Murder Abroad

by E. R. Punshon

  He reflected that he must learn how to boost himself, though indeed to boost oneself is a gift like another and best not attempted by those to whom it has not been granted. Alain, who had been deep in thought, said abruptly: “But luck is only of value to those who know how to use it. Do not think, monsieur, that I undervalue the intelligence you have shown. It will, however, be necessary to test thoroughly your theory by actual experiment. For one thing, I seem to have heard that the Massif is crossed by a crevasse with steep, indeed precipitous sides. It would be impossible to climb them in the dark and binder twine would be no help?”

  “I think,” Bobby answered, “that explains the two rope ladders in the attics here. Unless I am mistaken they still show traces of earth and vegetation to show they have been used out of doors. I called the attention of your inspector to it. Possibly expert analysis would show if the traces I think I made out, correspond to the soil round the crevasse. Such ladders left in position and led up to by the binder twine trail would make it easy to get across, especially for a strong athletic man like Shields who, too, had cultivated a power of seeing in the dark. Shields boasted about that once to me. Possibly he had, too, a small electric torch to help, and certainly the Abbé Taylour’s lantern would help to give him his direction. I know one of the police—the brigadier I think—saw his light go out in his bedroom at midnight as if he were retiring, but that could easily be managed by any clockwork appliance. I think it was to get that evidence, to make sure that police should be watching, that Shields manufactured signs of mysterious trespassing in his garden. At that time of the year it is dark early, and he could start by four in the afternoon. Allowing six hours to cross the fifteen miles of the Massif by the paths marked out, he would reach the Pépin Mill by ten. He could spend two or three hours there, leave about midnight, and be back at Barsac by six, before it was light or any risk of any one being up and about to notice his return.”

  “It is becoming plain how it could have happened,” Alain agreed. “The proofs accumulate. Yet where is Shields? What has become of him? If he has yet another alibi as ingenious to offer us, our work will begin again. I ask myself, what has become of him?”

  “I doubt if we are going to be worried by another alibi,” Bobby said. “At a guess, I should say that probably he has already left France—and with the start he has, it won*t be any too easy to catch up with him. I expect he realized that after Volny’s death flight was necessary. The body was certain to be found sooner or later.”

  “It might have been much later, even a year or two later, but for your gift of observation, monsieur,” Alain admitted.

  Bobby bowed acknowledgements.

  “At any rate,” he went on, “Shields could hardly hope this time to pass off what had happened as either suicide or accident. He had had neither time nor opportunity to make the careful preparations he carried out in the Polthwaite case. His only hope was flight and by this time he may be anywhere in Europe—or Africa either, for that matter, or on the way to America.”

  “We shall get him in the end, we always do,” said Alain, though without too much confidence in his voice. “But it will not be easy. Most criminals are very stupid. It is why they are criminals. But this man is the exception. He is intelligent. It is probable he has had his plans prepared in readiness. The world to-day is full of fugitives, of refugees. They swarm. One more. It is difficult, even very difficult.”

  “There is perhaps one line that might be followed,” Bobby suggested.

  “Which?”

  “The diamonds and so on stolen from Mademoiselle Polthwaite.”

  “The diamonds? Yes, it is true. Even so, it remains difficult. Many of the refugees, they have had the same idea as your Mademoiselle Polthwaite and have their capital with them in the form of jewels. It is easy to say to a jeweller: ‘I am a refugee. That is why I have these stones to sell.”

  “I am going on a theory,” Bobby said. “It is clear I think that Shields fled in panic after the murder of Volny.

  I imagine he had the jewels concealed in some secure hiding-place. I think there is no doubt that his story to Eudes, his pretence of hoping to discover them, was partly to avert suspicion, partly for an excuse to keep in touch with Citry so as to get early warning of any possible new developments. The prompt way he turned up there immediately after my arrival, his talk about coincidences— I dislike coincidence, almost as much as I distrust alibis— all helped to confirm my suspicions of his guilt. Therefore I assume he had the jewels already and had them hidden in some secure hiding-place. Not, I think, in his house. That, I am sure, he would think too dangerous. Not in any bank or anywhere like that. He would be afraid. Hidden, then, in a secure hiding-place, but at a distance, where it would need a little time to recover them. I doubt if he would want to take that time now, after the Volny affair, when he would feel every minute counted. I reason therefore that the jewels are still in their hiding-place.”

  “Yes, it is possible; all that is logic,” Alain interrupted. “But where? I ask you, where?”

  “I tried to think that out,” Bobby answered. “It seemed to me that in his place I should reflect that there was a secure hiding-place almost at my back door, so to say. The Bornay Massif. I think it would seem easy to dig a hole up there somewhere, to bury the jewels, to take a note somehow of the exact spot, and to leave them there, quite secure, till safe opportunity offered to remove them. All this case has shown that Shields understands the value of patience.”

  Alain was looking a good deal worried.

  “All this is very well reasoned,” he said, “but a search, it is impossible. How to tell where in all that wild wilderness of the Bornay Massif a little hole was dug six months ago? An army might search for a century and find nothing.”

  “I think it logical to suppose,” Bobby went on, unheeding this outburst, “that Shields made some sort of note of the place, both for his own sake, to help his memory and guard against any forgetfulness, and also to provide against the risk of having to send some one else to get the stuff for him. If you throw your mind back, monsieur le juge, you will remember, I think, we have already some idea of the form taken by that aid to his memory.”

  Alain leaped to his feet in sudden excitement.

  “Why, of course,” he cried. “That is as plain as the nose on your face. Only—”

  He paused, his enthusiasm suddenly evaporating. Bobby completed the sentence.

  “Only now it’s not there any longer,” he said, and Alain nodded a gloomy acquiescence.

  CHAPTER XXII

  SEARCHING

  It was late now—early perhaps would be a better word, since morning was not far away—and both Alain and Bobby were needing sleep. A few hours were all either could afford, and by eight o’clock Bobby was hard at work in Shields’s studio, trying to reproduce from memory that framed landscape he had seen hanging on the wall, that now had disappeared, that both he and Alain had so suddenly perceived the previous night must show the spot where the stolen jewels had been hidden.

  It was a simple deduction from the belief Bobby held that for every action there must be an explanation, difficult as it might be to discover that explanation.

  “For every action a criminal takes, there must be an adequate reason, which it is the business of the detective to discover,” he said presently to Clauzel, who had greeted this theory that the missing landscape showed the hiding-place of the diamonds with some incredulity.

  Bobby believed, too, that the inaccurate drawing by which the two duellists shown in the picture seemed to be aiming, not at each other, but at some unknown object in the background, had been in fact not clumsiness but intentional, and that the spot where the lines of fire crossed, at the foot of a stunted oak, showed the exact spot where the Polthwaite treasure had been buried.

  “In any event,” Clauzel grumbled, “how can one hope to find one stunted oak, one overhanging rock, in a wilderness that is full of them?”

  Bobby did not try to argue the
point. He went on busily with his sketching, trying his hardest to remember how tree and rock and the general background had been related to one another, and Glauzel went off to join Alain who had secured a map of the Bornay Massif. Together they set to work to portion it out in sections for the search they were organizing, though indeed Alain fully agreed with Clauzel that it would be difficult to find in that vast wilderness of scrub and rock the one spot where a hole had been dug and the lost diamonds buried.

  “Provided also,” growled Clauzel, “that Shields has not already recovered them. For my part, I cannot imagine a man who has committed two murders leaving behind him precisely what he committed the murders for. I say, find Shields, find the diamonds.”

  “For my part,” answered Alain, “I think, Commissaire, our young English friend is right and that Shields might easily think first of escape, hoping to return later or to send some one else to recover the diamonds. If so, that would explain why he took away with him the picture which we believe shows the actual hiding-place. In that connection, one observes,” added Alain thoughtfully, “that the young Camion has also disappeared.”

  “It is a coincidence,” agreed Clauzel, “it is even suggestive. Is there, however, anything to prove that this landscape does in fact represent a spot to be found on the Bornay Massif?”

  “It seems likely,” Alain answered. “Could one choose a better hiding-place? One hopes that if our young Englishman can reproduce the sketch from memory, then some one will recognize it. It is a chance.”

  Clauzel grunted again to show what he thought of that chance. Then he grumbled:

  “That young man, he does not seem to me very intelligent. Yet it is certain that he notices things. Also he can reason from what he notices. It is something.”

  “It is even a good deal,” observed Alain. “It is even possible that he is in fact intelligent—that is to say, for an Englishman.”

  They gave up discussing Bobby and continued with their work. After each man had been shown the sector to which he was assigned and before he was dispatched on his task, he was sent up to the studio where Bobby was trying so desperately to recapture his memory of Shields’s sketch in successive versions of which about the only permanent features were a stunted oak growing before a steep, overhanging cliff, overhanging to such an extent indeed that the hollow beneath was deep enough to be called a cave, and a tall, isolated rock, of the shape of a sugar loaf, which he found himself unable to relate to the rest of the landscape in any probable connection, and so tried putting it in to the right and to the left, in the background and in the foreground without any satisfactory result.

  “Hang it all, I don’t see how the thing could be there at all,” he told himself despairingly, and wondered if in fact it had been sketched in merely to deceive.

  Yet he could not remember that in the glance he had given at the lost landscape he was trying to reproduce, it had seemed in any way incongruous.

  His work was not helped nor his memory improved by the constant succession of interruptions to which he was subjected by the procession of prospective searchers who came to him all through the morning, all of them full of questions to which he could not reply, all of them declaring firmly that they had never seen or heard of such a spot as Bobby was trying to depict.

  He was indeed thoroughly tired out and disheartened by the time noon arrived and with it an excellent lunch Alain had arranged to be sent in.

  After that, he felt better, and was even allowed a little peace, since by now all Alain’s men, recruited chiefly from the gendarmerie, were away searching the Massif. The moment seeming appropriate for a little more of that sleep of which the night had been so much curtailed, he put some rugs and cushions on the floor, lay down, and instantly fell fast asleep. When, late in the afternoon, he woke, sat up, and looked round in that kind of bewilderment which follows wakening from sound slumber in unfamiliar surroundings, wondering where he was and how he had got there, he heard a familiar chuckle. Opposite to him sat Père Trouché.

  “Hé, hé,” the old man said, “one takes one’s ease, eh? Some work, it seems, and, my faith, it is work, out there running about on the Massif in the sun, and some slumber.”

  “And you,” asked Bobby, getting to his feet and shaking himself, “what are you doing here? How did you know where I was?”

  “I had only to follow the thunder of your snores,” Père Trouché explained gently.

  “I wasn’t snoring, I never do,” said Bobby, very indignantly.

  “I hoped also,” Père Trouché went on in a voice full of reproach, “to find a little left of that excellent déjeuner of which I smelt the savour as they carried it by. But it seems every plate is as clean as though a dozen starving men had been here. Fortunately,” he added with his characteristic chuckle, “they were good to the old blind man last night, so that I have no hunger yet.”

  “Three parcels of food, three bottles of wine, I heard,” Bobby remarked. “Two of them hidden away for another day perhaps.”

  “One must think of the future, it is fatal to be improvident,” answered the old beggar complacently. “You have heard then of my little hiding-places? I learnt it from my father and he from his father, who exercised his profession at first in this district, for by origin we are of Barsac. In our metier, it is necessary to practise much foresight.”

  “So I suppose,” agreed Bobby, looking thoughtfully at the various sketches he had produced, deciding that not one of them was really satisfactory, reflecting that this time sleep had not, as it sometimes did, brought good counsel.

  “Though sometimes,’’ Père Trouché added darkly, “scoundrels of an inconceivable baseness will watch for and discover the most secure, the most hidden reserves. It broke my poor grandfather’s heart when after he had saved near here by his economy and care a whole winter’s reserve of wine beneath an overhanging rock well hidden, some heartless and abominable rogues discovered it and removed all. Never was he the same man again; the injustice of it crushed him. Since then it is a tradition in our family never to reserve more than one bottle in one place.”

  “Under an overhanging rock? One not easily seen?” Bobby repeated and then reflected that on the Bornay Massif overhanging rocks are not so very uncommon. “Near here?” he asked; but what was the good of questioning a blind man? “If your grandfather were alive,” he said, “it might have been worth while asking him to take us there.”

  “Useless,” pronounced the other. “I have told you, every single bottle of wine was taken away by those who no doubt are now suffering torment where even a drop of water, much less wine, is denied them to cool their parched tongues.”

  It was a reflection that seemed to give the old man much pleasure. Bobby said:

  “There’s just a chance the stuff stolen from Mademoiselle Polthwaite was hidden somewhere near here under an overhanging rock. But since your grandfather is dead, one can’t very well ask him to take us there, even though his overhanging rock might be the very one we want.”

  “Why not ask me?” inquired Père Trouché.

  “Do you mean you could find it?”

  “Why not? Since I had full directions from my father that he had received from his father. I have not forgotten them, for if one is to beg well one must forget nothing. Fatal to speak of three hungry little ones to-day, and of five starving the week following.”

  Bobby was looking and feeling a little incredulous. He had some experience of the old beggar’s strange, uncanny powers, but that a blind man could find that one special spot in all the vast extent of the desolate Massif for which so many men with sight were searching, seemed hopelessly impossible. Above all, when apparently the old man had never visited it himself, but was relying solely on his memory of verbal directions.

  “What were the directions?” Bobby asked.

  “Already I have offered my help when I heard what it was they sought,” Père Trouché said with dignity. “They laughed. Oh, very loudly they laughed. An old blind beggar man,
what help could he be to those who had their sight and were still young? They laughed and went away. Well, do you too laugh and go away?”

  “Not if you can help,” Bobby said.

  “Good,” said the old man. “It is nearly five o’clock, is it not?”

  “So it is,” agreed Bobby, a little ashamed to think he had slept so long, though feeling all the better for it.

  “Then the sooner we start, the better,” said Père Trouché. “It was indeed to see if you were willing that I came to find you.”

  “Are you sure you remember the directions?” Bobby asked doubtfully. “Are you sure they are clear enough?”

  “I remember them perfectly,” Père Trouché assured him. “Also they are perfectly clear. It was thought at the time that our family might return to Barsac to practise here, but Barsac grew into a town, and in towns hearts are harder, the competition is greater, there is less need for news, so we stayed in the Citry district. Also in a town there are more gendarmes and such-like meddlers earning their own base living by preventing other folk from working for theirs. I tell you, Mr. Englishman, that I, I who now speak, I, the old blind beggar, I will guide you to this spot that others with their eyes they boast of, search for and will never find. You are ready?”

  “Yes,” Bobby answered, and knew enough of his strange old companion’s whims to ask no further questions.

  “Give me your arm,” the old man said when they were outside in the garden surrounding the house, “for I have need of support on this ground that I do not know. Once I have traversed it, I know it as well as another, but the first time it is difficult.”

  Bobby complied though he felt a little foolish. He was not sure he was not being made a victim of the other’s vanity and love of display. Absurd, he felt, in such a search as this, to trust to the guidance of an old, blind man. Père Trouché, with that uncanny instinct of his, seemed to guess Bobby’s thought, and said with his accustomed chuckle: