Having whispered, he cried aloud towards the doorway in his natural voice:
“Did you hear, Mademoiselle? Was that the whisper which reached your ears on the night when Madame died?”
All those in the bedroom waited for the answer in suspense. Francine Rollard, indeed, with her eyes fixed upon Hanaud in a very agony of doubt. And the answer came.
“Yes, but whoever whispered, whispered twice this afternoon. On the night when I came down in the dark to the treasure room, the words were only whispered once.”
“It was the same voice which whispered them twice, Mademoiselle?”
“Yes … I think so … I noticed no difference … Yes.”
And Hanaud flung out his arms with a comic gesture of despair, and addressed the room.
“You understand now my little experiment. A voice that whispers! How shall one tell it from another voice that whispers! There is no intonation, no depth, no lightness. There is not even sex in a voice which whispers. We have no clue, no, not the slightest to the identity of the person who whispered, ‘That will do now,’ on the night when Madame Harlowe died.” He waved his hand towards Monsieur Bex. “I will be glad if you will open now these cupboards, and Mademoiselle Harlowe will tell us, to the best of her knowledge, whether anything has been taken or anything disturbed.”
Hanaud returned to the treasure room, leaving Monsieur Bex and Betty at their work, with the Commissary and his secretary to supervise them. Jim Frobisher followed him. He was very far from believing that Hanaud had truthfully explained the intention of his experiment. The impossibility of identifying a voice which whispers! Here was something with which Hanaud must have been familiar from a hundred cases! No, that interpretation would certainly not work. There was quite another true reason for this melodramatic little scene which he had staged. He was following Hanaud in the hope of finding out that reason, when he heard him speaking in a low voice, and he stopped inside the dressing-room close to the communicating door where he could hear every word and yet not be seen himself.
“Mademoiselle,” Hanaud was saying to Ann Upcott, “there is something about this clock here which troubles you.”
“Yes—of course it’s nonsense. … I must be wrong. … For here is the cabinet and on it stands the clock.”
Jim could gather from the two voices that they were both standing together close to the marquetry cabinet.
“Yes, yes,” Hanaud urged. “Still you are troubled.”
There was a moment’s silence. Jim could imagine the girl looking from the clock to the door by which she had stood, and back again from the door to the clock. Surely that scene in the bedroom had been staged to extort some admission from Ann Upcott of the falsity of her story. Was he now, since the experiment had failed, resorting to another trick, setting a fresh trap?
“Well?” he asked insistently. “Why are you troubled?”
“It seems to me,” Ann replied in a voice of doubt, “that the clock is lower now than it was. Of course it can’t be … and I had only one swift glimpse of it. … Yet my recollection is so vivid—the room standing out revealed in the moment of bright light, and then vanishing into darkness again. … Yes, the clock seemed to me to be placed higher …” and suddenly she stopped as if a warning hand had been laid upon her arm. Would she resume? Jim was still wondering when silently, like a swift animal, Hanaud was in the doorway and confronting him.
“Yes, Monsieur Frobisher,” he said with an odd note of relief in his voice, “we shall have to enlist you in the Sûrété very soon. That I can see. Come in!”
He took Jim by the arm and led him into the room.
“As for that matter of the clock, Mademoiselle, the light goes up and goes out—it would have been a marvel if you had within that flash of vision seen every detail precisely true. No, there is nothing there!” He flung himself into a chair and sat for a little while silent in an attitude of dejection.
“You said this morning to me, Monsieur, that I had nothing to go upon, that I was guessing here, and guessing there, stirring up old troubles which had better be left quietly in their graves, and at the end discovering nothing. Upon my word, I believe you are right! My little experiment! Was there ever a failure more abject?”
Hanaud sat up alertly.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
Jim Frobisher had had a brain wave. The utter disappointment upon Hanaud’s face and in his attitude had enlightened him. Yes, his experiment had failed. For it was aimed at Francine Rollard. He had summoned her without warning, he had bidden her upon the instant to act a scene, nay, to take the chief part in it, in the hope that it would work upon her and break her down to a confession of guilt. He suspected Ann. Well, then, Ann must have had an accomplice. To discover the accomplice—there was the object of the experiment. And it had failed abjectedly, as Hanaud himself confessed. Francine had shrunk from the ordeal, no doubt, but the reason of the shrinking was manifest—fear of the police, suspicion of a trap, the furtive helplessness of the ignorant. She had not delivered herself into Hanaud’s toils. But not a word of this conjecture did Jim reveal to Hanaud. To his question what was the matter, he answered simply:
“Nothing.”
Hanaud beat with the palms of his hands upon the arms of his chair.
“Nothing, eh? nothing! That’s the only answer in this case. To every question! To every search! Nothing, nothing, nothing;” and as he ended in a sinking voice, a startled cry rang out in the bedroom.
“Betty!” Ann exclaimed.
Hanaud threw off his dejection like an overcoat. Jim fancied that he was out of his chair and across the dressing-room before the sound of the cry had ceased. Certainly Betty could not have moved. She was standing in front
