The Prefecture lay the better part of a mile away across the city. Hanaud set off at a great pace, and reaching the building conducted Jim into an office with a safe set against the wall.
“Will you sit down for a moment? And smoke, please,” he said.
He was in a mood of such deep dejection; he was so changed from his mercurial self; that only now did Jim Frobisher understand the great store he had set upon his interview with Jean Cladel. He unlocked the safe and brought over to the table a few envelopes of different sizes, the copy of the Treatise and his green file. He seated himself in front of Jim and began to open his envelopes and range their contents in a row, when the door was opened and a gendarme saluted and advanced. He carried a paper in his hand.
“A reply came over the telephone from Paris at nine o’clock tonight, Monsieur Hanaud. They say that this may be the name of the firm you want. It was established in the Rue de Batignolles, but it ceased to exist seven years ago.”
“Yes, that would have happened,” Hanaud answered glumly, as he took the paper. He read what was written upon it. “Yes—yes. That’s it. Not a doubt.”
He took an envelope from a rack upon the table and put the paper inside it and stuck down the flap. On the front of the envelope, Jim saw him write an illuminating word. “Address.”
Then he looked at Jim with smouldering eyes.
“There is a fatality in all this,” he cried. “We become more and more certain that murder was committed and how it was committed. We get a glimpse of possible reasons why. But we are never an inch nearer to evidence—real convincing evidence—who committed it. Fatality? I am a fool to use such words. It’s keen wits and audacity and nerve that stop us at the end of each lane and make an idiot of me!”
He struck a match viciously and lit a cigarette. Frobisher made an effort to console him.
“Yes, but it’s the keen wits and the audacity and the nerve of more than one person.”
Hanaud glanced at Frobisher sharply.
“Explain, my friend.”
“I have been thinking over it ever since we left the street of Gambetta. I no longer doubt that Mrs. Harlowe was murdered in the Maison Grenelle. It is impossible to doubt it. But her murder was part of the activities of a gang. Else how comes it that Jean Cladel was murdered too tonight?”
A smile drove for a moment the gloom from Hanaud’s face.
“Yes. You have been quite fifteen minutes in the bullring,” he said.
“Then you agree with me?”
“Yes!” But Hanaud’s gloom had returned. “But we can’t lay our hands upon the gang. We are losing time, and I am afraid that we have no time to lose.” Hanaud shivered like a man suddenly chilled. “Yes, I am very troubled now. I am very—frightened.”
His fear peered out of him and entered into Frobisher. Frobisher did not understand it, he had no clue to what it was that Hanaud feared, but sitting in that brightly-lit office in the silent building, he was conscious of evil presences thronging about the pair of them, presences grotesque and malevolent such as some old craftsman of Dijon might have carved on the pillars of a cathedral. He, too, shivered.
“Let us see, now!” said Hanaud.
He took the end of the arrow shaft from one envelope, and the barb from his pocket, and fitted them together. The iron barb was loose now because the hole to receive it at the top of the arrow shaft had been widened to take a nib. But the spoke was just about the right length. He laid the arrow down upon the table, and opened his green file. A small square envelope, such as chemists use, attracted Jim’s notice. He took it up. It seemed empty, but as he shook it out, a square tablet of some hard white substance rolled on to the table. It was soiled with dust, and there was a smear of green upon it; and as Jim turned it over, he noticed a cut or crack in its surface, as though something sharp had struck it.
“What in the world has this to do with the affair?” he asked.
Hanaud looked up from his file. He reached out his hand swiftly to take the tablet away from Jim, and drew his hand in again.
“A good deal perhaps. Perhaps nothing,” he said gravely. “But it is interesting—that tablet. I shall know more about it tomorrow.”
Jim could not for the life of him remember any occasion which had brought this tablet into notice. It certainly had not been discovered in Jean Cladel’s house, for it was already there in the safe in the office. Jim had noticed the little square envelope as Hanaud fetched it out of the safe. The tablet looked as if it had been picked up from the road like Monsieur Bex’s famous matchbox. Or—yes, there was that smear of green—from the grass. Jim sat up straight in his chair. They had all been together in the garden this morning. Hanaud, himself, Betty and Ann Upcott. But at that point Frobisher’s conjectures halted. Neither his memory nor deduction could connect that tablet with the half-hour the four of them had passed in the shade of the sycamores. The only thing of which he was quite sure was the great importance which Hanaud attached to it. For all the time that he handled and examined it Hanaud’s eyes never left him, never once. They followed each little movement of finger tip and thumb with an extraordinary alertness, and when Jim at last tilted it off his palm back into its little envelope, the detective undoubtedly drew a breath of relief.
Jim Frobisher laughed good-humouredly. He was getting to know his man. He did not invite any “Aha’s” and “Oho’s” by vain questionings. He leaned across the table and
