“Yes.”
Hanaud lit a cigarette and smiled.
“Francine Rollard would not stand at the side of the bed. No! She would stand at the foot and whisper those simple but appalling words. But nowhere else. That was significant, my friend. She would not stand exactly where she had stood when the murder was committed.” He added softly, “I have great hopes of Francine Rollard. A few days of a prison cell and that untamed little tiger-cat will talk.”
“And what of Waberski in all this?” Jim exclaimed.
Hanaud laughed and rose from his chair.
“Waberski? He is for nothing in all this. He brought a charge in which he didn’t believe, and the charge happened to be true. That is all.” He took a step or two away and returned. “But I am wrong. That is not all. Waberski is indeed for something in all this. For when he was pressed to make good his charge and must rake up some excuse for it somehow, by a piece of luck he thinks of a morning when he saw Betty Harlowe in the street of Gambetta near to the shop of Jean Cladel. And so he leads us to the truth. Yes, we owe something to that animal Boris Waberski. Did I not tell you, Monsieur, that we are all the servants of Chance?”
Hanaud went from the garden and for three days Jim Frobisher saw him no more. But the development which Monsieur Bex feared and for which Hanaud hoped took place, and on the third day Hanaud invited Jim to his office in the Prefecture.
He had Jim’s memorandum in his hand.
“Do you remember what you wrote?” he asked. “See!” He pushed the memorandum in front of Jim and pointed to a paragraph.
“But in the absence of any trace of poison in the dead woman’s body, it is difficult to see how the criminal can be brought to justice except by:
“(a) A confession.
“(b) The commission of another crime of a similar kind.
“Hanaud’s theory—once a poisoner, always a poisoner.”
Frobisher read it through.
“Now that is very true,” said Hanaud. “Never have I come across a case more difficult. At every step we break down. I think I have my fingers on Jean Cladel. I am five minutes too late. I think that I shall get some useful evidence from a firm in Paris. The firm has ceased to be for the last ten years. All the time I strike at air. So I must take a risk—yes, and a serious one. Shall I tell you what that risk was? I have to assume that Mademoiselle Ann will be brought alive to the Hôtel de Brebizart on that night of Madame Le Vay’s ball. That she would be brought back I had no doubt. For one thing, there could be no safer resting-place for her than under the stone flags of the kitchen there. For another, there was the portmanteau in the sidecar. It was not light, the portmanteau. Some friends of mine watched it being put into the sidecar before young Espinosa started for his rendezvous. I have no doubt it weighed just as many kilos as Mademoiselle Ann.”
“I never understood the reason of that portmanteau,” Frobisher interrupted.
“It was a matter of timing. There were twenty-five kilometres of a bad track, with many sharp little twists between the Val Terzon and the Hôtel de Brebizart. And a motorcycle with an empty sidecar would take appreciably longer to cover the distance than a cycle with a sidecar weighted, which could take the corners at its top speed. They were anxious to get the exact time the journey would take with Ann Upcott in the sidecar, so that there might be no needless hanging about waiting for its arrival. But they were a little too careful. Our friend Boris said a shrewd thing, didn’t he? Some crimes are discovered because the alibis are too unnaturally perfect. Oh, there was no doubt they meant to bring back Mademoiselle Ann! But suppose they brought her back dead! It wasn’t likely—no! It would be so much easier to finish her off with a dose of the arrow-poison. No struggle, no blood, no trouble at all. I reckoned that they would dope her at Madame Le Vay’s ball and bring her back half conscious, as indeed they meant to do. But I shivered all that evening at the risk I had taken, and when that cycle shut off its engine, as we stood in the darkness of the gallery, I was in despair.”
He shook his shoulders uncomfortably as though the danger was not yet passed.
“Anyway, I took the risk,” he resumed, “and so we got fulfilled your condition (b). The commission or, in this case, the attempted commission of another crime of the same kind.”
Frobisher nodded.
“But now,” said Hanaud, leaning forward, “we have got your condition (a) fulfilled—a confession; a clear and complete confession from Francine Rollard, and so many admissions from the Espinosas, and Jeanne Leclerc and Maurice Thevenet, that they amount to confessions. We have put them all together, and here is the new part of the case with which Monsieur Bex and you will have to deal—the charge not of murder attempted but of murder committed—the murder of Madame Harlowe.”
Jim Frobisher was upon the point of interrupting, but he thought better of it.
“Go on!” he contented himself with saying.
“Why Betty Harlowe took to writing anonymous letters, Monsieur—who shall say? The dullness of life for a girl young and beautiful and passionate in a provincial town, as our friend Boris suggests? The craving for excitement? Something bad and vicious and abnormal born in her, part of her, and craving more and more expression as she grew in years? The exacting attendance upon Madame? Probably all of these elements combined to suggest the notion to her. And suddenly it became easy for her. She discovered a bill in that box in Madame Harlowe’s bedroom, a receipted bill ten years old from the firm of Chapperon, builders, of the
