There was a thrill in Hanaud’s voice, a gleam in his eyes which dispersed in an instant Mr. Ricardo’s ill-humour. He had been inclined to be touchy over this matter of the gabare. He took it rather as an offence that Hanaud had remembered to lay his hands upon it and its crew. The gabare was his contribution to the elucidation of the case, and he resented the fact that the contribution had already been made by someone else. But Hanaud was obviously up on the tips of his toes. He was going to bowl the wickets down. He had the measure of his enemies. He was to be swift and terrible.
“Yes,” cried Ricardo in an enthusiasm, running to the door and ordering his car and running back again. “The Rolls-Royce is yours. You shall give the orders to my chauffeur. You shall own it. We go fast and far tonight!”
“But not at once, my friend. In an hour and a half at the Golden Pheasant. Even then he will wait,” Hanaud replied. “For in this we shall be different from Domenique Pouchette. We shall not close our offices tonight.”
XVIII
Hanaud Dines
The small hotel at which Hanaud put up was on the edge of the spacious Place des Quinconces and opposite to the great white memorial to the Girondins. A restaurant occupied the ground floor and Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo sat down by the open window. Outside, a few marble-topped tables and iron chairs were ranged upon the pavement beneath an awning, but two men only were drinking an apéritif at one of them, and they were out of earshot.
“Let us follow their example,” said Hanaud, after he had ordered dinner. “Some vermouth, I think. Yes, I promise you we shall eat well here.”
He tore open a new bright blue packet of Maryland cigarettes and smoked one of the black tubes of tobacco contentedly. Hanaud was not perhaps as marvellous as he invariably, his assistant Moreau generally, and Mr. Ricardo sometimes thought him to be. But he had one quality without which greatness is seldom found. He could disburden himself of all his anxieties the moment there came an interval in his labours. As the clock struck he closed his book and was in the playing-fields. He leaned back in his chair, smoothing out his mind and laving it in the peace of that vast quincunx of trees and of the river running red towards the sunset. Mr. Ricardo, however, had not the professional mind. He must always be busy, and the river with its load of great ships only recalled to him the pastoral reaches beyond the city and set before his eyes a big wicker basket gently rocking nearer and nearer to a bank of grass.
“You must tell me where we go tonight after we have dined,” he cried. “Not to know is more than I can bear.”
Hanaud came out of an abstraction very slowly.
“Where do we go?” he repeated, with an air of profound astonishment. He looked anxiously at Ricardo, reached out a hand and felt his pulse. “You ask me that when all this cloud of mystery is clearing away? There can be but the one place.”
“You can keep it to yourself if you want to, just as I like to keep my pulse to myself,” Mr. Ricardo rejoined sulkily, as he wrenched his hand away.
“Hanaud was wrong,” the detective exclaimed with his detestable habit of speaking of himself in the third person. “Hanaud should have recollected that he was in the proud position of being Mr. Ricardo’s host. Instead he must be the cat with the mouse—not nice—no!” He saw indignation gathering on Mr. Ricardo’s brow at the use of so objectionable a simile, and hastened on: “I tell you where we go. We go to the Château Mirandol and we interrupt the Vicomte in the act of writing a most interesting paper on the esoteric rites of the Rosicrucians, to be read to the young ladies of Bordeaux. And then we ask him very politely to show us that upper room where, two nights ago, the lights blazed to so late an hour.”
The tone of Hanaud’s voice more even than his words opened a tiny window in his companion’s mind. He saw again the long row of lights blazing across the sleeping country. What was going on in that big room? What strange ceremony was being conducted? For him too little pieces of the puzzle began to fall into their places—the theft and the return of the priest’s vestments, the priest’s obstinate strange silence, Hanaud’s visit this morning to the Archiepiscopal Palace.
“Then you think—?” he exclaimed; and sat staring at his friend, on the brink, as he felt, of some dreadful revelation.
Hanaud nodded his head.
“What took place two nights ago took place in that long upper room.”
“The murder of Evelyn Devenish?”
“Yes.”
“And of—no, I won’t believe that!”
Hanaud’s face grew dark and savage. He raised his hand and let it fall again.
“About that I can tell you no more than you can tell yourself. For I don’t know! I don’t understand!” he cried in a sudden exasperation; and he sat with gloomy eyes fixed upon the tablecloth and his big face working. After a moment or two he leaned forward and whispered: “We two shall make a little prayer each in his own heart, that the brave Joyce Whipple shall tell us all we want to know with her own lips before the morning comes.”
He drew quickly back as the proprietor approached the table with his little dishes of radishes and black olives.
“Come! Let us eat! We shall be fit for nothing unless we do.”
Hanaud had prophesied truly. One ate well at the little restaurant of the Golden Pheasant, though the only waiter was the proprietor in a tweed suit, and each step
