The Waxworks Murder

matter.

'So what happens? She does not dare tell anybody. Yet she must have a confidante, she must talk of this horror, or go mad. So, in a low voice, she speaks there in the darkness, with her mother's arm round her . .. she speaks to a deaf woman! She knows that her mother is not hearing the confession; but it is a comfort to clutch somebody and pour it out. All of it. All the things come rushing back over her, while her mother pats her, and babies her soothingly, and does not hear a single word !

'Yet another person has been attracted by this hysteria.

Her father, still trying to understand, still bothered to madness by these voices whispering in his brain, overhears.'

Chaumont uttered a groan. It trembled in the silent room, but nobody looked at him, nobody could for a moment understand what he felt. We were all thinking of an old man standing in the moonlight, rigid....

'Had he been sitting in his library, patiently piling up dominoes and listening to the clock? Had he been sitting with an old book, and an old glass of wine - knowing that he must not doubt a Martel by even suspecting Claudine, and yet still hearing the voices ? Before that, he could doubt. Now he can be sure. He hears the story of the club, he hears that his daughter is not merely one who has hurt her name with a scandal. It is not alone that she has caused the death of a harmless girl. She is, instead, only a kind of procuress, a kind of brothel-keeper. She is mean, and vicious, above all.

'I do not need to trace it. Colonel Martel has offered to supply us with a statement. Still, I do not think he considered - considered, that is, as a definite plan - the killing of his daughter. He might have felt an impulse to walk into that room and strangle her on her bed in the moonlight. But the coldness of his fury keeps him numb. I think he sat until dawn looking at the window.

'Then the next night... he hears the telephone conversation. He knows that these two girls, his daughter and Gina Prevost, will meet at the club again. They must have news; they must know what Galant has done with the body; they must be assured that they are safe. So, punctually at nine- thirty he puts on his great cape and takes up his gold-headed stick to go out as he has done for forty years - as though he were going to the home of his friend to play cards. But he does not go, this time.

'What he did before he went to the waxworks nearly two hours later, we may never know. I think he merely walked, and, the longer he walked, the more grimness came to him. He knew about the two entrances to the club - Galant had mentioned that long ago - but he did not know whether his daughter would come by way of the boulevard or the waxworks. Probably even at that time he merely intended to face her there, with her confederate, and show that he knew everything. I am not sure that he had any plan at all - for, you see, he carried no weapon.

'Presently he looked at the neighbourhood of the rue Saint-Appoline. He saw the tawdriness, he heard the banging music, and suddenly he saw for the first time the sort of world his daughter enjoyed. It was the worst poison of all. He walked into the waxworks - and the madness was on him fully. Then the twilight. Then the great dead of France, modelled in wax, all about him....

'Do you understand it!' cried Bencolin, crashing his fist down on the arm of the chair. 'Monsieur Augustin was right. The waxworks throws a spell over the imagination; it is a world of illusion. It takes us with terror, or mirth, or sublimity, according to our natures. But on nobody did it exercise a more powerful influence than on this old man who lived always in a dusky twilight of his own. He had heard the past. Now he saw the past. I fancy him going down into the Gallery of Horrors. It was deserted. I see him standing there alone, and for him - it was not a Gallery of Horrors at all.

'He saw people who killed, or were killed, for an abstract ideal. He saw cruelty or madness acquire a sort of terrible grandeur. He saw the Terrorists, unsmiling, watch heads drop into the guillotine basket. He saw the Spanish Inquisitors, unpitying, burn heretics for the glory of God. He saw-Charlotte Corday stab Marat, and Joan of Arc go to the stake, for the sake of an ideal, a terrible code, which must never yield ! That was what he saw, alone among all the people who have visited there.

'I see him standing straight in the green light, in his black cloak, with his hat off. All the weight of the things he believes is on him. He remembers what his daughter is, and what she has done. The museum is deserted. In a moment though he does not know it, the lights will be extinguished. Presently his harlot-murderess-bawdy-house keeper (so he sees her) will be coming there. He hears a last roll of drums, a stamp of the great past marching from its grave.

'Thy Will be done! He walks forward slowly, with his hat still off, and wrenches the knife from Marat's chest.'

One Card for Cyanide

Bencolin sat silent for a moment, staring at the carpet. Nobody spoke. We all felt the presence of a mad, stocky old man with a gold-headed cane; we all saw the tight line of his jaw, and his unwavering eyes.

'Is it strange, then,' the detective asked, softly, 'that he should continue this symbolism of his? That, after he had stabbed his daughter, he should put her body into the arms of - the satyr? He was offering her there as a kind of sacrifice. He had seen the satyr when he came down those stairs. He knew of the dummy wall, and the door to the passage. Even the lights extinguished did not destroy his plan. You know what happened. It was decreed that Mademoiselle Augustin should put on the lights again when his daughter was in the passage; he saw her, he struck, and Mademoiselle Prevost opened the boulevard door just then. Oh, yes, you know all that.

'But do you see now why he took the silver key from her and why he was searching for it? Because the Martel name must be preserved! He could offer his daughter to his own blind gods. He could dump her there in the satyr's arms, for the world to see; left in a dingy waxworks, as befitted her. But the vengeance must be a thing between himself and his blind gods solely. He had avenged the ghosts. But the world must not be allowed to know why. It was his secret. If the silver key were found, the police would trace it. It would be blazoned forth to the world that a Martel woman was a whore and a procuress....'

Bencolin smiled grimly. He passed a hand over his eyes and now his steady voice grew a little bewildered.

'Explain it? I don't try, beyond what I've told you. He killed Galant because he naively fancied that Galant was the only person who might betray what was known about his daughter, and brand her publicly. So - again I merely quote what he said over the telephone - he sent a note to Galant. He asked for an appointment, and said he was prepared to pay to protect his daughter's name. He arranged to meet Galant in the passage, after which (he said) Galant could take him into the club to the office for payment. And Galant's shrewd, prudent soul remembered that appointment even when his apaches were searching for Jeff there; even when an informer was present, Galant must take time off to go and see this man....

'Monsieur Martel hid in the waxworks once more. And once more he left by the boulevard door, shortly before you, Mademoiselle Augustin, and you, Jeff, escaped. The same knife avenged both crimes.'

Chaumont said, hoarsely: 'I believe it. I have to believe it. But his telling you this over the phone! - Do you mean to say he deliberately confessed, when he'd done all this?'

'That comes under the head of what I still believe to be the wildest part of this crime.' Bencolin had sat with his hand shading his eyes; now he whipped it away and turned to me. 'Jeff, when we visited his home this afternoon, did you realize that all the time he was deliberately giving us an even chance - a gambler's chance - to guess?'

'You've said that before,' I muttered. 'No, I didn't.'

'Well, and there's the glory of it! He was waiting for us, waiting with a full stage set. Think back, now. ... You remember how unnaturally poised he was, how motionless, how he greeted us with a poker face ? And do you remember what he was doing? He sat there and twisted in his hand, full under our eyes - what ?'

I tried to remember. I saw the lamplight, the rain, the man's frozen glance, and in his hand ...