THE DUKE ARRIVES
The morning was gloomy, and the police-station with its bare,
white-washed walls—their white expanse was only broken by notice-boards
to which were pinned portraits of criminals with details of their
appearance, their crime, and the reward offered for their
apprehension—with its shabby furniture, and its dingy fireplace,
presented a dismal and sordid appearance entirely in keeping with the
September grey. The inspector sat at his desk, yawning after a night
which had passed without an arrest. He was waiting to be relieved. The
policeman at the door and the two policemen sitting on a bench by the
wall yawned in sympathy.
The silence of the street was broken by the rattle of an uncommonly
noisy motor-car. It stopped before the door of the police-station, and
the eyes of the inspector and his men turned, idly expectant, to the
door of the office.
It opened, and a young man in motor-coat and cap stood on the
threshold.
He looked round the office with alert eyes, which took in everything,
and said, in a brisk, incisive voice: “I am the Duke of Charmerace. I
am here on behalf of M. Gournay-Martin. Last evening he received a
letter from Arsène Lupin saying he was going to break into his Paris
house this very morning.”
At the name of Arsène Lupin the inspector sprang from his chair, the
policemen from their bench. On the instant they were wide awake,
attentive, full of zeal.
“The letter, your Grace!” said the inspector briskly.
The Duke pulled off his glove, drew the letter from the breast-pocket
of his under-coat, and handed it to the inspector.
The inspector glanced through it, and said. “Yes, I know the
handwriting well.” Then he read it carefully, and added, “Yes, yes:
it’s his usual letter.”
“There’s no time to be lost,” said the Duke quickly. “I ought to have
been here hours ago—hours. I had a break-down. I’m afraid I’m too late
as it is.”
“Come along, your Grace—come along, you,” said the inspector briskly.
The four of them hurried out of the office and down the steps of the
police-station. In the roadway stood a long grey racing-car, caked with
muds—grey mud, brown mud, red mud—from end to end. It looked as if it
had brought samples of the soil of France from many districts.
“Come along; I’ll take you in the car. Your men can trot along beside
us,” said the Duke to the inspector.
He slipped into the car, the inspector jumped in and took the seat
beside him, and they started. They went slowly, to allow the two
policemen to keep up with them. Indeed, the car could not have made any
great pace, for the tyre of the off hind-wheel was punctured and
deflated.
In three minutes they came to the Gournay-Martin house, a wide-fronted
mass of undistinguished masonry, in an undistinguished row of exactly
the same pattern. There were no signs that any one was living in it.
Blinds were drawn, shutters were up over all the windows, upper and
lower. No smoke came from any of its chimneys, though indeed it was
full early for that.
Pulling a bunch of keys from his pocket, the Duke ran up the steps. The
inspector followed him. The Duke looked at the bunch, picked out the
latch-key, and fitted it into the lock. It did not open it. He drew it
out and tried another key and another. The door remained locked.
“Let me, your Grace,” said the inspector. “I’m more used to it. I shall
be quicker.”
The Duke handed the keys to him, and, one after another, the inspector
fitted them into the lock. It was useless. None of them opened the
door.
“They’ve given me the wrong keys,” said the Duke, with some vexation.
“Or no—stay—I see what’s happened. The keys have been changed.”
“Changed?” said the inspector. “When? Where?”
“Last night at Charmerace,” said the Duke. “M. Gournay-Martin declared
that he saw a burglar slip out of one of the windows of the hall of the
château, and we found the lock of the bureau in which the keys were
kept broken.”
The inspector seized the knocker, and hammered on the door.
“Try that door there,” he cried to his men, pointing to a side-door on
the right, the tradesmen’s entrance, giving access to the back of the
house. It was locked. There came no sound of movement in the house in
answer to the inspector’s knocking.
“Where’s the concierge?” he said.
The Duke shrugged his shoulders. “There’s a housekeeper, too—a woman
named Victoire,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t find them with their
throats cut.”
“That isn’t Lupin’s way,” said the inspector. “They won’t have come to
much harm.”
“It’s not very likely that they’ll be in a position to open doors,”
said the Duke drily.
“Hadn’t we better have it broken open and be done with it?”
The inspector hesitated.
“People don’t like their doors broken open,” he said. “And M.
Gournay-Martin—”
“Oh, I’ll take the responsibility of that,” said the Duke.
“Oh, if you say so, your Grace,” said the inspector, with a brisk
relief. “Henri, go to Ragoneau, the locksmith in the Rue Theobald.
Bring him here as quickly as ever you can get him.”
“Tell him it’s a couple of louis if he’s here inside of ten minutes,”
said the Duke.
The policeman hurried off. The inspector bent down and searched the
steps carefully. He searched the roadway. The Duke lighted a cigarette
and watched him. The house of the millionaire stood next but one to the
corner of a street which ran at right angles to the one in which it
stood, and the corner house was empty. The inspector searched the road,
then he went round the corner. The other policeman went along the road,
searching in the opposite direction. The Duke leant against the door
and smoked on patiently. He showed none of the weariness of a man who
has spent the night in a long and anxious drive in a rickety motor-car.
His eyes were bright and clear; he looked as fresh as if he had come
from his bed after a long night’s rest. If he had not found the South
Pole, he had at any rate brought back fine powers of endurance from his
expedition in search of it.
The inspector came back, wearing a disappointed air.
“Have you found anything?” said the Duke.
“Nothing,” said the inspector.
He came up the steps and hammered again on the door. No one answered
his knock. There was a clatter of footsteps, and Henri and the
locksmith, a burly, bearded man, his bag of tools slung over his
shoulder, came hurrying up. He was not long getting to work, but it was
not an easy job. The lock was strong. At the end of five minutes he
said that he might spend an hour struggling with the lock itself;
should he cut away a piece of the door round it?
“Cut away,” said the Duke.
The locksmith changed his tools, and in less than three minutes he had
cut away a square piece from the door, a square in which the lock was
fixed, and taken it bodily away.
The door opened. The inspector drew his revolver, and entered the
house. The Duke followed him. The policemen drew their revolvers, and
followed the Duke. The big hall was but dimly lighted. One of the
policemen quickly threw back the shutters of the windows and let in the
light. The hall was empty, the furniture in perfect order; there were
no signs of burglary there.
“The concierge?” said the inspector, and his men hurried through the
little door on the right which opened into the concierge’s rooms. In
half a minute one of them came out and said: “Gagged and bound, and his
wife too.”
“But the rooms which were to be plundered are upstairs,” said the
Duke—“the big drawing-rooms on the first floor. Come on; we may be just
in time. The scoundrels may not yet have got away.”
He ran quickly up the stairs, followed by the inspector, and hurried
along the corridor to the door of the big drawing-room. He threw it
open, and stopped dead on the threshold. He had arrived too late.
The room was in disorder. Chairs were overturned, there were empty
spaces on the wall where the finest pictures of the millionaire had
been hung. The window facing the door was wide open. The shutters were
broken; one of them was hanging crookedly from only its bottom hinge.
The top of a ladder rose above the window-sill, and beside it,
astraddle the sill, was an Empire card-table, half inside the room,
half out. On the hearth-rug, before a large tapestry fire-screen, which
masked the wide fireplace, built in imitation of the big, wide
fireplaces of our ancestors, and rose to the level of the
chimney-piece—a magnificent chimney-piece in carved oak-were some
chairs tied together ready to be removed.
The Duke and the inspector ran to the window, and looked down into the
garden. It was empty. At the further end of it, on the other side of
its wall, rose the scaffolding of a house a-building. The burglars had
found every convenience to their hand—a strong ladder, an egress
through the door in the garden wall, and then through the gap formed by
the house in process of erection, which had rendered them independent
of the narrow passage between the walls of the gardens, which debouched
into a side-street on the right.
The Duke turned from the window, glanced at the wall opposite, then, as
if something had caught his eye, went quickly to it.
“Look here,” he said, and he pointed to the middle of one of the empty
spaces in which a picture had hung.
There, written neatly in blue chalk, were the words:
ARSÈNE LUPIN
“This is a job for Guerchard,” said the inspector. “But I had better
get an examining magistrate to take the matter in hand first.” And he
ran to the telephone.
The Duke opened the folding doors which led into the second
drawing-room. The shutters of the windows were open, and it was plain
that Arsène Lupin had plundered it also of everything that had struck
his fancy. In the gaps between the pictures on the walls was again the
signature “Arsène Lupin.”
The inspector was shouting impatiently into the telephone, bidding a
servant wake her master instantly. He did not leave the telephone till
he was sure that she had done so, that her master was actually awake,
and had been informed of the crime. The Duke sat down in an easy chair
and waited for him.
When he had finished telephoning, the inspector began to search the two
rooms for traces of the burglars. He found nothing, not even a
finger-mark.
When he had gone through the two rooms he said, “The next thing to do
is to find the house-keeper. She may be sleeping still—she may not even
have heard the noise of the burglars.”
“I find all this extremely interesting,” said the Duke; and he followed
the inspector out of the room.
The inspector called up the two policemen, who had been freeing the
concierge and going through the rooms on the ground-floor. They did not
then examine any more of the rooms on the first floor to discover if
they also had been plundered. They went straight up to the top of the
house, the servants’ quarters.
The inspector called, “Victoire! Victoire!” two or three times; but
there was no answer.
They opened the door of room after room and looked in, the inspector
taking the rooms on the right, the policemen the rooms on the left.
“Here we are,” said one of the policemen. “This room’s been recently
occupied.” They looked in, and saw that the bed was unmade. Plainly
Victoire had slept in it.
“Where can she be?” said the Duke.
“Be?” said the inspector. “I expect she’s with the burglars—an
accomplice.”
“I gather that M. Gournay-Martin had the greatest confidence in her,”
said the Duke.
“He’ll have less now,” said the inspector drily. “It’s generally the
confidential ones who let their masters down.”
The inspector and his men set about a thorough search of the house.
They found the other rooms undisturbed. In half an hour they had
established the fact that the burglars had confined their attention to
the two drawing-rooms. They found no traces of them; and they did not
find Victoire. The concierge could throw no light on her disappearance.
He and his wife had been taken by surprise in their sleep and in the
dark.
They had been gagged and bound, they declared, without so much as
having set eyes on their assailants. The Duke and the inspector came
back to the plundered drawing-room.
The inspector looked at his watch and went to the telephone.
“I must let the Prefecture know,” he said.
“Be sure you ask them to send Guerchard,” said the Duke.
“Guerchard?” said the inspector doubtfully.
“M. Formery, the examining magistrate, does not get on very well with
Guerchard.”
“What sort of a man is M. Formery? Is he capable?” said the Duke.
“Oh, yes—yes. He’s very capable,” said the inspector quickly. “But he
doesn’t have very good luck.”
“M. Gournay-Martin particularly asked me to send for Guerchard if I
arrived too late, and found the burglary already committed,” said the
Duke. “It seems that there is war to the knife between Guerchard and
this Arsène Lupin. In that case Guerchard will leave no stone unturned
to catch the rascal and recover the stolen treasures. M. Gournay-Martin
felt that Guerchard was the man for this piece of work very strongly
indeed.”
“Very good, your Grace,” said the inspector. And he rang up the
Prefecture of Police.
The Duke heard him report the crime and ask that Guerchard should be
sent. The official in charge at the moment seemed to make some demur.
The Duke sprang to his feet, and said in an anxious tone, “Perhaps I’d
better speak to him myself.”
He took his place at the telephone and said, “I am the Duke of
Charmerace. M. Gournay-Martin begged me to secure the services of M.
Guerchard. He laid the greatest stress on my securing them, if on
reaching Paris I found that the crime had already been committed.”
The official at the other end of the line hesitated. He did not refuse
on the instant as he had refused the inspector. It may be that he
reflected that M. Gournay-Martin was a millionaire and a man of
influence; that the Duke of Charmerace was a Duke; that he, at any
rate, had nothing whatever to gain by running counter to their wishes.
He said that Chief-Inspector Guerchard was not at the Prefecture, that
he was off duty; that he would send down two detectives, who were on
duty, at once, and summon Chief-Inspector Guerchard with all speed. The
Duke thanked him and rang off.
“That’s all right,” he said cheerfully, turning to the inspector. “What
time will M. Formery be here?”
“Well, I don’t expect him for another hour,” said the inspector. “He
won’t come till he’s had his breakfast. He always makes a good
breakfast before setting out to start an inquiry, lest he shouldn’t
find time to make one after he’s begun it.”
“Breakfast—breakfast—that’s a great idea,” said the Duke. “Now you come
to remind me, I’m absolutely famished. I got some supper on my way late
last night; but I’ve had nothing since. I suppose nothing interesting
will happen till M. Formery comes; and I may as well get some food. But
I don’t want to leave the house. I think I’ll see what the concierge
can do for me.”
So saying, he went downstairs and interviewed the concierge. The
concierge seemed to be still doubtful whether he was standing on his
head or his heels, but he undertook to supply the needs of the Duke.
The Duke gave him a louis, and he hurried off to get food from a
restaurant.
The Duke went upstairs to the bathroom and refreshed himself with a
cold bath. By the time he had bathed and dressed the concierge had a
meal ready for him in the dining-room. He ate it with the heartiest
appetite. Then he sent out for a barber and was shaved.
He then repaired to the pillaged drawing-room, disposed himself in the
most restful attitude on a sofa, and lighted an excellent cigar. In the
middle of it the inspector came to him. He was not wearing a very
cheerful air; and he told the Duke that he had found no clue to the
perpetrators of the crime, though M. Dieusy and M. Bonavent, the
detectives from the Prefecture of Police, had joined him in the search.
The Duke was condoling with him on this failure when they heard a
knocking at the front door, and then voices on the stairs.
“Ah! Here is M. Formery!” said the inspector cheerfully. “Now we can
get on.”