Tidon stopped in his walk and looked sharply at Hanaud.
“It is you who return,” he said with an unpleasant smile, “and I who will not go with you.”
It was a strange moment, no doubt, to insist upon accurate words. Mr. Ricardo was a little puzzled by the Judge’s pedantry. But he had the upper hand, and even in little things was disposed to keep it.
“It is a pity,” Hanaud replied, and he began to talk in riddles. “For your hand really needs the skilled attention that you can only get in a clinic. And even then it will be six weeks before the wound is healed.”
“My hand!” cried the Judge furiously.
“The right one,” Hanaud continued. “It was obvious, when Mr. Ricardo and I had the honour to discuss the Suvlac crime with Monsieur le Juge yesterday morning, that monsieur was in considerable distress. And the pain will get worse, steadily worse, unless the proper treatment is applied.”
The Judge stood and sought to stare Hanaud down. But during the last few moments he had lost his predominance. His gaze was certainly imperious enough to quell an army of subordinates, but he had lost assurance none the less. He broke out roughly:
“And if I burn my hand, Monsieur Hanaud, what in the name of God has that got to do with you?”
“Nothing at all—if you burn your hand,” Hanaud retorted coolly. “But you didn’t burn your hand, Monsieur le Juge. You laid it on a gate two nights ago—you and Robin Webster too.”
“A gate! A gate! The man’s mad!” cried Tidon.
“Monsieur le Vicomte’s gate, which he was so careful to burn clean and repaint yesterday,” Hanaud continued imperturbably. “And indeed he was quite right. There was a sticky varnish upon that gate of which the chief ingredient was”—and he produced a blue telegram from his pocket and consulted it—“was dichlorethyl sulphide—”
“Poor fellow! Poor fellow! He’s quite mad,” the magistrate interrupted sympathetically, nodding his head at de Mirandol.
“Absolutely,” de Mirandol agreed, and Mr. Ricardo was leaning reluctantly to the same conclusion, until Hanaud produced the telegram from his pocket. Hanaud had sent a good many telegrams yesterday evening from Pauillac, amongst them one to Scotland Yard for the chief of a pharmacological laboratory in the north of England.
“More commonly known,” Hanaud resumed, “as mustard gas”—and now there were no interruptions to charge him with lunacy. “The varnish was invented in the year 1917, when the fortunes of the Allies were low. It became advisable to know who the actual people were who forgathered on certain nights in a certain cottage on the west coast of Ireland. This varnish was spread on the gate, and everybody who went in smeared his hand with it. For an hour nothing happened. But at the end of an hour a sore began to spread. Under the best conditions, it takes six weeks for that sore to heal; so that identification became more certain and more simple than even fingerprints could make it. The same ingenious device was used upon your gate, Monsieur de Mirandol, two nights ago. And three people were trapped by it.”
“Three?” exclaimed Mr. Ricardo, who had been listening open-mouthed and could hold himself in no longer.
Hanaud looked from de Mirandol, who was standing with his elbow on the mantelshelf, to Tidon, who had sunk down into a chair, and he laughed pleasantly.
“You will notice, Mr. Ricardo, that you alone exclaim when I say three. The number is no surprise to these gentlemen.”
The Vicomte turned and spread out his hands.
“It is extraordinary,” he said with a tremulous sarcasm, “that I have not a trace of this mysterious poison upon my hands.”
“But how could you have?” Hanaud returned easily. “You went home from the Château Suvlac early and by the ordinary road. Of course you did! Early because you had your little preparations to make, and by the ordinary road because you wished no break in your habits to be noticed. The mustard gas was spread only on the little sequestered private gate which was used by certain of your visitors after all the world was long in bed.”
“But three, you say?” Mr. Ricardo repeated. It might be very wrong of him to break into a discussion so official, but he had really got to understand this point, before other arguments swept it under. “Two—I agree—yes. Monsieur Tidon and Robin Webster—but the third? Who else wounded a hand upon that gate?”
“Evelyn Devenish,” said Hanaud.
XXII
The Judge Smokes a Cigarette
Mr. Ricardo fairly jumped in the air when he heard the third name. He looked at Hanaud anxiously. How could he know? He was just guessing with more than his usual audacity, more than his usual self-confidence. But no protest broke from the lips of the two men who were thus arraigned. Tidon the Judge sat hunched in his chair, his face white as paper, his eyes pinpoints of fire. The Vicomte de Mirandol stood like an enormous flabby child detected by his governess in one of the crimes of infancy. He shook from the crown of his bald head to his feet, and little wordless deprecating cries were whispered and caught back and whispered again. And gradually the damning argument was unrolled like a parchment before Ricardo’s eyes. It was to this house that Evelyn Devenish had come when all the world was in bed. In the conference room she had met her violent death; and her hand showed the same wound as the hands of Tidon the magistrate and Robin Webster the manager at Suvlac. It was for that reason that it had been lopped off after her death. A precaution had been taken, brutally by men in a panic of fear, not a sadic punishment exacted. It would never do to plunge that dead woman into the Gironde, however held down by lead, with the selfsame wound upon her palm as that which gnawed
