“We shall take great care of this mask, Monsieur le Commissaire,” Hanaud said, wrapping it up in a great coloured handkerchief which he pulled from his pocket. “There are only two men in the world, I think, who can make such masks as this. One of them is in America. The other is to be found in a studio in the back of the Haymarket in London. We shall soon know which of them made this, and for whom. Meanwhile, I beg that no one will speak of it.” He looked from face to face to impress his command upon them all, and continued with a quiet solemnity which Mr. Ricardo had only once or twice heard him use before: “For this crime of the Château Suvlac has, I think, a good deal in common with this mask. I mean, that when all at last is discovered, we shall find it to have been an inhuman and malignant business. It was pitiless, I believe. So we, in our turn, shall be pitiless too.”
Mr. Ricardo shivered.
XIII
Different Points of View
Hanaud gave an order to the gendarme.
“You will take those shoes and wrap them up and hand them over to the secretary of Monsieur le Commissaire. Then you will tell my assistant when he has finished with the flowerbed to take a cast of these footprints too and cover them up.”
Corbie picked up the slippers and hurried off upon his duty up the avenue. The rest of the search-party followed at a slower pace.
They had come to within twenty yards of the house when a smallish, round man in a cassock with a purple sash about his waist stepped out from the window of the drawing-room and looked carefully about him. There was something curiously secret in his manner. Hanaud, though he seemed sunk fathoms deep in his own thoughts, saw him on the instant. He stopped, and with a gesture stopped the others.
“Who is that?” he asked in a low voice.
“The Abbé Fauriel,” the Commissaire Herbesthal replied.
“Oh, yes!” said Hanaud.
But he did not resume his walk.
“Let no one move,” he whispered; and, screened by the trees, they watched the Abbé’s movements. He walked on the tips of his toes to the edge of the terrace, and turning about scanned the upper windows of the two turrets. Assured that no one was watching him from those points of vantage, he moved along the stone flags in the direction of the avenue, but slowly, with his eyes bent on the ground like a man pondering an abstraction. When, however, his pacing had brought him opposite to the glass door of the dining-room, he became all at once alert again. He peered into the room, raising himself up on the balls of his feet so that he might see the better, and then, crossing the terrace with a little noiseless, tripping run, he pressed his face against the glass.
“This is all very peculiar,” Mr. Ricardo whispered with displeasure. Furtiveness in an abbé was by no means an agreeable sight to him.
“Hush!” said Hanaud; and then to himself: “I wonder how long he has been waiting in the drawing-room to offer his condolences.”
The Commissaire answered him.
“Monsieur l’Abbé has not been waiting at all. No, indeed! He would have something to say, I think, if he was kept waiting. Oh! He is an authoritative one, the Abbé. He has already seen the ladies of Suvlac.”
“Oho!” said Hanaud, his voice lifting a little on a note of interest. “Has he now? Let me hear of this, Monsieur le Commissaire.”
“He arrived before you and your friend returned from Villeblanche. He asked my permission very correctly to offer his ministrations to the ladies. It is true that the ladies are Protestants, but in such calamities, the creeds are one.”
“You gave him the permission?” Hanaud observed softly.
“Without hesitation,” replied Herbesthal very firmly.
Hanaud inclined his head. Even famous inspectors from the Sûreté Générale of Paris do not tread on the toes of commissaires of police if they want their affairs to run smoothly.
“So all this while Monsieur l’Abbé has had us under his observation,” he remarked, as though nothing could have been more fortunate.
“Far from it,” Herbesthal replied. “The Abbé saw Mademoiselle Tasborough first of all, and was not very long with her. He went immediately afterwards to the room of Madame Tasborough, which is in the wing behind and does not look out in this direction at all.”
There is a flaw here, Mr. Ricardo reflected. It was obviously important to know when the Abbé left the room in the wing and made his furtive way to the drawing-room. But he did not intervene. “It is clear,” he argued to himself, “that the Commissaire has a Fauriel complex.” He left the matter to Hanaud, but Hanaud was once more watching the terrace with eyes for nothing else.
The Abbé, satisfied that there was no one in the drawing-room to overlook him, turned towards Diana Tasborough’s room and resumed his meditative walk in that direction. Hanaud whistled under his breath.
“Did he see Diana Tasborough in her own room in the turret there?” he asked of the Commissaire, but without taking his eyes for one moment from the terrace.
“Certainly.”
“And now he returns to it when it is empty. Yes, as my friend Mr. Ricardo says, it is all very peculiar.”
Nearer and nearer the Abbé paced towards the turret, and suddenly he whipped through the doorway. It seemed that Hanaud had been expecting just that movement. He was away from his shelter in a flash. In spite of his bulk, he sprinted. He reached the terrace almost before his companions had started. He ran across it noiseless as a man in rubber shoes, keeping close to the windows of the house. In the angle made by the round projection of the turret, he stopped. He certainly had not been heard, and where he stood
