CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: At Jean Cladel's
At nine o'clock that night Jim Frobisher walked past the cashier's desk and into the hall of the Grande Taverne. High above his head the cinematograph machine whirred and clicked and a blade of silver light cut the darkness. At the opposite end of the hall the square screen was flooded with radiance and the pictures melted upon it one into the other.
For a little while Jim could see nothing but that screen. Then the hall swam gradually within his vision. He saw the heads of people like great bullets and a wider central corridor where waitresses with white aprons moved. Jim walked up the corridor and turned off to the left between the tables. When he reached the wall he went forward again towards the top of the hall. On his left the hall fell back, and in the recess were two large cubicles in which billiard tables were placed. Against the wall of the first of these a young man was leaning with his eyes fixed upon the screen. Jim fancied that he recognised Maurice Thevenet, and nodded to him as he passed. A little further on a big man with a soft felt hat was seated alone, with a Bock in front of him—Hanaud. Jim slipped into a seat at his side.
"You?" Hanaud exclaimed in surprise.
"Why not? You told me this is where you would be at this hour," replied Jim, and some note of discouragement in his voice attracted Hanaud's attention.
"I didn't think that those two young ladies would let you go," he said.
"On the contrary," Jim replied with a short laugh. "They didn't want me at all."
He began to say something more, but thought better of it, and called to a waitress.
"Two Bocks, if you please," he ordered, and he offered Hanaud a cigar.
When the Bocks were brought, Hanaud said to him:
"It will be well to pay at once, so that we can slip away when we want."
"We have something to do to-night?" Jim asked.
"Yes."
He said no more until Jim had paid and the waitress had turned the two little saucers on which she had brought the Bocks upside down and had gone away. Then he leaned towards Jim and lowered his voice.
"I am glad that you came here. For I have a hope that we shall get the truth to-night, and you ought to be present when we do get it."
Jim lit his own cigar.
"From whom do you hope to get it?"
"Jean Cladel," Hanaud answered in a whisper. "A little later when all the town is quiet we will pay a visit to the street of Gambetta."
"You think he'll talk?"
Hanaud nodded.
"There is no charge against Cladel in this affair. To make a solution of that poison paste is not an offence. And he has so much against him that he will want to be on our side if he can. Yes, he will talk I have no doubt."
There would be an end of the affair then, to-night. Jim Frobisher was glad with an unutterable gladness. Betty would be free to order her life as she liked, and where she liked, to give to her youth its due scope and range, to forget the terror and horror of these last weeks, as one forgets old things behind locked doors.
"I hope, however," he said earnestly to Hanaud, "and I believe, that you will be found wrong, that if there was a murder Ann Upcott had nothing to do with it. Yes, I believe that." He repeated his assertion as much to convince himself as to persuade Hanaud.
Hanaud touched his elbow.
"Don't raise your voice too much, my friend," he said. "I think there is some one against the wall who is honouring us with his attention."
Jim shook his head.
"It is only Maurice Thevenet," he said.
"Oho?" answered Hanaud in a voice of relief. "Is that all? For a moment I was anxious. It seemed that there was a sentinel standing guard over us." He added in a whisper, "I, too, hope from the bottom of my heart that I may be proved wrong. But what of that arrow head in the pen tray? Eh? Don't forget that!" Then he fell into a muse.
"What happened on that night in the Maison Crenelle?" he said. "Why was that communicating door thrown open? Who was to be stripped to the skin by that violent woman? Who whispered 'That will do now'? Is Ann Upcott speaking the truth, and was there some terrible scene taking place before she entered so unexpectedly the treasure room—some terrible scene which ended in that dreadful whisper? Or is Ann Upcott lying from beginning to end? Ah, my friend, you wrote some questions down upon your memorandum this afternoon. But these are the questions I want answered, and where shall I find the answers?"
Jim had never seen Hanaud so moved. His hands were clenched, and the veins prominent upon his forehead, and though he whispered his voice shook.
"Jean Cladel may help," said Jim.
"Yes, yes, he may tell us something."
They sat through an episode of the film, and saw the lights go up and out again, and then Hanaud looked eagerly at his watch and put it back again into his pocket with a gesture of annoyance.
"It is still too early?" Jim asked.
"Yes. Cladel has no servant and takes his meals abroad. He has not yet returned home."
A little before ten o'clock a man strolled in, and seating himself at a table behind Hanaud twice scraped a match upon a match-box without getting a light. Hanaud, without moving, said quietly to Frobisher:
"He is at home now. In a minute I shall go. Give me five minutes and follow."
Jim nodded.
"Where shall we meet?"
"Walk straight along the Rue de la Liberté, and I will see to that," said Hanaud.
He pulled his packet of cigarettes from his pocket, put one between his lips, and took his time in lighting it. Then he got up, but to his annoyance Maurice Thevenet recognised him and came forward.
"When Monsieur Frobisher wished me good-evening and joined you I thought it was you, Monsieur Hanaud. But I had not the presumption to recall myself to your notice."
"Presumption! Monsieur, we are of the same service, only you have the advantage of youth," said Hanaud politely, as he turned.
"But you are going, Monsieur Hanaud?" Thevenet asked in distress. "I am desolated. I have broken into a conversation like a clumsy fellow."
"Not at all," Hanaud replied. To Frobisher his patience was as remarkable as Maurice Thevenet's impudence. "We were idly watching a film which I think is a little tedious."
"Then, since you are not busy I beg for your indulgence. One little moment that is all. I should so dearly love to be able to say to my friends, 'I sat in the cinema with Monsieur Hanaud—yes, actually I'—and asked for his advice."
Hanaud sat down again upon his chair.
"And upon what subject can you, of whom Monsieur Girardot speaks so highly, want my advice?" Hanaud asked with a laugh.
The eternal ambition of the provincial was tormenting the eager youth. To get to Paris—all was in that! Fortune, reputation, a life of colour. A word from Monsieur Hanaud and a way would open. He would work night and day to justify that word.
"Monsieur, all I can promise is that when the time comes I shall remember you. But that promise I make now with my whole heart," said Hanaud warmly, and with a bow he moved away.
Maurice Thevenet watched him go.
"What a man!" Maurice Thevenet went on enthusiastically. "I would not like to try to keep any secrets from him. No, indeed!" Jim had heard that sentiment before on other lips and with a greater sympathy. "I did not understand at all what he had in his mind when he staged that little scene with Francine Rollard. But something, Monsieur. Oh, you may be sure. Something wise. And that search through the treasure room! How quick and complete! No doubt while we searched Mademoiselle Upcott's bedroom, he was just as quick and complete in going through her sitting-room. But he found nothing. No, nothing."
He waited for Jim to corroborate him, but Jim only said "Oho!"
But Thevenet was not to be extinguished.
"I shall tell you what struck me, Monsieur. He was following out no suspicions; isn't that so? He was detached. He was gathering up every trifle, on the chance that each one might sometime fit in with another and at last a whole picture be composed. An artist! There was a letter, for instance, which Mademoiselle Harlowe handed to him, one of those deplorable letters which have disgraced us here—you remember that letter, Monsieur?"
"Aha!" said Frobisher, quite in the style of Hanaud. "But I see that this film is coming to its wedding bells. So I shall wish you a good evening."
Frobisher bowed and left Maurice Thevenet to dream of success in Paris. He strolled between the groups of spectators to the entrance and thence into the street. He walked to the arch of the Porte Guillaume and turned into the Rue de la Liberté. The provincial towns go to bed early and the street so busy throughout the day was like the street of a deserted city. A couple of hundred yards on, he was startled to find Hanaud, sprung from nowhere, walking at his side.
"So my young friend, the secretary engaged you when I had gone?" he said.
"Maurice Thevenet," said Jim, "may be as the Commissary says a young man of a surprising intelligence, but to tell you the truth, I find him a very intrusive fellow. First of all he wanted to know if you had discovered anything in Ann Upcott's sitting-room, and then what Miss Harlowe's anonymous letter was about."
Hanaud looked at Jim with interest.
"Yes, he is anxious to learn, that young man, Girardot is right. He will go far. And how did you answer him?"
"I said 'Oho'! first, and then I said 'Aha'! just like a troublesome friend of mine when I ask him a simple question which he does not mean to answer."
Hanaud laughed heartily.
"And you did very well," he said. "Come, let us turn into this little street upon the right. It will take us to our destination."
"Wait!" whispered Jim eagerly. "Don't cross the road for a moment. Listen!"
Hanaud obeyed at once; and both men stood and listened in the empty street.
"Not a sound," said Hanaud.
"No! That is what troubles me!" Jim whispered importantly. "A minute ago there were footsteps behind us. Now that we have stopped they have stopped too. Let us go on quite straight for a moment or two."
"But certainly my friend," said Hanaud.
"And let us not talk either," Jim urged.
"Not a single word," said Hanaud.
They moved forward again and behind them once more footsteps rang upon the pavement.
"What did I tell you?" asked Jim, taking Hanaud by the arm.
"That we would neither of us speak," Hanaud replied. "And lo! you have spoken!"
"But why? Why have I spoken? Be serious, Monsieur," Jim shook his arm indignantly. "We are being followed."
Hanaud stopped dead and gazed in steady admiration at his junior colleague.
"Oh!" he whispered. "You have discovered that? Yes, it is true. We are being followed by one of my men who sees to it that we are not followed."
Frobisher shook Hanaud's arm off indignantly. He drew himself up stiffly. Then he saw Hanaud's mouth twitching and he understood that he was looking "proper."
"Oh, let us go and find Jean Cladel," he said with a laugh and he crossed the road. They passed into a network of small, mean streets. There was not a soul abroad. The houses were shrouded in darkness. The only sounds they heard were the clatter of their own footsteps on the pavement and the fainter noise of the man who followed them. Hanaud turned to the left into a short passage and stopped before a little house with a shuttered shop front.
"This is the place," he said in a low voice and he pressed the button in the pillar of the door. The bell rang with a shrill sharp whirr just the other side of the panels.
"We may have to wait a moment if he has gone to bed," said Hanaud, "since he has no servant in the house."
A minute or two passed. The clocks struck the half hour. Hanaud leaned his ear against the panels of the door. He could not hear one sound within the house. He rang again; and after a few seconds shutters were thrown back and a window opened on the floor above. From behind the window some one whispered:
"Who is there?"
"The police," Hanaud answered, and at the window above there was silence.
"No one is going to do you any harm," Hanaud continued, raising his voice impatiently. "We want some information from you. That's all."
"Very well." The whisper came from the same spot. The man standing within the darkness of the room had not moved. "Wait! I will slip on some things and come down."
The window and the shutter were closed again. Then through the chinks a few beams of light strayed out Hanaud uttered a little grunt of satisfaction.
"That animal is getting up at last. He must have some strange clients amongst the good people of Dijon if he is so careful to answer them in a whisper."
He turned about and took a step or two along the pavement and another step or two back like a man upon a quarter deck. Jim Frobisher had never known him so restless and impatient during these two days.
"I can't help it," he said in a low voice to Jim. "I think that in five minutes we shall touch the truth of this affair. We shall know who brought the arrow to him from the Maison Crenelle."
"If any one brought the arrow to him at all," Jim Frobisher added.
But Hanaud was not in the mood to consider ifs and possibilities.
"Oh, that!" he said with a shrug of the shoulders. Then he tapped his forehead. "I am like Waberski. I have it here that some one did bring the arrow to Jean Cladel."
He started once more his quarter-deck pacing. Only it was now a trot rather than a walk. Jim was a little nettled by the indifference to his suggestion. He was still convinced that Hanaud had taken the wrong starting point in all his inquiry. He said tartly:
"Well, if some one did bring the arrow here, it will be the same person who replaced the treatise on Sporanthus on its book shelf."
Hanaud came to a stop in front of Jim Frobisher. Then he burst into a low laugh.
"I will bet you all the money in the world that that is not true, and then Madame Harlowe's pearl necklace on the top of it. For after all it was not I who brought the arrow to Jean Cladel, whereas it was undoubtedly I who put back the treatise on the shelf."
Jim took a step back. He stared at Hanaud with his mouth open in a stupefaction.
"You?" he exclaimed.
"I," replied Hanaud, standing up on the tips of his toes. "Alone I did it."
Then his manner of burlesque dropped from him. He looked up at the shuttered windows with a sudden anxiety.
"That animal is taking longer than he need," he muttered. "After all, it is not to a court ball of the Duke of Burgundy that we are inviting him."
He rang the bell again with a greater urgency. It returned its shrill reply as though it mocked him.
"I do not like this," said Hanaud.
He seized the door-handle and leaned his shoulder against the panel and drove his weight against it. But the door was strong and did not give. Hanaud put his fingers to his mouth and whistled softly. From the direction whence they had come they heard the sound of a man running swiftly. They saw him pass within the light of the one street lamp at the corner and out of it again; and then he stood at their side. Jim recognised Nicolas Moreau, the little agent who had been sent this very morning by Hanaud to make sure that Jean Cladel existed.
"Nicolas, I want you to wait here," said Hanaud. "If the door is opened, whistle for us and keep it open."
"Very well, sir."
Hanaud said in a low and troubled voice to Frobisher: "There is something here which alarms me." He dived into a narrow alley at the side of the shop.
"It was in this alley no doubt that Waberski meant us to believe that he hid on the morning of the 7th of May," Jim whispered as he hurried to keep with his companion.
"No doubt."
The alley led into a lane which ran parallel with the street of Gambetta. Hanaud wheeled into it. A wall five feet high, broken at intervals by rickety wooden doors, enclosed the yards at the backs of the houses. Before the first of these breaks in the wall Hanaud stopped. He raised himself upon the tips of his toes and peered over the wall, first downwards into the yard, and then upwards towards the back of the house. There was no lamp in the lane, no light showing from any of the windows. Though the night was clear of mist it was as dark as a cavern in this narrow lane behind the houses. Jim Frobisher, though his eyes were accustomed to the gloom, knew that he could not have seen a man, even if he had moved, ten yards away. Yet Hanaud still stood peering at the back of the house with the tips of his fingers on the top of the wall. Finally he touched Jim on the sleeve.
"I believe the back window on the first floor is open," he whispered, and his voice was more troubled than ever. "We will go in and see."
He touched the wooden door and it swung inwards with a whine of its hinges.
"Open," said Hanaud. "Make no noise."
Silently they crossed the yard. The ground floor of the house was low. Jim looking upwards could see now that the window above their heads yawned wide open.
"You are right," he breathed in Hanaud's ear, and with a touch Hanaud asked for silence.
The room beyond the window was black as pitch. The two men stood below and listened. Not a word came from it. Hanaud drew Jim into the wall of the house. At the end of the wall a door gave admission into the house. Hanaud tried the door, turning the handle first and then gently pressing with his shoulder upon the panel.
"It's locked, but not bolted like the door in front," he whispered. "I can manage this."
Jim Frobisher heard the tiniest possible rattle of a bunch of keys as Hanaud drew it from his pocket, and then not a noise of any kind whilst Hanaud stooped above the lock. Yet within half a minute the door slowly opened. It opened upon a passage as black as that room above their heads. Hanaud stepped noiselessly into the passage. Jim Frobisher followed him with a heart beating high in excitement. What had happened in that lighted room upstairs and in the dark room behind it? Why didn't Jean Cladel come down and open the door upon the street of Gambetta? Why didn't they hear Nicolas Moreau's soft whistle or the sound of his voice? Hanaud stepped back past Jim Frobisher and shut the door behind them and locked it again.
"You haven't an electric torch with you, of course?" Hanaud whispered.
"No," replied Jim.
"Nor I. And I don't want to strike a match. There's something upstairs which frightens me."
You could hardly hear the words. They were spoken as though the mere vibration of the air they caused would carry a message to the rooms above.
"We'll move very carefully. Keep a hand upon my coat," and Hanaud went forward. After he had gone a few paces he stopped.
"There's a staircase here on my right. It turns at once. Mind not to knock your foot on the first step," he whispered over his shoulder; and a moment later, he reached down and, taking hold of Jim's right arm, laid his hand upon a balustrade. Jim lifted his foot, felt for and found the first tread of the stairs, and mounted behind Hanaud. They halted on a little landing just above the door by which they had entered the house.
In front of them the darkness began to thin, to become opaque rather than a black, impenetrable hood drawn over their heads. Jim understood that in front of him was an open door and that the faint glimmer came from that open window on their left hand beyond the door.
Hanaud passed through the doorway into the room. Jim followed and was already upon the threshold, when Hanaud stumbled and uttered a cry. No doubt the cry was low, but coming so abruptly upon their long silence it startled Frobisher like the explosion of a pistol. It seemed that it must clash through Dijon like the striking of a clock.
But nothing followed. No one stirred, no one cried out a question. Silence descended upon the house again, impenetrable, like the darkness a hood upon the senses. Jim was tempted to call out aloud himself, anything, however childish, so that he might hear a voice speaking words, if only his own voice. The words came at last, from Hanaud and from the inner end of the room, but in an accent which Jim did not recognise.
"Don't move! ... There is something.... I told you I was frightened.... Oh!" and his voice died away in a sigh.
Jim could hear him moving very cautiously. Then he almost screamed aloud. For the shutters at the window slowly swung to and the room was once more shrouded in black.
"Who's that?" Jim whispered violently, and Hanaud answered:
"It's only me—Hanaud. I don't want to show a light here yet with that window open. God knows what dreadful thing has happened here. Come just inside the room and shut the door behind you."
Jim obeyed, and having moved his position, could see a line of yellow light, straight and fine as if drawn by a pencil, at the other end of the room on the floor. There was a door there, a door into the front room where they had seen the light go up from the street of Gambetta.
Jim Frobisher had hardly realised that before the door was burst open with a crash. In the doorway, outlined against the light beyond, appeared the bulky frame of Hanaud.
"There is nothing here," he said, standing there blocking up the doorway with his hands in his pockets. "The room is quite empty."
That room, the front room—yes! But between Hanaud's legs the light trickled out into the dark room behind, and here, on the floor illuminated by a little lane of light, Jim, with a shiver, saw a clenched hand and a forearm in a crumpled shirt-sleeve.
"Turn round," he cried to Hanaud. "Look!"
Hanaud turned.
"Yes," he said quietly. "That is what I stumbled against."
He found a switch in the wall close to the door and snapped it down. The dark room was flooded with light, and on the floor, in the midst of a scene of disorder, a table pushed back here, a chair overturned there, lay the body of a man. He wore no coat. He was in his waistcoat and his shirt sleeves, and he was crumpled up with a horrible suggestion of agony like a ball, his knees towards his chin, his head forward towards his knees. One arm clutched the body close, the other, the one which Jim had seen, was flung out, his hand clenched in a spasm of intolerable pain. And about the body there was such a pool of blood as Jim Frobisher thought no body could contain.
Jim staggered back with his hands clasped over his eyes. He felt physically sick.
"Then he killed himself on our approach," he cried with a groan.
"Who?" answered Hanaud steadily.
"Jean Cladel. The man who whispered to us from behind the window."
Hanaud stunned him with a question.
"What with?"
Jim drew his hands slowly from before his face and forced his eyes to their service. There was no gleam of a knife, or a pistol, anywhere against the dark background of the carpet.
"You might think that he was a Japanese who had committed hari-kari," said Hanaud. "But if he had, the knife would be at his side. And there is no knife."
He stooped over the body and felt it, and drew his hand back.
"It is still warm," he said, and then a gasp, "Look!" He pointed. The man was lying on his side in this dreadful pose of contracted sinews and unendurable pain. And across the sleeve of his shirt there was a broad red mark.
"That's where the knife was wiped clean," said Hanaud.
Jim bent forward.
"By God, that's true," he cried, and a little afterwards, in a voice of awe: "Then it's murder."
Hanaud nodded.
"Not a doubt."
Jim Frobisher stood up. He pointed a shaking finger at the grotesque image of pain crumpled upon the floor, death without dignity, an argument that there was something horribly wrong with the making of the human race—since such things could be.
"Jean Cladel?" he asked.
"We must make sure," answered Hanaud. He went down the stairs to the front door and, unbolting it, called Moreau within the house. From the top of the stairs Jim heard him ask:
"Do you know Jean Cladel by sight?"
"Yes," answered Moreau.
"Then follow me."
Hanaud led him up into the back room. For a moment Moreau stopped upon the threshold with a blank look upon his face.
"Is that the man?" Hanaud asked.
Moreau stepped forward.
"Yes."
"He has been murdered," Hanaud explained. "Will you fetch the Commissary of the district and a doctor? We will wait here."
Moreau turned on his heel and went downstairs. Hanaud dropped into a chair and stared moodily at the dead body.
"Jean Cladel," he said in a voice of discouragement. "Just when he could have been of a little use in the world! Just when he could have helped us to the truth! It's my fault, too. I oughtn't to have waited until to-night. I ought to have foreseen that this might happen."
"Who can have murdered him?" Jim Frobisher exclaimed.
Hanaud roused himself out of his remorse.
"The man who whispered to us from behind the window," answered Hanaud.
Jim Frobisher felt his mind reeling.
"That's impossible!" he cried.
"Why?" Hanaud asked. "It must have been he. Think it out!" And step by step he told the story as he read it, testing it by speaking it aloud.
"At five minutes past ten a man of mine, still a little out of breath from his haste, comes to us in the Grande Taverne and tells us that Jean Cladel has just reached home. He reached home then at five minutes to ten."
"Yes," Jim agreed.
"We were detained for a few minutes by Maurice Thevenet. Yes." He moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue and said softly: "We shall have to consider that very modest and promising young gentleman rather carefully. He detained us. We heard the clock strike half-past ten as we waited in the street."
"Yes."
"And all was over then. For the house was as silent as what, indeed, it is—a grave. And only just over, for the body is still warm. If this—lying here, is Jean Cladel, some one else must have been waiting for him to come home to-night, waiting in the lane behind, since my man didn't see him. And an acquaintance, a friend—for Jean Cladel lets him in and locks the door behind him."
Jim interrupted.
"He might have been here already, waiting for him with his knife bared in this dark room."
Hanaud looked around the room. It was furnished cheaply and stuffily, half office, half living-room. An open bureau stood against the wall near the window. A closed cabinet occupied the greater part of one side.
"I wonder," he said. "It is possible, no doubt—— But if so, why did the murderer stay so long? No search has been made—no drawers are ransacked." He tried the door of the cabinet. "This is still locked. No, I don't think that he was waiting. I think that he was admitted as a friend or a client—I fancy Jean Cladel had not a few clients who preferred to call upon him by the back way in the dark of the night. I think that his visitor came meaning to kill, and waited his time and killed, and that he had hardly killed before we rang the bell at the door." Hanaud drew in his breath sharply. "Imagine that, my friend! He is standing here over the man he has murdered, and unexpectedly the shrill, clear sound of the bell goes through the house—as though God said, 'I saw you!' Imagine it! He turned out the light and stands holding his breath in the dark. The bell rings again. He must answer it or worse may befall. He goes into the front room and throws open the window, and hears it is the police who are at the door." Hanaud nodded his head in a reluctant admiration. "But that man had an iron nerve! He doesn't lose his head. He closes the shutter, he turns on the light, that we may think he is getting up, he runs back into this room. He will not waste time by stumbling down the stairs and fumbling with the lock of the back door. No, he opens these shutters and drops to the ground. It is done in a second. Another second, and he is in the lane; another, and he is safe, his dreadful mission ended. Cladel will not speak. Cladel will not tell us the things we want to know."
Hanaud went over to the cabinet and, using his skeleton keys, again opened its doors. On the shelves were ranged a glass jar or two, a retort, the simplest utensils of a laboratory and a few bottles, one of which, larger than the rest, was half filled with a colourless liquid.
"Alcohol," said Hanaud, pointing to the label.
Jim Frobisher moved carefully round on the outskirts of the room, taking care not to alter the disarrangements of the furniture. He looked the bottles over. Not one of them held a drop of that pale lemon-coloured solution which the Professor, in his Treatise, had described. Hanaud shut and locked the doors of the cabinet again and stepped carefully over to the bureau. It stood open, and a few papers were strewn upon the flap. He sat down at the bureau and began carefully to search it. Jim sat down in a chair. Somehow it had leaked out that, since this morning, Hanaud knew of Jean Cladel. Jean Cladel therefore must be stopped from any revelations; and he had been stopped. Frobisher could no longer doubt that murder had been done on the night of April the 27th, in the Maison Crenelle. Development followed too logically upon development. The case was building itself up—another storey had been added to the edifice with this new crime. Yes, certainly and solidly it was building itself up—this case against some one.