The Case of the Flying Donkey: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “Yes,” Travers told him. “There are things that have just been discovered. It appears that she was concerned in the murder of this Braque.”

  “But, monsieur, it is impossible,” Charles said fiercely.

  “One must not say that,” Travers told him quietly. “It is not for us to question the orders of M. Gallois.”

  “It is he?” demanded Charles with the same indignation. “Then he is an imbecile. I could have told him—”

  He was suddenly quiet, and shaking his head.

  “Told him what?”

  “It is nothing,” Charles said despondently. “But I know her, and I know that she is incapable of this thing.”

  “Well, you’ll have your chance to say what you know,” Travers told him.

  “We will go, then—”

  Travers held him by the arm.

  “We remain here, and for once you act under my instructions. And, no talking. All we have to do is watch.”

  Then Travers saw something he had not noticed, that a man had emerged from the side door. The bad light had deceived him and now he realized that a man must have been placed on guard while the woman was absent.

  “Listen,” said Travers. “All these agents are known to you?”

  “Doubtless,” Charles said laconically, and there was still a grievance in his tone.

  “Then tell that man that you have the orders of M. Gallois. He is to remove himself over there, just out of that light, and you will stay with him and keep the door under observation. It is important that neither of you should be observed. You understand that? If anything miscarries, I hold you responsible. Remain there no matter how long. It anyone enters the door, make no move, but when he comes out, wait till he is near you and then arrest him. If he comes this way, I will stop him. If he arrives by taxi, then close in on the taxi as soon as he re-enters.”

  “Ah!” said Charles. “This Pierre Larne returns?”

  “Yes,” said Travers. “It appears that he returns.”

  Another two minutes and that gloomy street was deserted again.

  Travers lighted a cigarette and shielded it while he smoked, and his eyes were always on that door. Twice there were people who appeared, but they had no business at that door. Half an hour went by, and nothing happened, and then a man appeared at the far end by which Travers and Charles had come. He was a tall man, and lame, and he looked about him as he slowly made his way along that ill-lighted street. Then he crossed to that side where Travers was, and Travers drew quietly back to the darkness of his concealing doorway. Then all at once the lameness of the man had gone, and he was at Travers’s elbow.

  “It is you, my friend?”

  “Yes,” whispered Travers, “But how did you know I was here?”

  Gallois was now in the same shelter of the doorway.

  “Perhaps I have what one calls the intuition. This morning, by example, Pierre Larne arrives in Paris. What is more natural than that he should come here when it is dark to arrange with this Elise Moulins with whom he is so acquaint?”

  “You’ve questioned him?” asked the startled Travers.

  But the fingers of Gallois had closed all at once about his arm, and the narrow street had suddenly an oppressive quiet. A man was coming slowly towards the door, and his rubber-shod boots made no sound on the cobbles. He passed the door, still walking slowly, and then twenty yards on, he turned. He approached that door again, and then as if by some queer illusion, he had suddenly disappeared.

  Travers was motionless, Gallois waited a moment.

  “Allons!” he said, but the hand of Travers drew him back.

  “Remain here!” he said. “All the precautions are taken. It is necessary that we wait till he emerges.”

  There were no lights that flashed on below the stairs, and the man might have been some delusion of the brain. But for the sound of their own quiet breathing, the street had still a silence that was strangely oppressive. Then, before they were scarcely aware, there was a darkness by the doorway. The man appeared again, and there seemed a difference about his shape, but it was only a something he was carrying. A quick look each way along that gloomy street and he was crossing to the other side.

  Travers moved and Gallois with him. They moved more quickly and broke into a run, and ahead of them there was a cry and the sound of more feet on the damp cobble-stones. Gallois was now running madly, and then as suddenly he halted. Travers drew pantingly up to see him standing with Charles and the other man, looking down at a figure that sprawled on the scones.

  “He hasn’t killed himself?”

  “No,” said Charles. “It was the wet of the stones, and he slipped, and he struck perhaps his head.”

  He was stooping and feeling, and turning the man to the light. Then his voice came startledly.

  “But it is not Pierre!” His mouth had a foolish gape. “It is the painter—Henri Larne! Where then is Pierre?”

  “That I know,” said Gallois unconcernedly. “Since five o’clock, Pierre has been under arrest.”

  “You know everything!” asked the bewildered Travers.

  Gallois shook his head.

  “No, my friend. This Pierre refuses to speak.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There is very little that I know. At this moment I do not even know for a certainty who it was that killed Braque. And if I guess, then it is incredible how it could be done.”

  But Travers was picking up that awkward-looking thing that had fallen from the grasp of the slipping man.

  “Ah! the picture,” Gallois said. “It is of an importance?”

  “Yes,” said Travers. “It is everything that one needs. On it you will read what it is that will end this case—the name of the man who killed Braque.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE FLYING DONKEY

  GALLOIS had insisted that Travers should be first with the explanation. Charles was in the room too, though Elise was doubtless imagining that he had been removed for interrogation. It was Travers who had insisted that the comedy should be played to its end, and Charles had at first been sent to the room where she waited.

  “Though I didn’t know it,” began Travers, “what was always at the back of my mind was a feeling of disappointment which I could never quite explain. Now I know that it was this: I never felt we had a satisfactory explanation for that curious conduct of Braque in the Tate Gallery that morning I told you about. But we’ll come to that later. What I’ll do is begin at where the whole scheme began, and if you think I’m wrong”—he paused to smile—“or know I’m wrong, then you’ll tell me.

  “To begin with Henri Larne. He was a good portrait painter of the humdrum kind, and he realized he’d never do more than scrape a living in France. So he went to America, where his mother’s relations lived. Then, six years or so ago, and whether in America or France or even Algiers I can’t say, he ran across the derelict Moulins. He couldn’t help recognizing him, and I’d say that out of the kindness of his heart he befriended him and got him somewhat on his feet again. Moulins painted a picture or two—the still-life things that were now his speciality—and Larne must have gasped in amazement when he saw them. And what he decided to do was to try and market the pictures and pocket most of the proceeds. Then he thought of a much better scheme. He would pass the pictures off as his own. The only trouble was that Moulins had signed them with his initials, and to scrape off the pigment or tamper with it, might be suspicious.

  “Then he had a far better scheme. He had never forgotten the jibe of a certain critic and the pun on his name, and he suddenly realized he could add additional strokes to the initials of Maurice Moulins’ name. That was done like this, as you see on the picture he gave to his sister.

  “That double M, artistically placed, was his signature. Now look at the picture he gave me, and you can see where the additional lines were added. Mind you, Moulins might not have gone on signing the pictures, but once Larne had taken the flying donkey for his signature, he had to go on with it, even if he painted the w
hole flying donkey himself— which wouldn’t worry him at all. It would avoid all possibility of detection, for one thing. Have a look at this marguerite study he gave me, and compare. Most ingenious, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” said Gallois, after a long look. “That was undoubtedly the scheme. And yet this Henri Larne could never have killed Braque.”

  “That we shall see,” Travers told him. “But to go back. The first picture so exhibited created a sensation at the Salon. Larne knew he had a gold-mine, and he decided to control its output. He gave Moulins every facility for drinking again—”

  “You will pardon,” broke in Gallois, “but you have not, as I have, the doctors’ report. There may have been these facilities for drink, but it was drugs that they gave him. Everywhere on his arms are the pricks of the needle.”

  Travers winced. “Even more hellish than I thought. But the rest of the scheme is easy. Pierre, the half-brother, was brought into it, and the woman Gurlot to be the guardian and the supposed wife. A suitable retreat had to be found, and a most excellent one was discovered at the Villa Claire. Larne was supposed to paint very little, but it was Moulins who could only be induced to recover from the necessary drugs and paint little. But that didn’t matter so much. It even in a way enhanced the value of what was saleable, and it helped to create a Larne legend.

  “A letter, ostensibly written by a priest, was sent from Algiers to the sister whom Moulins must have mentioned to Larne, and the scheme settled down to steady working. For five years Moulins was kept alive, but of late he produced less and less that was really saleable. Owing to the drugs, he was less and less able to concentrate, and Larne had a dozen and more comparatively useless things of his which he explained away to me as being merely experiments in light.

  “Then came the meeting of Braque and Élise Moulins. Braque saw nothing in the picture at first. Remember that both those signatures are very small, and the similarity didn’t strike him till later. His first gold-mine in Spain had petered out, but now he knew he had a better one. Perhaps he privately watched the Villa, and he certainly made a close study of every signature of Larne’s he could find—as he did that morning in the Tate—and be was anxious also to know what Larne was making out of the imposture. All that explains what he did in England, and the fact must remain that between the time I saw him and the time of my arrival in Paris, he had Larne under his thumb and was blackmailing him. Pierre was the go-between. It was from Larne that Braque got the wad of notes he flourished under the eyes of Cointeau. It was the Villa Claire that was the gold-mine to which, as Braque remarked to Cointeau, one had merely to take a taxi to reach.”

  “That, without doubt, is correct,” said Gallois, and nodded. “All this money from the gold-mine of Moulins was now to be divided, not by two but by three.”

  “And there was the possibility that Braque would take far more than a third,” Travers said. “I’d say the brothers resolved to get rid of him at once. Before he was actually murdered, Pierre was looking for likely houses where Moulins could be hidden again and more securely. But the real bomb-shell was when I artlessly appeared at the Villa Claire with my story of Braque in England.

  “Larne told me a cock-and-bull story, about a burglary and an attempt to murder him—all to throw a veil of mystery round Braque and also himself, and he was most anxious to find out not only all I knew but all I was likely to know. Then on that Monday afternoon he began to see how he could use an innocent-looking amateur like myself to establish a perfect alibi. He pretended, for instance, that I had given him the inspiration he needed to paint a picture.”

  “You do not yet tell us of this alibi,” Gallois said anxiously.

  “I’m coming to it now,” Travers said. “As an alibi, it was one of the best I’ve ever encountered. At five-thirty he began on blank canvas, and from then on he painted under the eyes of a model. Furthermore, when you and I arrived later, we knew from the vast amount of work he’d done that he must have concentrated with a tremendous intensity. Yet meanwhile he’d murdered Braque, and helped himself to the wad of notes with which he’d recently parted, and searched the rooms for anything incriminating.

  “Next day I was told the story of Bertrand and how he was going to Grenoble, and how Larne had had his patience exhausted and was getting rid of Pierre. The rest of that you know better than I do.”

  “Yes,” said Gallois. “But the murder, my friend. How was it committed? And how could you discover?”

  “As soon as I clapped eyes on the initials in the corner of the sister’s picture, that was how and when I discovered things,” Travers said. “I saw the initials and there was also some curious recalling of Larne’s pictures. Then, as soon as I began to work things out, I knew he must have done the murder. But even then I couldn’t think how, and so I decided to put up a bluff and make him reveal it himself. When I saw him this evening I said we knew Elise had committed the murder but we couldn’t discover how. I said she must have left the room for twenty minutes without his knowing it. Then he told me a story about her drugging the tea she made, and altering the clock, I can tell you his story later, but it’s full of the most obvious flaws, but the main thing is that while he did incriminate Elise, he told me just what I wanted to know and incriminated himself. And as a final proof, I’d told him about the picture she had, and its connection with Braque, and how it had her brother’s initials. I told him enough to make him aware that that picture must be got rid of. Then I made it easy by telling him in so many words that her apartment would be deserted. After that there was only to keep him under observation. He couldn’t harm Elise because she was safely here, but he did take the picture.”

  He smiled as he caught Gallois’ look of anxious impatience.

  “But you want to hear how the alibi was worked. Well, it was planned with an ingenuity that was absolutely uncanny. On the murder morning he took a last precaution. He saw Cointeau, who didn’t know him, and by means of shrewd questioning convinced himself that what Braque had already assured him was true—that Cointeau knew nothing of a secret which Braque was only too anxious to keep to himself. Next Larne rang me, pretending to be Braque, and arranged for me to go to the rue Jourdoise at six o’clock. Meanwhile he’d asked me to see him at the Villa where I was to establish his alibi.

  “The picture of the Lazy Servant—shall we call it?—was of course already painted by Moulins, and all Larne was proposing was to adapt it and include a figure as a background to Moulins’ simple still-life painting of vegetables. The pose, and this is most important, was designed so that the model should be in the most natural—and the most comfortable—position for sleep. The canvas I saw was a prepared blank, and while I was there the model arrived.

  ‘‘You, my dear Gallois, had the idea that the secretary at the bureau wasn’t telling you the truth when she said it was by accident that Elise Moulins went to the studio. Larne must have known all about Elise, of course, since he wrote that letter from Algiers, but all the same it doesn’t matter now whether he wanted her specially as his model so as to be able to throw suspicion on her if need arose.

  “What does not matter either is that Elise was tired and he told her to make tea. He’d have told her that in any case. She, or he, made the tea, and it was mildly drugged. He took care that she had finished drinking it just as he began to work. Then, if you remember, she was lying in a position of rest and at once she felt asleep, just as she was supposed to in the picture. Pierre, who was handy, came in to keep guard and to explain things plausibly if she awoke too soon. In twenty minutes at the latest, Larne was back. The clock, which stood behind the model, was put right and the finished canvas of Moulins—but for the figure—was put on the easel. Pierre disappeared and Larne began to paint in the model. She woke, and knew she had had a nap. But a peep disclosed that Larne had observed nothing. He had assumed she was merely posing, had never suspected a real sleep, and the last thing she would wish to do was to call attention to her lapse.

  “On we
nt Larne with his painting, which of course she couldn’t see, and which was really a filling in of herself as a background and very roughly, as it would presumably have been done by Moulins. Then we arrived, and even if we had had suspicions, we should have known by the amount of work he’d done that he could never have left the room. That was the alibi, and I think you’ll agree it was perfect.”

  “But for you, monsieur,” said Charles, who had been straining hard to follow Travers’s English.

  “But for M. Travers, there you are right,” said Gallois, with a majestic wave of the hand. “This is an example for one so inexperienced as yourself, to see how a master can employ his brain and his sensibility.”

  He was coming round from the table to shake Travers warmly by the hand.

  “And you,” said Travers. “There are things which you also must explain.”

  Gallois shrugged his shoulders. “Of myself I have a shame that is immense. It is you who are the artist, and I, I am what you call—what you call”

  “A very modest fellow,” broke in Travers “This was a partnership affair, and it’s got to end up as one. It’s your turn to do the explaining.”

  “Ah, well,” said Gallois, and went back to his desk. “To explain, but what am I to explain? From the beginning I know everything, except what it is necessary that I should know. I know of the existence of this picture which is painted by Maurice Moulins, but to me, to me who claim that he is an artist, it showed nothing.” He spread his palms with an enormous humility. “But I will also commence at the beginning.

  “And it is at this very beginning that you assure me of something which is of the most interesting. There are three people who know the hotel at which you stay, and of the three I am one. Therefore I suspect the other two, who are Henri Larne and Pierre Larne. But Henri Larne, for many reasons and for his alibi, it is impossible to suspect seriously. There remains therefore that it was Pierre Larne who makes for you in the voice of Braque the appointment in the rue Jourdoise. There I was wrong, but the logic to me is still unanswerable. From the time that I suspect this Pierre to be the assassin of Braque, he is as far as possible under observation. Unhappily he was not followed to Fécamp when he came to see M. Archon just after the murder of Braque, because I had not begun sufficiently to suspect.”