“To-night I shall be in Paris. My vacancy is past. The cathedrals which I so much wished to see—”
“From a café opposite with a striped awning,” Mr. Ricardo interposed with more of regret than sarcasm in his voice. Hanaud from time to time opened a door upon a different and intriguing world, and now the door was to close. But more than the closing door he regretted its tiler. Strict but impish, relentless yet kind, Hanaud seasoned Mr Ricardo’s ineffective days and raised him at times into high consideration. The corner house would be very empty after the four o’clock express had steamed out to Folkestone. Mr. Ricardo foresaw himself suffering a nostalgia for the smell of the black cigarettes from the blue paper packets and—he actually coined a portmanteau word—the argotistical flourishes of Hanaud’s speech. He felt that, but for Thompson, he would have tried a peppermint frappé last thing at night. He summed, him up, at all events, in the lingo Hanaud might have used, “He’s a one”.
“A cognac with your coffee in the study?” Mr. Ricardo suggested.
“Superb!” answered Hanaud; and in a few minutes; seated in a comfortable chair with a Maryland between his lips, his coffee smoking at his elbow and an ancient goblet of fine glass, worthy of its little pool of condensed sunlight, in his hand, he was gazing across the square. His luggage was packed. Thompson would book it to Paris and find a seat for him on the train. He should have been at ease, but his shoulders twitched and his eyes were gloomy, and even when he set the golden pond gently swirling just beneath his nose, it released no sunlight on his face.
“I do not like things unfinished,” he exclaimed “Pictures which trail away to a corner like the train of a lady’s dress, books which another author completes, crimes which are not solved—especially crimes which are not solved because other crimes come after them.”
“Imitation crimes,” said Mr Ricardo, and it is deplorable that he, so fastidious and indeed finicking, should at this moment have committed the vulgar crime of using a noun when an adjective would be correct.
“Not only those,” Hanaud answered, concerned with facts and indifferent to grammar. “They are not so difficult. But the crimes which follow because someone has a glimpse into the crime which is not explained.”
“And you have that glimpse?” Ricardo was startled into asking.
“I have,” Hanaud answered simply as he exhaled a little cloud of smoke. “Yes, I have him, but not enough of him to paint the rest of the picture or write the last chapters of the book.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But, after all, he is Maltby’s pigeon.”
“Then the jeweller of the Place Vendôme must still whistle for his cheque?” Mr. Ricardo was sorry. When Hanaud failed, he felt that he lost a few plumes himself.
“No, no.” Hanaud pulled his pocket-book from the breast of his coat and slipped back the band of indiarubber which held it shut.
“See! An envelope. Inside the envelope a banker’s draft on Paris and a little note for Gravot of Madame Horbury’s regrets.”
He showed them to Ricardo and replaced the draft in the envelope, whilst his friend’s eyes lingered over Olivia’s apology. “O. Horbury,” Mr. Ricardo said as he came to the signature.
“Yes,” Hanaud observed with a good deal of significance. “We have seen that name written before—you and I.”
There was a note in Hanaud’s voice which puzzled Ricardo. As if they two had been especially privileged.
“We? You and I? No!”
For answer Hanaud pointed to the drawer in which were locked away two torn halves of a pasteboard card.
“But ‘D. Horbury’ was the name written,” cried Ricardo. “D for Daniel.” He was straining his eyes, as if he could force the name to take shape upon the air. “Yes, D for Dan—”
He got up and, taking his keys from his pocket, opened the drawer. He brought the two pieces of card to a small table by the side of his chair and fitted them together.
“D. Horbury,” he insisted. “Of course, my dear. man! D. . . . ” and his voice weakened.
The name was written in some sort of flurry. The initial was attached to the name, as if the writer had written it without lifting the pen from the card; great was the need to write it out and have done it for good. Suppose that you started to write O, beginning at the top and following down on the right-hand side and up on the left, and then made a twirl at the top so that the pen might run away to the first letter of the surname, H., you might indeed mistake it for a D, as he himself had done. The more he looked at the writing, the surer he felt. O for Olivia, not D for Daniel—yes, but why?
Mr. Ricardo was not very alert to whispers from the dark pools of fear where knowledge ends, but here something which troubled him, for which he must find, if he could, some quite simple and comfortable explanation. He had seen Agatha Crottle’s face at the exact moment when the lock was broken and the drawer, with a sound of splintering wood, burst open. There had been such a look of terror in her eyes, such a sickly convulsion of her features as he hoped never to see again. He had slammed a shutter across that vision in his mind and by no word had reopened it. But it was in front of him now.
“You saw her that night when she was alone,” said Hanaud with a challenge in his voice.
“I saw her in a mirror. But her hands covered her face. Tears were falling between her fingers and running down the backs of her hands. She was in a storm of misery. Why?” Hanaud could explain it. He had sent him on a pretence just to see and bring back that story. “You expected that I should see what I did,” Ricardo cried.
Hanaud shook his head gravely.
“I was not sure.”
“It was—it was frightening.”
And now, as gravely, Hanaud nodded.
“Yes, that is the word,” he said. “You have heard of people who hate enough to summon death to help them. They use a sort of witchcraft.”
Hanaud’s voice dropped as he spoke, and to Ricardo the room, even on that day of late summer, had suddenly grown cold.
“They write the name of their enemy on a card, and they lock it away in a drawer where no one will see it. They make of that drawer a coffin. And it has been known—whether by chance or some dreadful power of evil—that the victim has fallen sick, has faded until, in an agony of remorse, the would—be murderer has unlocked the drawer and torn up the card.”
“As she did—Agatha?” cried Ricardo in a great relief.
“I wonder,” Hanaud replied sombrely. “One of the name of Horbury has died violently. But not the woman. She had never unlocked the drawer. She did not mean it to be unlocked. Are you sure those passionate tears were not tears of bitter anger? Isn’t it even possible that she thought that she had killed the man when she had meant to kill the wife? In that extremity she might have believed it.”
Mr. Ricardo, of course, chose the obvious explanation of the words. “But you can’t mean,” he gasped, “that Miss Agatha had set her heart on that fat rogue Horbury!”
“I don’t,” Hanaud answered with a grin upon his face in which there was neither humour nor amusement.
“Upon someone else, then?”
“Obviously,” replied Hanaud.
“Who—oh, I see—who had set his heart on Olivia Horbury?”
“So it would seem.”
So here was Mr. Ricardo faced with the triangle of the dramatists. Two women and a man or two men and a woman. It was a triangle of the first sort in this case. A man pursued by Agatha who had set his longings on Olivia.
“Who is it?” cried Ricardo.
“I wish I knew,” Hanaud returned, and the lines of disappointment deepened on Ricardo’s face. After all, what’s the use of a walking Who’s Who if it doesn’t answer your questions?—he asked of himself indignantly.
The Frenchman continued:
“The unknown man. Perhaps my friend, the murderer. There is now something we did not have before, a reason for murder.”
They had Devisher, to be sure, or they would have, if they could lay their hands upon him. But neither Ricardo, nor Hanaud, nor indeed Maltby, had any real belief in the guilt of Devisher. Ricardo was thrown back upon his disinclination to accept the picture of Agatha Crottle presented to him.
“She is middle-aged. I can’t believe she ever had a lover,” he cried. “She is of the kind which finds its consolation in religion.”
And there Hanaud wholly agreed with him.
“Yes, yes, she goes to church, no doubt of it, and prays with all her soul. But to such, what is the witchcraft of the locked drawer but a more desperate prayer? She is helping. Oh, I have seen them, the religious ones, the unconsidered ones, the world’s faded, pitiable wallflowers, when passion comes to them for the first time in middle-age they can be dangerous.”
And so quietly, yet with such significance, did Hanaud let that word fall from his lips that once more Ricardo gazed into a black pit with horror in his eyes.
But Thompson, the unfailing, brought the grim conference to an end. The Rolls Royce (No. 1) was at the door. He himself was now starting in the second car. A quarter of an hour and they should follow.
“I shall come with you,” said Ricardo, and he stood by the train’s side after Hanaud had taken his seat.
“You will come back, I hope,” he said.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders.
“It may be,” and he suddenly leaned out of the window. “I will tell you a little thing. Maltby will press at the inquest for an open verdict. This affair is not ended, my friend.”
“And there will be danger before it is ended,” Ricardo declared.
But this danger struck first of all where neither of them expected it.