Arsène Lupin intervenes
“Oh, I made those to mark the four points I scored in a game of écarté.
We often played écarté together, and I must have picked this visiting
card up without thinking and put it in my pocketbook.”
Leboc gave this plausible explanation in a perfectly natural manner and
it seemed to satisfy Formerie. What remained unexplained was how on
earth Jim Barnett could have guessed that such a card was hidden in the
pocketbook of a man he had never seen before in his life.
And Barnett himself furnished no elucidation. He merely smiled and
insisted that they should call Elizabeth Lovendale as a witness. This
they agreed to do.
Miss Lovendale was out of town and did not put in an appearance for a
week. The inquiry was at a standstill for that time, although Formerie
zealously pursued his investigations, the memory of Jim Barnett egging
him on.
“You’ve riled him,” Béchoux told Barnett on the afternoon when they
were all assembled again at the cottage. “So much so that he’s
determined to decline your assistance.”
“Ought I to clear out?” Barnett asked. “I don’t want to cloud any one’s
sky—not even Formerie’s!”
“No, you can stay,” Béchoux told him. “Anyway, I fancy he’s come to a
definite decision.”
“All the better. It’s sure to be the wrong one. There’s a good time
coming!”
“Don’t be so disrespectful, Barnett!”
“Oh, all right, I’ll be respectful and, of course, absolutely
disinterested. Nothing in hand or pocket. But, I must say, a little
more Formerie will about finish me!”
Monsieur Leboc had been waiting half an hour when a car drew up and
Miss Lovendale got out. Monsieur Formerie came up briskly.
“How do you do, Mr. Barnett,” he said. “Any more bright ideas?”
“Perhaps, monsieur,” was Barnett’s cautious reply.
“Well, wait till you’ve heard mine. But first we must get through with
your witness. Absolutely irrelevant and a sheer waste of time, you’ll
be glad to hear. Still, it can’t be helped.”
Elizabeth Lovendale was a dowdily dressed, middle-aged Englishwoman,
her slight eccentricity of manner heightened by her dishevelled hair.
She spoke French fluently, but so volubly that she was hard to
understand.
At once, before any question could be put to her, she launched forth:
“That poor Monsieur Vaucherel! Murdered! Such a nice man, if he was a
bit queer. And you want to know whether I knew him? Oh, not well. I
only came here once—on business. I wanted to buy something from him. We
disagreed about the price. I was going to have another appointment with
him after seeing my brothers. My brothers are well known in
London—Lovendale and Lovendale, Limited, the big provision merchants.”
Monsieur Formerie strove to stem this flow of eloquence.
“What was it you wanted to buy, mademoiselle?”
“A little scrap of paper—nothing but a scrap of paper. Sentimental
value only, as people say. But it was worth a lot to me and I made the
mistake of telling him so. It all goes back to my great-grandmother,
Dorothy Lovendale. She was a beauty and much admired by King George the
Fourth. She kept eighteen love-letters that he wrote her and hid them,
one in each volume of an eighteen-volume calf-bound edition of
Richardson’s works. When she died, the family found every volume except
the fourteenth, which was missing, together with the letter inside of
it—the fourteenth letter and the most interesting, for it was known to
prove that the lovely Dorothy had stepped aside from virtue’s
path,”—Miss Lovendale lowered her eyes discreetly so as not to meet
Barnett’s look of amusement—“just nine months before the birth of her
eldest son. You can understand what it would mean to us to get that
letter back! Why, it would prove our royal descent!”
Formerie was growing more and more impatient.
Elizabeth Lovendale took a deep breath, and went on with her story.
“After searching and advertising for nearly thirty years, I learned one
day that among a number of books sold at auction was the fourteenth
volume of the set of Richardson. I flew to the purchaser, a second-hand
bookseller on the Quai Voltaire, who referred me to Monsieur Vaucherel
who had just bought the book. Monsieur Vaucherel produced the precious
volume, and, like a fool, I told him that the letter I was after must
be in the back of the binding. He examined it closely and changed
color. Then, of course, I realized my stupidity. If I had kept quiet
about the letter he would have sold me the book for fifty francs. I
offered him a thousand. Monsieur Vaucherel, shaking with excitement,
asked ten thousand. I agreed. We both lost our heads. It was like a
nightmare auction. Twenty thousand—thirty—finally he demanded fifty
thousand francs, yelling like a madman, with his eyes blazing. ‘Fifty
thousand,’ he cried, ‘not a sou less—that will buy me all the books I
want—the rarest and finest—fifty thousand francs!’ He wanted a deposit
then and there—a check. I said I would come back. He let me go and I
saw him lock the book into the drawer of this table.”
Elizabeth Lovendale went on embellishing her statement with much
unnecessary detail. Nobody paid any attention to her. All eyes were for
the contorted countenance of the magistrate. He was obviously the prey
of somewhat violent emotion and was quite overwhelmed with excessive
jubilation. At last he managed to get out:
“In short, mademoiselle, you are asking for the return of the
fourteenth volume of Richardson’s collected works?”
“I am.” She looked at him with sudden hope.
“Then here it is,” he cried, and with a theatrical gesture he produced
a small calf-bound book from his pocket.
“Not really!” cried Miss Lovendale.
“Here it is,” he repeated. “But King George’s love-letter isn’t there.
I should have noticed it. But I’ll wager I can find it if I was able to
discover the missing volume that people have been after for the past
century. The man who stole the one indubitably stole the other.”
Monsieur Formerie paced the room, his hands behind his back, enjoying
his triumph. Suddenly he drummed on the table and spoke again.
“Now we know the motive for the murder. Someone overheard the
conversation between Vaucherel and Miss Lovendale and saw where
Vaucherel had put the book. A few days later that person murdered
Vaucherel to rob him of the book so that he could later on dispose of
the fourteenth letter. Who was it? Why, Gaudu, the farm-hand, whose
guilt I never doubted. I searched his house yesterday and noticed a
large crack between the bricks of the fireplace. Hidden in a hole
behind this crack I found a book, which obviously belonged to Monsieur
Vaucherel’s library. Miss Lovendale’s story, coming as it does, proves
the accuracy of my deductions. The Gaudu cousins will be placed under
arrest, the scum, as the murderers of poor old Vaucherel and the
criminal accusers of Monsieur Leboc.”
Monsieur Formerie solemnly shook hands with Monsieur Leboc as a mark of
his esteem and was effusively thanked by the latter. Then he gallantly
escorted Elizabeth Lovendale to her car and returned, rubbing his hands
together.
After this, everybody made for the Gaudus’ house, whither the three
cousins were being brought under escort. It was a brilliant day.
Monsieur Formerie, walking between Barnett and Béchoux, with Leboc
bringing up the rear, was full of satisfaction. The coveted Paris
appointment loomed ever nearer on his horizon.
“Well, well, Barnett,” he remarked, “very neatly done, eh? Not quite
what you expected, though. After all, you were inclined to be hostile
to Monsieur Leboc, weren’t you?”
“I admit, monsieur,” Barnett confessed, “that I allowed my line of
reasoning to be influenced by that confounded visiting card. Would you
believe it? That card was lying on the cottage floor during the
confrontation, and I actually saw Leboc drawing stealthily nearer and
nearer till he got his right foot on it. When we left the place, he had
it stuck to the sole of his boot. Afterwards he detached it and slipped
it into his pocketbook. Well, the imprint of his right sole on the damp
ground showed me that the said sole had four spikes arranged in a
lozenge. That meant that our friend Leboc, knowing that he had
forgotten the card lying on the floor, and anxious to keep Elizabeth
Lovendale’s name and address out of things, hit upon this neat little
dodge. And really, it’s thanks to the visiting card that——”
Monsieur Formerie burst out laughing.
“My dear Barnett, don’t be childish! Why all these pointless
complications? You shouldn’t waste your energy ferreting out mares’
nests. It’s a thing I never do. For goodness sake let’s stick to the
facts as we find them and refrain from distorting them to fit
impossible theories.”
The party was by now near Monsieur Leboc’s house which was on their way
to the Gaudus’. Monsieur Formerie took Barnett’s arm and went affably
on with his curtain lecture.
“Where you went wrong, Barnett, was in refusing to admit the
incontrovertible truth that, after all, one man cannot be in two places
at the same moment. Everything turns on that—Monsieur Leboc, smoking at
his window, couldn’t be at the same time committing a murder at the
cottage. Here we have Monsieur Leboc just behind us. There is the gate
of his house, three yards away. I say it’s impossible to conceive a
miracle by which Monsieur Leboc could be at once behind us and at his
window.”
Suddenly Formerie stood still in his tracks, choking, helpless and
amazed.
“What is it?” Béchoux asked.
Formerie pointed towards the house.
“There!... Look!...”
Through the bars of the gate, twenty yards away, beyond the lawn, they
could see Monsieur Leboc smoking his pipe, framed in the open
window—Monsieur Leboc who nevertheless was standing with the group in
the road.
A nightmare vision—a hallucination! It was incredible. Who could be
impersonating the real Leboc, whom Formerie had by the arm?
Béchoux had opened the gate and was running to the house. Formerie
followed him, shouting threats at Leboc’s extraordinary double. But the
figure in the window never heeded nor stirred. How should it heed or
stir, since, as they could see on drawing closer, it was merely a
picture, a painted canvas fitting the window-frame exactly and
presenting a tolerably life-like profile of Monsieur Leboc smoking his
pipe. It was daubed in the same style as the portrait of Vaucherel
hanging in the cottage. Obviously the same artist had painted both.
Formerie wheeled round. The mask of smiling placidity had dropped from
Monsieur Leboc’s face; the man had collapsed utterly under this
unforeseen blow. He began a maudlin confession.
“I lost my head—I never meant to stab him—I only wanted to share in
with him, fifty-fifty.... He refused—I didn’t know what I was doing. I
never meant to stab him.”
His whining trailed off and Jim Barnett’s voice, now harsh and
scathing, was raised in mocking inquiry.
“What do you say to that, Monsieur Formerie? Nice lad, Leboc, all ready
with a perfect alibi! How were the unobservant passers-by to doubt the
reality of the Monsieur Leboc they only saw at a distance? Personally,
I suspected something like this when I saw the portrait of old
Vaucherel. I wondered if the same artist could have painted Leboc. I
didn’t have to look hard—Leboc was too sure he’d fooled us all. The
canvas was rolled up and hidden in the corner of a shed under a heap of
rusty tools. I only had to nail it in place at the window a little
while ago, after Leboc had gone to answer your summons. That’s how a
man can simultaneously murder abroad and smoke his pipe at home!”
Jim Barnett was ruthless. His grating voice flayed the hapless
Formerie.
“Just look what a clean sheet Leboc had. What a ready answer about the
visiting card—the four holes marking his score at écarté. And the book