"Voices!" cried Hanaud. He sat up straight in his chair, whilst Betty Harlowe went as white as a ghost. "Voices! What is this? Did you recognise those voices?"
"One, Madame's. There was no mistaking it. It was loud and violent for a moment. Then it went off into a mumble of groans. The other voice only spoke once and very few words and very clearly. But it spoke in a whisper. There was too a sound of—movements."
"Movements!" said Hanaud sharply; and with his voice his face seemed to sharpen too. "Here's a word which does not help us much. A procession moves. So does the chair if I push it. So does my hand if I cover a mouth and stop a cry. Is it that sort of movement you mean, Mademoiselle?"
Under the stern insistence of his questions Ann Upcott suddenly weakened.
"Oh, I am afraid so," she said with a loud cry, and she clapped her hands to her face. "I never understood until this morning when you spoke of how the arrow might be used. Oh, I shall never forgive myself. I stood in the darkness, a few yards away—no more—I stood quite still and listened and just beyond the lighted doorway Madame was being killed!" She drew her hands from her face and beat upon her knees with her clenched fists in a frenzy.
"'Yes, I believe that now!' Madame cried in the hoarse, harsh voice we knew: 'Stripped, eh? Stripped to the skin!' and she laughed wildly; and then came the sound, as though—yes, it might have been that!—as though she were forced down and held, and Madame's voice died to a mumble and then silence—and then the other voice in a low clear whisper, 'That will do now.' And all the while I stood in the darkness—oh!"
"What did you do after that clear whisper reached your ears?" Hanaud commanded. "Take your hands from your face, if you please, and let me hear."
Ann Upcott obeyed him. She flung her head back with the tears streaming down her face.
"I turned," she whispered. "I went out of the room. I closed the door behind me—oh, ever so gently. I fled."
"Fled? Fled? Where to?"
"Up the stairs! To my room."
"And you rang no bell? You roused no one? You fled to your room! You hid your head under the bed-clothes like a child! Come, come, Mademoiselle!"
Hanaud broke off his savage irony to ask,
"And whose voice did you think it was that whispered so clearly, 'That will do now?' The stranger's you spoke of in the library this morning?"
"No, Monsieur," Ann replied. "I could not tell. With a whisper one voice is like another."
"But you must have given that voice an owner. To run away and hide—no one would do that."
"I thought it was Jeanne Baudin's."
And Hanaud sat back in his chair again, gazing at the girl with a look in which there was as much horror as incredulity. Jim Frobisher stood behind him ashamed of his very race. Could there be a more transparent subterfuge? If she thought that the nurse Jeanne Baudin was in the bedroom, why did she turn and fly?
"Come, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud. His voice had suddenly become gentle, almost pleading. "You will not make me believe that."
Ann Upcott turned with a helpless gesture towards Betty.
"You see!" she said.
"Yes," Betty answered. She sat in doubt for a second or two and then sprang to her feet.
"Wait!" she said, and before any one could have stopped her she was skimming half-way across the garden to the house. Jim Frobisher wondered whether Hanaud had meant to stop her and then had given up the idea as quite out of the question. Certainly he had made some small quick movement; and even now, he watched Betty's flight across the broad lawn between the roses with an inscrutable queer look.
"To run like that!" he said to Frobisher, "with a boy's nimbleness and a girl's grace! It is pretty, eh? The long slim legs that twinkle, the body that floats!" and Betty ran up the stone steps into the house.
There was a tension in Hanaud's attitude with which his light words did not agree, and he watched the blank windows of the house with expectancy. Betty, however, was hardly a minute upon her errand. She reappeared upon the steps with a largish envelope in her hand and quickly rejoined the group.
"Monsieur, we have tried to keep this back from you," she said, without bitterness but with a deep regret. "I yesterday, Ann to-day, just as we have tried for many years to keep it from all Dijon. But there is no help for it now."
She opened the envelope and, taking out a cabinet photograph, handed it to Hanaud.
"This is the portrait of Madame, my aunt, at the time of her marriage with my uncle."
It was the three-quarter length portrait of a woman, slender with the straight carriage of youth, in whose face a look of character had replaced youth's prettiness. It was a face made spiritual by suffering, the eyes shadowed and wistful, the mouth tender, and conveying even in the hard medium of a photograph some whimsical sense of humour. It made Jim Frobisher, gazing over Hanaud's shoulder, exclaim not "She was beautiful," but "I would like to have known her."
"Yes! A companion," Hanaud added.
Betty took a second photograph from the envelope.
"But this, Monsieur, is the same lady a year ago."
The second photograph had been taken at Monte Carlo, and it was difficult to believe that it was of the same woman, so tragic a change had taken place within those ten years. Hanaud held the portraits side by side. The grace, the suggestion of humour had all gone; the figure had grown broad, the features coarse and heavy; the cheeks had fattened, the lips were pendulous; and there was nothing but violence in the eyes. It was a dreadful picture of collapse.
"It is best to be precise, Mademoiselle," said Hanaud gently, "though these photographs tell their unhappy story clearly enough. Madame Harlowe, during the last years of her life, drank?"
"Since my uncle's death," Betty explained. "Her life, as very likely you know already, had been rather miserable and lonely before she married him. But she had a dream then on which to live. After Simon Harlowe died, however——" and she ended her explanation with a gesture.
"Yes," Hanaud replied, "of course, Mademoiselle, we have known, Monsieur Frobisher and I, ever since we came into this affair that there was some secret. We knew it before your reticence of yesterday or Mademoiselle Upcott's of to-day. Waberski must have known of something which you would not care to have exposed before he threatened your lawyers in London, or brought his charges against you."
"Yes, he knew and the doctors and the servants of course who were very loyal. We did our best to keep our secret but we could never be sure that we had succeeded."
A friendly smile broadened Hanaud's face.
"Well, we can make sure now and here," he said, and both the girls and Jim stared at him.
"How?" they exclaimed in an incredulous voice.
Hanaud beamed. He held them in suspense. He spread out his hands. The artist as he would have said, the mountebank as Jim Frobisher would have expressed it, had got the upper hand in him, and prepared his effect.
"By answering me one simple question," he said. "Have either of you two ladies received an anonymous letter upon the subject?"
The test took them all by surprise; yet each one of them recognised immediately that they could hardly have a better. All the secrets of the town had been exploited at one time or another by this unknown person or group of persons—all the secrets that is, except this one of Mrs. Harlowe's degradation. For Betty answered,
"No! I never received one."
"Nor I," added Ann.
"Then your secret is your secret still," said Hanaud.
"For how long now?" Betty asked quickly, and Hanaud did not answer a word. He could make no promise without being false to what he had called his creed.
"It is a pity," said Betty wistfully. "We have striven so hard, Ann and I," and she gave to the two men a glimpse of the life the two girls had led in the Maison Crenelle. "We could do very little. We had neither of us any authority. We were both of us dependent upon Madame's generosity, and though no one could have been kinder when—when Madame was herself, she was not easy when she had—the attacks. There was too much difference in age between us and her for us really to do anything but keep guard.
"She would not brook interference; she drank alone in her bedroom; she grew violent and threatening if any one interfered. She would turn them all into the street. If she needed any help she could ring for the nurse, as indeed she sometimes, though rarely, did." It was a dreadful and wearing life as Betty Harlowe described it for the two young sentinels.
"We were utterly in despair," Betty continued. "For Madame, of course, was really ill with her heart, and we always feared some tragedy would happen. This letter which Ann was to write when I was at Monsieur de Pouillac's ball seemed our one chance. It was to a doctor in England—he called himself a doctor at all events—who advertised that he had a certain remedy which could be given without the patient's knowledge in her food and drink. Oh, I had no faith in it, but we had got to try it."
Hanaud looked round at Frobisher triumphantly.
"What did I say to you, Monsieur Frobisher, when you wanted to ask a question about this letter? You see! These things disclose themselves in their due order if you leave them alone."
The triumph went out of his voice. He rose to his feet and, bowing to Betty with an unaffected stateliness and respect, he handed her back the photographs.
"Mademoiselle, I am very sorry," he said. "It is clear that you and your friend have lived amongst difficulties which we did not suspect. And, for the secret, I shall do what I can."
Jim quite forgave him the snub which had been administered to him for the excellence of his manner towards Betty. He had a hope even that now he would forswear his creed, so that the secret might still be kept and the young sentinels receive their reward for their close watch. But Hanaud sat down again in his chair, and once more turned towards Ann Upcott. He meant to go on then. He would not leave well alone. Jim was all the more disappointed, because he could not but realise that the case was more and more clearly building itself from something unsubstantial into something solid, from a conjecture to an argument—this case against some one.
CHAPTER TEN: The Clock upon the Cabinet
Ann Upcott's story was in the light of this new disclosure intelligible enough. Standing in the darkness, she had heard, as she thought, Mrs. Harlowe in one of her violent outbreaks. Then with a sense of relief she had understood that Jeanne Baudin the nurse was with Mrs. Harlowe, controlling and restraining her and finally administering some sedative. She had heard the outcries diminish and cease and a final whisper from the nurse to her patient or even perhaps to herself, "That will do now." Then she had turned and fled, taking care to attract no attention to herself. Real cowardice had nothing to do with her flight. The crisis was over. Her intervention, which before would only have been a provocation to a wilder outburst on the part of Mrs. Harlowe, was now altogether without excuse. It would once more have aroused the invalid, and next day would have added to the discomfort and awkwardness of life in the Maison Crenelle. For Mrs. Harlowe sober would have known that Ann had been a witness of one more of her dreadful exhibitions. The best thing which Ann could do, she did, given that her interpretation of the scene was the true one. She ran noiselessly back in the darkness to her room.
"Yes," said Hanaud. "But you believe now that your interpretation was not correct. You believe now that whilst you stood in the darkness with the door open and the light beyond, Madame Harlowe was being murdered, coldly and cruelly murdered a few feet away from you."
Ann Upcott shivered from head to foot.
"I don't want to believe it," she cried. "It's too horrible."
"You believe now that the one who whispered 'That will do now,' was not Jeanne Baudin," Hanaud insisted, "but some unknown person, and that the whisper was uttered after murder had been done to a third person in that room."
Ann twisted her body from this side to that; she wrung her hands.
"I am afraid of it!" she moaned.
"And what is torturing you now, Mademoiselle, is remorse that you did not step silently forward and from the darkness of the treasure-room look through that lighted doorway." He spoke with a great consideration and his insight into her distress was in its way a solace to her.
"Yes," she exclaimed eagerly. "I told you this morning I could have hindered it. I didn't understand until this morning. You see, that night something else happened"; and now indeed stark fear drew the colour from her cheeks and shone in her eyes.
"Something else?" Betty asked with a quick indraw of her breath, and she shifted her chair a little so that she might face Ann. She was wearing a black coat over a white silk shirt open at the throat, and she took her handkerchief from a side pocket of the coat and drew it across her forehead.
"Yes, Mademoiselle," Hanaud explained. "It is clear that something else happened that night to your friend, something which, taken together with our talk this morning over the book of arrows, had made her believe that murder was done." He looked at Ann. "You went then to your room?"
Ann resumed her story.
"I went to bed. I was very—what shall I say?—disturbed by Madame's outburst, as I thought it. One never knew what was going to happen in this house. It was on my nerves. For a time I tumbled from side to side in my bed. I was in a fever. Then suddenly I was asleep, sound asleep. But only for a time. I woke up and it was still pitch dark in my room. There was not a thread of light from the shutters. I turned over from my side on to my back and I stretched out my arms above my head. As God is my Judge I touched a face——" and even after all these days the terror of that moment was so vivid and fresh to her that she shuddered and a little sob broke from her lips. "A face quite close to me bending over me, in silence. I drew my hands away with a gasp. My heart was in my throat. I lay just for a second or two dumb, paralysed. Then my voice came back to me and I screamed."
It was the look of the girl as she told her story perhaps more than the words she used; but something of her terror spread like a contagion amongst her hearers. Jim Frobisher's shoulders worked uneasily. Betty with her big eyes wide open, her breath suspended, hung upon Ann's narrative. Hanaud himself said:
"You screamed? I do not wonder."
"I knew that no one could hear me and that lying down I was helpless," Ann continued. "I sprang out of bed in a panic, and now I touched no one. I was so scared out of my wits that I had lost all sense of direction. I couldn't find the switch of the electric light. I stumbled along a wall feeling with my hands. I heard myself sobbing as though I was a stranger. At last I knocked against a chest of drawers and came a little to myself. I found my way then to the switch and turned on the light. The room was empty. I tried to tell myself that I had been dreaming, but I knew that the tale wasn't true. Some one had been stealthily bending down close, oh, so close over me in the darkness. My hand that had touched the face seemed to tingle. I asked myself with a shiver, what would have happened to me if just at that moment I had not waked up? I stood and listened, but the beating of my heart filled the whole room with noise. I stole to the door and laid my ear against the panel. Oh, I could easily have believed that one after another an army was creeping on tiptoe past my door. At last I made up my mind. I flung the door open wide. For a moment I stood back from it, but once the door was open I heard nothing. I stole out to the head of the great staircase. Below me the hall was as silent as an empty church. I think that I should have heard a spider stir. I suddenly realised that the light was streaming from my room and that some of it must reach me. I cried at once, 'Who's there?' And then I ran back to my room and locked myself in. I knew that I should sleep no more that night. I ran to the windows and threw open the shutters. The night had cleared, the stars were bright in a clean black sky and there was a freshness of morning in the air. I had been, I should think, about five minutes at the window when—you know perhaps, Monsieur, how the clocks in Dijon clash out and take up the hour from one another and pass it on to the hills—all of them struck three. I stayed by the window until the morning came."
After she had finished no one spoke for a little while. Then Hanaud slowly lit another cigarette, looking now upon the ground, now into the air, anywhere except at the faces of his companions.
"So this alarming thing happened just before three o'clock in the morning?" he asked gravely. "You are very sure of that, I suppose? For, you see, it may be of the utmost importance."
"I am quite sure, Monsieur," she said.
"And you have told this story to no one until this moment?"
"To no one in the world," replied Ann. "The next morning Madame Harlowe was found dead. There were the arrangements for the funeral. Then came Monsieur Boris's accusation. There were troubles enough in the house without my adding to them. Besides, no one would have believed my story of the face in the darkness; and I didn't of course associate it then with the death of Mrs. Harlowe."
"No," Hanaud agreed. "For you believed that death to have been natural."
"Yes, and I am not sure that it wasn't natural now," Ann protested. "But to-day I had to tell you this story, Monsieur Hanaud"; and she leaned forward in her chair and claimed his attention with her eyes, her face, every tense muscle of her body. "Because if you are right and murder was done in this house on the twenty-seventh, I know the exact hour when it was done."
"Ah!"
Hanaud nodded his head once or twice slowly. He gathered up his feet beneath him. His eyes glittered very brightly as he looked at Ann. He gave Frobisher the queer impression of an animal crouching to spring.
"The clock upon the marquetry cabinet," he said, "against the middle of the wall in the treasure-room. The white face of it and the hour which leapt at you during that fraction of a second when your fingers were on the switch."
"Yes," said Ann with a slow and quiet emphasis. "The hour was half-past ten."
With that statement the tension was relaxed. Betty's tightly-clenched hand opened and her trifle of a handkerchief fluttered down on the grass. Hanaud changed from that queer attitude of a crouching animal. Jim Frobisher drew a great breath of relief.
"Yes, that is very important," said Hanaud.
"Important. I should think it was!" cried Jim.
For this was clear and proven to him. If murder had been done on the night of the 27th of April, there was just one person belonging to the household of the Maison Crenelle who could have no share in it; and that one person was his client, Betty Harlowe.
Betty was stooping to pick up her handkerchief when Hanaud spoke to her; and she drew herself erect again with a little jerk.
"Does that clock on the marquetry cabinet keep good time, Mademoiselle?" he asked.
"Very good," she answered. "Monsieur Sabin the watch-maker in the Rue de la Liberté has had it more than once to clean. It is an eight-day clock. It will be going when the seals are broken this afternoon. You will see for yourself."
Hanaud, however, accepted her declaration on the spot. He rose to his feet and bowed to her with a certain formality but with a smile which redeemed it.
"At half-past ten Mademoiselle Harlowe was dancing at the house of M. de Pouillac on the Boulevard Thiers," he said. "Of that there is no doubt. Inquiries have been made. Mademoiselle did not leave that house until after one in the morning. There is evidence enough of that to convince her worst enemy, from her chauffeur and her dancing partners to M. de Pouillac's coachman, who stood at the bottom of the steps with a lantern during that evening and remembers to have held open for Mademoiselle the door of her car when she went away."
"So that's that," said Jim to himself. Betty at all events was out of the net for good. And with that certainty there came a revolution in his thoughts. Why shouldn't Hanaud's search go on? It was interesting to watch the building up of this case against an unknown criminal—a case so difficult to bring to its proper conclusion in the Court of Assize, a case of poison where there was no trace of poison, a case where out of a mass of conjectures, here and there and more and more definite facts were coming into view; just as more and more masts of ships stand up out of a tumbled sea, the nearer one approaches land. Yes, now he wanted Hanaud to go on, delving astutely, letting, in his own phrase, things disclose themselves in their due sequence. But there was one point which Hanaud had missed, which should be brought to his notice. The mouse once more, he thought with all a man's vanity in his modesty, would come to the help of the netted lion. He cleared his throat.
"Miss Ann, there is one little question I would like to ask you," he began, and Hanaud turned upon him, to his surprise, with a face of thunder.
"You wish to ask a question?" he said. "Well, Monsieur, ask it if you wish. It is your right."
His manner added, what his voice left unsaid, "and your responsibility." Jim hesitated. He could see no harm in the question he proposed to ask. It was of vital importance. Yet Hanaud stood in front of him with a lowering face, daring him to put it. Jim did not doubt any longer that Hanaud was quite aware of his point and yet for some unknown reason objected to its disclosure. Jim yielded, but not with a very good grace.
"It is nothing," he said surlily, and Hanaud at once was all cheerfulness again.
"Then we will adjourn," he said, looking at his watch. "It is nearly one o'clock. Shall we say three for the Commissary of Police? Yes? Then I shall inform him and we will meet in the library at three and"—with a little bow to Betty—"the interdict shall be raised."
"At three, then," she said gaily. She sprang up from her chair, stooped, picked up her handkerchief with a swift and supple movement, twirled upon her heel and cried, "Come along, Ann!"
The four people moved off towards the house. Betty looked back.
"You have left your gloves behind you on your chair," she said suddenly to Hanaud. Hanaud looked back.
"So I have," he said, and then in a voice of protest, "Oh, Mademoiselle!"
For Betty had already darted back and now returned dangling the gloves in her hand.
"Mademoiselle, how shall I thank you?" he asked as he took them from her. Then he cocked his head at Frobisher, who was looking a little stiff.
"Ha! ha! my young friend," he said with a grin. "You do not like that so much kindness should be shown me. No! You are looking very proper. You have the poker in the back. But ask yourself this: 'What are youth and good looks compared with Hanaud?'"
No, Jim Frobisher did not like Hanaud at all when the urchin got the upper hand in him. And the worst of it was that he had no rejoinder. He flushed very red, but he really had no rejoinder. They walked in silence to the house, and Hanaud, picking up his hat and stick, took his leave by the courtyard and the big gates. Ann drifted into the library. Jim felt a touch upon his arm. Betty was standing beside him with a smile of amusement upon her face.
"You didn't really mind my going back for his gloves, did you?" she asked. "Say you didn't, Jim!" and the amusement softened into tenderness. "I wouldn't have done it for worlds if I had thought you'd have minded."
Jim's ill-humour vanished like mist on a summer morning.
"Mind?" he cried. "You shall pin a rose in his button-hole if it pleases you, and all I'll say will be, 'You might do the same for me'!"
Betty laughed and gave his arm a friendly squeeze.
"We are friends again, then," she said, and the next moment she was out on the steps under the glass face of the porch. "Lunch at two, Ann!" she cried. "I must walk all the grime of this morning out of my brain."
She was too quick and elusive for Jim Frobisher. She had something of Ariel in her conception—a delicate creature of fire and spirit and air. She was across the courtyard and out of sight in the street of Charles-Robert before he had quite realised that she was going. He turned doubtfully towards the library, where Ann Upcott stood in the doorway.
"I had better follow her," he said, reaching for his hat
Ann smiled and shook her head wisely.
"I shouldn't. I know Betty. She wants to be alone."
"Do you think so?"
"I am sure."
Jim twiddled his hat in his hands, not half as sure upon the point as she was. Ann watched him with a rather rueful smile for a little while. Then she shrugged her shoulders in a sudden exasperation.
"There is something you ought to do," she said. "You ought to let Monsieur Bex, Betty's notary here, know that the seals are to be broken this afternoon. He ought to be here. He was here when they were affixed. Besides, he has all the keys of Mrs. Harlowe's drawers and cupboards."
"That's true," Jim exclaimed. "I'll go at once."
Ann gave him Monsieur Bex's address in the Place Etienne Dolet, and from the window of the library watched him go upon his errand. She stood at the window for a long while after he had disappeared.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: A New Suspect
Monsieur Bex the notary came out into the hall of his house when Frobisher sent his card in to him. He was a small, brisk man with a neat pointed beard, his hair cut en brosse and the corner of his napkin tucked into his neck between the flaps of his collar.
Jim explained that the seals were to be removed from the rooms of the Maison Grenelle, but said nothing at all of the new developments which had begun with the discovery of the book of the arrows.
"I have had communications with Messrs. Frobisher and Haslitt," the little man exclaimed. "Everything has been as correct as it could possibly be. I am happy to meet a partner of so distinguished a firm. Yes. I will certainly present myself at three with my keys and see the end of this miserable scandal. It has been a disgrace. That young lady so delicious and so correct! And that animal of a Waberski! But we can deal with him. We have laws in France."
He gave Jim the impression that there were in his opinion no laws anywhere else, and he bowed his visitor into the street.
Jim returned by the Rue des Godrans and the main thoroughfare of the town, the street of Liberty. As he crossed the semicircle of the Place d'Armes in front of the Hôtel de Ville, he almost ran into Hanaud smoking a cigar.
"You have lunched already?" he cried.
"An affair of a quarter of an hour," said Hanaud with a wave of the hand. "And you?"
"Not until two. Miss Harlowe wanted a walk."
Hanaud smiled.
"How I understand that! The first walk after an ordeal! The first walk of a convalescent after an operation! The first walk of a defendant found innocent of a grave charge! It must be worth taking, that walk. But console yourself, my friend, for the postponement of your luncheon. You have met me!" and he struck something of an attitude.
Now Jim had the gravest objection to anything theatrical, especially when displayed in public places, and he answered stiffly, "That is a pleasure, to be sure."
Hanaud grinned. To make Jim look "proper" was becoming to him an unfailing entertainment.
"Now I reward you," he said, though for what Jim could not imagine. "You shall come with me. At this hour, on the top of old Philippe le Bon's Terrace Tower, we shall have the world to ourselves."
He led the way into the great courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville. Behind the long wing which faced them, a square, solid tower rose a hundred and fifty feet high above the ground. With Frobisher at his heels, Hanaud climbed the three hundred and sixteen steps and emerged upon the roof into the blue and gold of a cloudless May in France. They looked eastwards, and the beauty of the scene took Frobisher's breath away. Just in front, the slender apse of Notre Dame, fine as a lady's ornament, set him wondering how in the world through all these centuries it had endured; and beyond, rich and green and wonderful, stretched the level plain with its shining streams and nestling villages.
Hanaud sat down upon a stone bench and stretched out his arm across the parapet. "Look!" he cried eagerly, proudly. "There is what I brought you here to see. Look!"
Jim looked and saw, and his face lit up. Far away on the horizon's edge, unearthly in its beauty, hung the great mass of Mont Blanc; white as silver, soft as velvet, and here and there sparkling with gold as though the flame of a fire leaped and sank.
"Oho!" said Hanaud as he watched Jim's face. "So we have that in common. You perhaps have stood on the top of that mountain?"
"Five times," Jim answered, with a smile made up of many memories. "I hope to do so again."
"You are fortunate," said Hanaud a little enviously. "For me I see him only in the distance. But even so—if I am troubled—it is like sitting silent in the company of a friend."
Jim Frobisher's mind strayed back over memories of snow slope and rock ridge. It was a true phrase which Hanaud had used. It expressed one of the many elusive, almost incommunicable emotions which mountains did mean to the people who had "that"—the passion for mountains—in common. Jim glanced curiously at Hanaud.
"You are troubled about this case, then?" he said sympathetically. The distant and exquisite vision of that soaring arc of silver and velvet set in the blue air had brought the two men into at all events a momentary brotherhood.
"Very," Hanaud returned slowly, without turning his eyes from the horizon, "and for more reasons than one. What do you yourself think of it?"
"I think, Monsieur Hanaud," Jim said dryly, "that you do not like any one to ask any questions except yourself."
Hanaud laughed with an appreciation of the thrust.
"Yes, you wished to ask a question of the beautiful Mademoiselle Upcott. Tell me if I have guessed aright the question you meant to ask! It was whether the face she touched in the darkness was the smooth face of a woman or the face of a man."
"Yes. That was it."
It was now for Hanaud to glance curiously and quickly at Jim. There could be no doubt of the thought which was passing through his mind: "I must begin to give you a little special attention, my friend." But he was careful not to put his thoughts into words.
"I did not want that question asked," he said.
"Why?"
"Because it was unnecessary, and unnecessary questions are confusing things which had best be avoided altogether."
Jim did not believe one word of that explanation. He had too clear a recollection of the swift movement and the look with which Hanaud had checked him. Both had been unmistakably signs of alarm. Hanaud would not have been alarmed at the prospect of a question being asked, merely because the question was superfluous. There was another and, Jim was sure, a very compelling reason in Hanaud's mind. Only he could not discover it.
Besides, was the question superfluous?
"Surely," Hanaud replied. "Suppose that that young lady's hand had touched in the darkness the face of a man with its stubble, its tough skin, and the short hair of his head around it, bending down so low over hers, would not that have been the most vivid, terrifying thing to her in all the terrifying incident? Stretching out her hands carelessly above her head, she touches suddenly, unexpectedly, the face of a man? She could not have told her story at all without telling that. It would have been the unforgettable detail, the very heart of her terror. She touched the face of a man!"
Jim recognised that the reasoning was sound, but he was no nearer to the solution of his problem—why Hanaud so whole-heartedly objected to the question being asked. And then Hanaud made a quiet remark which drove it for a long time altogether out of Jim's speculations.
"Mademoiselle Ann touched the face of a woman in the darkness that night—if that night, in the darkness she touched a face at all."
Jim was utterly startled.
"You believe that she was lying to us?" he cried.
Hanaud shook a protesting hand in the air.
"I believe nothing," he said. "I am looking for a criminal."
"Ann Upcott!" Jim spoke the name in amazement. "Ann Upcott!" Then he remembered the look of her as she had told her story, her face convulsed with terror, her shaking tones. "Oh, it's impossible that she was lying. Surely no one could have so mimicked fear?"
Hanaud laughed.
"You may take this from me, my friend. All women who are great criminals are also very artful actresses. I never knew one who wasn't."
"Ann Upcott!" Jim Frobisher once more exclaimed, but now with a trifle less of amazement. He was growing slowly and gradually accustomed to the idea. Still—that girl with the radiant look of young Spring! Oh, no!
"Ann Upcott was left nothing in Mrs. Harlowe's will," he argued. "What could she have to gain by murder?"
"Wait, my friend! Look carefully at her story! Analyse it. You will see—what? That it falls into two parts." Hanaud ground the stump of his cigar beneath his heel, offered one of his black cigarettes to Jim Frobisher and lighted one for himself. He lit it with a sulphur match which Jim thought would never stop fizzling, would never burst into flame.
"One part when she was alone in her bedroom—a little story of terror and acted very effectively, but after all any one could invent it. The other part was not so easy to invent. The communicating door open for no reason, the light beyond, the voice that whispered, 'That will do,' the sound of the struggle! No, my friend, I don't believe that was invented. There were too many little details which seemed to have been lived through. The white face of the clock and the hour leaping at her. No! I think all that must stand. But adapt it a little. See! This morning Waberski told us a story of the Street of Gambetta and of Jean Cladel!"
"Yes," said Jim.
"And I asked you afterwards whether Waberski might not be telling a true story of himself and attributing it to Mademoiselle Harlowe?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, interpret Ann Upcott's story in the same way," continued Hanaud. "Suppose that sometime that day she had unlocked the communicating door! What more easy? Madame Harlowe was up during the day-time. Her room was empty. And that communicating door opened not into Madame's bedroom, where perhaps it might have been discovered whether it was locked or not, but into a dressing-room."
"Yes," Jim agreed.
"Well then, continue! Ann Upcott is left alone after Mademoiselle Harlowe's departure to Monsieur de Pouillac's Ball. She sends Gaston to bed. The house is all dark and asleep. Suppose then that she is joined by—some one—some one with the arrow poison all ready in the hypodermic needle. That they enter the treasure-room just as Ann Upcott described. That she turns on the light for a second whilst—some one—crosses the treasure-room and opens the door. Suppose that the voice which whispered, 'That will do now,' was the voice of Ann Upcott herself and that she whispered it across Madame Harlowe's body to the third person in that room!"
"The 'some one,'" exclaimed Jim. "But, who then? Who?"
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. "Why not Waberski?"
"Waberski?" cried Jim with a new excitement in his voice.
"You asked me what had Ann Upcott to gain by this murder and you answered your own question. Nothing you said, Monsieur Frobisher, but did your quick answer cover the ground? Waberski—he at all events expected a fine fat legacy. What if he in return for help proposed to share that fine fat legacy with the exquisite Mademoiselle Ann. Has she no motive now? In the end what do we know of her at all except that she is the paid companion and therefore poor? Mademoiselle Ann!"; and he threw up his hands. "Where does she spring from? How did she come into that house? Was she perhaps Waberski's friend?"—and a cry from Jim brought Hanaud to a stop.
Jim had thought of Waberski as the possible murderer if murder had been done—a murderer who, disappointed of his legacy, the profits of his murder, had carried on his villainy to blackmail and a false accusation. But he had not associated Ann Upcott with him until those moments on the Terrace Tower. Yet now memories began to crowd upon him. The letter to him, for instance. She had said that Waberski had claimed her support and ridiculed his claim. Might that letter not have been a blind and a rather cunning blind? Above all there was a scene passing vividly through his mind which was very different from the scene spread out before his eyes, a scene of lighted rooms and a crowd about a long green table, and a fair slender girl seated at the table, who lost and lost until the whole of her little pile of banknotes was swept in by the croupier's rake, and then turned away with a high carriage but a quivering lip.
"Aha!" said Hanaud keenly. "You know something after all of Ann Upcott, my friend. What do you know?"
Jim hesitated. At one moment it did not seem fair to her that he should relate his story. Explained, it might wear so different a complexion. At another moment that it would be fairer to let her explain it. And there was Betty to consider. Yes, above all there was Betty to consider. He was in Dijon on her behalf.
"I will tell you," he said to Hanaud. "When I saw you in Paris, I told you that I had never seen Ann Upcott in all my life. I believed it. It wasn't until she danced into the library yesterday morning that I realised I had misled you. I saw Ann Upcott at the trente et quarante table at the Sporting Club in Monte Carlo in January of this year. I sat next to her. She was quite alone and losing her money. Nothing would go right for her. She bore herself proudly and well. The only sign I saw of distress was the tightening of her fingers about her little handbag, and a look of defiance thrown at the other players when she rose after her last coup, as though she dared them to pity her. I was on the other hand winning, and I slipped a thousand-franc note off the table on to the floor, keeping my heel firmly upon it as you can understand. And as the girl turned to move out from the crowd I stopped her. I said in English, for she was obviously of my race, 'This is yours. You have dropped it on the floor.' She gave me a smile and a little shake of the head. I think that for the moment she dared not trust her lips to speak, and in a second, of course, she was swallowed up in the crowd. I played for a little while longer. Then I too rose and as I passed the entrance to the bar on my way to get my coat, this girl rose up from one of the many little tables and spoke to me. She called me by my name. She thanked me very prettily and said that although she had lost that evening she was not really in any trouble. I doubted the truth of what she said. For she had not one ring upon any finger, not the tiniest necklace about her throat, not one ornament upon her dress or in her hair. She turned away from me at once and went back to the little table where she sat down again in the company of a man. The girl of course was Ann Upcott, the man Waberski. It was from him no doubt that she had got my name."
"Did this little episode happen before Ann Upcott became a member of the household?" Hanaud asked.
"Yes," replied Jim. "I think she joined Mrs. Harlowe and Betty at Monte Carlo. I think that she came with them back to Dijon."
"No doubt," said Hanaud. He sat for a little while in silence. Then he said softly, "That does not look so very well for Mademoiselle Ann."
Jim had to admit that it did not.
"But consider this, Monsieur Hanaud," he urged. "If Ann Upcott, which I will not believe, is mixed up in this affair, why should she of her own free will volunteer this story of what she heard upon the night of the twenty-seventh and invent that face which bent down over her in the darkness?"
"I have an idea about that," Hanaud replied. "She told us this story—when? After I had said that we must have the seals broken this afternoon and the rooms thrown open. It is possible that we may come upon something in those rooms which makes it wise for her to divert suspicion upon some other woman in the house. Jeanne Baudin, or even Mademoiselle Harlowe's maid Francine Rollard."
"But not Mademoiselle Betty," Jim interposed quickly.
"No, no!" Hanaud returned with a wave of his hand. "The clock upon the marquetry cabinet settled that. Mademoiselle Betty is out of the affair. Well, this afternoon we shall see. Meanwhile, my friend, you will be late for your luncheon."
Hanaud rose from the bench and with a last look at the magical mountain, that outpost of France, they turned towards the city.
Jim Frobisher looked down upon tiny squares green with limes and the steep gaily-patterned roofs of ancient houses. About him the fine tapering spires leapt high like lances from the slates of its many churches. A little to the south and a quarter of a mile away across the roof tops he saw the long ridge of a big house and the smoke rising from a chimney stack or two and behind it the tops of tall trees which rippled and shook the sunlight from their leaves.
"The Maison Crenelle!" he said.
There was no answer, not even the slightest movement at his side.
"Isn't it?" he asked and he turned.
Hanaud had not even heard him. He was gazing also towards the Maison Crenelle with the queerest look upon his face; a look with which Jim was familiar in some sort of association, but which for a moment or two he could not define. It was not an expression of amazement. On the other hand interest was too weak a word. Suddenly Jim Frobisher understood and comprehension brought with it a sense of discomfort. Hanaud's look, very bright and watchful and more than a little inhuman, was just the look of a good retriever dog when his master brings out a gun.
Jim looked again at the high ridge of the house. The slates were broken at intervals by little gabled windows, but at none of them could he see a figure. From none of them a signal was waved.
"What is it that you are looking at?" asked Jim in perplexity and then with a touch of impatience. "You see something, I'm sure."
Hanaud heard his companion at last. His face changed in a moment, lost its rather savage vigilance, and became the face of a buffoon.
"Of course I see something. Always I see something. Am I not Hanaud? Ah, my friend, the responsibility of being Hanaud! Aren't you fortunate to be without it? Pity me! For the Hanauds must see something everywhere—even when there is nothing to see. Come!"
He bustled out of the sunlight on that high platform into the dark turret of the staircase. The two men descended the steps and came out again into the semi-circle of the Place d'Armes.
"Well!" said Hanaud and then "Yes," as though he had some little thing to say and was not quite sure whether he would say it. Then he compromised. "You shall take a Vermouth with me before you go to your luncheon," he said.
"I should be late if I did," Frobisher replied.
Hanaud waved the objection aside with a shake of his outstretched forefinger.
"You have plenty of time, Monsieur. You shall take a Vermouth with me, and you will still reach the Maison Crenelle before Mademoiselle Harlowe. I say that, Hanaud," he said superbly, and Jim laughed and consented.
"I shall plead your vanity as my excuse when I find her and Ann Upcott half through their meal."
A café stands at the corner of the street of Liberty and the Place d'Armes, with two or three little tables set out on the pavement beneath an awning. They sat down at one of them, and over the Vermouth, Hanaud was once more upon the brink of some recommendation or statement.
"You see——" he began and then once more ran away. "So you have been five times upon the top of the Mont Blanc!" he said. "From Chamonix?"
"Once," Jim replied. "Once from the Col du Géant by the Brenva glacier. Once by the Dôme route. Once from the Brouillard glacier. And the last time by the Mont Mandit."
Hanaud listened with genuine friendliness and said:
"You tell me things which are interesting and very new to me," he said warmly. "I am grateful, Monsieur."
"On the other hand," Jim answered dryly, "you, Monsieur, tell me very little. Even what you brought me to this café to say, you are going to keep to yourself. But for my part I shall not be so churlish. I am going to tell you what I think."
"Yes?"
"I think we have missed the way."
"Oh?"
Hanaud selected a cigarette from his bundle in its bright blue wrapping.
"You will perhaps think me presumptuous in saying so."
"Not the least little bit in the world," Hanaud replied seriously. "We of the Police are liable in searching widely to overlook the truth under our noses. That is our danger. Another angle of view—there is nothing more precious. I am all attention."
Jim Frobisher drew his chair closer to the round table of iron and leaned his elbows upon it.
"I think there is one question in particular which we must answer if we are to discover whether Mrs. Harlowe was murdered, and if so by whom."
Hanaud nodded.
"I agree," he said slowly. "But I wonder whether we have the same question in our minds."
"It is a question which we have neglected. It is this—Who put back the Professor's treatise on Sporanthus in its place upon the bookshelf in the library, between mid-day yesterday and this morning."
Hanaud struck another of his abominable matches, and held it in the shelter of his palm until the flame shone. He lit his cigarette and took a few puffs at it.
"No doubt that question is important," he admitted, although in rather an off-hand way. "But it is not mine. No. I think there is another more important still. I think if we could know why the door of the treasure-room, which had been locked since Simon Harlowe's death, was unlocked on the night of the twenty-seventh of April, we should be very near to the whole truth of this dark affair. But," and he flung out his hands, "that baffles me."
Jim left him sitting at the table and staring moodily upon the pavement, as if he hoped to read the answer there.
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Breaking of the Seals
A few minutes later Jim Frobisher had to admit that Hanaud guessed very luckily. He would not allow that it was more than a guess. Monsieur Hanaud might be a thorough little Mr. Know-All; but no insight, however brilliant, could inform him of so accidental a circumstance. But there the fact was. Frobisher did arrive at the Maison Crenelle, to his great discomfort, before Betty Harlowe. He had loitered with Hanaud at the café just so that this might not take place. He shrank from being alone with Ann Upcott now that he suspected her. The most he could hope to do was to conceal the reason of his trouble. The trouble itself in her presence he could not conceal. She made his case the more difficult perhaps by a rather wistful expression of sympathy.
"You are distressed," she said gently. "But surely you need not be any longer. What I said this morning was true. It was half-past ten when that dreadful whisper reached my ears. Betty was a mile away amongst her friends in a ball-room. Nothing can shake that."
"It is not on her account that I am troubled," he cried, and Ann looked at him with startled eyes.
Betty crossed the court and joined them in the hall before Ann could ask a question; and throughout their luncheon he made conversation upon indifferent subjects with rapidity, if without entertainment.
Fortunately there was no time to spare. They were still indeed smoking their cigarettes over their coffee when Gaston informed them that the Commissary of Police with his secretary was waiting in the library.
"This is Mr. Frobisher, my solicitor in London," said Betty as she presented Jim.
The Commissary, Monsieur Girardot, was a stout, bald, middle-aged man with a pair of folding glasses sitting upon a prominent fat nose; his secretary, Maurice Thevenet, was a tall good-looking novice in the police administration, a trifle flashy in his appearance, and in his own esteem, one would gather, rather a conqueror amongst the fair.
"I have asked Monsieur Bex, Mademoiselle's notary in Dijon, to be present," said Jim.
"That is quite in order," replied the Commissary, and Monsieur Bex was at that moment announced. He came on the very moment of three. The clock was striking as he bowed in the doorway. Everything was just as it should be. Monsieur Bex was pleased.
"With Monsieur le Commissaire's consent," he said, smiling, "we can now proceed with the final ceremonies of this affair."
"We wait for Monsieur Hanaud," said the Commissary.
"Hanaud?"
"Hanaud of the Sûrété of Paris, who has been invited by the Examining Magistrate to take charge of this case," the Commissary explained.
"Case?" cried Monsieur Bex in perplexity. "But there is no case for Hanaud to take charge of;" and Betty Harlowe drew him a little aside.
Whilst she gave the little notary some rapid summary of the incidents of the morning, Jim went out of the room into the hall in search of Hanaud. He saw him at once; but to his surprise Hanaud came forward from the back of the hall as if he had entered the house from the garden.
"I sought you in the dining-room," he said, pointing to the door of that room which certainly was at the back of the house behind the library, with its entrance behind the staircase. "We will join the others."
Hanaud was presented to Monsieur Bex.
"And this gentleman?" asked Hanaud, bowing slightly to Thevenet.
"My secretary, Maurice Thevenet," said the Commissary, and in a loud undertone, "a charming youth, of an intelligence which is surprising. He will go far."
Hanaud looked at Thevenet with a friendly interest. The young recruit gazed at the great man with kindling eyes.
"This will be an opportunity for me, Monsieur Hanaud, by which, if I do not profit, I prove myself of no intelligence at all," he said with a formal modesty which quite went to the heart of Monsieur Bex.
"That is very correct," said he.
Hanaud for his part was never averse to flattery. He cocked an eye at Jim Frobisher; he shook the secretary warmly by the hand.
"Then don't hesitate to ask me questions, my young friend," he answered. "I am Hanaud now, yes. But I was once young Maurice Thevenet without, alas! his good looks."
Maurice Thevenet blushed with the most becoming diffidence.
"That is very kind," said Monsieur Bex.
"This looks like growing into a friendly little family party," Jim Frobisher thought, and he quite welcomed a "Hum" and a "Ha" from the Commissary.
He moved to the centre of the room.
"We, Girardot, Commissaire of Police, will now remove the seals," he said pompously.
He led the way from the Library across the hall and along the corridor to the wide door of Mrs. Harlowe's bedroom. He broke the seals and removed the bands. Then he took a key from the hand of his secretary and opened the door upon a shuttered room. The little company of people surged forward. Hanaud stretched out his arms and barred the way.
"Just for a moment, please!" he ordered and over his shoulder Jim Frobisher had a glimpse of the room which made him shiver.
This morning in the garden some thrill of the chase had made him for a moment eager that Hanaud should press on, that development should follow upon development until somewhere a criminal stood exposed. Since the hour, however, which he had spent upon the Tower of the Terrace, all thought of the chase appalled him and he waited for developments in fear. This bedroom mistily lit by a few stray threads of daylight which pierced through the chinks of the shutters, cold and silent and mysterious, was for him peopled with phantoms, whose faces no one could see, who struggled dimly in the shadows. Then Hanaud and the Commissary crossed to the windows opposite, opened them and flung back the shutters. The clear bright light flooded every corner in an instant and brought to Jim Frobisher relief. The room was swept and clean, the chairs ranged against the wall, the bed flat and covered with an embroidered spread; everywhere there was order; it was as empty of suggestion as a vacant bedroom in an hotel.
Hanaud looked about him.
"Yes," he said. "This room stood open for a week after Madame's funeral. It would have been a miracle if we discovered anything which could help us."
He went to the bed, which stood with its head against the wall midway between the door and the windows. A small flat stand with a button of enamel lay upon the round table by the bed-side, and from the stand a cord ran down by the table leg and disappeared under the carpet.
"This is the bell into what was the maid's bedroom, I suppose," he said, turning towards Betty.
"Yes."
Hanaud stooped and minutely examined the cord. But there was no sign that it had ever been tampered with. He stood up again.
"Mademoiselle, will you take Monsieur Girardot into Jeanne Baudin's bedroom and close the door. I shall press this button, and you will know whether the bell rings whilst we here shall be able to assure ourselves whether sounds made in one of the rooms would be heard in the other."
"Certainly."
Betty took the Commissary of Police away, and a few seconds later those in Mrs. Harlowe's room heard a door close in the corridor.
"Will you shut our door now, if you please?" Hanaud requested.
Bex, the notary, closed it.
"Now, silence, if you please!"
Hanaud pressed the button, and not a sound answered him. He pressed it again and again with the same result. The Commissary returned to the bedroom.
"Well?" Hanaud asked.
"It rang twice," said the Commissary.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders with a laugh.
"And an electric bell has a shrill, penetrating sound," he cried. "Name of a name, but they built good houses when the Maison Crenelle was built! Are the cupboards and drawers open?"
He tried one and found it locked. Monsieur Bex came forward.
"All the drawers were locked on the morning when Madame Harlowe's death was discovered. Mademoiselle Harlowe herself locked them in my presence and handed to me the keys for the purpose of making an inventory. Mademoiselle was altogether correct in so doing. For until the funeral had taken place the terms of the will were not disclosed."
"But afterwards, when you took the inventory you must have unlocked them."
"I have not yet begun the inventory, Monsieur Hanaud. There were the arrangements for the funeral, a list of the properties to be made for valuation, and the vineyards to be administered."
"Oho," cried Hanaud alertly. "Then these wardrobes and cupboards and drawers should hold exactly what they held on the night of the twenty-seventh of April." He ran quickly about the room trying a door here, a drawer there, and came to a stop beside a cupboard fashioned in the thickness of the wall. "The trouble is that a child with a bent wire could unlock any one of them. Do you know what Madame Harlowe kept in this, Monsieur Bex?" and Hanaud rapped with his knuckles upon the cupboard door.
"No, I have no idea. Shall I open it?" and Bex produced a bunch of keys from his pocket.
"Not for the moment, I think," said Hanaud.
He had been dawdling over the locks and the drawers, as though time meant nothing to him at all. He now swung briskly back into the centre of the room, making notes, it seemed to Frobisher, of its geography. The door opening from the corridor faced, across the length of the floor, the two tall windows above the garden. If one stood in the doorway facing these two windows, the bed was on the left hand. On the corridor side of the bed, a second smaller door, which was half open, led to a white-tiled bath-room. On the window side of the bed was the cupboard in the wall about the height of a woman's shoulders. A dressing-table stood between the windows, a great fire-place broke the right-hand wall, and in that same wall, close to the right-hand window, there was yet another door. Hanaud moved to it.
"This is the door of the dressing-room?" he asked of Ann Upcott, and without waiting for an answer pushed it open.
Monsieur Bex followed upon his heels with his keys rattling. "Everything here has been locked up too," he said.
Hanaud paid not the slightest attention. He opened the shutters.
It was a narrow room without any fire-place at all, and with a door exactly opposite to the door by which Hanaud had entered. He went at once to this door.
"And this must be the communicating door which leads into what is called the treasure-room," he said, and he paused with his hand upon the knob and his eyes ranging alertly over the faces of the company.
"Yes," said Ann Upcott.
Jim was conscious of a queer thrill. He thought of the opening of some newly-discovered tomb of a Pharaoh in a hill-side of the Valley of Kings. Suspense passed from one to the other as they waited, but Hanaud did not move. He stood there impassive and still like some guardian image at the door of the tomb. Jim felt that he was never going to move, and in a voice of exasperation he cried:
"Is the door locked?"
Hanaud replied in a quiet but a singular voice. No doubt he, too, felt that strange current of emotion and expectancy which bound all in the room under a spell, and even gave to their diverse faces for a moment a kind of family similitude.
"I don't know yet whether it's locked or not," he said. "But since this room is now the private sitting-room of Mademoiselle Harlowe, I think that we ought to wait until she rejoins us."
Monsieur Bex just had time to remark with approval, "That is very correct," before Betty's fresh, clear voice rang out from the doorway leading to Mrs. Harlowe's bedroom:
"I am here."
Hanaud turned the handle. The door was not locked. It opened at a touch—inwards towards the group of people and upwards towards the corridor. The treasure-room was before them, shrouded in dim light, but here and there a beam of light sparkled upon gold and held out a promise of wonders. Hanaud picked his way daintily to the windows and fastened the shutters back against the outside wall. "I beg that nothing shall be touched," he said as the others filed into the room.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Simon Harlowe's Treasure-room
Like the rest of the reception-rooms along the corridor, it was longer than it was broad and more of a gallery than a room. But it had been arranged for habitation rather than for occasional visits. For it was furnished with a luxurious comfort and not over-crowded. In the fawn-coloured panels of the walls a few exquisite pictures by Fragonard had been framed; on the writing-table of Chinese Chippendale by the window every appointment, ink-stand, pen-tray, candlestick, sand-caster and all were of the pink Battersea enamel and without a flaw. But they were there for use, not for exhibition. Moreover a prominent big fire-place in the middle of the wall on the side of the hall, jutted out into the room and gave it almost the appearance of two rooms in communication, The one feature of the room, indeed, which at a first glimpse betrayed the collector, was the Sedan chair set in a recess of the wall by the fire-place and opposite to the door communicating with Mrs. Harlowe's bedroom. Its body was of a pale French grey in colour, with elaborately carved mouldings in gold round the panels and medallions representing fashionable shepherds and shepherdesses daintily painted in the middle of them. It had glass windows at the sides to show off the occupant, and it was lined with pale grey satin, embroidered in gold to match the colour of the panels. The roof, which could be raised upon a hinge at the back, was ornamented with gold filigree work, and it had a door in front of which the upper part was glass. Altogether it was as pretty a gleaming piece of work as the art of carriage-building could achieve, and a gilt rail very fitly protected it. Even Hanaud was taken by its daintiness. He stood with his hands upon the rail examining it with a smile of pleasure, until Jim began to think that he had quite forgotten the business which had brought him there. However, he brought himself out of his dream with a start.
"A pretty world for rich people, Monsieur Frobisher," he said. "What pictures of fine ladies in billowy skirts and fine gentlemen in silk stockings! And what splashings of mud for the unhappy devils who had to walk!"
He turned his back to the chair and looked across the room. "That is the clock which marked half-past ten, Mademoiselle, during the moment when you had the light turned up?" he asked of Ann.
"Yes," she answered quickly. Then she looked at it again. "Yes, that's it."
Jim detected or fancied that he detected a tiny change in her intonation, as she repeated her assurance, not an inflexion of doubt—it was not marked enough for that—but of perplexity. It was clearly, however, fancy upon his part, for Hanaud noticed nothing at all. Jim pulled himself up with an unspoken remonstrance. "Take care!" he warned himself. "For once you begin to suspect people, they can say and do nothing which will not provide you with material for suspicion."
Hanaud was without doubt satisfied. The clock was a beautiful small gilt clock of the Louis Quinze period, shaped with a waist like a violin; it had a white face, and it stood upon a marquetry Boulle cabinet, a little more than waist high, in front of a tall Venetian mirror. Hanaud stood directly in front of it and compared it with his watch.
"It is exact to the minute, Mademoiselle," he said to Betty, with a smile as he replaced his watch in his pocket.
He turned about, so that he stood with his back to the clock. He faced the fire-place across the narrow neck of the room. It had an Adam mantelpiece, fashioned from the same fawn-coloured wood as the panels, with slender pillars and some beautiful carving upon the board beneath the shelf. Above the shelf one of the Fragonards was framed in the wall and apparently so that nothing should mask it, there were no high ornaments at all upon the shelf itself. One or two small boxes of Battersea enamel and a flat glass case alone decorated it. Hanaud crossed to the mantelshelf and, after a moment's inspection, lifted, with a low whistle of admiration, the flat glass case.
"You will pardon me, Mademoiselle," he said to Betty. "But I shall probably never in my life have the luck to see anything so incomparable again. And the mantel-shelf is a little high for me to see it properly."
Without waiting for the girl's consent he carried it towards the window.
"Do you see this, Monsieur Frobisher?" he called out, and Jim went forward to his side.
The case held a pendant wrought in gold and chalcedony and translucent enamels by Benvenuto Cellini. Jim acknowledged that he had never seen craftsmanship so exquisite and delicate, but he chafed none the less at Hanaud's diversion from his business.
"One could spend a long day in this room," the detective exclaimed, "admiring these treasures."
"No doubt," Jim replied dryly. "But I had a notion that we were going to spend an afternoon looking for an arrow."
Hanaud laughed.
"My friend, you recall me to my duty." He looked at the jewel again and sighed. "Yes, as you say, we are not visitors here to enjoy ourselves."
He carried the case back again to the mantelshelf and replaced it. Then all at once his manner changed. He was leaning forward with his hands still about the glass case. But he was looking down. The fire-grate was hidden from the room by a low screen of blue lacquer; and Hanaud, from the position in which he stood, could see over the screen into the grate itself.
"What is all this?" he asked.
He lifted the screen from the hearth and put it carefully aside. All now could see what had disturbed him—a heap of white ashes in the grate.
Hanaud went down upon his knees and picking up the shovel from the fender he thrust it between the bars and drew it out again with a little layer of the ashes upon it. They were white and had been pulverised into atoms. There was not one flake which would cover a finger-nail. Hanaud touched them gingerly, as though he had expected to find them hot.
"This room was sealed up on Sunday morning and to-day is Thursday afternoon," said Jim Frobisher with heavy sarcasm. "Ashes do not as a rule keep hot more than three days, Monsieur Hanaud."
Maurice Thevenet looked at Frobisher with indignation. He was daring to make fun of Hanaud! He treated the Sûrété with no more respect than one might treat—well, say Scotland Yard.
Even Monsieur Bex had an air of disapproval. For a partner of the firm of Frobisher & Haslitt this gentleman was certainly not very correct. Hanaud on the contrary was milk and water.
"I have observed it," he replied mildly, and he sat back upon his heels with the shovel still poised in his hands.
"Mademoiselle!" he called; and Betty moved forward and leaned against the mantelshelf at his side. "Who burnt these papers so very carefully?" he asked.
"I did," Betty replied.
"And when?"
"On Saturday night, a few, and the rest on Sunday morning, before Monsieur le Commissaire arrived."
"And what were they, Mademoiselle?"
"Letters, Monsieur."
Hanaud looked up into her face quickly.
"Oho!" he said softly. "Letters! Yes! And what kind of letters, if you please?"
Jim Frobisher was for throwing up his hands in despair. What in the world had happened to Hanaud? One moment he forgot altogether the business upon which he was engaged in his enjoyment of Simon Harlowe's collection. The next he was off on his wild-goose chase after anonymous letters. Jim had not a doubt that he was thinking of them now. One had only to say "letters," and he was side-tracked at once, apparently ready to accuse any one of their authorship.