble, almost supplicating voice said:
‘Doctor, doctor, for the love of God! These findings prove nothing. I’m convinced that this handkerchief, which is, unquestionably, a woman’s, is the one the dead man carried in his pocket. It’s true. Don’t you remember that we couldn’t find his handkerchief?’
‘And don’t you remember, too, that we still haven’t found his cravat?’
Defeated, the masked man did not respond.
‘When all’s said and done, I am neither judge here nor party to the cause!’ I exclaimed. ‘I vigorously deplore this death, and I speak of it only because of the sorrow and the feeling of horror it inspires. Whether this young fellow killed himself or was killed, whether he died at the hands of a woman or a man, matters little to me. What I must point out, however, is that the corpse cannot remain unburied for much longer. He needs to be buried today. That’s all. It’s daylight now, and all I want is to leave this place.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said the masked man, ‘in a minute.’
And then, taking A.M.C. by the arm he said to me:
‘One moment, I’ll be right back!’
And they went out through the door that led into rest of the house, locking it from the other side.
I stayed there alone, pacing restlessly up and down.
The light of day had aroused in my mind a multitude of thoughts, entirely new and different from those that had occupied me during the night. There are thoughts that can live only in silence and shadows, thoughts that the day disperses and erases. There are still others that appear only in the glare of the sun.
My head was filled with a host of confused ideas, which, in the sudden dawn light, had whirled into the air like a flock of pigeons startled by a gunshot.
I wandered, unthinking, into the bedroom, sat down on the bed, and rested one arm on the pillow.
Then, quite how I do not know, on the white pillow case, caught on a mother-of-pearl button, I saw, noticed, fixed upon, a long blonde hair – that of a woman.
I did not dare to touch it immediately. I merely observed it eagerly for some time.
‘So it was true! There you are! I’ve found you at last, poor little hair! I pity the innocent way you lie there, oblivious, careless, idle, languid! You may be cruel, you may be wicked, but you are not crafty or underhand. I have you within my grasp, within my line of sight; don’t run away, don’t tremble, don’t blush; you give yourself, you consent, you offer yourself up, O meek, gentle, trusting hair. And yet, albeit fragile, tiny, almost microscopic, you are a part of the woman whom I had intuited, foreseen, and whom I seek! Is she the author of the crime or completely blameless? Is she merely an accomplice? I don’t know, and you cannot tell me.’
Suddenly, as I continued to study the hair, through some inexplicable mental process, I seemed to recognize that blonde thread, to recognise it completely: its colour, its subtle shade, its whole appearance! It reminded me of… and then the woman to whom the hair belonged appeared to me! But when her name sprang unbidden to my lips, I said to myself:
‘Oh really! From a single hair? What nonsense!’
And I burst out laughing.
This letter has already gone on far too long. I will continue tomorrow.