HELLIER’S chambers in Clifford’s Inn were a part of the past. So was the
staircase that led to them.
Generations of lawyers and rats and the fogs of two hundred or so
Novembers had left their traces on wall and ceiling, on floors that
sagged, and stairs that groaned, and doors that jammed, and chimneys
that smoked.
On windy nights one heard all sorts of quaint arguments in the chimney
and behind the wainscoting. Steps of defunct lawyers sounded in the
passage outside and sitting by the flickering fire-light before the lamp
was lit you might, were you an imaginative man, have heard or seen
pretty much anything your fancy willed.
The rooms had a smell of their own, quite peculiar to themselves and not
unpleasant to an antiquarian mind.
A smell of must, or was it rats, or was it dead and gone lawyers? a
faint, faint perfume, which, if one could bottle, one might label
“Clifford’s Inn,” just as M. Warrick labels his productions, “Ess
Bouquet,” or “New-mown Hay.”
Hellier’s sitting-room was a comfortable enough place despite the doors
that would not open except when kicked, or at their own caprice, the
skeleton-suggesting cupboards, the creaking floor and the sounds and
scents of age.
There were plenty of books for one thing, a few good engravings, a
comfortable easy chair, a hospitable-looking tobacco jar, a cigar
cabinet not too big and not too small, a bright brass kettle on the hob,
a canister of green tea in one of the musty-fusty smelling cupboards and
a tantalus case on the table where Archbald’s _Lunacy_ reposed from its
labours of teaching under a volume of Baudelaire.
Evidently it was the room of a barrister with tastes of his own.
Hellier, since leaving Boulogne some weeks ago, with the _dossier_ of
the Lefarge case in his pocket, had spent some days in Paris.
He had gone into the case with that thoroughness which a man only
exhibits when urged by either of the two great motive powers of life,
ambition or love.
He had obtained an introduction to M. Hamard, he had interviewed the
detectives who had been engaged on the case, he had pored over files of
newspapers, and from M. Hamard, from the detectives, from the printed
reports, he had obtained only the one dreary and reiterated statement:
“M. Lefarge is guilty. The case admits of no other verdict. The thing is
conclusively proved and the affair is closed.”
He had returned to London and there again carefully sifted the evidence
alone in his rooms in Clifford’s Inn. Reviewing the whole matter, he
could not but come to the conclusion arrived at by M. Hamard, the
detectives and the newspapers. He could not but say to himself: “However
much I wish to believe the contrary, I _must_ believe what is the fact.
M. Lefarge was guilty of as cruel and calculated and cold-blooded a
murder as was ever committed by man.”
This was bad, for his love for Cécile Lefarge had grown into a passion.
One talks and laughs about heartache, but heartache is a pain beside
which all other pains are trifles. To be possessed by the image of a
woman, to love her and to know that she returns one’s love, to be
separated from her, to live without her and without assured hope of
possessing her is the cruellest torture ever inflicted by an all-wise
Providence on man.
Love is not blind, it confers the brightest and clearest vision to the
person it possesses. Hellier knew quite well, knew for a certainty,
that, till this cloud was cleared from her father’s name, Cécile Lefarge
would never marry.
She was the daughter of an assassin. He was quite prepared to forget the
fact. She could never do so. It was a penalty laid upon her by fate and
she would not palter with the fact, and unless her father’s name was, by
some miracle, cleared, she would go to her grave as she was, upheld by
that iron determination which women alone possess when the passions are
concerned and which is at once the most beautiful and the most terrible
trait in women.
And the thing was hopeless, for M. Lefarge’s name could never be
cleared, so Hellier told himself, as he sat gloomily over the fire in
his sitting-room at Clifford’s Inn.
During his research in Paris he had come across several facts in
connexion with the case that struck him especially.
One was that the head of the murdered man, Müller, had never been
recovered.
Another was of a different nature. In a copy of the Petit Journal, dated
some weeks after the day upon which the Lefarge tragedy had occurred, he
had come across the details of a murder committed in the neighbourhood
of Montmartre. The victim was an old man named Mesnier; he had been
killed in a most brutal manner and for no object apparently.
Mesnier lived in the Rue d’Antibes, a squalid street near the Moulin
Rouge. A man had been seen leaving his room and, as Mesnier had no
visitors as a rule, and the man had been seen leaving the room within a
very short time after the assassination occurred, the man was presumably
the criminal.
Alphonse Karr, the witness, an ex-waiter of the Théâtre-Concert Européen
of Montmartre, said that he would have sworn that this man was Wilhelm
Müller, whom he had often seen at the _chat noir_, only for the fact
that he knew that Müller was dead.
This paragraph greatly interested Hellier and he searched on through the
files of the _Petit Journal_ in hopes of finding more details of the
case. He found none.
But he found a headline that interested him in a copy of the _Petit
Journal_, dated some days after the murder of Mesnier. It ran:
“Another motiveless murder.”
It related to the murder of a woman named Sabatier, who had been found
strangled in a field near Paris.
There was no possible motive for the crime, the woman had a purse in her
hand containing twenty-five francs. The purse had not been taken, no
violence had been done to her, if we except the fact that she had been
strangled as though by some violent maniac.
“This case,” said the _Petit Journal_, “recalls that of the old man,
Mesnier, recorded by us some days since, in each the victim was
strangled, evidently by the grip of a powerful hand; in each there was
no motive for the crime, for it will be remembered that Mesnier had
received his quarterly annuity and the money, a fairly large sum, was
lying intact upon the table.”
Hellier, just by chance before dropping the file of the paper, turned a
page, and came upon the detail of another crime.
A child had been strangled on the high road leading to Villeneuve St
George’s, in the broad light of day.
A labourer had seen the occurrence from a distance. He saw the figure of
a man, he saw the child. He thought the man was playing with the child.
Then he saw the child lying on the high road and the man running away
across a field. He could give no definite description of the man. He was
about the middle height and dressed in dark clothes.
The case recalled the Sabatier case and the case of Mesnier.
Hellier searched on through the files of the paper. There was nothing
more. The assassin had vanished and was never captured, no similar
crimes were recorded. All these crimes had most probably been committed
by the same man. They ceased suddenly and were not repeated, they had
been committed for no apparent reason, most probably by some lunatic,
whose mania was destruction.
What had become of the lunatic, why had this sudden mania seized him?
why had it suddenly ceased? These questions were never answered. The
thing was one of those unsolved mysteries, with which the pigeon-holes
of the prefecture are stocked.
Hellier searched no more. The fact that Karr, the ex-café waiter, had
fancied a resemblance between the supposed assassin and Müller, the fact
of the similarity between the three crimes lay in his memory but they
did not stir his imagination.
Even love could not hide from him the fact that Lefarge was guilty and
Müller dead, and Cécile Lefarge the daughter of an assassin.
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