He walked out of the mortuary with a slow step from which all the lightness had gone. For the third time Mr. Ricardo was aware of a shrinking, a reluctance in his companion.
“It is true,” said Hanaud as they climbed into the car. He was answering Mr. Ricardo’s unuttered question. “I have a glimpse of things I do not like to see. And I shall have to look them full in the face before I reach the end. I should say to Monsieur Tidon if I could: ‘Sir, this is not my affair.’ But it is my affair. I came to Bordeaux about some disappearances—on the face of it, a sordid, vulgar, uninteresting business, which a little attention would solve. But your Miss Whipple disappears too. Does that disappearance stand by itself? Or does it lift the others to the level of a great and infamous conspiracy? I don’t know!” He brought his clenched fist down upon the cushions at his side.
“But I must know. It is my business,” he cried vigorously, and from that moment to the end of the long and difficult inquiry, Mr. Ricardo saw no more of any hesitation upon Hanaud’s part.
“There is one question I would like to ask,” he said timidly.
“Ask it, my friend, for I have many to ask you,” Hanaud replied.
“Was the severed hand discovered in the basket?”
Hanaud shook his head.
“No! It is a pity. Yes—a great pity. For in that case we might have discovered why it was cut off, and I think that of all the questions we have to answer, there is not one which is more important than that.”
The car stopped at the Prefecture.
VIII
The Magistrate in Charge of the Case
Destiny, careless as ever of the creature comforts, had written down that Mr. Ricardo, who was rather particular about them, should have no luncheon worth talking about at all on that unusual day. As Hanaud entered the vestibule of the Prefecture, he was passed by a man who suddenly stopped and turned about.
“Is it Monsieur Hanaud?” he asked.
“Yes,” Hanaud replied, turning about too.
“What a stroke of luck! I am Arthur Tidon, the examining magistrate, and I was off this moment to the Château Suvlac in search of you.”
For a few minutes the two men talked earnestly in the shadow of the archway, whilst Mr. Ricardo sat in the car and imagined that he was beginning to feel very faint for lack of food. Then they came out into the sunlight and approached him.
“My friend, Mr. Ricardo—Monsieur Tidon, the Juge d’Instruction,” said Hanaud, and he stood aside.
Arthur Tidon was a tall, slim man of thirty-five years or thereabouts, with a thin, pointed, smiling face. He was clean-shaven except for a short strip of whisker upon each cheek, and his clothes were of an urban elegance scarcely to be expected in the provinces.
“The name of Mr. Ricardo is of course known to me in connection with the famous Hanaud and an affair at Aix a few years ago,” Tidon began affably. “I count myself happy that Providence has brought you together again at a moment so impressive. I invite you to give me at once a little of your attention in my office.”
Mr. Ricardo was torn between his importance and the pangs of hunger. On the one hand he had an intriguing story to relate which justice, the enigma of Joyce Whipple, the distress of Diana Tasborough, all demanded should be related at once. On the other, would it not be more brilliantly told after a good luncheon, with a big, long, fat cigar to underline its drama—a minute’s silence now whilst the lips expelled a neat ring of smoke and the eyes thoughtfully watched it mount and dissipate, a vigorous quick puff afterwards to illustrate the pounding of his heart, an inch of white ash flicked off by his little finger to close a sentence? It was hard to abandon these accessions of good story-telling, harder than to forget his stomach’s emptiness, but the magistrate had opened the door of the limousine; and Mr. Ricardo had committed his foot to the step.
Tidon led the way into a large, oblong, comfortably furnished room at the side of the front door. Two tall windows looked on to the street; a knee-hole table stood between them; against the wall was a smaller table where the magistrate’s clerk sat writing.
“I shall ring for you, Saussac, when I have finished with these gentlemen,” said Tidon pleasantly, and the clerk rose at once with a little grimace of disappointment. He left the room with his eyes so intent upon Hanaud that he knocked his nose against the panels of the door.
“My poor Saussac,” cried Monsieur Tidon, laughing. “He is heartbroken. So little happens here—the theft of a curé’s vestments at the most. Then comes this startling case. Saussac, from the window, sees the great Monsieur Hanaud and his famous friend Mr. Ricardo drive up to the door, and he is sent out of the room. Yes, poor fellow.”
He laid his hat and his malacca cane upon a side-table, placed a chair in front of his table for Ricardo and another for Hanaud, and then stood behind it facing them.
“You see?” he rattled on, laughing once more, but this time with apology in his voice. “We have here all the discredited methods—the light behind me and shining upon your faces. Everyone who is examined recognises the old trick at once and composes his expressions to defeat it. But I keep to the arrangement because
