I was silent, impressed in spite of myself. Another few minutes brought us to the famous shed. We found all our friends there and, after an interchange of polite amenities, Poirot began his task.
Having watched Giraud at work, I was keenly interested. Poirot bestowed but a cursory glance on the surroundings. The only thing he examined was the ragged coat and trousers by the door. A disdainful smile rose to Giraud’s lips, and, as though noting it, Poirot flung the bundle down again.
“Old clothes of the gardener’s?” he queried.
“Exactly,” said Giraud.
Poirot knelt down by the body. His fingers were rapid but methodical. He examined the texture of the clothes, and satisfied himself that there were no marks on them. The boots he subjected to special care, also the dirty and broken fingernails. Whilst examining the latter he threw a quick question at Giraud.
“You saw these?”
“Yes, I saw them,” replied the other. His face remained inscrutable.
Suddenly Poirot stiffened.
“Dr. Durand!”
“Yes?” The doctor came forward.
“There is foam on the lips. You observed it?”
“I didn’t notice it, I must admit.”
“But you observe it now?”
“Oh, certainly.”
Poirot again shot a question at Giraud.
“You noticed it without doubt?”
The other did not reply. Poirot proceeded. The dagger had been withdrawn from the wound. It reposed in a glass jar by the side of the body. Poirot examined it, then he studied the wound closely. When he looked up, his eyes were excited, and shone with the green light I knew so well.
“It is a strange wound, this! It has not bled. There is no stain on the clothes. The blade of the dagger is slightly discoloured, that is all. What do you think, M. le docteur?”
“I can only say that it is most abnormal.”
“It is not abnormal at all. It is most simple. The man was stabbed after he was dead.” And, stilling the clamour of voices that arose with a wave of his hand, Poirot turned to Giraud and added, “M. Giraud agrees with me, do you not, monsieur?”
Whatever Giraud’s real belief, he accepted the position without moving a muscle. Calmly and almost scornfully he replied:
“Certainly I agree.”
The murmur of surprise and interest broke out again.
“But what an idea!” cried M. Hautet. “To stab a man after he is dead! Barbaric! Unheard of! Some unappeasable hate, perhaps.”
“No, M. le juge,” said Poirot. “I should fancy it was done quite cold-bloodedly—to create an impression.”
“What impression?”
“The impression it nearly did create,” returned Poirot oracularly.
M. Bex had been thinking.
“How, then, was the man killed?”
“He was not killed. He died. He died, M. le juge, if I am not much mistaken, of an epileptic fit!”
This statement of Poirot’s again aroused considerable excitement. Dr. Durand knelt down again, and made a searching examination. At last he rose to his feet.
“Well, M. le docteur?”
“M. Poirot, I am inclined to believe that you are correct in your assertion. I was misled to begin with. The incontrovertible fact that the man had been stabbed distracted my attention from any other indications.”
Poirot was the hero of the hour. The examining magistrate was profuse in compliments. Poirot responded gracefully, and then excused himself on the pretext that neither he nor I had yet lunched, and that he wished to repair the ravages of the journey. As we were about to leave the shed, Giraud approached us.
“One more thing, M. Poirot,” he said, in his suave mocking voice. “We found this coiled round the handle of the dagger. A woman’s hair.”
“Ah!” said Poirot. “A woman’s hair? What woman’s, I wonder?”
“I wonder also,” said Giraud. Then, with a bow, he left us.
“He was insistent, the good Giraud,” said Poirot thoughtfully, as we walked towards the hotel. “I wonder in what direction he hopes to mislead me? A woman’s hair—h’m!”
We lunched heartily, but I found Poirot somewhat distrait and inattentive. Afterwards we went up to our sitting-room and there I begged him to tell me something of his mysterious journey to Paris.
“Willingly, my friend. I went to Paris to find this.”
He took from his pocket a small faded newspaper cutting. It was the reproduction of a woman’s photograph. He handed it to me. I uttered an exclamation.
“You recognize it, my friend?”
I nodded. Although the photo obviously dated from very many years back, and the hair was dressed in a different style, the likeness was unmistakable.
“Madame Daubreuil!” I exclaimed.
Poirot shook his head with a smile.
“Not quite correct, my friend. She did not call herself by that name in those days. That is a picture of the notorious Madame Beroldy!”
Madame Beroldy! In a flash the whole thing came back to me. The murder trial that had evoked such worldwide interest.
The Beroldy Case.
XVI
The Beroldy Case
Some twenty years or so before the opening of the present story, Monsieur Arnold Beroldy, a native of Lyons, arrived in Paris accompanied by his pretty wife and their little daughter, a mere babe. Monsieur Beroldy was a junior partner in a firm of wine merchants, a stout middle-aged man, fond of the good things of life, devoted to his charming wife, and altogether unremarkable in every way. The firm in which Monsieur Beroldy was a partner was a small one, and although doing well, it did not yield a large income to the junior partner. The Beroldys had a small apartment and lived in a very modest fashion to begin with.
But unremarkable though Monsieur Beroldy might be, his wife was plentifully gilded with the brush of Romance. Young and good looking, and gifted withal with a singular charm of manner, Madame Beroldy at once created a stir in the quarter, especially when it began to be whispered that some interesting mystery surrounded her birth. It was rumoured that she was the illegitimate daughter of a Russian Grand Duke. Others asserted that it was an Austrian Archduke, and that the union was legal, though morganatic. But all stories agreed upon one point, that Jeanne Beroldy was the
