“I’ll tell you, Betty,” he said gently. “Hanaud and I went to find Jean Cladel tonight. We found him dead. He had been murdered—cruelly.”
Betty moaned and swayed upon her feet. She would have fallen had not Jim caught her in his arms.
“Betty!” he cried.
Betty buried her face upon his shoulder. He could feel the heave of her bosom against his heart.
“It’s appalling!” she moaned. “Jean Cladel! … No one ever had heard of him till this morning … and now he’s swept into this horror—like the rest of us! Oh, where will it end?”
Jim placed her in a chair and dropped on his knees beside her.
She was sobbing now, and he tried to lift her face up to his.
“My dear!” he whispered.
But she would not raise her head.
“No,” she said in a stifled voice, “no,” and she pressed her face deeper into the crook of his shoulder and clung to him with desperate hands.
“Betty!” he repeated, “I am so sorry. … But it’ll all come right. I’m sure it will. Oh, Betty!” And whilst he spoke he cursed himself for the banality of his words. Why couldn’t he find some ideas that were really fine with which to comfort her? Something better than these stupid commonplaces of “I am sorry” and “It will all straighten out”? But he couldn’t, and it seemed that there was no necessity that he should. For her arms crept round his neck and held him close.
XIX
A Plan Frustrated
The road curled like a paper ribbon round the shoulder of a hill and dropped into a shallow valley. To the left a little below the level of the road, a stream ran swiftly through a narrow meadow of lush green grass. Beyond the meadow the wall of the valley rose rough with outcroppings of rock, and with every tuft of its herbage already brown from the sun. On the right the northern wall rose almost from the road’s edge. The valley was long and curved slowly, and halfway along to the point where it disappeared a secondary road, the sort of road which is indicated in the motorist’s handbooks by a dotted line, branched off to the left, crossed the stream by a stone bridge and vanished in a cleft of the southern wall. Beyond this branching road grew trees. The stream disappeared under them as though it ran into a cavern; the slopes on either side were hidden behind trees—trees so thick that here at this end the valley looked bare in the strong sunlight, but low trees, as if they had determined to harmonise with their environment. Indeed, the whole valley had a sort of doll’s-house effect—it was so shallow and narrow and stunted. It tried to be a valley and succeeded in being a depression.
When the little two-seater car swooped round the shoulder of the hill and descended, the white ribbon of road was empty but for one tiny speck at the far end, behind which a stream of dust spurted and spread like smoke from the funnel of an engine.
“That motor dust is going to smother us when we pass,” said Jim.
“We shall do as much for him,” said Betty, looking over her shoulder from the steering wheel. “No, worse!” Behind the car the dust was a screen. “But I don’t mind, do you, Jim?” she asked with a laugh, in which for the first time, with a heart of thankfulness, Jim heard a note of gaiety. “To be free of that town if only for an hour! Oh!” and Betty opened her lungs to the sunlight and the air. “This is my first hour of liberty for a week!”
Frobisher was glad, too, to be out upon the slopes of the Côte-d’Or. The city of Dijon was ringing that morning with the murder of Jean Cladel; you could not pass down a street but you heard his name mentioned and some sarcasms about the police. He wished to forget that nightmare of a visit to the street of Gambetta and the dreadful twisted figure on the floor of the back room.
“You’ll be leaving it for good very soon, Betty,” he said significantly.
Betty made a little grimace at him, and laid her hand upon his sleeve.
“Jim!” she said, and the colour rose into her face, and the car swerved across the road. “You mustn’t speak like that to the girl at the wheel,” she said with a laugh as she switched the car back into its course, “or I shall run down the motorcyclist and that young lady in the sidecar.”
“The young lady,” said Jim, “happens to be a portmanteau!”
The motorcyclist, indeed, was slowing down as he came nearer to the branching road, like a tourist unacquainted with the country, and when he actually reached it he stopped altogether and dismounted. Betty brought her car to a standstill beside him, and glanced at the clock and the speedometer in front of her.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
The man standing beside the motorcycle was a young man, slim, dark, and of a pleasant countenance. He took off his helmet and bowed politely.
“Madame, I am looking for Dijon,” he said in a harsh accent which struck Frobisher as somehow familiar to his ears.
“Monsieur, you can see the tip of it through that gap across the valley,” Betty returned. In the very centre of the cleft the point of the soaring spire of the cathedral stood up like a delicate lance. “But I warn you that that way, though short, is not good.”
Through the gradually thinning cloud of dust which hung behind the car they heard the jug-jug of another motorcycle.
“The road by which we have come is the better one,” she continued.
“But how far is it?” the young man asked.
Betty once more consulted her speedometer.
“Forty kilometres, and we have covered them in forty minutes, so that you can see the going is good. We started at eleven punctually, and it is now twenty minutes to twelve.”
“Surely we started
