The events of yesterday crowded back into Ricardo’s mind.
“You will want me,” he cried. “I must give my evidence. A judge died by his own hand in my Rolls-Royce car. It is all most important. I beg you to retire.”
Already Mr. Ricardo had flung back the bedclothes and rung the bell for Elias Thomson. He was on his way to the Prefecture within the hour, where, indeed, he had little on that day to do but corroborate Hanaud’s narrative. He learnt, however, the actual mode of Tidon’s death. He had carried a cigarette in his case of an especial thickness. At each end there was a tiny wad of tobacco, but the case was really filled by a glass tube containing a ninety percent dose of prussic acid.
“I told you that he was a very clever man,” said Hanaud as he sat down afterwards to luncheon with his friend in the restaurant of the Chapon Fin. “He was ready, you see.”
“And you knew that he was ready,” said Mr. Ricardo.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders.
“I suspected it, and—I shall be frank with you—I was glad when he took the way out that he did. He was of the magistracy. The scandal will be enormous as it is, when all the truth is known, as it must be at the next assizes. It would have been dangerous, had Monsieur Tidon lived to have received the sentence of the court.”
“He would have been sentenced for the murder of Evelyn Devenish?” Mr. Ricardo exclaimed in bewilderment, and Hanaud hastened to interrupt him.
“Oh, no, no, my friend!”
Mr. Ricardo threw up his hands.
“I am adrift in a mist,” he cried. “I hear sirens and foghorns on this side and that telling me my position, but the more I hear the more the mist thickens, and less and less am I sure of my position.”
“Try this smoked salmon,” said Hanaud, and looking round the great room. “On the rare occasions when a wealthy friend has taken me to lunch with him at the Chapon Fin I am never quite sure whether I am lunching in a rock-garden or at the bottom of an aquarium.”
Mr. Ricardo was familiar with these disconcerting moods of this officer of the Sûreté, when, knowing everything, he would play the man of mystery. In a sort of desperation he cried out:
“You shall tell me one thing. You shall tell me how you came to know that Tidon had damaged his hand.”
“Yes, that will interest you,” Hanaud answered with a laugh. He filled his companion’s glass and his own with a Lafite of 1899. “First I had a little idea. Then your chauffeur strengthened it. Then you very wonderfully confirmed it.”
Mr. Ricardo drew himself up. He spoke with a good deal of dignity.
“A certain amount of raillery, I expect from you. More! When you are hot upon the trail and I interrupt you, I know that I shall be leapt upon and gibbeted. I may not like it, but I don’t resent it. I know that I am merely an elderly gentleman of no consequence, who has had the good fortune to become the friend of a very interesting personage. But when the whole affair is, as you tell me, over, and you are at your ease whilst I am dancing upon hot plates, I should prefer, I admit it, to obtain some relief from my perplexities.”
At once Hanaud’s big face clouded with remorse.
“But, my dear sir,” he cried, “no one could value a friendship more than I value this one I have the honour to share with you—I do not play with you. No! I tell you the truth!” He was pleading earnestly, a man very much moved. “Listen! We—you and I—we go to the Prefecture at Villeblanche. Good! We meet Monsieur Tidon and he takes us into his room.”
“Yes,” Ricardo agreed.
“He lays down his hat and his cane on a side table. Good! But he keeps on his gloves. All through that interview he keeps on his gloves. Now I tell you. On the stage—yes, they keep on their gloves. Why, I don’t know. And Monsieur Clemenceau—yes, he too. But apart from the actors and Monsieur Clemenceau, people in a room take off their gloves. So I wonder. Then a moment came whilst you were telling your story, a very curious moment. You speak of that room at the door of which you knocked in the dead of night. You say, ‘It is Diana Tasborough’s room,’ and in an exasperation at the difficulty of the problem, he strikes his right hand flat upon his table. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
“At once he turns his back upon us and his face to the window.”
“Yes.”
“He lifts his left arm and plays with the bolt.”
That scene in the magistrate’s room was growing clearer and clearer to Ricardo’s recollections under the stimulus of Hanaud’s narrative.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“But to me, it seemed that he was holding himself up by that bolt. His body swayed a little. I had the clearest impression of a man about to faint. Then he spoke, and in a voice so weak and feeble that I cannot but pity him. And it was a long while before he turned round and showed us his face again. So I wonder all the more. And I remember that Robin Webster has a wounded hand. And when we reach the Château Suvlac I make an excuse to send you on and I speak privately with your chauffeur. Aha, you did not like it that I converse with him. I learn two things—yes, first an idiom, which I will use in due time, and next an important confirmation of my idea. I say: ‘When that gentleman hangs himself by the left hand to the bolt of the window, what air had he?’ I ask him that, and he answer—now let me get it right—he answer: ‘Gorblimey, he was all in.
