The Teeth of the Tiger - Maurice Leblanc (feel good books txt) 📗

“Eh?”

“We will both of us go, my lad. I want to be doing something; the atmosphere of this house is deadly for me.”

“What are you talking about, Chief?”

“Nothing. I know.”

Half an hour later they were flying along the Versailles Road. Perenna himself was driving his open car and driving it in such a way that Mazeroux, almost stifling, kept blurting out, at intervals:

“Lord, what a pace! Dash it all, how you’re letting her go, Chief! Aren’t you afraid of a smash? Remember the other day⁠—”

They reached Alençon in time for lunch. When they had done, they went to the chief post-office. Nobody knew the name of Langernault there. Besides, Damigni had its own post-office, though the presumption was that M. Langernault had his letters addressed poste restante at Alençon.

Don Luis and Mazeroux went on to the village of Damigni. Here again the postmaster knew no one of the name of Langernault; and this in spite of the fact that Damigni contained only about a thousand inhabitants.

“Let’s go and call on the mayor,” said Perenna.

At the mayor’s Mazeroux stated who he was and mentioned the object of his visit. The mayor nodded his head.

“Old Langernault? I should think so. A decent fellow: used to run a business in the town.”

“And accustomed, I suppose, to fetch his letters at Alençon post-office?”

“That’s it, every day, for the sake of the walk.”

“And his house?”

“Is at the end of the village. You passed it as you came along.”

“Can we see it?”

“Well, of course⁠ ⁠… only⁠—”

“Perhaps he’s not at home?”

“Certainly not! The poor, dear man hasn’t even set foot in the house since he left it the last time, four years ago!”

“How is that?”

“Why, he’s been dead these four years!”

Don Luis and Mazeroux exchanged a glance of amazement.

“So he’s dead?” said Don Luis.

“Yes, a gunshot.”

“What’s that!” cried Perenna. “Was he murdered?”

“No, no. They thought so at first, when they picked him up on the floor of his room; but the inquest proved that it was an accident. He was cleaning his gun, and it went off and sent a load of shot into his stomach. All the same, we thought it very queer in the village. Daddy Langernault, an old hunter before the Lord, was not the man to commit an act of carelessness.”

“Had he money?”

“Yes; and that’s just what clinched the matter: they couldn’t find a penny of it!”

Don Luis remained thinking for some time and then asked:

“Did he leave any children, any relations of the same name?”

“Nobody, not even a cousin. The proof is that his property⁠—it’s called the Old Castle, because of the ruins on it⁠—has reverted to the State. The authorities have had the doors of the house sealed up, and locked the gate of the park. They are waiting for the legal period to expire in order to take possession.”

“And don’t sightseers go walking in the park, in spite of the walls?”

“Not they. In the first place, the walls are very high. And then⁠—and then the Old Castle has had a bad reputation in the neighbourhood ever since I can remember. There has always been a talk of ghosts: a pack of silly tales. But still⁠—”

Perenna and his companion could not get over their surprise.

“This is a funny affair,” exclaimed Don Luis, when they had left the mayor’s. “Here we have Fauville writing his letters to a dead man⁠—and to a dead man, by the way, who looks to me very much as if he had been murdered.”

“Someone must have intercepted the letters.”

“Obviously. But that does not do away with the fact that he wrote them to a dead man and made his confidences to a dead man and told him of his wife’s criminal intentions.”

Mazeroux was silent. He, too, seemed greatly perplexed.

They spent part of the afternoon in asking about old Langernault’s habits, hoping to receive some useful clue from the people who had known him. But their efforts led to nothing.

At six o’clock, as they were about to start, Don Luis found that the car had run out of petrol and sent Mazeroux in a trap to the outskirts of Alençon to fetch some. He employed the delay in going to look at the Old Castle outside the village.

He had to follow a hedged road leading to an open space, planted with lime trees, where a massive wooden gate stood in the middle of a wall. The gate was locked. Don Luis walked along the wall, which was, in fact, very high and presented no opening. Nevertheless, he managed to climb over by means of the branches of a tree.

The park consisted of unkept lawns, overgrown with large wild flowers, and grass-covered avenues leading on the right to a distant mound, thickly dotted with ruins, and, on the left, to a small, tumbledown house with ill-fitting shutters.

He was turning in this direction, when he was much surprised to perceive fresh footprints on a border which had been soaked with the recent rain. And he could see that these footprints had been made by a woman’s boots, a pair of elegant and dainty boots.

“Who the devil comes walking here?” he thought.

He found more footprints a little farther, on another border which the owner of the boots had crossed, and they led him away from the house, toward a series of clumps of trees where he saw them twice more. Then he lost sight of them for good.

He was standing near a large, half-ruined barn, built against a very tall bank. Its worm-eaten doors seemed merely balanced on their hinges. He went up and looked through a crack in the wood. Inside the windowless barn was in semidarkness, for but little light came through the openings stopped up with straw, especially as the day was beginning to wane. He was able to distinguish a heap of barrels, broken winepresses, old ploughs, and scrap-iron of all kinds.

“This is certainly not where my fair stroller turned her steps,” thought Don Luis. “Let’s look somewhere else.”

Nevertheless, he did