At the Villa Rose (6 page)

Ricardo looked triumphant.

"Yes, there are differences," said Hanaud. "Look how long the up stroke
of the 'p' is, how it wavers! See how suddenly this 's' straggles off,
as though some emotion made the hand shake. Yet this," and touching
Wethermill's letter he smiled ruefully, "this is where the emotion
should have affected the pen." He looked up at Wethermill's face and
then said quietly:

"You have given us no opinion, monsieur. Yet your opinion should be the
most valuable of all. Were these two papers written by the same hand?"

"I do not know," answered Wethermill.

"And I, too," cried Hanaud, in a sudden exasperation, "je ne sais pas.
I do not know. It may be her hand carelessly counterfeited. It may be
her hand disguised. It may be simply that she wrote in a hurry with her
gloves on."

"It may have been written some time ago," said Mr. Ricardo, encouraged
by his success to another suggestion.

"No; that is the one thing it could not have been," said Hanaud. "Look
round the room. Was there ever a room better tended? Find me a little
pile of dust in any one corner if you can! It is all as clean as a
plate. Every morning, except this one morning, this room has been swept
and polished. The paper was written and torn up yesterday."

He enclosed the card in an envelope as he spoke, and placed it in his
pocket. Then he rose and crossed again to the settee. He stood at the
side of it, with his hands clutching the lapels of his coat and his
face gravely troubled. After a few moments of silence for himself, of
suspense for all the others who watched him, he stooped suddenly.
Slowly, and with extraordinary care, he pushed his hands under the
head-cushion and lifted it up gently, so that the indentations of its
surface might not be disarranged. He carried it over to the light of
the open window. The cushion was covered with silk, and as he held it
to the sunlight all could see a small brown stain.

Hanaud took his magnifying-glass from his pocket and bent his head over
the cushion. But at that moment, careful though he had been, the down
swelled up within the cushion, the folds and indentations disappeared,
the silk covering was stretched smooth.

"Oh!" cried Besnard tragically. "What have you done?"

Hanaud's face flushed. He had been guilty of a clumsiness—even he.

Mr. Ricardo took up the tale.

"Yes," he exclaimed, "what have you done?"

Hanaud looked at Ricardo in amazement at his audacity.

"Well, what have I done?" he asked. "Come! tell me!"

"You have destroyed a clue," replied Ricardo impressively.

The deepest dejection at once overspread Hanaud's burly face.

"Don't say that, M. Ricardo, I beseech you!" he implored. "A clue! and
I have destroyed it! But what kind of a clue? And how have I destroyed
it? And to what mystery would it be a clue if I hadn't destroyed it?
And what will become of me when I go back to Paris, and say in the Rue
de Jerusalem, 'Let me sweep the cellars, my good friends, for M.
Ricardo knows that I destroyed a clue. Faithfully he promised me that
he would not open his mouth, but I destroyed a clue, and his
perspicacity forced him into speech.'"

It was the turn of M. Ricardo to grow red.

Hanaud turned with a smile to Besnard.

"It does not really matter whether the creases in this cushion remain,"
he said, "we have all seen them." And he replaced the glass in his
pocket.

He carried that cushion back and replaced it. Then he took the other,
which lay at the foot of the settee, and carried it in its turn to the
window. This was indented too, and ridged up, and just at the marks the
nap of the silk was worn, and there was a slit where it had been cut.
The perplexity upon Hanaud's face greatly increased. He stood with the
cushion in his hands, no longer looking at it, but looking out through
the doors at the footsteps so clearly defined—the foot-steps of a girl
who had run from this room and sprung into a motor-car and driven away.
He shook his head, and, carrying back the cushion, laid it carefully
down. Then he stood erect, gazed about the room as though even yet he
might force its secrets out from its silence, and cried, with a sudden
violence:

"There is something here, gentlemen, which I do not understand."

Mr. Ricardo heard some one beside him draw a deep breath, and turned.
Wethermill stood at his elbow. A faint colour had come back to his
cheeks, his eyes were fixed intently upon Hanaud's face.

"What do you think?" he asked; and Hanaud replied brusquely:

"It's not my business to hold opinions, monsieur; my business is to
make sure."

There was one point, and only one, of which he had made every one in
that room sure. He had started confident. Here was a sordid crime,
easily understood. But in that room he had read something which had
troubled him, which had raised the sordid crime on to some higher and
perplexing level.

"Then M. Fleuriot after all might be right?" asked the Commissaire
timidly.

Hanaud stared at him for a second, then smiled.

"L'affaire Dreyfus?" he cried. "Oh la, la, la! No, but there is
something else."

What was that something? Ricardo asked himself. He looked once more
about the room. He did not find his answer, but he caught sight of an
ornament upon the wall which drove the question from his mind. The
ornament, if so it could be called, was a painted tambourine with a
bunch of bright ribbons tied to the rim; and it was hung upon the wall
between the settee and the fireplace at about the height of a man's
head. Of course it might be no more than it seemed to be—a rather
gaudy and vulgar toy, such as a woman like Mme. Dauvray would be very
likely to choose in order to dress her walls. But it swept Ricardo's
thoughts back of a sudden to the concert-hall at Leamington and the
apparatus of a spiritualistic show. After all, he reflected
triumphantly, Hanaud had not noticed everything, and as he made the
reflection Hanaud's voice broke in to corroborate him.

"We have seen everything here; let us go upstairs," he said. "We will
first visit the room of Mlle. Celie. Then we will question the maid,
Helene Vauquier."

The four men, followed by Perrichet, passed out by the door into the
hall and mounted the stairs. Celia's room was in the southwest angle of
the villa, a bright and airy room, of which one window overlooked the
road, and two others, between which stood the dressing-table, the
garden. Behind the room a door led into a little white-tiled bathroom.
Some towels were tumbled upon the floor beside the bath. In the bedroom
a dark-grey frock of tussore and a petticoat were flung carelessly on
the bed; a big grey hat of Ottoman silk was lying upon a chest of
drawers in the recess of a window; and upon a chair a little pile of
fine linen and a pair of grey silk stockings, which matched in shade
the grey suede shoes, were tossed in a heap.

"It was here that you saw the light at half-past nine?" Hanaud said,
turning to Perrichet.

"Yes, monsieur," replied Perrichet.

"We may assume, then, that Mlle. Celie was changing her dress at that
time."

Besnard was looking about him, opening a drawer here, a wardrobe there.

"Mlle. Celie," he said, with a laugh, "was a particular young lady, and
fond of her fine clothes, if one may judge from the room and the order
of the cupboards. She must have changed her dress last night in an
unusual hurry."

There was about the whole room a certain daintiness, almost, it seemed
to Mr. Ricardo, a fragrance, as though the girl had impressed something
of her own delicate self upon it. Wethermill stood upon the threshold
watching with a sullen face the violation of this chamber by the
officers of the police.

No such feelings, however, troubled Hanaud. He went over to the
dressing-room and opened a few small leather cases which held Celia's
ornaments. In one or two of them a trinket was visible; others were
empty. One of these latter Hanaud held open in his hand, and for so
long that Besnard moved impatiently.

"You see it is empty, monsieur," he said, and suddenly Wethermill moved
forward into the room.

"Yes, I see that," said Hanaud dryly.

It was a case made to hold a couple of long ear-drops—those diamond
ear-drops, doubtless, which Mr. Ricardo had seen twinkling in the
garden.

"Will monsieur let me see?" asked Wethermill, and he took the case in
his hands. "Yes," he said. "Mlle. Celie's ear-drops," and he handed the
case back with a thoughtful air.

It was the first time he had taken a definite part in the
investigation. To Ricardo the reason was clear. Harry Wethermill had
himself given those ear-drops to Celia. Hanaud replaced the case and
turned round.

"There is nothing more for us to see here," he said. "I suppose that no
one has been allowed to enter the room?" And he opened the door.

"No one except Helene Vauquier," replied the Commissaire.

Ricardo felt indignant at so obvious a piece of carelessness. Even
Wethermill looked surprised. Hanaud merely shut the door again.

"Oho, the maid!" he said. "Then she has recovered!"

"She is still weak," said the Commissaire. "But I thought it was
necessary that we should obtain at once a description of what Celie
Harland wore when she left the house. I spoke to M. Fleuriot about it,
and he gave me permission to bring Helene Vauquier here, who alone
could tell us. I brought her here myself just before you came. She
looked through the girl's wardrobe to see what was missing."

"Was she alone in the room?"

"Not for a moment," said M. Besnard haughtily. "Really, monsieur, we
are not so ignorant of how an affair of this kind should be conducted.
I was in the room myself the whole time, with my eye upon her."

"That was just before I came," said Hanaud. He crossed carelessly to
the open window which overlooked the road and, leaning out of it,
looked up the road to the corner round which he and his friends had
come, precisely as the Commissaire had done. Then he turned back into
the room.

"Which was the last cupboard or drawer that Helene Vauquier touched?"
he asked.

"This one."

Besnard stooped and pulled open the bottom drawer of a chest which
stood in the embrasure of the window. A light-coloured dress was lying
at the bottom.

"I told her to be quick," said Besnard, "since I had seen that you were
coming. She lifted this dress out and said that nothing was missing
there. So I took her back to her room and left her with the nurse."

Hanaud lifted the light dress from the drawer, shook it out in front of
the window, twirled it round, snatched up a corner of it and held it to
his eyes, and then, folding it quickly, replaced it in the drawer.

"Now show me the first drawer she touched." And this time he lifted out
a petticoat, and, taking it to the window, examined it with a greater
care. When he had finished with it he handed it to Ricardo to put away,
and stood for a moment or two thoughtful and absorbed. Ricardo in his
turn examined the petticoat. But he could see nothing unusual. It was
an attractive petticoat, dainty with frills and lace, but it was hardly
a thing to grow thoughtful over. He looked up in perplexity and saw
that Hanaud was watching his investigations with a smile of amusement.

"When M. Ricardo has put that away," he said, "we will hear what Helene
Vauquier has to tell us."

He passed out of the door last, and, locking it, placed the key in his
pocket.

"Helene Vauquier's room is, I think, upstairs," he said. And he moved
towards the staircase.

But as he did so a man in plain clothes, who had been waiting upon the
landing, stepped forward. He carried in his hand a piece of thin,
strong whipcord.

"Ah, Durette!" cried Besnard. "Monsieur Hanaud, I sent Durette this
morning round the shops of Aix with the cord which was found knotted
round Mme. Dauvray's neck."

Hanaud advanced quickly to the man.

"Well! Did you discover anything?"

"Yes, monsieur," said Durette. "At the shop of M. Corval, in the Rue du
Casino, a young lady in a dark-grey frock and hat bought some cord of
this kind at a few minutes after nine last night. It was just as the
shop was being closed. I showed Corval the photograph of Celie Harland
which M. le Commissaire gave me out of Mme. Dauvray's room, and he
identified it as the portrait of the girl who had bought the cord."

Complete silence followed upon Durette's words. The whole party stood
like men stupefied. No one looked towards Wethermill; even Hanaud
averted his eyes.

"Yes, that is very important," he said awkwardly. He turned away and,
followed by the others, went up the stairs to the bedroom of Helene
Vauquier.

A nurse opened the door. Within the room Helene Vauquier was leaning
back in a chair. She looked ill, and her face was very white. On the
appearance of Hanaud, the Commissaire, and the others, however, she
rose to her feet. Ricardo recognised the justice of Hanaud's
description. She stood before them a hard-featured, tall woman of
thirty-five or forty, in a neat black stuff dress, strong with the
strength of a peasant, respectable, reliable. She looked what she had
been, the confidential maid of an elderly woman. On her face there was
now an aspect of eager appeal.

"Oh, monsieur!" she began, "let me go from here—anywhere—into prison
if you like. But to stay here—where in years past we were so
happy—and with madame lying in the room below. No, it is
insupportable."

She sank into her chair, and Hanaud came over to her side.

"Yes, yes," he said, in a soothing voice. "I can understand your
feelings, my poor woman. We will not keep you here. You have, perhaps,
friends in Aix with whom you could stay?"

"Oh yes, monsieur!" Helene cried gratefully. "Oh, but I thank you! That
I should have to sleep here tonight! Oh, how the fear of that has
frightened me!"