The Hollow Needle - Maurice Leblanc (ebook e reader .txt) 📗

The supposition becomes more definite. The field narrows. Rouen, the banks of the Seine, the Caux country: it really seems as though all roads lead in that direction. Two kings of France are mentioned more particularly, after the secret is lost by the Dukes of Normandy and their heirs, the kings of England, and becomes the royal secret of France; and these two are King Henry IV, who laid siege to Rouen and won the battle of Arques, near Dieppe, and Francis I, who founded the Havre and uttered that suggestive phrase:

“The kings of France carry secrets that often decide the fate of towns!”

Rouen, Dieppe, the Havre: the three angles of the triangle, the three large towns that occupy the three points. In the centre, the Caux country.

The seventeenth century arrives. Louis XIV burns the book in which a person unknown reveals the truth. Captain de Larbeyrie masters a copy, profits by the secret thus obtained, steals a certain number of jewels and dies by the hand of highway murderers. Now at which spot is the ambush laid? At Gaillon! At Gaillon, a little town on the road leading from Havre, Rouen or Dieppe to Paris!

A year later, Louis XIV buys a domain and builds the Château de l’Aiguille. Where does he select his site? In the Midlands of France, with the result that the curious are thrown off the scent and do not hunt about in Normandy.

Rouen, Dieppe, the Havre⁠—the Cauchois triangle⁠—everything lies there. On one side, the sea; on another, the Seine: on the third, the two valleys that lead from Rouen to Dieppe.

A light flashed across Beautrelet’s mind. That extent of ground, that country of the high tablelands which run from the cliffs of the Seine to the cliffs of the Channel almost invariably constituted the field of operations of Arsène Lupin. For ten years, it was just this district which he parcelled out for his purposes, as though he had his haunt in the very centre of the region with which, the legend of the Hollow Needle was most closely connected.

The affair of Baron Cahorn?3 Or the banks of the Seine, between Rouen and the Havre.

The Thiberménil case?4 At the other end of the tableland, between Rouen and Dieppe.

The Gruchet, Montigny, Crasville burglaries? In the midst of the Caux country.

Where was Lupin going when he was attacked and bound hand and foot, in his compartment by Pierre Onfrey, the Auteuil murderer?5 To Rouen.

Where was Holmlock Shears, Lupin’s prisoner, put on board ship?6 Near the Havre.

And what was the scene of the whole of the present tragedy? Ambrumésy, on the road between the Havre and Dieppe.

Rouen, Dieppe, the Havre: always the Cauchois triangle.

And so, a few years earlier, possessing the pamphlet and knowing the hiding-place in which Marie Antoinette had concealed the document, Arsène Lupin had ended by laying his hand on the famous book of hours. Once in possession of the document, he took the field, “found” and settled down as in a conquered country.

Beautrelet took the field.

He set out in genuine excitement, thinking of the same journey which Lupin had taken, of the same hopes with which he must have throbbed when he thus went in search of the tremendous secret which was to arm him with so great a power. Would his, Beautrelet’s efforts have the same victorious results?

He left Rouen early in the morning, on foot, with his face very much disguised and his bag at the end of a stick on his shoulder, like an apprentice doing his round of France. He walked straight to Duclair, where he lunched. On leaving this town, he followed the Seine and practically did not lose sight of it again. His instinct, strengthened, moreover, by numerous influences, always brought him back to the sinuous banks of the stately river. When the Château du Malaquis was robbed, the objects stolen from Baron Cahorn’s collection were sent by way of the Seine. The old carvings removed from the chapel at Ambrumésy were carried to the Seine bank. He pictured the whole fleet of pinnaces performing a regular service between Rouen and the Havre and draining the works of art and treasures from a countryside to dispatch them thence to the land of millionaires.

“I’m burning! I’m burning!” muttered the boy, gasping under the truth, which came to him in a mighty series of shocks and took away his breath.

The checks encountered on the first few days, did not discourage him. He had a firm and profound belief in the correctness of the supposition that was guiding him. It was bold, perhaps, and extravagant; no matter: it was worthy of the adversary pursued. The supposition was on a level with the prodigious reality that bore the name of Lupin. With a man like that, of what good could it be to look elsewhere than in the domain of the enormous, the exaggerated, the superhuman?

Jumieges, the Mailleraye, Saint-Wandrille, Caudebec, Tancarville, Quillebeuf were places filled with his memories. How often he must have contemplated the glory of their Gothic steeples or the splendor of their immense ruins!

But the Havre, the neighborhood of the Havre drew Isidore like a beacon-fire.

“The kings of France carry secrets that often decide the fate of towns!”

Cryptic words which, suddenly, for Beautrelet, shone bright with clearness! Was this not an exact statement of the reasons that determined Francis I to create a town on this spot and was not the fate of the Havre-de-Grâce linked with the very secret of the Needle?

“That’s it, that’s it,” stammered Beautrelet, excitedly. “The old Norman estuary, one of the essential points, one of the original centres around which our French nationality was formed, is completed by those two forces, one in full view, alive, known to all, the new port commanding the ocean and opening on the world; the other dim and obscure, unknown and all the more