The Waxworks Murder

'It looked,' I said, 'like a piece of blue paper.'

'It was. It was a ticket to this museum.'

The appalling realization struck me between the eyes. The blue tickets! which I had thought about ever since I thought of Mademoiselle Augustin sitting in her glass booth

'There, in front of our eyes,' Bencolin explained carefully, 'he flourished a proof that he had been here to this museum. He was working again according to his code. He would not tell us. But the code said he should not strike, like a thug, and slink away. He would place before the police sufficient evidence. If they were too blind to see it - he had done his duty. I said before, and I say again, that he is the strangest murderer within my experience. But he didn't stop with that. He did two other things.'

'What?'

'He told us that he had been accustomed to going, every week, for forty years, to the home of a friend to play cards. He said that he went there on the night of die murder. All we needed to do was to check that statement, and we should have found it false. It would have been proof complete, an absence which his friend could not conceivably have failed to notice. But I, dunderhead, never thought of it then! And then, to finish it, he offered us the most subtle suggestion of all. He knew we must have found those bits of glass from the broken wrist watch in the passage. And do you remember what he did?'

'Well? Go on!'

'Think back, now. We were just about to leave. What happened ?'

'Why ... the grandfather clock began to strike . . . '

'Yes. And he glanced at his wrist, on which there was no watch. Then, to emphasize that fact, he frowned, and looked up at the grandfather clock. Jeff, no plainer piece of pantomime was ever described. A habit - he looks at his watch, finds it gone, and naturally raises his eyes to the clock.'

The thing was so blatantly, glaringly plain as I looked back; as I considered those carefully weighed answers, all calculated to tell us just enough; all part of a huge gambling game which he had played....

'Several times,' continued Bencolin, 'he almost weakened. That was when his wife would burst out wildly. It took an almost superhuman self-control to sit and listen to that from the mother of his daughter ... the daughter he had stabbed. At the end, he had to dismiss us rather abruptly. Even he could stand just so much.'

'But what are you going to do?' demanded Chaumont. 'What have you done?'

'Just before I came here to-night,' Bencolin said, slowly, 'after I had heard what had happened, I telephoned Monsieur Martel. I told him I knew, I told my evidence, and I asked him to supply certain gaps.'

•Well?'

'He complimented me.'

'Isn't there a limit,' snapped Marie Augustin, 'to your showmanship, monsieur? Aristocracy, bah! The man is a murderer. He has committed as callous and brutal a crime as any I ever heard of. And do you know what you have done ? You've given him a chance to escape.'

'No,' said Bencolin, calmly. 'But that is what I am going to do.'

'You mean to say — !'

Bencolin got to his feet. His face wore a thoughtful and deadly smile.

'I mean,^’ he said, 'that I am going to subject this gentlemanly gambler to the worst test I have ever imposed on anybody. It may cost me my office. But I told you I would judge him by his own standards. I will judge him by the Martels. ... Mademoiselle, has your telephone an extension cord? Can it be brought out here and put on this table?'

'I don't think I understand.'

'Answer me! Can it?'

She rose stiffly, tightening her lips, and went to a curtained archway at the back of the room. In a moment she was back with a telephone, yanking after it savagely a length of wire. She set it down on the table beside the lamp.

'If monsieur,' she said frigidly, 'will condescend to tell us why he could not himself go into the other room and--'

'Thank you. I should like you all to hear this. Jeff, do you mind letting me sit in that chair?'

What was he up to? I rose and backed away, but he motioned us all close to the table, and twitched the newspaper off the shade of the lamp. The faces of my companions sprang out of gloom: Chaumont bent forward, his arms hanging limply and his eyes screwed up; Marie Augustin rigid and waxen pale; her father mumbling incoherently to some dream behind his red-rimmed eyes.

'Alio!' said the detective leaning back in his chair with the phone. 'Allo! Invalides twelve-eighty-five. ... '

His half-shut eyes were fixed on the fire. One leg swung with a rhythmic motion. Outside, a car whirred past in the rue Saint-Appoline. There came a screech of gears, the slur of another car skidding past it, and a burst of profanity. The noises were intensified in this stuffy room; they beat through the thick curtains with a kind of hysteria.

'That - that's the Martel number,' Chaumont said.

'Allo! Invalides twelve-eighty-five? Thank you. I should like to speak to the colonel....'

Another pause. Augustin brushed the sleeve of his nightgown across his nose, his snuffle was very loud.

'He will be sitting alone in his library now,' the detective said, musingly. 'I told him to expect this message. ... Yes? Colonel Martel? .. . This is Bencolin speaking.'

He held the instrument away from his ear. The place was so very quiet that you could hear distinctly the reply from the telephone. There was something eerie, something ghastly and disembodied, about that voice. It was small and almost squeaky, but very calm.

'Yes, monsieur!' it said. 'I was waiting for your call.'

'I spoke to you a while ago.. . .'

'Yes?'

'I told you that I should be compelled to order your arrest.'

'Naturally, monsieur!' The voice was rasping, rather impatient.

'I mentioned the scandal which must attend your trial. Your name, your daughter's name and your wife's, kicked around in the dirt, and gloated over; yourself telling your knowledge and your decision in a crowded court- room, with flashlights going off, and workmen eating sausage while they gaped at you. ...'

He had spoken still thoughtfully. The rasping voice cut him short:

'Well, monsieur?'

'And I asked you whether you had any poison in the house. You replied that you had cyanide, which is swift, monsieur, and painless. You also said —'

He held the telephone up so that the cold voice grew even louder.

'And I say it again, monsieur,' snapped Colonel Martel, 'that I am prepared to pay for what I have done, I am not afraid of the guillotine.'

'That is not the question, Colonel,' the detective said, gently. 'Suppose you gained my permission to drink instant oblivion ... ?'

Marie Augustin took a step forward. Bencolin turned with a fierce exclamation on his lips; she fell back, and he went on quietly:

'You have won the sportsman's right to do so - if you will take a sportsman's chance.'

'I do not understand.'

'If you were to drink that cyanide, Colonel, you would have atoned. I could keep the whole thing quiet. The connexion of your daughter with that club, her past deeds of all kinds, your own acts - in short, everything pertaining to the affair - would never be known. I swear it. And you know that my word is good.'

Even over those miles of wire you could sense a hiss of indrawn breath. You could feel the bulky old man stiffen in his great chair.

'What - what do you mean?' the voice said, rather hoarsely.

'You are the last of your great line, Colonel. The name would still mean honour for all of those who have borne it. All of them! And if I, the representative of the police, told you that you have satisfied justice - that you had left your name, Colonel, your name' - his words were cool, pointed