The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux (books to get back into reading TXT) 📗

CHAPTER XI. In Which Frederic Larsan Explains How the Murderer Was Able to Get Out of “The Yellow Room”

Among the mass of papers, legal documents, memoirs, and extracts from newspapers, which I have collected, relating to the mystery of The Yellow Room, there is one very interesting piece; it is a detail of the famous examination which took place that afternoon, in the laboratory of Professor Stangerson, before the Chief of the Surete. This narrative is from the pen of Monsieur Maleine, the Registrar, who, like the examining magistrate, had spent some of his leisure time in the pursuit of literature. The piece was to have made part of a book which, however, has never been published, and which was to have been entitled: “My Examinations.” It was given to me by the Registrar himself, some time after the astonishing denouement to this case, and is unique in judicial chronicles.

Here it is. It is not a mere dry transcription of questions and answers, because the Registrar often intersperses his story with his own personal comments.

THE REGISTRAR’S NARRATIVE

The examining magistrate and I (the writer relates) found ourselves in The Yellow Room in the company of the builder who had constructed the pavilion after Professor Stangerson’s designs. He had a workman with him. Monsieur de Marquet had had the walls laid entirely bare; that is to say, he had had them stripped of the paper which had decorated them. Blows with a pick, here and there, satisfied us of the absence of any sort of opening. The floor and the ceiling were thoroughly sounded. We found nothing. There was nothing to be found. Monsieur de Marquet appeared to be delighted and never ceased repeating:

“What a case! What a case! We shall never know, you’ll see, how the murderer was able to get out of this room!”

Then suddenly, with a radiant face, he called to the officer in charge of the gendarmes.

“Go to the chateau,” he said, “and request Monsieur Stangerson and Monsieur Robert Darzac to come to me in the laboratory, also Daddy Jacques; and let your men bring here the two concierges.”

Five minutes later all were assembled in the laboratory. The Chief of the Surete, who had arrived at the Glandier, joined us at that moment. I was seated at Monsieur Stangerson’s desk ready for work, when Monsieur de Marquet made us the following little speech—as original as it was unexpected:

“With your permission, gentlemen—as examinations lead to nothing—we will, for once, abandon the old system of interrogation. I will not have you brought before me one by one, but we will all remain here as we are,—Monsieur Stangerson, Monsieur Robert Darzac, Daddy Jacques and the two concierges, the Chief of the Surete, the Registrar, and myself. We shall all be on the same footing. The concierges may, for the moment, forget that they have been arrested. We are going to confer together. We are on the spot where the crime was committed. We have nothing else to discuss but the crime. So let us discuss it freely—intelligently or otherwise, so long as we speak just what is in our minds. There need be no formality or method since this won’t help us in any way.”

Then, passing before me, he said in a low voice:

“What do you think of that, eh? What a scene! Could you have thought of that? I’ll make a little piece out of it for the Vaudeville.” And he rubbed his hands with glee.

I turned my eyes on Monsieur Stangerson. The hope he had received from the doctor’s latest reports, which stated that Mademoiselle Stangerson might recover from her wounds, had not been able to efface from his noble features the marks of the great sorrow that was upon him. He had believed his daughter to be dead, and he was still broken by that belief. His clear, soft, blue eyes expressed infinite sorrow. I had had occasion, many times, to see Monsieur Stangerson at public ceremonies, and from the first had been struck by his countenance, which seemed as pure as that of a child—the dreamy gaze with the sublime and mystical expression of the inventor and thinker.

On those occasions his daughter was always to be seen either following him or by his side; for they never quitted each other, it was said, and had shared the same labours for many years. The young lady, who was then five and thirty, though she looked no more than thirty, had devoted herself entirely to science. She still won admiration for her imperial beauty which had remained intact, without a wrinkle, withstanding time and love. Who would have dreamed that I should one day be seated by her pillow with my papers, and that I should see her, on the point of death, painfully recounting to us the most monstrous and most mysterious crime I have heard of in my career? Who would have thought that I should be, that afternoon, listening to the despairing father vainly trying to explain how his daughter’s assailant had been able to escape from him? Why bury ourselves with our work in obscure retreats in the depths of woods, if it may not protect us against those dangerous threats to life which meet us in the busy cities?

“Now, Monsieur Stangerson,” said Monsieur de Marquet, with somewhat of an important air, “place yourself exactly where you were when Mademoiselle Stangerson left you to go to her chamber.”

Monsieur Stangerson rose and, standing at a certain distance from the door of “The Yellow Room”, said, in an even voice and without the least trace of emphasis—a voice which I can only describe as a dead voice:

“I was here. About eleven o’clock, after I had made a brief chemical experiment at the furnaces of the laboratory, needing all the space behind me, I had my desk moved here by Daddy Jacques, who spent the evening in cleaning some of my apparatus. My daughter had been working at the same desk with me. When it was her time to leave she rose, kissed me, and bade Daddy Jacques goodnight. She had to pass behind my desk and the door to enter her chamber, and she could do this only with some difficulty. That is to say, I was very near the place where the crime occurred later.”

“And the desk?” I asked, obeying, in thus mixing myself in the conversation, the express orders of my chief, “as soon as you heard the cry of ‘murder’ followed by the revolver shots, what became of the desk?”

Daddy Jacques answered.

“We pushed it back against the wall, here—close to where it is at the present moment—so as to be able to get at the door at once.”

I followed up my reasoning, to which, however, I attached but little importance, regarding it as only a weak hypothesis, with another question.

“Might not a man in the room, the desk being so near to the door, by stooping and slipping under the desk, have left it unobserved?”

“You are forgetting,” interrupted Monsieur Stangerson wearily, “that my daughter had locked and bolted her door, that the door had remained fastened, that we vainly tried to force it open when we heard the noise, and that we were at the door while the struggle between the murderer and my poor child was going on—immediately after we heard her stifled cries as she was being held by the fingers that have left their red mark upon her throat.