The Eight Strokes of the Clock (16 page)

Every word of her confession was strictly true. Those who listened to her felt this profoundly, and nothing could have given Hortense and Rénine a keener impression of tragedy.

She had fallen back into her chair, utterly exhausted. Nevertheless, she went on speaking unintelligible words, and it was only gradually by leaning over her, that they were able to make out:

“I thought that there would be an outcry and that I should be arrested. But no. It happened in such a way and under such conditions that no one had seen anything. Further, Jacques had drawn himself up at the same time as myself, and he actually did not fall. No, he did not fall! I had stabbed him, and he remained standing! I saw him from the terrace, to which I had returned. He had hung his jacket over his shoulders, evidently to hide his wound, and he moved away without staggering … or staggering so little that I alone was able to perceive it. He even spoke to some friends who were playing cards. Then he went to his cabin and disappeared … In a few moments, I came back indoors. I was persuaded that all of this was only a bad dream … that I had not killed him … or that at the worst the wound was a slight one. Jacques would come out again. I was certain of it … I watched from my balcony … If I had thought for a moment that he needed assistance, I should have flown to him … But truly I didn’t know … I didn’t guess … People speak of presentiments: there are no such things. I was perfectly calm, just as one is after a nightmare of which the memory is fading away … No, I swear to you, I knew nothing … until the moment …”

She interrupted herself, stifled by sobs.

Rénine finished her sentence for her:

“Until the moment when they came and told you, I suppose?”

Thérèse stammered:

“Yes. It was not till then that I was conscious of what I had done … and I felt that I was going mad and that I should cry out to all those people, ‘Why, it was I who did it! Don’t search! Here is the dagger … I am the culprit!’ Yes, I was going to say that, when suddenly I caught sight of my poor Jacques … They were carrying him along … His face was very peaceful, very gentle … And, in his presence, I understood my duty, as he had understood his … He had kept silent, for the sake of the children. I would be silent too. We were both guilty of the murder of which he was the victim, and we must both do all we could to prevent the crime from recoiling upon them … He had seen this clearly in his dying agony. He had had the amazing courage to keep his feet, to answer the people who spoke to him and to lock himself up to die. He had done this, wiping out all his faults with a single action, and in so doing had granted me his forgiveness, because he was not accusing me … and was ordering me to hold my peace … and to defend myself … against everybody … especially against you, Germaine.”

She uttered these last words more firmly. At first wholly overwhelmed by the unconscious act which she had committed in killing her husband, she had recovered her strength a little in thinking of what she had done and in defending herself with such energy. Faced by the intriguing woman whose hatred had driven both of them to death and crime, she clenched her fists, ready for the struggle, all quivering with resolution.

Germaine Astaing did not flinch. She had listened without a word, with a relentless expression which grew harder and harder as Thérèse’s confessions became precise. No emotion seemed to soften her and no remorse to penetrate her being. At most, towards the end, her thin lips shaped themselves into a faint smile. She was holding her prey in her clutches.

Slowly, with her eyes raised to a mirror, she adjusted her hat and powdered her face. Then she walked to the door.

Thérèse darted forward:

“Where are you going?”

“Where I choose.”

“To see the examining magistrate?”

“Very likely.”

“You sha’n’t pass!”

“As you please. I’ll wait for him here.”

“And you’ll tell him what?”

“Why, all that you’ve said, of course, all that you’ve been silly enough to say. How could he doubt the story? You have explained it all to me so fully.”

Thérèse took her by the shoulders:

“Yes, but I’ll explain other things to him at the same time, Germaine, things that concern you. If I’m ruined, so shall you be.”

“You can’t touch me.”

“I can expose you, show your letters.”

“What letters?”

“Those in which my death was decided on.”

“Lies, Thérèse! You know that famous plot exists only in your imagination. Neither Jacques nor I wished for your death.”

“You did, at any rate. Your letters condemn you.”

“Lies! They were the letters of a friend to a friend.”

“Letters of a mistress to her paramour.”

“Prove it.”

“They are there, in Jacques’ pocketbook.”

“No, they’re not.”

“What’s that you say?”

“I say that those letters belonged to me. I’ve taken them back, or rather my brother has.”

“You’ve stolen them, you wretch! And you shall give them back again,” cried Thérèse, shaking her.

“I haven’t them. My brother kept them. He has gone.”

Thérèse staggered and stretched out her hands to Rénine with an expression of despair. Rénine said:

“What she says is true. I watched the brother’s proceedings while he was feeling in your bag. He took out the pocketbook, looked through it with his sister, came and put it back again and went off with the letters.”

Rénine paused and added,

“Or, at least, with five of them.”

The two women moved closer to him. What did he intend to convey? If Frédéric Astaing had taken away only five letters, what had become of the sixth?

“I suppose,” said Rénine, “that, when the pocketbook fell on the shingle, that sixth letter slipped out at the same time as the photograph and that M. d’Ormeval must have picked it up, for I found it in the pocket of his blazer, which had been hung up near the bed. Here it is. It’s signed Germaine Astaing, and it is quite enough to prove the writer’s intentions and the murderous counsels which she was pressing upon her lover.”

Madame Astaing had turned grey in the face and was so much disconcerted that she did not try to defend herself. Rénine continued, addressing his remarks to her:

“To my mind, madame, you are responsible for all that happened. Penniless, no doubt, and at the end of your resources, you tried to profit by the passion with which you inspired M. d’Ormeval in order to make him marry you, in spite of all the obstacles, and to lay your hands upon his fortune. I have proofs of this greed for money and these abominable calculations and can supply them if need be. A few minutes after I had felt in the pocket of that jacket, you did the same. I had removed the sixth letter, but had left a slip of paper which you looked for eagerly and which also must have dropped out of the pocketbook. It was an uncrossed cheque for a hundred thousand francs, drawn by M. d’Ormeval in your brother’s name … just a little wedding present … what we might call pin money. Acting on your instructions, your brother dashed off by motor to Le Havre to reach the bank before four o’clock. I may as well tell you that he will not have cashed the cheque, for I had a telephone message sent to the bank to announce the murder of M. d’Ormeval, which stops all payments. The upshot of all this is that the police, if you persist in your schemes of revenge, will have in their hands all the proofs that are wanted against you and your brother. I might add, as an edifying piece of evidence, the story of the conversation which I overheard between your brother and yourself in a dining car on the railway between Brest and Paris, a fortnight ago. But I feel sure that you will not drive me to adopt these extreme measures and that we understand each other. Isn’t that so?”

Natures like Madame Astaing’s, which are violent and headstrong so long as a fight is possible and while a gleam of hope remains, are easily swayed in defeat. Germaine was too intelligent not to grasp the fact that the least attempt at resistance would be shattered by such an adversary as this. She was in his hands. She could but yield.

She therefore did not indulge in any playacting, nor in any demonstration such as threats, outbursts of fury or hysterics. She bowed:

“We are agreed,” she said. “What are your terms?”

“Go away. If ever you are called upon for your evidence, say that you know nothing.”

She walked away. At the door, she hesitated and then, between her teeth, said:

“The cheque.”

Rénine looked at Madame d’Ormeval, who declared:

“Let her keep it. I would not touch that money.”

When Rénine had given Thérèse d’Ormeval precise instructions as to how she was to behave at the enquiry and to answer the questions put to her, he left the chalet, accompanied by Hortense Daniel.

On the beach below, the magistrate and the public prosecutor were continuing their investigations, taking measurements, examining the witnesses and generally laying their heads together.

“When I think,” said Hortense, “that you have the dagger and M. d’Ormeval’s pocketbook on you!”

“And it strikes you as awfully dangerous, I suppose?” he said, laughing. “It strikes
me
as awfully comic.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Of what?”

“That they may suspect something?”

“Lord, they won’t suspect a thing! We shall tell those good people what we saw and our evidence will only increase their perplexity, for we saw nothing at all. For prudence sake we will stay a day or two, to see which way the wind is blowing. But it’s quite settled: they will never be able to make head or tail of the matter.”

“Nevertheless,
you
guessed the secret and from the first. Why?”

“Because, instead of seeking difficulties where none exist, as people generally do, I always put the question as it should be put, and the solution comes quite naturally. A man goes to his cabin and locks himself in. Half an hour later, he is found inside, dead. No one has gone in. What has happened? To my mind there is only one answer. There is no need to think about it. As the murder was not committed in the cabin, it must have been committed beforehand and the man was already mortally wounded when he entered his cabin. And forthwith the truth in this particular case appeared to me. Madame d’Ormeval, who was to have been killed this evening, forestalled her murderers and while her husband was stooping to the ground, in a moment of frenzy stabbed him in the back. There was nothing left to do but look for the reasons that prompted her action. When I knew them, I took her part unreservedly. That’s the whole story.”

The day was beginning to wane. The blue of the sky was becoming darker and the sea, even more peaceful than before.

“What are you thinking of?” asked Rénine, after a moment.

“I am thinking,” she said, “that if I too were the victim of some machination, I should trust you whatever happened, trust you through and against all. I know, as certainly as I know that I exist, that you would save me, whatever the obstacles might be. There is no limit to the power of your will.”

He said, very softly:

“There is no limit to my wish to please you.”

VI. THE LADY WITH THE HATCHET
 

One of the most incomprehensible incidents that preceded the great war was certainly the one which was known as the episode of the lady with the hatchet. The solution of the mystery was unknown and would never have been known, had not circumstances in the cruellest fashion obliged Prince Rénine—or should I say, Arsène Lupin?—to take up the matter and had I not been able today to tell the true story from the details supplied by him.

Let me recite the facts. In a space of eighteen months, five women disappeared, five women of different stations in life, all between twenty and thirty years of age and living in Paris or the Paris district.

I will give their names: Madame Ladoue, the wife of a doctor; Mlle. Ardant, the daughter of a banker; Mlle. Covereau, a washer woman of Courbevoie; Mlle. Honorine Vernisset, a dressmaker; and Madame Grollinger, an artist. These five women disappeared without the possibility of discovering a single particular to explain why they had left their homes, why they did not return to them, who had enticed them away, and where and how they were detained.

Each of these women, a week after her departure, was found somewhere or other in the western outskirts of Paris, and each time it was a dead body that was found, the dead body of a woman who had been killed by a blow on the head from a hatchet. And each time, not far from the woman, who was firmly bound, her face covered with blood and her body emaciated by lack of food, the marks of carriage wheels proved that the corpse had been driven to the spot.

The five murders were so much alike that there was only a single investigation, embracing all the five enquiries and, for that matter, leading to no result. A woman disappeared; a week later, to a day, her body was discovered; and that was all. The bonds that fastened her were similar in each case; so were the tracks left by the wheels; so were the blows of the hatchet, all of which were struck vertically at the top and right in the middle of the forehead.

The motive of the crime? The five women had been completely stripped of their jewels, purses and other objects of value. But the robberies might well have been attributed to marauders or any passersby, since the bodies were lying in deserted spots. Were the authorities to believe in the execution of a plan of revenge or of a plan intended to do away with the series of persons mutually connected, persons, for instance, likely to benefit by a future inheritance? Here again the same obscurity prevailed. Theories were built up, only to be demolished forthwith by an examination of the facts. Trails were followed and at once abandoned.

And suddenly there was a sensation. A woman engaged in sweeping the roads picked up on the pavement a little notebook, which she brought to the local police station. The leaves of this notebook were all blank, excepting one, on which was written a list of the murdered women, with their names set down in order of date and accompanied by three figures: Ladoue, 132; Vernisset, 118; and so on.

Certainly no importance would have been attached to these entries, which anybody might have written, since everyone was acquainted with the sinister list. But, instead of five names, it included six! Yes, below the words “Grollinger, 128,” there appeared “Williamson, 114.” Did this indicate a sixth murder?