The Eight Strokes of the Clock - Maurice Leblanc (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

increasing as my investigations seemed to centre on him and concern him more closely. Now I know.”

“And he’s in love with Madame Aubrieux?”

“In logic, he’s bound to be. But so far we have only hypothetical suppositions, or rather certainties which are personal to myself. We shall never intercept the guillotine with those. Ah, if we could only find the banknotes! Given the banknotes, M. Dudouis would act. Without them, he will laugh in my face.”

“What then?” murmured Hortense, in anguished accents.

He did not reply. He walked up and down the room, assuming an air of gaiety and rubbing his hands. All was going so well! It was really a treat to take up a case which, so to speak, worked itself out automatically.

“Suppose we went on to the prefecture, M. Morisseau? The chief must be there by now. And, having gone so far, we may as well finish. Will M. Dutreuil come with us?”

“Why not?” said Dutreuil, arrogantly.

But, just as Rénine was opening the door, there was a noise in the passage and the manager ran up, waving his arms:

“Is M. Dutreuil still here?⁠ ⁠… M. Dutreuil, your flat is on fire!⁠ ⁠… A man outside told us. He saw it from the square.”

The young man’s eyes lit up. For perhaps half a second his mouth was twisted by a smile which Rénine noticed:

“Oh, you ruffian!” he cried. “You’ve given yourself away, my beauty! It was you who set fire to the place upstairs; and now the notes are burning.”

He blocked his exit.

“Let me pass,” shouted Dutreuil. “There’s a fire and no one can get in, because no one else has a key. Here it is. Let me pass, damn it!”

Rénine snatched the key from his hand and, holding him by the collar of his coat:

“Don’t you move, my fine fellow! The game’s up! You precious blackguard! M. Morisseau, will you give orders to the sergeant not to let him out of his sight and to blow out his brains if he tries to get away? Sergeant, we rely on you! Put a bullet into him, if necessary!⁠ ⁠…”

He hurried up the stairs, followed by Hortense and the chief inspector, who was protesting rather peevishly:

“But, I say, look here, it wasn’t he who set the place on fire! How do you make out that he set it on fire, seeing that he never left us?”

“Why, he set it on fire beforehand, to be sure!”

“How? I ask you, how?”

“How do I know? But a fire doesn’t break out like that, for no reason at all, at the very moment when a man wants to burn compromising papers.”

They heard a commotion upstairs. It was the waiters of the restaurant trying to burst the door open. An acrid smell filled the well of the staircase.

Rénine reached the top floor:

“By your leave, friends. I have the key.”

He inserted it in the lock and opened the door.

He was met by a gust of smoke so dense that one might well have supposed the whole floor to be ablaze. Rénine at once saw that the fire had gone out of its own accord, for lack of fuel, and that there were no more flames:

“M. Morisseau, you won’t let anyone come in with us, will you? An intruder might spoil everything. Bolt the door, that will be best.”

He stepped into the front room, where the fire had obviously had its chief centre. The furniture, the walls and the ceiling, though blackened by the smoke, had not been touched. As a matter of fact, the fire was confined to a blaze of papers which was still burning in the middle of the room, in front of the window.

Rénine struck his forehead:

“What a fool I am! What an unspeakable ass!”

“Why?” asked the inspector.

“The hatbox, of course! The cardboard hatbox which was standing on the table. That’s where he hid the notes. They were there all through our search.”

“Impossible!”

“Why, yes, we always overlook that particular hiding-place, the one just under our eyes, within reach of our hands! How could one imagine that a thief would leave sixty thousand francs in an open cardboard box, in which he places his hat when he comes in, with an absentminded air? That’s just the one place we don’t look in.⁠ ⁠… Well played, M. Dutreuil!”

The inspector, who remained incredulous, repeated:

“No, no, impossible! We were with him and he could not have started the fire himself.”

“Everything was prepared beforehand on the supposition that there might be an alarm.⁠ ⁠… The hatbox⁠ ⁠… the tissue paper⁠ ⁠… the banknotes: they must all have been steeped in some inflammable liquid. He must have thrown a match, a chemical preparation or whatnot into it, as we were leaving.”

“But we should have seen him, hang it all! And then is it credible that a man who has committed a murder for the sake of sixty thousand francs should do away with the money in this way? If the hiding-place was such a good one⁠—and it was, because we never discovered it⁠—why this useless destruction?”

“He got frightened, M. Morisseau. Remember that his head is at stake and he knows it. Anything rather than the guillotine; and they⁠—the banknotes⁠—were the only proof which we had against him. How could he have left them where they were?”

Morisseau was flabbergasted:

“What! The only proof?”

“Why, obviously!”

“But your witnesses? Your evidence? All that you were going to tell the chief?”

“Mere bluff.”

“Well, upon my word,” growled the bewildered inspector, “you’re a cool customer!”

“Would you have taken action without my bluff?”

“No.”

“Then what more do you want?”

Rénine stooped to stir the ashes. But there was nothing left, not even those remnants of stiff paper which still retain their shape.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s queer, all the same! How the deuce did he manage to set the thing alight?”

He stood up, looking attentively about him. Hortense had a feeling that he was making his supreme effort and that, after this last struggle in the dark, he would either have devised his plan of victory or admit that he was beaten.

Faltering with anxiety, she asked:

“It’s all up, isn’t