The Emperor's Snuff-Box

by John Dickson Carr

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No,” Dermot assured him. “The evidence is very strong against her. And the Lawes family are doing very little to help.”

  “I’ll bet they are,” said Ned. He threw back the bed-clothes, and started to climb out of bed.

  The ensuing moments were chaotic.

  “Now, look!” said Ned, tottering on his feet but clinging firmly with one hand to the table beside the bed. The old grinning animation was back in his expression. He seemed convulsed by some huge inner amusement, a joke whispered to the reeds and too deep to share.

  “I’m supposed to be a sick man,” he went on, as a wheel seemed to go round behind his eyes. “Right! Then humor me. I want my clothes. What for? To go to the town hall, of course. If I don’t get ’em, I’m going to go over and hop out that window; and Eve herself could tell you I mean every blasted word I say.”

  “Mr. Atwood,” said the nurse, “if I ring for some one to hold you down….”

  “And I say unto you, sweetie, that I could be out of that window before your fair hand touched the bell. At the moment all I can see is a hat. I’ll make my dive in that if necessary.”

  He appealed to Dermot and M. Goron.

  “I don’t know what’s been happening in this town since I passed out. You can inform me, if you will, while we’re on the way to see Eve. You see, gentlemen, there are wheels within wheels in this business. You don’t understand.”

  “I think we do,” answered Dermot. “Mrs. Neill has told us about the person in the brown gloves.”

  “But I bet she hasn’t told you who it was. Because why? Because she doesn’t know.”

  “And you know?” inquired M. Goron.

  “Of course,” returned Ned, at which M. Goron removed his bowler hat with every serious indication of an intent to drive his fist through it. Ned remained teetering and grinning by the table, his forehead furrowed with horizontal wrinkles. “She’s told you, maybe, about our looking across there and seeing somebody with the old man? And then, afterwards, seeing him when he’d been hit? But that’s the point. That’s the whole joke. It was….”

  XVII

  “MESDAMES AND MESSIEURS,” BOWED M. Vautour the examining magistrate, “please enter my humble office?’

  “Thanks,” murmured Janice.

  “Is this where you’re going to let us speak to poor Eve?” panted Helena. “How is the dear girl taking it, by the way?”

  “Not too well, I should imagine,” volunteered Uncle Ben.

  Toby said nothing. He had thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and shook his head in moody sympathy.

  The town hall at La Bandelette is a tall, narrow, yellow-stone building with a clock tower, facing a pleasant park and not far from the Central Market. The office of M. Vautour, a big room on the top floor, had two wide windows facing north and another facing west. There were filing cabinets, a few dusty-looking legal books—the examining magistrate must be a lawyer—and a framed photograph of some forgotten dignitary in Legion-of-Honor uniform.

  M. Vautour’s desk was so placed that M. Vautour had his back to the west window when he sat there. A little way out from the desk, facing him, stood a worn wooden armchair. A hanging light was suspended over this chair.

  Then the visitors noticed something else: something, it seemed to them, at once childish and terrifying.

  Through the uncurtained west window leaped a dazzle of blinding white light, paralyzing the eyes. It made them jump. It swept one side of the room, like a white broom that scrapes skin, seemed to burst after the fashion of a bubble, and disappear. It was the beam of the great lighthouse. A person sitting in the witness chair—facing M. Vautour’s desk—would have that blinding glare rake across his eyes, once every twenty seconds, as certain and impersonal as fate, so long as the examining magistrate kept him sitting there.

  “Ah, that annoying lighthouse!” murmured M. Vautour, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. He indicated chairs on the side of the room where the beam did not fall. “Please sit down, and make yourselves comfortable.”

  M. Vautour sat down behind his desk, swivelling the chair sideways to face them.

  The examining magistrate was a bony elderly man, with a hard eye and a suspicion of side-whisker. He rubbed his hands together with a dry noise.

  “Are we going to see Mrs. Neill?” demanded Toby.

  “Well… no,” replied M. Vautour. “Not just yet.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because I think, first of all, that there are some explanations due to me.”

  Again the white blaze dazzled at the window, pouring past M. Vautour’s shoulder. It turned him into a silhouette, despite the ceiling light; it kindled the edge of his gray hair, and showed him rubbing his hands again. Otherwise nothing could have been homelier than the lair of this theatrical gentleman. A clock ticked, and the office cat was curled up on a side table.

  Yet they could almost feel wrath flowing from the direction of the examining magistrate.

  “I have just had,” he pursued, “a lengthy conversation on the telephone with my colleague M. Goron. He is at the Donjon Hotel. He spoke of new evidence. He will be here at any minute, with his friend Dr. Kinross.”

  Here M. Vautour struck the desk with the palm of his hand.

  “I do not necessarily admit,” he said, “that we were precipitate. I do not necessarily admit, even now, that we were too hasty in arresting Madame Neill….”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Toby.

  “But this new evidence is startling. It upsets me. It makes me return to a certain point, indicated some time ago by Dr. Kinross, which in our natural concern with Madame Neill we were almost in danger of forgetting.”

  “Toby,” Helena asked quietly, “what did happen last night?”

  Turning, she stretched out her hand towards M. Vautour across the room. Helena was now perhaps the coolest of the Lawes family, all of whom seemed to sense a trap.

  “M. Vautour,” Helena pursued, getting her breath, “let me tell you. Last night my son came home late. He came in storming….”

  “That,” Toby interrupted in desperation, “hasn’t got anything to do with father’s death!”

  “I was still up, because I couldn’t sleep, and I asked him if he would have a cup of cocoa. He went banging up to his bedroom without exchanging three words.” Helena’s face clouded. “All I could gather was that he had had a dreadful quarrel of some kind with Eve, whom he said he never wanted to see again.”

  M. Vautour rubbed his hands together. Again the white glare flared across his shoulder.

  “Ah!” murmured the examining magistrate. “And did he tell you where he had been, madame?”

  Helena looked puzzled. “No. Should he have told me?”

  “Number 17, rue de la Harpe? He did not mention that?”

  Helena shook her head.

  Both Janice and Uncle Ben were watching Toby. A close observer might have seen that a brief, crooked smile flashed across Janice’s face, to be veiled demurely by the gravity of a young lady who has taken four cocktails on an empty stomach. Uncle Ben was scraping the inside of an empty pipe with a pocket-knife; the small rasps of the knife seemed badly to afflict Toby’s nerves. But Helena, who evidently noticed nothing, was continuing in the same pleading tone.

  “A quarrel with Eve seemed to me just about the last straw. I couldn’t sleep at all for thinking of it. In fact, I saw her come home well after daylight with that rather sinister-looking man who’s supposed to be a great doctor. On top of that, Eve is arrested. Are any of these things connected? Could you possibly tell us what’s happening?”

  “Second the motion,” observed Uncle Ben.

  M. Vautour’s jaws tightened.

  “Then your son has told you nothing at all, madame?”

  “I’ve said so.”

  “Not even, for instance, of Madame Neill’s accusation?”

  “Accusation?”

  “That some member of your family, wearing a pa
ir of brown gloves, crept into Sir Maurice’s study and beat the old man to death.”

  There was a long silence. Toby, sitting forward in his chair, put his head in his hands; he kept shaking his head violently, as though this were the one suggestion he could not countenance.

  “I knew those brown gloves were going to pop up somehow,” remarked Uncle Ben, in a startlingly normal tone. He seemed to inspect the idea from all sides. “You mean the girl… saw something?”

  “And if she did, M. Phillips?”

  Uncle Ben smiled a dry smile. “If she did, my friend, you wouldn’t be suggesting. You’d be arresting. So I think we can take it that she didn’t. Murder in the family, eh? Well, well, well!”

  “It’s no good saying,” Janice blurted out, “that the same idea hasn’t occurred to all of us.”

  Helena eyed her in evident stupefaction.

  “It certainly hasn’t to me! My dear Janice! Have you gone out of your mind? Have we all gone out of our minds?”

  “See here,” began Uncle Ben, and drew at the empty pipe.

  He waited for them to give him a glance of forebearing tolerance, such as usually greeted a suggestion of his which did not deal with the practical mechanics of a household. There was a frown on his face, and a mild doggedness in his manner.

  “It’s no good making ourselves out as stupider than we are. Of course it’s occurred to all of us. God damn it all!” The others straightened up, shocked at the change in his tone. “Let’s stop being such a ‘civilized’ family. Let’s let air and daylight into our souls … if we’ve got any.”

  “Ben!” cried Helena.

  “That house was locked up. Doors and windows. It wasn’t a burglar. You don’t have to be a detective to guess that. Either Eve Neill did it, or one of us did.”

  “And do you think,” demanded Helena, “that I’d put the welfare of a total stranger before the welfare of one of my own flesh and blood?”

  “Well, then,” said Uncle Ben patiently, “why be a hypocrite? Why not come out and say you believe she did it?”

  Helena was flustered.

  “Because I’m very fond of the girl. And she has got quite a lot of money, which can be very useful to Toby. Or could have been, if I could only get away from the idea that she might have done that to Maurice. But I can’t get away from it, and it’s no good saying I can.”

  “Then you believe Eve is guilty?”

  “I don’t know!” wailed Helena.

  “Perhaps,” observed M. Vautour in a cold, hard, steady voice which instantly quieted them, “we can have a little elucidation soon.—Come in!”

  The door to the hall outside was directly opposite the west window. With each revolution the searchlight-beam wheeled up across this door, throwing on the pale-glowing panels a pattern from the dust of the window. Someone had knocked at this door. In response to M. Vautour’s command, Dermot Kinross came in.

  The glare was just wheeling past as he entered. Though Dermot lifted a hand to shield his eyes, they saw in its passionless clearness a face of controlled wrath: a dangerous face, changing as soon as he knew he was observed to the easy-going suavity which was his public mood. He bowed to them. Going across to the examining magistrate, he shook hands in the formal French fashion.

  M. Vautour had none of M. Goron’s blandness.

  “I have not seen you, monsieur,” he said coldly, “since our first introduction last night, before you departed for the rue de la Harpe with that very interesting necklace.”

  “A good deal,” said Dermot, “has happened since then.”

  “So I understand. This new evidence of yours—well, there may be something in it! In any case, there is your party.” He waved his hand towards the others. “Attack! Stick them in the gizzard, faith! Then we shall see what we shall see.”

  “M. Goron,” continued Dermot, looking sideways at the visitors, “is bringing Madame Neill upstairs to this office. You will allow that?”

  “Of course, of course!”

  “And, speaking of the question of necklaces, M. Goron says you have both of them here.”

  The examining magistrate nodded. Opening a drawer of his desk, he drew out two objects which he laid on the blotter. As the white light wheeled again, it stirred to life two lines of fiery points which ran across the blotter. A diamond-and-turquoise necklace, and an imitation which at first glance might have been mistaken for the first necklace, lay side by side. To the second necklace was attached a small card.

  “According to the note you wrote to M. Goron,” the examining magistrate told him sourly, “we sent a man to the rue de la Harpe, claimed the imitation, and traced it. You observe?”

  He touched the card. Dermot nodded.

  “Though I am only now beginning to perceive the meaning of this,” snapped M. Vautour. “Today (I assure you!) we were much too busy with Madame Neill and the snuff-box to trouble our heads about anyone else and these necklace-twins.”

  Dermot turned round, and went towards the quiet group across the room.

  They resented him. He could feel the force of that resentment, all the more bitter for being unspoken; in a way, it pleased him. While M. Vautour sat spiderlike in the background, and the searchlight flicked its white surge across the wall, Dermot drew out a chair. Its legs rasped on the linoleum of the floor as he set it round to face them.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged in English. “As you were thinking, I’m butting in.”

  “Why?” asked Uncle Ben.

  “Because somebody’s got to, or this mess will never be straightened out. Have you heard about the famous brown gloves? Good! Then let me tell you a little more about them.”

  “Including,” said Janice, “who wore them?”

  “Yes,” said Dermot.

  He sat back in the chair, thrusting his hands into his pockets.

  “I want to call your attention,” he went on, “to the afternoon, evening, and night of the day when Sir Maurice Lawes died. You’ve heard the evidence, or most of it. But it may be as well to emphasize it.

  “Sir Maurice Lawes, on that day, went out for his afternoon walk as usual. His favorite walk, as we’ve heard, was through the Zoological Gardens behind the Donjon Hotel. But there’s more evidence than this. On this occasion, to the surprise of waiters and barmen, he actually went so far as to come into the back bar of the hotel.”

  Helena turned round to peer in evident bewilderment at her brother, who was watching Dermot with a hard, wary stare. But it was Janice who answered.

  “Really?” remarked Janice, lifting her round chin. “I hadn’t heard that little bit of information.”

  “Perhaps not. Anyway, I tell you so. I questioned the people in the bar this morning. Later, he was seen in the Zoological Gardens: near, of all places, the monkey house. He appeared to be speaking to somebody, who was hidden behind a bush from the witness’s view. You might remember that little incident. It is significant. It’s a prelude to murder.”

  “Are you telling us,” gulped Helena, with her wide round eyes fixed on Dermot’s face, and her color rising, “that you know who killed Maurice?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where,” inquired Janice, “did you get your idea?”

  “As a matter of fact, Miss Lawes, I got it from you.”

  Dermot pondered on this for a moment.

  “Lady Lawes was helpful, too,” he added, “by introducing the topic that you pursued. It’s in the realm of the mind, actually,” he rubbed his hand across his forehead, and looked apologetic, “that one little thing leads to another. However, let me go on with my story.

  “Before dinner Sir Maurice returned home. He had made what the barman described as ‘ferocious eyes’ before even the significant meeting in the Zoological Gardens. But, by the time he returned home, he was in that white and shaky state we’ve so often heard described. He refused to go to the theatre. He shut himself up in his study. At eight o’clock in the evening, the rest of you set out for the theatre. Correct?”

/>   Uncle Ben rubbed his chin.

  “Yes, that’s all true enough. But why repeat it again?”

  “Because it’s very instructive. You, together with Eve Neill, returned from the theatre about eleven o’clock. In the meantime, M. Veille the art dealer had phoned at half-past eight about his new treasure, had come with the snuff-box, and had left it. The rest of you, however, had heard nothing about any snuff-box until your return. Still correct?”

  “Yes,” admitted Uncle Ben.

  “Certainly Eve Neill had heard nothing about a snuff-box at any time. By the testimony, which M. Goron repeated to me yesterday, she did not actually accompany you back to your house. Mr. Lawes,” he nodded towards Toby, “dropped her off at her own villa, where he said good-night.”

  “Look here,” cried Toby, with sudden wildness, “what is this? What are you getting at?”

  “Am I still giving the evidence correctly?”

  “Yes. But —”

  Toby checked his gesture of impatience. While the flickering white light still played beyond, getting on their nerves even though they were not compelled to face it, there had been another knock at the door. M. Vautour rose to his feet, as did Dermot. Three persons entered the office. The first was M. Aristide Goron. The second was a gray-haired, sad-featured woman in a serge dress which vaguely suggested a uniform. The third was Eve Neill; and the gray-haired woman’s hand hovered meaningly round Eve’s wrist, ready to pounce if her charge attempted to run.

  Eve showed no disposition to run. Nevertheless, as she saw the worn wooden armchair raked by that inexorable light, she stiffened and drew back in such a way that the wardress’s hand fastened on her wrist.

  “I’m not going to sit in that chair again.” She spoke calmly, but with an inflexion Dermot recognized as dangerous. “You can do what you like. But I’m not going to sit in that chair again.”

  “It will not be necessary, madame,” said M. Vautour. “Dr. Kinross, endeavor to control yourself!”