The Crystal Stopper - Maurice Leblanc (best ereader for epub .txt) 📗

The porter rang at the same moment.”

“Could she see the envelope?”

“Yes.”

The conclusion was evident. It remained to discover how the visitor had been able to effect her theft. By slipping from one window to the other, outside the flat? Impossible: Lupin found the window of his room shut. By opening the communicating door? Impossible: Lupin found it locked and barred with its two inner bolts.

Nevertheless, a person cannot pass through a wall by a mere operation of will. To go in or out of a room requires a passage; and, as the act was accomplished in the space of a few minutes, it was necessary, in the circumstances, that the passage should be previously in existence, that it should already have been contrived in the wall and, of course, known to the woman. This hypothesis simplified the search by concentrating it upon the door; for the wall was quite bare, without a cupboard, chimneypiece or hangings of any kind, and unable to conceal the least outlet.

Lupin went back to the drawing-room and prepared to make a study of the door. But he at once gave a start. He perceived, at the first glance, that the left lower panel of the six small panels contained within the crossbars of the door no longer occupied its normal position and that the light did not fall straight upon it. On leaning forward, he saw two little tin tacks sticking out on either side and holding the panel in place, similar to a wooden board behind a picture-frame. He had only to shift these. The panel at once came out.

Achille gave a cry of amazement. But Lupin objected:

“Well? And what then? We are no better off than before. Here is an empty oblong, eight or nine inches wide by sixteen inches high. You’re not going to pretend that a woman can slip through an opening which would not admit the thinnest child of ten years old!”

“No, but she can have put her arm through and drawn the bolts.”

“The bottom bolt, yes,” said Lupin. “But the top bolt, no: the distance is far too great. Try for yourself and see.”

Achille tried and had to give up the attempt.

Lupin did not reply. He stood thinking for a long time. Then, suddenly, he said:

“Give me my hat⁠ ⁠… my coat⁠ ⁠…”

He hurried off, urged by an imperative idea. And, the moment he reached the street, he sprang into a taxi:

“Rue Matignon, quick!⁠ ⁠…”

As soon as they came to the house where he had been robbed of the crystal stopper, he jumped out of the cab, opened his private entrance, went upstairs, ran to the drawing-room, turned on the light and crouched at the foot of the door leading to his bedroom.

He had guessed right. One of the little panels was loosened in the same manner.

And, just as in his other flat in the Rue Chateaubriand, the opening was large enough to admit a man’s arm and shoulder, but not to allow him to draw the upper bolt.

“Hang!” he shouted, unable any longer to master the rage that had been seething within him for the last two hours. “Blast! Shall I never have finished with this confounded business?”

In fact, an incredible ill-luck seemed to dog his footsteps, compelling him to grope about at random, without permitting him to use the elements of success which his own persistency or the very force of things placed within his grasp. Gilbert gave him the crystal stopper. Gilbert sent him a letter. And both had disappeared at that very moment.

And it was not, as he had until then believed, a series of fortuitous and independent circumstances. No, it was manifestly the effect of an adverse will pursuing a definite object with prodigious ability and incredible boldness, attacking him, Lupin, in the recesses of his safest retreats and baffling him with blows so severe and so unexpected that he did not even know against whom he had to defend himself. Never, in the course of his adventures, had he encountered such obstacles as now.

And, little by little, deep down within himself, there grew a haunting dread of the future. A date loomed before his eyes, the terrible date which he unconsciously assigned to the law to perform its work of vengeance, the date upon which, in the light of a wan April morning, two men would mount the scaffold, two men who had stood by him, two comrades whom he had been unable to save from paying the awful penalty⁠ ⁠…

III The Home Life of Alexis Daubrecq

When Daubrecq the deputy came in from lunch on the day after the police had searched his house he was stopped by Clémence, his portress, who told him that she had found a cook who could be thoroughly relied on.

The cook arrived a few minutes later and produced first-rate characters, signed by people with whom it was easy to take up her references. She was a very active woman, although of a certain age, and agreed to do the work of the house by herself, without the help of a manservant, this being a condition upon which Daubrecq insisted.

Her last place was with a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Comte Saulevat, to whom Daubrecq at once telephoned. The count’s steward gave her a perfect character, and she was engaged.

As soon as she had fetched her trunk, she set to work and cleaned and scrubbed until it was time to cook the dinner.

Daubrecq dined and went out.

At eleven o’clock, after the portress had gone to bed, the cook cautiously opened the garden-gate. A man came up.

“Is that you?” she asked.

“Yes, it’s I, Lupin.”

She took him to her bedroom on the third floor, overlooking the garden, and at once burst into lamentations:

“More of your tricks and nothing but tricks! Why can’t you leave me alone, instead of sending me to do your dirty work?”

“How can I help it, you dear old Victoire?2 When I want a person of respectable