Moreau returned to the room as he spoke with the inlaid box in his hands.
“It is done,” he said.
Hanaud sprang up, relocked the box with his forceps, and stowed it away in its hiding-place.
“Good!” he said, his face beaming with relief. “Let us go now! For the motorcar—I give it the permission to return!”
And the three men departed from the chalet and returned to the terrace.
XI
Footsteps
Hanaud was quite genuinely relieved to find himself once more upon the open terrace of the Château Suvlac. He laughed in a low, quiet rumble of a voice which to Mr. Ricardo sounded peculiarly alarming. He nodded at Ricardo with a gleaming eye.
“You have a poem. I know him. He is a very fine poem. Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is certainly somebody’s goal. Yes, I am of a pleasant humour. For we are nearer to the truth. Now we will see what it is that our excellent gendarme there is guarding for our inspection.”
He descended the steps and crossed the lawn to the circular flowerbed. Mr. Ricardo could now see that the objects which had puzzled him were three dishes of brown earthenware, capsized one upon the grass rim of the circle and the other two upon the mould of the bed itself. The gendarme standing near to the dishes saluted.
“It was you who discovered these marks?” Hanaud asked genially.
“Yes, monsieur. Monsieur le Commissaire ordered me to look round the garden. When I discovered the marks I ran at once to the kitchen for the dishes to cover them.”
“Yes, that was a good idea,” said Hanaud with a smile of approval.
“But I had some difficulty in collecting them, monsieur.”
Hanaud nodded sympathetically.
“Marianne,” he said, and warmed by his approval the gendarme lost something of his rigidity. He puffed out his cheeks.
“She is a prodigious woman, monsieur, if she is a woman at all. She boxed my ears, monsieur. I had the dishes in my hands. She dared me to drop them, and boxed my ears again. You understand, monsieur, that I was helpless. She said—but, pardon me, it would be an impertinence to repeat what she said.”
“You shall certainly repeat what she said,” Hanaud insisted. “There are no ladies present.”
The gendarme blushed under his képi.
“Oh, it wasn’t an impertinence of that kind. No, it was worse.”
“Nevertheless, repeat it.”
“She said: ‘And if you don’t like my boxes on the ear, you rascal, you can pass them on to your precious Monsieur Hanaud, of whom I think nothing at all.’ ”
The Commissaire Herbesthal was shocked, but Hanaud’s face expanded in a grin.
“I have an inclination towards Marianne,” said he. “Well, you got the dish covers and set them here. Yes?”
“Then I found Monsieur le Commissaire and he ordered me to keep watch so that nothing should be disturbed.”
“Good! Has anyone come about this flowerbed as if he wanted to disturb it?”
“No, monsieur.”
“That’s not so good,” said Hanaud. “Now you shall tell me your name, so that I may have it to bear in mind. Then you shall uncover one by one those marks on the ground.”
For a second time the gendarme coloured with pleasure.
“For my name, monsieur, it is Corbie—Victor Corbie, at monsieur’s service. For the marks, look!”
He knelt down and removed the dish from the rim of the grass about the flowerbed. Where it had lain the turf was broken, and just by the side of it in the mould but at the very edge was the imprint of a small foot, wearing a pointed shoe with a high heel.
“Yes,” said Mr. Ricardo, agreeing with himself. “At that point a woman’s foot has slipped.”
Victor Corbie, kneeling upon the ground, was able to reach to the second dish on the slope of the flowerbed. He lifted it and disclosed yet another footprint. Mr. Ricardo examined it from the place where he stood.
“That imprint was made by the same woman,” he declared.
“You will notice, however, that it was made by the left foot, whereas this one on the edge of the bed was made by the right foot,” said Hanaud.
“I quite agree, my dear Hanaud,” said Mr. Ricardo. “Yes, I agree.”
The Commissaire Herbesthal, who from time to time during the last hour had been staring at Mr. Ricardo, and from Mr. Ricardo to Hanaud in a maze of wonder, was now completely at a loss as to which category or department of men he belonged to. Hanaud, on the other hand, was a picture of delight.
“I am so glad that you agree,” he said.
He nodded to Victor Corbie, who hurried round the circle of the flowerbed and removed the third dish. This was nearer to the house, and, since the imprints pointed towards the river and away from the house, it was behind the other two. The mark which it disclosed was the imprint of a foot too, but of a man’s foot shod in a big nailed boot. Yet the imprint was shallower. Mr. Ricardo, however, was not deterred by observations of any subtlety. He declared boldly:
“It is obvious that a woman fled and that a man pursued her.”
Hanaud, however, was not at that moment paying the homage to Mr. Ricardo’s statements which he so often paid. He did not, indeed, seem to hear this one at all. He said:
“I think the first thing to do is to discover which one of the young ladies at the Château Suvlac ran across the flowerbed last night, if it was last night and not the night before that she ran across the flowerbed. Victor Corbie, you shall help me.”
He hurried back to the house, disappeared into the turret bedroom of Diana Tasborough, and less than a couple of minutes afterwards reappeared at the window of the drawing-room. Victor Corbie followed him. He ran back to the flowerbed, and Corbie dropped on the grass beside him three pairs of the gay kind of evening slippers
