(1) Why does Hanaud attach no importance to the return of the
"Treatise on Strophanthus Hispidus" to its place in the library?
(2) What was it which so startled him upon the top of the Terrace
Tower?
(3) What was it that he had in his mind to say to me at the Café in
the Place D'Armes and in the end did not say?
(4) Why did Hanaud search every corner of the treasure room for the
missing poison arrow--except the interior of the Sedan chair?
The noise of a door gently closing aroused him from his speculations.
He looked across the room. Hanaud had just entered it from the
bedroom, shutting the communicating door behind him. He stood with
his hand upon the door-knob gazing at Frobisher with a curious
startled stare. He moved swiftly to the end of the table at which
Jim was sitting.
"How you help me!" he said in a low voice and smiling. "How you do
help me!"
Alert though Jim's ears were to a note of ridicule, he could discover
not a hint of it. Hanaud was speaking with the utmost sincerity, his
eyes very bright and his heavy face quite changed by that uncannily
sharp expression which Jim had learned to associate with some new
find in the development of the case.
"May I see what you have written?" Hanaud asked.
"It could be of no value to you," Jim replied modestly, but Hanaud
would have none of it.
"It is always of value to know what the other man thinks, and even
more what the other man sees. What did I say to you in Paris? The
last thing one sees one's self is the thing exactly under one's
nose"; and he began to laugh lightly but continuously and with a
great deal of enjoyment, which Jim did not understand. He gave in,
however, over his memorandum and pushed it along to Hanaud, ashamed
of it as something schoolboyish, but hopeful that some of these
written questions might be answered.
Hanaud sat down at the end of the table close to Jim and read the
items and the questions very slowly with an occasional grunt, and a
still more occasional "Aha!" but with a quite unchanging face. Jim
was in two minds whether to snatch it from his hands and tear it up
or dwell upon its recollected phrases with a good deal of pride. One
thing was clear. Hanaud took it seriously.
He sat musing over it for a moment or two.
"Yes, here are questions, and dilemmas." He looked at Frobisher with
friendliness. "I shall make you an allegory. I have a friend who is
a matador in Spain. He told me about the bull and how foolish those
people are who think the bull not clever. Yes, but do not jump and
look the offence with your eyes and tell me how very vulgar I am and
how execrable my taste. All that I know very well. But listen to my
friend the matador! He says all that the bull wants, to kill without
fail all the bull-fighters in Spain, is a little experience. And
very little, he learns so quick. Look! Between the entrance of the
bull into the arena and his death there are reckoned twenty minutes.
And there should not be more, if the matador is wise. The bull--he
learns so quick the warfare of the ring. Well, I am an old bull who
has fought in the arena many times. This is your first corrida. But
only ten minutes of the twenty have passed. Already you have learned
much. Yes, here are some shrewd questions which I had not expected
you to ask. When the twenty are gone, you will answer them all for
yourself. Meanwhile"--he took up another pen and made a tiny
addition to item one--"I carry this on one step farther. See!"
He replaced the memorandum under Jim's eyes. Jim read:
"--subsequent developments, e.g., the disappearance of the Poison
Arrow, the introduction into the case of the ill-famed Jean Cladel,
Ann Upcott's story of her visit to the treasure-room, and now the
mystery of Mrs. Harlowe's pearl necklace, _and the finding of the
arrow_, make out a prima facie case for inquiry."
Jim sprang to his feet in excitement.
"You have found the arrow, then?" he cried, glancing towards the door
of Ann Upcott's bedroom.
"Not I, my friend," replied Hanaud with a grin.
"The Commissaire, then?"
"No, not the Commissaire."
"His secretary, then?"
Jim sat down again in his chair.
"I am sorry. He wears cheap rings. I don't like him."
Hanaud broke into a laugh of delight.
"Console yourself! I, too, don't like that young gentleman of whom
they are all so proud. Maurice Thevenet has found nothing."
Jim looked at Hanaud in a perplexity.
"Here is a riddle," he said.
Hanaud rubbed his hands together.
"Prove to me that you have been ten minutes in the bull-ring," he
said.
"I think that I have only been five," Jim replied with a smile. "Let
me see! The arrow had not been discovered when we first entered
these rooms?"
"No."
"And it is discovered now?"
"Yes."
"And it was not discovered by you?"
"No."
"Nor the Commissaire?"
"No."
"Nor Maurice Thevenet?"
"No."
Jim stared and shook his head.
"I have not been one minute in the bull-ring. I don't understand."
Hanaud's face was all alight with enjoyment.
"Then I take your memorandum and I write again."
He hid the paper from Jim Frobisher's eyes with the palm of his left
hand, whilst he wrote with his right. Then with a triumphant gesture
he laid it again before Jim. The last question of all had been
answered in Hanaud's neat, small handwriting.
Jim read:
(4) Why did Hanaud search every corner of the treasure-room for
the missing Poison Arrow--except the interior of the Sedan chair?
Underneath the question Hanaud had written as if it was Jim Frobisher
himself who answered the question:
"It was wrong of Hanaud to forget to examine the Sedan chair, but
fortunately no harm has resulted from that lamentable omission.
For Life, the incorrigible Dramatist, had arranged that the head
of the arrow-shaft should be the pen-holder with which I have
written this memorandum."
Jim looked at the pen-holder and dropped it with a startled cry.
There it was--the slender, pencil-like shaft expanding into a slight
bulb where the fingers held it, and the nib inserted into the tiny
cleft made for the stem of the iron dart! Jim remembered that the
nib had once or twice become loose and spluttered on the page, until
he had jammed it in violently.
Then came a terrible thought. His jaw dropped; he stared at Hanaud
in awe.
"I wonder if I sucked the end of it, whilst I was thinking out my
sentences," he stammered.
"O Lord!" cried Hanaud, and he snatched up the pen-holder and rubbed
it hard with his pocket handkerchief. Then he spread out the
handkerchief upon the table, and fetching a small magnifying glass
from his pocket, examined it minutely. He looked up with relief.
"There is not the least little trace of that reddish-brown clay which
made the poison paste. The arrow was scraped clean before it was put
on that tray of pens. I am enchanted. I cannot now afford to lose
my junior colleague."
Frobisher drew a long breath and lit a cigarette, and gave another
proof that he was a very novice of a bull.
"What a mad thing to put the head of that arrow-shaft, which a glance
at the plates in the Treatise would enable a child to identify, into
an open tray of pens without the slightest concealment!" he exclaimed.
It looked as if Ann Upcott was wilfully pushing her neck into the
wooden ring of the guillotine.
Hanaud shook his head.
"Not so mad, my friend! The old rules are the best. Hide a thing in
some out-of-the-way corner, and it will surely be found. Put it to
lie carelessly under every one's nose and no one will see it at all.
No, no! This was cleverly done. Who could have foreseen that
instead of looking on at our search you were going to plump yourself
down in a chair and write your memorandum so valuable on Mademoiselle
Ann's notepaper? And even then you did not notice your pen. Why
should you?"
Jim, however, was not satisfied.
"It is a fortnight since Mrs. Harlowe was murdered, if she was
murdered," he cried. "What I don't understand is why the arrow
wasn't destroyed altogether!"
"But until this morning there was never any question of the arrow,"
Hanaud returned. "It was a curiosity, an item in a collection--why
should one trouble to destroy it? But this morning the arrow becomes
a dangerous thing to possess. So it must be hidden away in a hurry.
For there is not much time. An hour whilst you and I admired Mont
Blanc from the top of the Terrace Tower."
"And while Betty was out of the house," Jim added quickly.
"Yes--that is true," said Hanaud. "I had not thought of it. You can
add that point, Monsieur Frobisher, to the reasons which put
Mademoiselle Harlowe out of our considerations. Yes."
He sat lost in thought for a little while and speaking now and then a
phrase rather to himself than to his companion: "To run up here--to
cut the arrow down--to round off the end as well as one can in a
hurry--to stain it with some varnish--to mix it with the other pens
in the tray. Not so bad!" He nodded his head in appreciation of the
trick. "But nevertheless things begin to look black for that
exquisite Mademoiselle Ann with her delicate colour and her pretty
ways."
A noise of the shifting of furniture in the bedroom next door
attracted his attention. He removed the nib from the arrow-head.
"We will keep this little matter to ourselves just for the moment,"
he said quickly, and he wrapped the improvised pen-holder in a sheet
of the notepaper. "Just you and I shall know of it. No one else.
This is my case, not Girardot's. We will not inflict a great deal of
pain and trouble until we are sure."
"I agree," said Jim eagerly. "That's right, I am sure."
Hanaud tucked the arrow-head carefully away in his pocket.
"This, too," he said, and he took up Jim Frobisher's memorandum. "It
is not a good thing to carry about, and perhaps lose. I will put it
away at the Prefecture with the other little things I have collected."
He put the memorandum into his letter-case and got up from his chair.
"The rest of the arrow-shaft will be somewhere in this room, no
doubt, and quite easy to see. But we shall not have time to look for
it, and, after all, we have the important part of it."
He turned towards the mantelshelf, where some cards of invitation
were stuck in the frame of the mirror, just as the door was opened
and the Commissary with his secretary came out from the bedroom.
"The necklace is not in that room," said Monsieur Girardot in a voice
of finality.
"Nor is it here," Hanaud replied with an unblushing assurance. "Let
us go downstairs."
Jim was utterly staggered. This room had not been searched for the
necklace at all. First the Sedan chair, then this sitting-room was
neglected. Hanaud actually led the way out to the stairs without so
much as a glance behind him. No wonder that in Paris he had styled
himself and his brethren the Servants of Chance.