by Tony Medawar
Kissed … he seemed to be speaking inaudible words, and she was replying. She lighted a cigarette, inhaled deeply a few moments, and laughed soundlessly; you could see him smirking sideways at you now. She ground out the cigarette against an ashtray. Her eyes moved towards the place where the window should be, and I stared into them. Then she pointed to the button of her slipper, which had become unfastened; she advanced almost to the divan, and put out her left foot. While he knelt over the slipper, she threw her weight to the right, as though leaning against the divan … Catlike, she leaped aside. In her hands the great sword flashed aloft and fell.
His head seemed to leap like a grisly toy, springing out on wires … The scene went dark. Somewhere the orchestra banged into the last bar of ‘Hallelujah!’
‘It is not yet eleven-fifteen,’ Bencolin’s voice snapped. ‘See, she looks around. She shakes the head aloft in triumph. She picks up the head and gestures like Salomé—this man, who would have killed her, she has killed. Then she becomes tense, ready, watchful. She has left a cigarette; that must be destroyed. She drops it into her wrist-bag. There are some ashes on the rug; she grinds them into the nap with her heel. Then she leaves again by the hall door, having raised the window to let the smoke out.
‘And why has she done this? Why has she not denounced this man, whom she knows to be an impostor, to the police? So that the world will never know he is not the real Saligny; so that she, having married him, will inherit his fortune—which she can enjoy with her confederate … Vautrelle! Now, the murder committed, Vautrelle, who planned all this, must supply her with an alibi …
‘She knows that the detective Bencolin is sitting in the main salon, down at its far end. Very soon she joins him. To all outward appearances, Saligny (or Laurent) is not yet dead; she talks of him. At precisely eleven-thirty, according to a prearranged signal, a man walks through the door of the card-room from the salon. His back is turned, and he is thirty feet away from the people she has joined, but he is tall and blond. She says, “There goes Raoul now …” But that man was Vautrelle.’
(As one puzzles at a cryptogram, and slowly sees the letters click into place, one by one, fewer gaps and fewer) …
‘Vautrelle simply walked through the card-room, pulling the bell-cord deliberately as he went, walked out into the hall. But he turned to his left and entered the smoking room by the door in the projection of the wall which conceals the card-room door from the eyes of the detective seated at the end of the hall. Vautrelle walks out the door of the smoking room into the hall, and speaks to the detective. The whole process, by time-tests, consumes just twelve and one-half seconds. His own alibi was now complete, as well as that of his colleague. He has summoned the boy with the cocktails, by pulling the bell, so that the body may be discovered and he can possess this alibi.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bencolin cried out of the dark, ‘there will be no more pictures, no more stage-effects. You see now that these two were working together to gain control of Saligny’s fortune; Mr Golton blurted out the truth about their affair. That was why it was necessary to go through with the marriage.
‘But the body of the real Saligny must be disposed of. This body was then in a trunk at the home of Saligny, and Vautrelle must have known of it. He left the gambling-house, took madame home, and then (knowing that he was followed) he eluded my shadower at Maxim’s and drove to the back door of Saligny’s house, arriving there around one-thirty. He carried the body downstairs, having wrapped it in a blanket; then he walled it up in the cellar. By that time my companion and I had arrived. He did not know of our presence, and tried to come upstairs—probably to get rid of the bloodstained sawdust or dispose of the trunk by carrying it away. The intervention of Girard led him to murder. He escaped by the cellar door, having stolen a bunch of keys on a previous visit to Saligny. Just when he learned that Saligny was the madman Laurent we shall have to ask him to tell us himself …’
The single drop-light appeared over Bencolin’s head, but the rest of us were in shadow. I leaned back limply, and I was exhausted.
‘And now,’ said Bencolin, ‘before turning on the lights over you, I may tell you the purpose of this experiment. I venture to predict that M. Vautrelle’s chair is empty. If you will examine your manacles, you will see that with a little easy manipulation you could have slid them off without difficulty. None of you has tried to slip them off, I venture to assert; this was because you were innocent. The crux of our practical psychology, and the reason why this test was tried, is that the guilty person always does.’
The room appeared in a flood of light. There was a nervous, exhausted calm, and a strained silence. The sweated hair clung to Golton’s forehead and I could hear him wheezing behind his gag. Fenelli seemed about to melt. Madame lay back in her chair, head lolling, one wrist free. Vautrelle’s chair was empty.
Bencolin walked to the middle of the room, but he did not speak. The tile walls lent that room the chill semblance of a morgue. Laboriously madame worked herself free. She rose, swayed a little; tried to untie the gag, and finally ripped it off. Her ermine collar lay back from her throat, and she was panting. The face was sunken, a Madonna out of which peeped a vulture, and the dry lipstick cracked on her mouth. Her eyes, as she turned her head from side to side, were empty and frightening; a ruin.
Hard, harsh light … then the sound of steps on the tile floor. Two gendarmes appeared, escorting Vautrelle between them. He carried his coat over his arm, and he had casually lighted a cigarette.
‘You weak-knees!’ Louise de Saligny said, with sudden shrillness. ‘You left, did you?—Damn you.’ She leaned crookedly against the chair. The beauty and languor peeled away from her. ‘Well, tell them—go on—frightened at a lot of stage-traps—tell them!—’
Vautrelle was breaking. He tried to keep his mouth straight, but his forehead was a glitter of sweat; he tried to be contemptuous, but the ivory cigarette-holder trembled.
‘You fixed up that story about ordering the cocktails,’ madame said, giggling. ‘I knew it—wouldn’t go. You wanted me to kill him; you hadn’t the nerve … in a public place where we could prove an alibi … if you’d listened to me,’ she smirked. ‘Yes. I’ll tell them! Do you think I care about my precious neck? Or do you want to kiss my neck now—as you used to? “Ah, that divine neck”—you goat of a Russian!—well, go on; it will be your last chance before the guillotine hits it.’ She drew her hand across her throat, and her laugh echoed against the walls.
Vautrelle’s face was ghastly. The coat slid from his arm, and the cigarette spilled fire down his chin. With a terrific gritting of his nerves, he drew himself up. In a clear, defiant voice he sneered at Bencolin:
‘Why, yes, I left your performance. I thought I would go up and see the Grand Guignol. If your men hadn’t interfered, I should have been just in time for the second act.’
He essayed a bow towards the detective; then he lurched, and slid down in a dead faint. High and shrill against the tiles rang the laughter of Louise de Saligny.
X
BENCOLIN TAKES A CURTAIN-CALL
‘You will want some explanations, I take it,’ said Bencolin. ‘Well, there were certain features of the case which were clear from the moment I entered the room of the murder, and others which baffled me for the extraordinary time of nearly twelve hours.’
Again we were sitting in his littered study, before a fire which looked a great deal more cheerful than that of the night before. He had mellowed under the influence of an appalling quantity of Veuve Cliquot, and I was far from taciturn myself. He lighted a cigar luxuriously, and leaned back to blow thoughtful rings at the firelight.
‘Let us take it from the beginning. Before Madame Louise was supposed to know about the murder, when we were all sitting there in the salon, you remember that I salvaged her cigarette, as I told you. Possibly the implication of much hashish has not occurred to you. It is the killer’s drug. If you doubt it, look up the origin of the word “assassin”, which is a
direct derivation. A confirmed user is at any time liable to go amuck—we get that phrase from the drug, too. It makes them nearly as insane as our first trouble-maker, Laurent.
‘Then we were called into the room of the murder. You probably noted that heavy, sweet odour; if you ever dabble with this case in fiction, be sure to include it. It suggested hashish. She smoked before us, in the other room, but the overpowering collection of other smells made it confused with powder and perfume. Now that room was perfectly clear, and it appeared quite distinctly. The window was up, which might or might not have been an indication that it was raised to drive out the odour. At any rate, it created a strong suspicion that madame had been there a short time before. A short time, or the odour would have been entirely dissipated.
‘Next we examined the position of the body. It was in a grotesque kneeling position; showed no sign of a struggle, and indicated that he had been hit from behind, as I pointed out. The body of a decapitated man, as we discover at the guillotine, has a habit of freezing into its position. Now imagine to yourself the only way in the world it would have been possible to get him into that position, so that he could be struck from behind! Why, attending to the fastening of a lady’s slipper! It is not normally necessary to demand masculine attention to the stocking or the garter—well, or the roll, if you insist. My comment about pillows, which seems to have puzzled you, was perfectly simple. It might surprise the victim to see a sharp sword lying in full view on the divan, and pillows in a line would very effectually conceal it.
‘Thus far, it was a woman’s crime; and I thought I could name the woman. Strength? Remember that once before Madame Louise had overpowered a madman, as I told you; and so it was no very far stretch of the imagination to conceive of her wielding that sword.
‘Was it possible,I thought, that the time of the crime might have been before half-past eleven? I would pigeonhole the idea with the question, Who was the man who actually entered, and why?
‘Before I came there, I already had a suspicion that the man posing as Saligny was Laurent. When we found the pictures of himself in his pockets, it suggested not so much conceit as an endless studying of his prototype; especially since some of the pictures were not at all flattering. Find me the beau who preserves pictures that make him look hideous! Then that question of a weapon in his pockets—it was curious—’
‘But we found no weapon in his pocket!’ I protested.
‘Ah, that was the curious thing. Put yourself in the place of a man who fears for his life from an unknown assailant. Would you go around entirely unarmed, particularly if you were one of the finest pistol-shots in Europe? Now, I thought to myself, is it possible that Madame Louise knew this too? Might she have killed him because of it? If so, why in the devil’s name does she not speak and exonerate herself? Hold that idea in mind, please. Remember that Laurent is a cunning villain, who sends notes to himself and, when he knows he is being shadowed at the opium-house, voluntarily tells the police so that we shall believe he has merely been collecting evidence.
‘Then came the crux: that outlandish business of the bell being rung. The question is, Who rang it; the false Saligny or the murderer? If Saligny rang it, the murderer certainly was insane, for, after his victim has rung a bell which will summon a witness quite soon, he coolly kills Saligny anyhow! If the murderer rang it, the same rule applies: he blithely rang for a witness to see him commit the murder, since he could not have known that the boy would be delayed in answering the bell. The only tenable hypothesis, however, is that the man whom we saw enter the room rang the bell. If it was not Saligny, who was it; and (here is the locked room) where did that man go?
‘I now switch back to the idea that when the bell was rung the victim had already been killed, and the evidence points to Louise de Saligny. Who could have been the man who entered the room? By his size and the colour of his hair, only Vautrelle! Well, then, Vautrelle knew about the crime; and madame knew it was he who entered, if she had just left her husband without a head. It was pretty evidence of collusion, when coupled with Golton’s drunken assertion about a possible affair there.
‘Collusion, why? The answer is obvious. They know about the false Saligny, but they must keep the world thinking it was Saligny, or there would be no fortune. But how could they have known this? The probability was that the false Saligny’s refusal to indulge in sports had aroused Vautrelle’s suspicions, and he investigated Saligny’s house—indicated by the fact that he stole the cellar keys.
‘When he learned about the trunk we shall not know until the juge d’instruction gets his confession, but clearly he had to hurry to Saligny’s house and destroy that damning evidence that an impostor was about. The house would have been gone over by the attorneys and the appraisers of the estate, and a conspicuous trunk in the study would assuredly have been opened.
‘Having already proved an alibi for madame and for himself, Vautrelle would return to Saligny’s home as soon as he could. I did not, naturally, know about the trunk until we ourselves reached the premises; but it seemed probable that there was in that house some evidence of a false Saligny which Vautrelle would wish destroyed. I shall be very much surprised if the executors do not unearth a diary, some letters in Laurent’s handwriting, or other suspicious material. That Vautrelle had visited Saligny’s home on the day before the murder is fairly clear since he knew about and suspected the trunk. This was probably when he stole the keys of the cellar door … So after the killing of Laurent he gave my shadower the slip (recall the operative’s report over the telephone), and went back to hide the body of the real Saligny. Fresh mortar does not ordinarily lie about loose in cellars, and presents another indication that not only was the prowler familiar with the house, but that he had prepared for his work on that or the preceding day.
‘The intruder was, then, a close friend of Saligny—’
‘But why didn’t Golton fit in as well? He lived next door, too.’
‘Zut alors! That Golton hypothesis of yours is an idée fixe!’
I narrated the experiment of the handshake in the café, and added, ‘That was why I suspected him to the very last minute—’
Bencolin chuckled. ‘Well, some of our evidence hinges round the flashlight; let us take that into consideration. Golton’s bad hand was no evidence at all that he was guilty. Have you ever had anything knocked out of your own hand by a pistol bullet?’
I confessed to no such charming experience.
‘A light object would cause no more disastrous result than a momentary jar. Something very heavy, of course, might numb one’s hand; but certainly not an electric torch. Did you think for a moment that I was trying to hit the intruder with my shots?’
‘Since you fired point-blank at him, it seemed highly probable.’
‘Why? I knew who the intruder was and I also was morally certain he carried no pistol—why should he? He expected to find the house deserted. But remember above all that we ourselves were fully as guilty of house-breaking as he. I hardly wanted to complicate matters by unnecessary shooting. Had I known that Girard was in danger I would have dropped him, but I cannot lay claim to omniscience. What I was doing—sound as it may like the master detective of fiction—was estimating his height … How? Well, if you are holding an electric torch, what is the natural position of your hand? Try it. You see—waist-high. Now I took good aim—I couldn’t have had a better target—and put two bullets through the flashlight firing from the stairs. One of the bullets nicked the newel post at the precise height of the electric torch, and then entered the floor. Calculating from my own position on the stairs, and estimating the mark on the newel post as indicating the man’s waist, it was not too difficult to estimate his height at about six feet.’
‘It is without doubt a unique, if somewhat too spectacular, method of taking a man’s measurements. But it seems to this hard-headed person that it would have been much simpler neatly to put those bullets through both legs—’
‘My dear fellow, you are s
aturated with traditions of American gunplay! In France the police shoot only as a last resort. Besides, a sense of drama prevented me from pouncing too soon on my victim.’
‘And thereby cost a man’s life. But proceed.’
‘So the height of the murderer,’ went on Bencolin expansively, ‘excludes definitely your candidate, M. Golton. Your last remarks indicate why I did not give you a loaded pistol. Had you been in my place, you would have felt an overwhelming urge to clutter up the premises with bullets on the slightest provocation. You would have caught the machine-gun urge of New York and Chicago—in which cities, I am told, under the beneficent American government, a man has no personal liberties except the full and free right to commit murder.’
‘Thereby,’ I said, ‘causing French detectives to talk like United States senators …’
‘It is true!’ he protested. ‘That is the philosophy of your great country. It is even so bad that every time I see in the newsreels a picture of your president M. Coolidge, he is either wearing a cowboy suit or indulging in rifle-practice. Diable! The crime-situation must be terrible.’
‘It is certainly a branch of crime,’ I said, ‘sponsored by the W.C.T.U.[4] and kindred producers of nausea … You were saying?’
‘About the murder. When you add the evidence of the cigarette ashes in the card-room containing hashish, the fingerprints on the window being those of madame, you add a couple of details which never interested me, but which would be highly valuable in a court of law. A search of Vautrelle’s house tonight produced the gloves he had worn to bury Saligny and kill Girard—’
‘What is the evidence in a pair of soiled gloves? I have a pair myself.’
‘I would warn you never to discount the efforts of our tireless laboratory. Did you know that the fibres of certain fabrics, impressed on a receptive surface, will print their individual weave exactly like fingerprints? And that no two weaves, even on a machine-made article, are precisely similar under a microscope? No, Jack, it is no longer safe even to use gloves. The fibreprints on the dust of the knife that stabbed Girard correspond with the soiled gloves Vautrelle had neglected to throw away.’
