Detection by Gaslight Read online

  “He would have killed his father,” I said, as I passed him, going toward the Groix Inn.

  “That’s his business,” snarled the Purple Emperor. There was a deadly light in his eyes. For a moment I thought he was going to attack me; but he was merely viciously drunk, so I shoved him out of my way and went to bed, tired and disgusted.

  The worst of it was I couldn’t sleep, for I feared that the Purple Emperor might begin to abuse Lys. I lay restlessly tossing among the sheets until I could stay there no longer. I did not dress entirely; I merely slipped on a pair of chaussons and sabots, a pair of knickerbockers, a jersey, and a cap. Then, loosely tying a handkerchief about my throat, I went down the worm-eaten stairs and out into the moonlit road. There was a candle flaring in the Purple Emperor’s window, but I could not see him.

  “He’s probably dead drunk,” I thought, and looked up at the window where, three years before, I had first seen Lys.

  “Asleep, thank Heaven!” I muttered, and wandered out along the road. Passing the small cottage of the Red Admiral, I saw that it was dark, but the door was open. I stepped inside the hedge to shut it, thinking, in case Yves Terrec should be roving about, his father would lose whatever he had left.

  Then, after fastening the door with a stone, I wandered on through the dazzling Breton moonlight. A nightingale was singing in a willow swamp below, and from the edge of the mere, among the tall swamp grasses, myriads of frogs chanted a bass chorus.

  When I returned, the eastern sky was beginning to lighten, and across the meadows on the cliffs, outlined against the paling horizon, I saw a seaweed gatherer going to his work among the curling breakers on the coast. His long rake was balanced on his shoulder, and the sea wind carried his song across the meadows to me:

  St. Gildas!

  St. Gildas!

  Pray for us,

  Shelter us,

  Us who toil in the sea.

  Passing the shrine at the entrance of the village, I took off my cap and knelt in prayer to Our Lady of Faöuet; and if I neglected myself in that prayer, surely I believed Our Lady of Faöuet would be kinder to Lys. It is said that the shrine casts white shadows. I looked, but saw only the moonlight. Then very peacefully I went to bed again, and was only awakened by the clank of sabres and the trample of horses in the road below my window.

  “Good gracious!” I thought, “it must be eleven o’clock, for there are the gendarmes from Quimperlé.”

  I looked at my watch; it was only half-past eight, and as the gendarmes made their rounds every Thursday at eleven, I wondered what had brought them out so early to St. Gildas.

  “Of course,” I grumbled, rubbing my eyes, “they are after Terrec,” and I jumped into my limited bath.

  Before I was completely dressed I heard a timid knock, and opening my door, razor in hand, stood astonished and silent. Lys, her blue eyes wide with terror, leaned on the threshold.

  “My darling!” I cried, “what on earth is the matter?” But she only clung to me, panting like a wounded sea gull. At last, when I drew her into the room and raised her face to mine, she spoke in a heart-breaking voice:

  “Oh, Dick! they are going to arrest you, but I will die before I believe one word of what they say. No, don’t ask me,” and she began to sob desperately.

  When I found that something really serious was the matter, I flung on my coat and cap, and, slipping one arm about her waist, went down the stairs and out into the road. Four gendarmes sat on their horses in front of the café door; beyond them, the entire population of St. Gildas gaped, ten deep.

  “Hello, Durand!” I said to the brigadier, “what the devil is this I hear about arresting me?”

  “It’s true, mon ami,” replied Durand with sepulchral sympathy. I looked him over from the tip of his spurred boots to his sulphur-yellow sabre belt, then upward, button by button, to his disconcerted face.

  “What for?” I said scornfully. “Don’t try any cheap sleuth work on me! Speak up, man, what’s the trouble?”

  The Purple Emperor, who sat in the doorway staring at me, started to speak, but thought better of it and got up and went into the house. The gendarmes rolled their eyes mysteriously and looked wise.

  “Come, Durand,” I said impatiently, “what’s the charge?”

  “Murder,” he said in a faint voice.

  “What!” I cried incredulously. “Nonsense! Do I look like a murderer? Get off your horse, you stupid, and tell me who’s murdered.”

  Durand got down, looking very silly, and came up to me, offering his hand with a propitiatory grin.

  “It was the Purple Emperor who denounced you! See, they found your handkerchief at his door—”

  “Whose door, for Heaven’s sake?” I cried.

  “Why, the Red Admiral’s!”

  “The Red Admiral? What has he done?”

  “Nothing—he’s only been murdered.”

  I could scarcely believe my senses, although they took me over to the little stone cottage and pointed out the blood-spattered room. But the horror of the thing was that the corpse of the murdered man had disappeared, and there only remained a nauseating lake of blood on the stone floor, in the centre of which lay a human hand. There was no doubt as to whom the hand belonged, for everybody who had ever seen the Red Admiral knew that the shrivelled bit of flesh which lay in the thickening blood was the hand of the Red Admiral. To me it looked like the severed claw of some gigantic bird.

  “Well,” I said, “there’s been murder committed. Why don’t you do something?”

  “What?” asked Durand.

  “I don’t know. Send for the Commissaire.”

  “He’s at Quimperlé. I telegraphed.”

  “Then send for a doctor, and find out how long this blood has been coagulating.”

  “The chemist from Quimperlé is here; he’s a doctor.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He says that he doesn’t know.”

  “And who are you going to arrest?” I inquired, turning away from the spectacle on the floor.

  “I don’t know,” said the brigadier solemnly; “you are denounced by the Purple Emperor, because he found your handkerchief at the door when he went out this morning.”

  “Just like a pig-headed Breton!” I exclaimed, thoroughly angry. “Did he not mention Yves Terrec?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “He overlooked the fact that Terrec tried to shoot his father last night, and that I took away his gun. All that counts for nothing when he finds my handkerchief at the murdered man’s door.”

  “Come into the café,” said Durand, much disturbed, “we can talk it over, there. Of course, Monsieur Darrel, I have never had the faintest idea that you were the murderer!”

  The four gendarmes and I walked across the road to the Groix Inn and entered the café. It was crowded.with Britons, smoking, drinking, and jabbering in half a dozen dialects, all equally unsatisfactory to a civilized ear; and I pushed through the crowd to where little Max Fortin, the chemist of Quimperlé, stood smoking a vile cigar.

  “This is a bad business,” he said, shaking hands and offering me the mate to his cigar, which I politely declined.

  “Now, Monsieur Fortin,” I said, “it appears that the Purple Emperor found my handkerchief near the murdered man’s door this morning, and so he concludes”—here I glared at the Purple Emperor—“that I am the assassin. I will now ask him a question,” and turning on him suddenly, I shouted, “What were you doing at the Red Admiral’s door?”

  The Purple Emperor started and turned pale, and I pointed at him triumphantly.

  “See what a sudden question will do. Look how embarrassed he is, and yet I do not charge him with murder; and I tell you, gentlemen, that man there knows as well as I do who was the murderer of the Red Admiral!”

  “I don’t!” bawled the Purple Emperor.

  “You do,” I said. “It was Yves Terrec.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said obstinately, dropping
his voice.

  “Of course not, being pig-headed.”

  “I am not pig-headed,” he roared again, “but I am mayor of St. Gildas, and I do not believe that Yves Terrec killed his father.”

  “You saw him try to kill him last night?”

  The mayor grunted.

  “And you saw what I did.”

  He grunted again.

  “And,” I went on, “you heard Yves Terrec threaten to kill his father. You heard him curse the Red Admiral and swear to kill him. Now the father is murdered and his body is gone.”

  “And your handkerchief?” sneered the Purple Emperor.

  “I dropped it, of course.”

  “And the seaweed gatherer who saw you last night lurking about the Red Admiral’s cottage,” grinned the Purple Emperor.

  I was startled at the man’s malice.

  “That will do,” I said. “It is perfectly true that I was walking on the Bannalec road last night, and that I stopped to close the Red Admiral’s door, which was ajar, although his light was not burning. After that I went up the road to the Dinez Woods, and then walked over by St. Julien, whence I saw the seaweed gatherer on the cliffs. He was near enough for me to hear what he sang. What of that?”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Then I stopped at the shrine and said a prayer, and then I went to bed and slept until Brigadier Durand’s gendarmes awoke me with their clatter.”

  “Now, Monsieur Darrel,” said the Purple Emperor, lifting a fat finger and shooting a wicked glance at me, “Now, Monsieur Darrel, which did you wear last night on your midnight stroll—sabots or shoes?”

  I thought a moment. “Shoes—no, sabots. I just slipped on my chaussons and went out in my sabots.”

  “Which was it, shoes or sabots?” snarled the Purple Emperor.

  “Sabots, you fool.”

  “Are these your sabots?” he asked, lifting up a wooden shoe with my initials cut on the instep.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Then how did this blood come on the other one?” he shouted, and held up a sabot, the mate to the first, on which a drop of blood had spattered.

  “I haven’t the least idea,” I said calmly; but my heart was beating very fast and I was furiously angry.

  “You blockhead!” I said, controlling my rage, “I’ll make you pay for this when they catch Yves Terrec and convict him. Brigadier Durand, do your duty if you think I am under suspicion. Arrest me, but grant me one favour. Put me in the Red Admiral’s cottage, and I’ll see whether I can’t find some clew that you have overlooked. Of course, I won’t disturb anything until the Commissaire arrives. Bah! You all make me very ill.”

  “He’s hardened,” observed the Purple Emperor, wagging his head.

  “What motive had I to kill the Red Admiral?” I asked them all scornfully. And they all cried:

  “None! Yves Terrec is the man!”

  Passing out of the door I swung around and shook my finger at the Purple Emperor.

  “Oh, I’ll make you dance for this, my friend,” I said; and I followed Brigadier Durand across the street to the cottage of the murdered man.

  III.

  They took me at my word and placed a gendarme with a bared sabre at the gateway by the hedge.

  “Give me your parole,” said poor Durand, “and I will let you go where you wish.” But I refused, and began prowling about the cottage looking for clews. I found lots of things that some people would have considered most important, such as ashes from the Red Admiral’s pipe, footprints in a dusty vegetable bin, bottles smelling of Pouldu cider, and dust—oh, lots of dust!—but I was not an expert, only a stupid, everyday amateur; so I defaced the footprints with my thick shooting boots, and I declined to examine the pipe ashes through a microscope, although the Red Admiral’s microscope stood on the table close at hand.

  At last I found what I had been looking for, some long wisps of straw, curiously depressed and flattened in the middle, and I was certain I had found the evidence that would settle Yves Terrec for the rest of his life. It was plain as the nose on your face. The straws were sabot straws, flattened where the foot had pressed them, and sticking straight out where they projected beyond the sabot. Now nobody in St. Gildas used straw in sabots except a fisherman who lived near St. Julien, and the straw in his sabots was ordinary yellow wheat straw! This straw, or rather these straws, were from the stalks of the red wheat which only grows inland, and which, everybody in St. Gildas knew, Yves Terrec wore in his sabots. I was perfectly satisfied; and when, three hours later, a hoarse shouting from the Bannalec Road brought me to the window, I was not surprised to see Yves Terrec, bloody, dishevelled, hatless, with his strong arms bound behind him, walking with bent head between two mounted gendarmes. The crowd around him swelled every minute, crying: “Parricide! parricide! Death to the murderer!” As he passed my window I saw great clots of mud on his dusty sabots, from the heels of which projected wisps of red wheat straw. Then I walked back into the Red Admiral’s study, determined to find what the microscope would show on the wheat straws. I examined each one very carefully, and then, my eyes aching, I rested my chin on my hand and leaned back in the chair. I had not been as fortunate as some detectives, for there was no evidence that the straws had ever been used in a sabot at all. Furthermore, directly across the hallway stood a carved Breton chest, and now I noticed for the first time that, from beneath the closed lid, dozens of similar red wheat straws projected, bent exactly as mine were bent by the weight of the lid.

  I yawned in disgust. It was apparent that I was not cut out for a detective, and I bitterly pondered over the difference between clews in real life and clews in a detective story. After a while I rose, walked over to the chest and opened the lid. The interior was wadded with the red wheat straws, and on this wadding lay two curious glass jars, two or three small vials, several empty bottles labelled chloroform, a collecting jar of cyanide of potassium, and a book. In a farther corner of the chest were some letters bearing English stamps, and also the torn coverings of two parcels, all from England, and all directed to the Red Admiral under his proper name of “Sieur Louis Jean Terrec, St. Gildas, par Moëlan, Finistère.”

  All these traps I carried over to the desk, shut the lid of the chest, and sat down to read the letters. They were written in commercial French, evidently by an Englishman.

  Freely translated, the contents of the first letter were as follows:

  “LONDON, June 12, 1894.

  DEAR MONSIEUR (sic):

  Your kind favour of the 19th inst. received and contents noted. The latest work on the Lepidoptera of England is Blowzer’s How to catch British Butterflies, with notes and tables, and an introduction by Sir Thomas Sniffer. The price of this work (in one volume, calf) is £5 or 125 francs of French money. A post-office order will receive our prompt attention. We beg to remain,

  Yours, etc.,

  FRADLEY & TOOMER,

  470 Regent Square, London, S. W.

  The next letter was even less interesting. It merely stated that the money had been received and the book would be forwarded. The third engaged my attention, and I shall quote it, the translation being a free one:

  DEAR SIR:

  Your letter of the 1st of July was duly received, and we at once referred it to Mr. Fradley himself. Mr. Fradley being much interested in your question, sent your letter to Professor Schweineri, of the Berlin Entomological Society, whose note Blowzer refers to on page 630, in his How to catch British Butterflies. We have just received an answer from Professor Schweineri, which we translate into French—(see inclosed slip). Professor Schweineri begs to present to you two jars of cythyl, prepared under his own supervision. We forward the same to you. Trusting that you will find everything satisfactory, we remain,

  Yours sincerely,

  FRADLEY & TOOMER.

  The inclosed slip read as follows:

  Messrs. FRADLEY & TOOMER,

  GENTLEMEN:

  Cythaline, a complex hydrocarbon, was first use
d by Professor Schnoot, of Antwerp, a year ago. I discovered an analogous formula about the same time and named it cythyl. I have used it with great success everywhere. It is as certain as a magnet. I beg to present you three small jars, and would be pleased to have you forward two of them to your correspondent in St. Gildas with my compliments. Blowzer’s quotation of me, on page 630 of his glorious work, How to catch British Butterflies, is correct.

  Yours, etc.,

  HEINRICH SCHWEINERI,

  P. H. D., D. D., D. S., M. S.

  When I had finished this letter I folded it up and put it into my pocket with the others. Then I opened Blowzer’s valuable work, How to catch British Butterflies, and turned to page 630.

  Now, although the Red Admiral could only have acquired the book very recently, and although all the other pages were perfectly clean, this particular page was thumbed black, and heavy pencil marks inclosed a paragraph at the bottom of the page. This is the paragraph:

  Professor Schweineri says: ‘Of the two old methods used by collectors for the capture of the swift-winged, high-flying Apatura Iris, or Purple Emperor, the first, which was using a long-handled net, proved successful once in a thousand times; and the second, the placing of bait upon the ground, such as decayed meat, dead cats, rats, etc., was not only disagreeable, even for an enthusiastic collector, but also very uncertain. Once in five hundred times would the splendid butterfly leave the tops of his favourite oak trees to circle about the fetid bait offered. I have found cythyl a perfectly sure bait to draw this beautiful butterfly to the ground, where it can be easily captured. An ounce of cythyl placed in a yellow saucer under an oak tree, will draw to it every Apatura Iris within a radius of twenty miles. So, if any collector who possesses a little cythyl, even though it be in a sealed bottle in his pocket—if such a collector does not find a single Apatura Iris fluttering close about him within an hour, let him be satisfied that the Apatura Iris does not inhabit his country.’