A few minutes later Jim Frobisher had to admit that Hanaud guessed
very luckily. He would not allow that it was more than a guess.
Monsieur Hanaud might be a thorough little Mr. Know-All; but no
insight, however brilliant, could inform him of so accidental a
circumstance. But there the fact was. Frobisher did arrive at the
Maison Grenelle, to his great discomfort, before Betty Harlowe. He
had loitered with Hanaud at the café just so that this might not take
place. He shrank from being alone with Ann Upcott now that he
suspected her. The most he could hope to do was to conceal the
reason of his trouble. The trouble itself in her presence he could
not conceal. She made his case the more difficult perhaps by a
rather wistful expression of sympathy.
"You are distressed," she said gently. "But surely you need not be
any longer. What I said this morning was true. It was half-past ten
when that dreadful whisper reached my ears. Betty was a mile away
amongst her friends in a ball-room. Nothing can shake that."
"It is not on her account that I am troubled," he cried, and Ann
looked at him with startled eyes.
Betty crossed the court and joined them in the hall before Ann could
ask a question; and throughout their luncheon he made conversation
upon indifferent subjects with rapidity, if without entertainment.
Fortunately there was no time to spare. They were still indeed
smoking their cigarettes over their coffee when Gaston informed them
that the Commissary of Police with his secretary was waiting in the
library.
"This is Mr. Frobisher, my solicitor in London," said Betty as she
presented Jim.
The Commissary, Monsieur Girardot, was a stout, bald, middle-aged man
with a pair of folding glasses sitting upon a prominent fat nose; his
secretary, Maurice Thevenet, was a tall good-looking novice in the
police administration, a trifle flashy in his appearance, and in his
own esteem, one would gather, rather a conqueror amongst the fair.
"I have asked Monsieur Bex, Mademoiselle's notary in Dijon, to be
present," said Jim.
"That is quite in order," replied the Commissary, and Monsieur Bex
was at that moment announced. He came on the very moment of three.
The clock was striking as he bowed in the doorway. Everything was
just as it should be. Monsieur Bex was pleased.
"With Monsieur le Commissaire's consent," he said, smiling, "we can
now proceed with the final ceremonies of this affair."
"We wait for Monsieur Hanaud," said the Commissary.
"Hanaud?"
"Hanaud of the Sûrété of Paris, who has been invited by the Examining
Magistrate to take charge of this case," the Commissary explained.
"Case?" cried Monsieur Bex in perplexity. "But there is no case for
Hanaud to take charge of;" and Betty Harlowe drew him a little aside.
Whilst she gave the little notary some rapid summary of the incidents
of the morning, Jim went out of the room into the hall in search of
Hanaud. He saw him at once; but to his surprise Hanaud came forward
from the back of the hall as if he had entered the house from the
garden.
"I sought you in the dining-room," he said, pointing to the door of
that room which certainly was at the back of the house behind the
library, with its entrance behind the staircase. "We will join the
others."
Hanaud was presented to Monsieur Bex.
"And this gentleman?" asked Hanaud, bowing slightly to Thevenet.
"My secretary, Maurice Thevenet," said the Commissary, and in a loud
undertone, "a charming youth, of an intelligence which is surprising.
He will go far."
Hanaud looked at Thevenet with a friendly interest. The young
recruit gazed at the great man with kindling eyes.
"This will be an opportunity for me, Monsieur Hanaud, by which, if I
do not profit, I prove myself of no intelligence at all," he said
with a formal modesty which quite went to the heart of Monsieur Bex.
"That is very correct," said he.
Hanaud for his part was never averse to flattery. He cocked an eye
at Jim Frobisher; he shook the secretary warmly by the hand.
"Then don't hesitate to ask me questions, my young friend," he
answered. "I am Hanaud now, yes. But I was once young Maurice
Thevenet without, alas! his good looks."
Maurice Thevenet blushed with the most becoming diffidence.
"That is very kind," said Monsieur Bex.
"This looks like growing into a friendly little family party," Jim
Frobisher thought, and he quite welcomed a "Hum" and a "Ha" from the
Commissary.
He moved to the centre of the room.
"We, Girardot, Commissaire of Police, will now remove the seals," he
said pompously.
He led the way from the Library across the hall and along the
corridor to the wide door of Mrs. Harlowe's bedroom. He broke the
seals and removed the bands. Then he took a key from the hand of his
secretary and opened the door upon a shuttered room. The little
company of people surged forward. Hanaud stretched out his arms and
barred the way.
"Just for a moment, please!" he ordered and over his shoulder Jim
Frobisher had a glimpse of the room which made him shiver.
This morning in the garden some thrill of the chase had made him for
a moment eager that Hanaud should press on, that development should
follow upon development until somewhere a criminal stood exposed.
Since the hour, however, which he had spent upon the Tower of the
Terrace, all thought of the chase appalled him and he waited for
developments in fear. This bedroom mistily lit by a few stray
threads of daylight which pierced through the chinks of the shutters,
cold and silent and mysterious, was for him peopled with phantoms,
whose faces no one could see, who struggled dimly in the shadows.
Then Hanaud and the Commissary crossed to the windows opposite,
opened them and flung back the shutters. The clear bright light
flooded every corner in an instant and brought to Jim Frobisher
relief. The room was swept and clean, the chairs ranged against the
wall, the bed flat and covered with an embroidered spread; everywhere
there was order; it was as empty of suggestion as a vacant bedroom in
an hotel.
Hanaud looked about him.
"Yes," he said. "This room stood open for a week after Madame's
funeral. It would have been a miracle if we discovered anything
which could help us."
He went to the bed, which stood with its head against the wall midway
between the door and the windows. A small flat stand with a button
of enamel lay upon the round table by the bed-side, and from the
stand a cord ran down by the table leg and disappeared under the
carpet.
"This is the bell into what was the maid's bedroom, I suppose," he
said, turning towards Betty.
"Yes."
Hanaud stooped and minutely examined the cord. But there was no sign
that it had ever been tampered with. He stood up again.
"Mademoiselle, will you take Monsieur Girardot into Jeanne Baudin's
bedroom and close the door. I shall press this button, and you will
know whether the bell rings whilst we here shall be able to assure
ourselves whether sounds made in one of the rooms would be heard in
the other."
"Certainly."
Betty took the Commissary of Police away, and a few seconds later
those in Mrs. Harlowe's room heard a door close in the corridor.
"Will you shut our door now, if you please?" Hanaud requested.
Bex, the notary, closed it.
"Now, silence, if you please!"
Hanaud pressed the button, and not a sound answered him. He pressed
it again and again with the same result. The Commissary returned to
the bedroom.
"Well?" Hanaud asked.
"It rang twice," said the Commissary.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders with a laugh.
"And an electric bell has a shrill, penetrating sound," he cried.
"Name of a name, but they built good houses when the Maison Grenelle
was built! Are the cupboards and drawers open?"
He tried one and found it locked. Monsieur Bex came forward.
"All the drawers were locked on the morning when Madame Harlowe's
death was discovered. Mademoiselle Harlowe herself locked them in my
presence and handed to me the keys for the purpose of making an
inventory. Mademoiselle was altogether correct in so doing. For
until the funeral had taken place the terms of the will were not
disclosed."
"But afterwards, when you took the inventory you must have unlocked
them."
"I have not yet begun the inventory, Monsieur Hanaud. There were the
arrangements for the funeral, a list of the properties to be made for
valuation, and the vineyards to be administered."
"Oho," cried Hanaud alertly. "Then these wardrobes and cupboards and
drawers should hold exactly what they held on the night of the
twenty-seventh of April." He ran quickly about the room trying a
door here, a drawer there, and came to a stop beside a cupboard
fashioned in the thickness of the wall. "The trouble is that a child
with a bent wire could unlock any one of them. Do you know what
Madame Harlowe kept in this, Monsieur Bex?" and Hanaud rapped with
his knuckles upon the cupboard door.
"No, I have no idea. Shall I open it?" and Bex produced a bunch of
keys from his pocket.
"Not for the moment, I think," said Hanaud.
He had been dawdling over the locks and the drawers, as though time
meant nothing to him at all. He now swung briskly back into the
centre of the room, making notes, it seemed to Frobisher, of its
geography. The door opening from the corridor faced, across the
length of the floor, the two tall windows above the garden. If one
stood in the doorway facing these two windows, the bed was on the
left hand. On the corridor side of the bed, a second smaller door,
which was half open, led to a white-tiled bath-room. On the window
side of the bed was the cupboard in the wall about the height of a
woman's shoulders. A dressing-table stood between the windows, a
great fire-place broke the right-hand wall, and in that same wall,
close to the right-hand window, there was yet another door. Hanaud
moved to it.
"This is the door of the dressing-room?" he asked of Ann Upcott, and
without waiting for an answer pushed it open.
Monsieur Bex followed upon his heels with his keys rattling.
"Everything here has been locked up too," he said.
Hanaud paid not the slightest attention. He opened the shutters.
It was a narrow room without any fire-place at all, and with a door
exactly opposite to the door by which Hanaud had entered. He went at
once to this door.
"And this must be the communicating door which leads into what is
called the treasure-room," he said, and he paused with his hand upon
the knob and his eyes ranging alertly over the faces of the company.
"Yes," said Ann Upcott.
Jim was conscious of a queer thrill. He thought of the opening of
some newly-discovered tomb of a Pharaoh in a hill-side of the Valley
of Kings. Suspense passed from one to the other as they waited, but
Hanaud did not move. He stood there impassive and still like some
guardian image at the door of the tomb. Jim felt that he was never
going to move, and in a voice of exasperation he cried:
"Is the door locked?"
Hanaud replied in a quiet but a singular voice. No doubt he, too,
felt that strange current of emotion and expectancy which bound all
in the room under a spell, and even gave to their diverse faces for a
moment a kind of family similitude.
"I don't know yet whether it's locked or not," he said. "But since
this room is now the private sitting-room of Mademoiselle Harlowe, I
think that we ought to wait until she rejoins us."
Monsieur Bex just had time to remark with approval, "That is very
correct," before Betty's fresh, clear voice rang out from the doorway
leading to Mrs. Harlowe's bedroom:
"I am here."
Hanaud turned the handle. The door was not locked. It opened at a
touch--inwards towards the group of people and upwards towards the
corridor. The treasure-room was before them, shrouded in dim light,
but here and there a beam of light sparkled upon gold and held out a
promise of wonders. Hanaud picked his way daintily to the windows
and fastened the shutters back against the outside wall. "I beg that
nothing shall be touched," he said as the others filed into the room.