The Helm of Hades

by Paul Halter

  ‘“Are you looking for something?” asked Louis, who had just joined him.

  ‘Philippe shrugged:

  ‘“You never know. Go and have a look under the bed.”

  ‘The jockey went across the room, then crouched on all fours and squinted long and hard under the bed. He stood up and shook his head:

  ‘“Nothing human or animal there.”

  ‘Without another word, Houdeville went out with his companion on his heels, and the two of them inspected the small shed attached to the side of the cabin. There was nothing there but dry wood.

  ‘“Why are you doing this? What do you hope to find?” protested Prince. “You can see the tracks leading to the forest. We’re wasting time. We have to alert the others. My God, my poor Frida—it’s horrible, I still can’t believe it!”

  ‘He turned to go back to the lodge and Philippe, who could hear him sobbing, followed him at a distance.

  ‘A few minutes later, they were back in the lodge. Before going in, Prince noticed Marcellus lurking behind the window of his room. In the lounge he found Roger, who gave him the same questioning look he gave Houdeville, as the latter appeared in the doorway. The sounds of steps on the squeaky stairs announced the arrival of Marcellus, pale with anxiety, but seemingly unable to pose the question on his lips.

  ‘“Let’s go into the kitchen,” suggested Philippe. “Roger, please prepare us something strong. We’re going to need it. Where are the others? Where’s Hélène? No, don’t move. I’ll go and get her.”

  ‘When he reappeared with his wife, Prince—who had just explained the tragedy to the others—broke down again.

  ‘“Philippe, go and wake Burns,” said Marcellus. “I fear we shall need his services.”

  ‘A few minutes later, I made my appearance, followed shortly by Denison and his lady-love. I had a dreadful hangover, but the terrible news acted like a cold shower. Although the circumstances of the tragedy seemed evident enough—the lovely Frida had met her fate in the form of a wild beast she had provoked—it was too much like something out of mythology for my taste. Marcellus, whom I suspected of sharing my opinion, announced clumsily that I had a gift for precipitating such situations. I retorted that nothing would have happened if he hadn’t invited me in the first place. Whilst Roger went to alert the police, I suggested my companions stay where they were until their arrival.

  ‘I shall spare you the details of the police investigation and simply give you the conclusions of Commissaire Martin—who knew me by reputation, which made things a lot easier. Let’s begin with the snow, which played a major role in the proceedings, in the sense of limiting the range of possibilities. Over a distance of a hundred metres in all directions around the cabin, there was nothing but virgin snow except for the prints I already described. First, those of Frida leaving the lodge: they were still visible, but faint—due to the fact the snow had continued for about twenty minutes after she left at half past ten, after which not a single flake had fallen. Then, the tracks of the “beast,” coming out of the forest and doing a return trip from the spot where Frida’s body was found. Due to the thickness of the undergrowth and the density of the trees, they couldn’t be traced farther into the woods. They were indisputably the prints of a large canine, with no possibility of trickery. No trickery with the other prints either: those of our two witnesses, perfectly clear from the hedge of the lodge to the cabin, then to the shed, then back to the hedge again. There were no hiding places in the cabin, other than the two or three that had been carefully searched by the witnesses. I might add—though who could doubt it? –that police did not find a living soul at the scene of the crime.

  ‘Next, there’s the time of death, difficult to determine precisely because of the ambient cold, but at least two or three hours before the discovery of the body. Three o’clock in the morning seemed the best guess. Frida died from a haemorrhage, following the grievous wound to her hand. The experts identified the fang-marks of a wolf or large dog. The skin was curiously torn, but that was put down to the frenetic behaviour of the beast. There was a bump on the left side of her skull, probably caused by her fainting, which would at least have alleviated the pain of her last moments. The police concluded from all the foregoing that the lovely Frida was the victim of a savage attack by a wild beast, which was eventually identified. A huge half-wild Alsatian roamed the area and nobody could approach it except a game warden who occasionally fed it. Apart from a few missing chickens, nobody had had cause to blame it for anything until then. But its prowling silhouette and furtive behaviour frightened all those who saw it, and who had named it after the Nordic monster. It was never caught, but the tracks it left in the forest corresponded exactly to those near the victim. It was therefore the culprit. Not just because the evidence pointed to it, but also because there could be no other explanation, given that the condition of the snow ruled out any human intervention. That was the conclusion of the investigation… So where is the mystery, I hear you ask?’

  After a moment’s thought, I replied sardonically:

  ‘It’s you who’ve blown the whole thing out of proportion, Owen.’

  ‘Is that the only thought which crosses your mind about this extraordinary affair, Achilles? I suppose it’s all that can be expected of a South African farmer or a Homeric brute.’

  Ignoring the double allusion to my origins and my name, I replied from the depths of my armchair:

  ‘No, of course not. There’s obviously something fishy going on, probably some clandestine love affair. But, since you’ve ruled out murder….’

  ‘Now I shall tell you the rest, my friend, starting with the interviews of the suspects. The most enlightening was that of Philippe Houdeville, when Commissaire Martin and I questioned him about his strange behaviour upon the discovery of the body. Taking a look in the shed to see if the beast had gone to ground there was reasonable. But under the bed or in the clock? It didn’t take him long to spill the beans. To be frank, I wasn’t really surprised, because I had already suspected what he told us. It’s a story as old as mankind: the eternal triangle of the wife, the lover and the cuckold of a husband. Except in this case it was Frida, our “goddess of love,” who had several lovers whom she met sporadically in the cabin, on the occasion of Marcellus’s parties, which were organised primarily for that purpose. All the male members of the group, without exception, had received Frida’s favours and she played with them all each time before making her choice. In other words, the nocturnal meetings with the “wolf”—–even though “Freyja” had genuinely tamed it—were a pretext for meeting a male, but a male of the biped kind. And, just as always in such situations, everyone was in the know except the husband. Getting back to Houdeville: he was unaware of the identity of the lucky candidate for that evening. He thought it might be me, given that I was the new arrival, but he was—alas!—mistaken.’

  ‘In your role as noble knight, you would have saved her life by your mere presence while, at the same time, preserving her virtue.’

  Owen ignored the sarcasm.

  ‘So, he thought the frightened lover might be hiding somewhere. But there clearly hadn’t been a lover in the cabin that night. And Philippe Houdeville had been in bed with his wife Hélène. We had to tread carefully when we questioned her, because her husband beseeched us not to reveal the truth. Just like young Barbara and the jockey, she was unaware of the night-time escapades of Frida, who was a childhood friend. Apart from hearing the distant howls at six in the morning, she was unable to tell us anything other than the concern she had felt for Frida following the discussions of the previous evening. From the window of her room, she had watched her husband and Louis Prince walk towards the cabin and had anxiously awaited their return. From their manner, it had been obvious something dreadful had happened.

  ‘As a bachelor, Marcellus Blanchard wasn’t in a position to furnish an alibi for the fatal time. He vaguely remembered hearing a distant scream, but he was half asleep and in the grip of a nightmare. He,
too, suspected Frida had chosen me as her companion for the night, despite my tardy libations. Awakened by the departure of the jockey and the accountant, he had awaited their return behind the window of his room, after having exchanged a few words with Roger in the corridor. Like Hélène, he had feared the worst, just by observing the way they walked: Houdeville’s tread was weary and resigned and Prince’s was bizarrely nervous. Needless to say, Marcellus was really down in the dumps. According to him, Frida had been more than a mistress: she was a much-loved friend and Louis Prince hadn’t deserved her.

  ‘It’s customary to feel sorry for the cuckolded husband—and, in this case, a widower as well—but Louis Prince was not one to inspire sympathy. Perhaps it was because he looked like an ill-tempered gnome. His affliction could not conceal his ham acting or the unpleasant arrogance of the arriviste. I gathered from the interview that Frida hadn’t married him for his blue eyes, and I took it upon myself not to open them regarding the wholly justifiable infidelities of his wife. Like Marcellus, he had no alibi other than solitary sleep in his bachelor bed.

  ‘Roger, the steward, was discrete, efficient and a keen observer to boot, for he noticed an apparently trivial anomaly which immediately attracted my attention. On the morning of the previous day, just before it began to snow heavily, he had cleaned the cabin—hoping, no doubt, to profit personally from the preparations. Amongst other things, he had wound the clock which, he knew from personal experience, was as accurate as a Swiss watch. When he returned with the police the following morning, however, although it was still running smoothly, it showed a ten-minute delay.’

  ‘Due to the cold, perhaps?’ I suggested.

  ‘Perhaps, but it continued to function correctly afterwards, as I was able to verify.’

  ‘I think I can see where you’re headed,’ I observed, snapping my fingers. ‘The weight from the pendulum could have been used to knock the victim out.’

  ‘Bravo, Achilles! I had exactly the same idea.’

  ‘So, someone could have knocked Frida out and then, with a suitable instrument, faked the beast’s attack. The problem is the creature’s tracks, which prove it really was there.’

  ‘Alas, yes. But still, the detail of the clock put me even more firmly amongst the sceptics, as if that were necessary. Getting back to Roger, he hadn’t any better an alibi than the other bachelors. He hadn’t heard the howls, but he’d been awakened by the departure of Houdeville and Prince. He’d run into his employer in the corridor, who had asked him about the rumpus, but he’d been unable to respond. After that, he’d gone to the kitchen to prepare the coffee. Ian Denison, our noble Viking, had slept like a log until someone knocked on his door to tell him what had happened. He was undoubtedly the most disappointing witness; we didn’t learn anything from him. I kept the lovely Barbara Rivière for last. She had spent the night with Denison, but had been unconscious due to the several sleeping pills she had taken following Frida’s affront about the Turner watercolour, which had very much upset her. That little one is truly an artist, who sees things with greater perspicacity than that of a purely rational spirit like yours, Achilles. She saw right through Frida immediately, based on nothing more than the colour of her dress, a yellowy-green like Eve’s apple, which has been the colour of sin since time immemorial, as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘Um… yes, of course. You could also call it feminine intuition. But, frankly, Owen, I can’t see where you’re going. There can’t be any criminal action lurking behind this tragedy. The immaculate whiteness of the snow has banished any evil human designs, if I may put it that way. Your account is the proof of that.’

  Owen favoured me with an unctuous smile, full of irony.

  ‘There’s a lot of insight in your remark, Achilles, which is all to your credit. But let us shed the light of our intelligence on the matter, which was, in fact a carefully prepared crime.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes, a murder of the first water, committed by the second jockey.’

  ‘Which second jockey? You’ve only mentioned one: the cuckolded husband.’

  ‘Allow me to explain. The crime itself went unpunished, for I didn’t understand the mechanism until much later, after having heard the confession of one of the protagonists, who, without admitting his sin, clarified the motive. It was at the burial ceremony for his wife, Hélène Houdeville, who had just been carried away by a sudden heart attack. Beside himself with grief, Philippe Houdeville, as if to absolve the deceased, shed further light on the dark side of Frida Prince. We knew already that she was a femme fatale, but, according to him, she was worse than that: she gave free rein to her uncontrollable impulses and laughed at the wreckage she caused, seeming even to be stimulated by the misery of her victims. Hélène was one of them. She suffered from an irrepressible jealousy, which only the elimination of the “sinner” who had led her husband—her childhood sweetheart, no less—astray could cure. She insisted furthermore that Houdeville himself help her in her sinister project. The future of their family and the well-being of their children, whom she cherished above everything, depended on it. Trapped in a typically masculine dilemma, Houdeville found himself hating Frida while at the same time being unable to resist her charms. In order not to succumb further to temptation, and to deliver himself once and for all from evil, he finally consented to help sacrifice the “witch” on the altar of their conjugal happiness. Needless to say, Houdeville didn’t tell me that in so many words, but I was able to piece it together from his hints, after which the solution was a piece of cake, particularly in view of the late-running clock.’

  The clock in Owen’s lounge continued its regular tick-tock, which seemed particularly loud during the silence which followed.

  ‘Having an accomplice certainly facilitates matters,’ I declared. ‘But I can’t see how that explains the extraordinary business entirely. And what does the clock have to do with it, beyond what I proposed?’

  ‘Think carefully, Achilles. If it was ten minutes late, that means it wasn’t functioning during that time, in other words it was blocked. I’m not ruling out the use of one of the weights as a weapon, but because Houdeville peered inside to see if anyone was inside, that meant that there could very well have been.’

  ‘A man hidden inside the base of a clock? Nonsense.’

  ‘Obviously not someone like you or me. But a diminutive woman with a supple waist, such as Houdeville’s wife….’

  ‘And Prince didn’t see anything?’

  ‘The door to the lower part wasn’t glass-fronted, it was made of wood. And remember Houdeville’s behaviour: he let it be understood quite casually that there was no one inside and immediately sent his companion to search under the bed—a clever way to deflect his attention.’

  ‘I suppose so. But how did Hélène get into the cabin without leaving footprints in the snow?’

  ‘As easy as falling off a log, as you shall see. I was just telling you what put me on the right track. And once you start in the right direction, Achilles, the rest follows, as you well know. Initially, their plan was, I think, to frame Prince, who would have made a perfect culprit as the cheated husband punishing his unfaithful wife. Freda’s exploits would rapidly have come to light in any police investigation, so Houdeville himself steered them in that direction. The jockey’s loathsome personality and other factors made him the ideal scapegoat, provided the weather cooperated, which it did. Early in the fateful evening, Houdeville lets Frida know discreetly that he will be joining her in the cabin later. Frida performs her “taming of the wolf” act and leaves at half past ten. It’s still snowing lightly. Hélène takes her leave almost immediately, but, instead of going upstairs to bed, she follows in Frida’s footsteps, by which I mean she plants her feet precisely in the footprints left by her friend. The thin coat of snow which follows thereafter conceals the subterfuge.’

  ‘Ingenious. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘Child’s play. Hélène then joins her friend in the cabin and concocts
a story to justify her presence and her desire to spend the night there. Since they’d known each other from childhood, it wouldn’t have been difficult. I think her intention was to kill Frida brutally just before dawn, so that the first person into the cabin—which would be Prince, because Houdeville had intentionally followed at a distance—would be accused of the murder. After all, there would be virgin snow all around and nobody apparently in the cabin, since Hélène would be hiding inside the clock. That, as I say, was their plan, and a very ingenious one. Then fate throws a spanner in the works, in the form of the “Wolf of Fenrir.”’

  ‘Who suddenly attacks his beloved friend?’

  ‘Yes, Achilles, and all because of me. Frida must be thinking of my comment about Tyr’s hand when she opens the door at three o’clock in the morning to the dog scratching at the door. Trying no doubt to impress her friend, show her how fearless she was and prove the beast would never bite her—divine creature that she is!—she must have upset it by offering it bacon from Roger’s breakfast basket. But one cannot provoke a wild beast with impunity. The dog seizes her hand violently. She doubtless fights back, but the animal doesn’t let go immediately. The result is an ugly wound. Then the beast runs off and Frida needs to get back to the lodge urgently to have the wound treated, which will completely wreck the Houdevilles’ diabolical plan. But Hélène is a resourceful woman: the “Wolf of Fenrir” will replace the jockey in the role of culprit….

  ‘Everything happens very quickly: she knocks her friend out with a blunt instrument—probably a log from the fire—and proceeds to aggravate the wound with a knife to ensure she will bleed to death. Then she waits until six o’clock to imitate the howl of a wolf, which is doubtless the pre-arranged signal to her accomplice. Houdeville puts on a show to pretend his wife is still in her room, then sets off for the cabin with Prince. Hélène hides in the clock and prays to the infernal gods that her husband, who will obviously be unaware of the new developments, will adapt to the situation. Everything goes smoothly: checking that Hélène is indeed inside the clock, he proceeds as planned. You can guess what happens next, Achilles, I feel sure.’