Part 14

Inspector Béchoux sped through the arched gateway of the préfecture and across a couple of courtyards, took the stairs two at a time, and dashed, without pausing to knock, into the sanctum of his chief. Pale and breathless, he stammered:

“Arsène Lupin is mixed up in the Desroques case!”

The chief gave a startled exclamation.

“Surely not!”

“I saw him myself only a little while ago, outside Desroques’ flat, and recognized him at once.”

“Don’t try and be funny, Béchoux. Nobody ever recognizes Arsène Lupin.”

“I do!” declared Béchoux. “This time he’s disguised as a private detective and calls himself Jim Barnett—you remember, the chap I told you about before, who left Paris a little while ago.”

The chief gave a slight chuckle.

“Left with Olga Vaubant of the Folies Bergère, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” assented Béchoux wrathfully. “Olga Vaubant, the singing acrobat, and my ex-wife!”

“Well,” said the chief, “what did you do when you—recognized Lupin?”

“I shadowed him.”

“Without his knowing it?” The other was frankly incredulous.

Béchoux drew himself up stiffly. “When I shadow a man, chief, he never knows it,” he declared. “All the same,” he added thoughtfully, “although the beggar was pretending to be out for a stroll, he didn’t take any chances. First he walked round the Place de l’Etoile. Then he went along the Avenue Kléber and stopped on the east side of the Rond Point du Trocadéro. Sitting on a bench there was a gipsy girl. She was a pretty piece of goods, with her black head bare in the sunshine, and her colored shawl wrapped about her. Well I watched Lupin, alias Barnett, sit down beside her, and a minute later they were talking away together, but hardly moving their lips—an old prison trick that, chief. More than once I noticed them looking up at a house on the corner of the Place du Trocadéro and the Avenue Kléber. After a while, Lupin got up and took the Metro.”

“Did you keep on shadowing him?”

“Yes—or, rather, I tried to,” said Béchoux. “But he jumped aboard a train that was just moving while I was held up in the crowd. When I got back to the bench, the gipsy girl was gone.”

“And what about the house they were looking up at?”

“That’s where I’ve just come from,” said Béchoux. He took a deep breath, and launched forth: “On the fourth floor of that house is a furnished flat where for the last month old General Desroques, Jean Desroques’ father, has been living. You remember that he came up from Limoges to defend his son when the latter was arrested and charged”—Béchoux swelled with the majesty of the law—“with abduction, illegal detention, and wilful murder!”

This repetition of the roll of crimes seemingly impressed the chief, who nodded solemnly and asked his subordinate:

“Did you call on the general?”

“I did, and he opened the door to me himself. Then I described to him the little comedy that had just been played under his windows, leaving out all mention of Arsène Lupin, of course. He was not surprised, and told me that the day before a gipsy girl had come to see him. She offered to tell his fortune and reveal the outcome of the trial. She demanded three thousand francs and said she would await his answer next afternoon in the Place du Trocadéro between two and half-past two.”

“But why should the general pay her all that money?”

“She assured him that she could get hold of the mystery photograph and let him have it.”

“What?” the chief was genuinely surprised. “You mean that photograph we’ve all been searching for and can’t find anywhere?”

“That’s it,” said Béchoux. “The photograph that would save the general’s son—or finally establish his guilt!”

Both were silent for a while. At last the chief said:

“I expect you know, Béchoux, how anxious we are to get hold of that photograph ourselves?”

Béchoux nodded.

“It means even more than you realize, though. Listen, Béchoux, if you can lay hands on that photograph it must be turned over to me before the Parquet gets wind of it.” He added in a whisper: “The Department comes first, see?...”

And, with equal seriousness and set purpose, Béchoux replied, “Chief, you shall have it. I will get it for you, and, at the same time, I will get Jim Barnett, or rather Arsène Lupin!”

Just a month before this conversation at the préfecture, Jacques Veraldy had been kept waiting for his dinner. Jacques Veraldy, one of the foremost figures in Parisian society, a man of vast wealth, one of the unscrupulous spiders that spin political webs, had waited till long past the dinner hour for the return of his wife, Christiane. But she did not come home that night, and next morning the police were called in. They soon elicited the following facts:

On the afternoon of her disappearance, Christiane Veraldy had gone for a walk in the Bois de Boulogne, near her house. On this walk she had been stopped by a well-dressed man who, after a brief conversation, had led her to a closed car, with the blinds pulled down, which was waiting in a deserted alley. They both got into the car and drove off quickly in the direction of Saint-Cloud.

None of the witnesses who came forward to describe this meeting in the Bois had been able to see the man’s face. He seemed young, they said, and they were all agreed that he wore a very smart dark-blue overcoat and a black beret.

Two days passed, and still there was no news of the missing Christiane Veraldy. Then, suddenly, the tragedy happened.

About sunset, some peasants working in the fields on the main road from Paris to Chartres noticed a car being driven at a reckless speed. Even as they watched its onrush, the car door was pushed open, and a woman fell out on the road. They rushed to her assistance. At the same time the car raced up the steep bank at the side of the road, crashed into a tree and overturned. A man sprang from it, miraculously uninjured, and dashed to where the woman lay. She was dead. Her head had struck a heap of stones in her fall. They carried her body to the nearest village and told the gendarmes what had happened.

The man made no secret of his identity. He was Député Jean Desroques, a well-known political figure, and at that time leader of the Opposition.

The dead woman was Christiane Veraldy.

Immediately trouble began brewing. The bereaved husband, thirsting for revenge rather than overcome with grief, was determined to make his supplanter, as he considered Jean Desroques, pay the penalty of the law. The accused man, on the other hand, had powerful political supporters, who strenuously denied that the leader of their party could be guilty of such a crime. These in turn brought pressure to bear on the police.

Meanwhile, the peasants, one and all, swore that they had seen a man’s arm push the woman out of the car. Nor did there seem any possible doubt that the man who had been observed talking with Madame Veraldy in the Bois was indeed Desroques. At the time of the accident Jean Desroques was wearing a dark-blue greatcoat and a black beret.

In any case, Desroques did not attempt to advance an alibi. He admitted having abducted Madame Veraldy, and acknowledged that he had detained her illegally. On the other hand, he swore that he had done all in his power to prevent her committing—suicide! For that was his explanation of the tragic occurrence.

Desroques’ account of what had happened was that he had been struggling to hold Madame Veraldy down in her seat, that the door of the car had been forced open when she flung her weight against it, and she had fallen out.

But concerning what had led up to the struggle, where they had spent the days since their meeting in the Bois, what had happened during that time, or even when and how he had first made the acquaintance of Madame Veraldy, Jean Desroques was obstinately silent.

This last point—the question of the first meeting of Desroques and the banker’s wife—remained one of the minor yet most baffling mysteries of the case, since Veraldy declared he had never, since his marriage, had anything to do with Desroques, whom he regarded as a dangerous Radical. He testified to having frequently spoken disparagingly about him to Christiane, who had invariably refrained from comment.

The examining magistrate tried in vain to get past the accused’s enigmatic barrier of reserve. The only reply his efforts elicited was:

“I have nothing to say. You can do what you like with me. Whatever happens I shall not speak another word.”

And when the police officials, one of whom was Béchoux, called at Desroques’ flat, he opened the door to them in person, saying:

“I am quite ready to come with you, gentlemen.”

Before leaving, a thorough search was made of the flat. There was a pile of ashes in the study fireplace, showing that Desroques had been burning papers. The police found nothing of any importance in the drawers of the desk or anywhere else. They took down every volume from the well-stocked bookshelves and shook them vigorously, but no telltale document fluttered out to reward their efforts. They took up the carpet and discovered nothing but dust!

While this routine search was going on, Béchoux, pursuing his own rather more intuitive methods, stood perfectly still near the door and darted a lightning glance over the room. Suddenly he swooped down on the waste-paper basket. To one side of it lay a screw of paper which might have been an advertisement leaflet.

Béchoux had it in his hands and was just smoothing it out, when Jean Desroques, who had been standing quietly by during the search of his study, sprang forward and snatched it from the detective’s hands.

“You don’t want that,” he cried, “its only an old photograph. It came off its mount and I threw it away.”

Béchoux, struck by Desroques’ eagerness to retain possession of an apparently worthless bit of rubbish that he had self-avowedly thrown away, was on the point of using force to make him give it up.

But Desroques was too quick for him. Before the detective could bar the way, he had darted into the adjoining room and slammed the door behind him.

There was a policeman on guard in the anteroom into which he had fled. When Béchoux and the others got the door open, this man had Desroques pinned on the floor. Immediately Béchoux searched his prisoner. He turned out the man’s pockets, made him take off his shoes and socks. But the unmounted photograph had disappeared!

The window was tightly shut and there was no fire in the room. The policeman stated that he had stopped Desroques when he rushed in in case he should be trying to escape, but had seen no sign of any photograph or paper.

Béchoux had a warrant for Desroques’ arrest, and, without vouchsafing a word, he went quietly off to prison.

The foregoing are the bare facts of the case which, a little while before the Great War, caused such a stir in the press and among the public of Paris. There is no need to give in detail the inquiry conducted by the examining magistrate, as it shed no light on the mystery. But there should be considerable interest in the relation for the first time of an episode which led up to certain startling disclosures and put an entirely different complexion on the case, besides marking the last encounter in the long duel between Inspector Béchoux and his “friendly enemy,” Jim Barnett, of the Barnett Agency.

The stage was set, and for once Béchoux felt happy in the possession of a little advance information as to the program. He knew what Barnett was up to—had watched his little confabulation with the gipsy girl under the windows of General Desroques’ flat. This time he intended to be first on the scene and to spoil Barnett’s entrance!

On the day after the conversation with his chief at the préfecture, Béchoux again called at General Desroques’ flat. The latter had been advised by headquarters of the inspector’s visit.

A rather corpulent, clean-shaven man-servant opened the door to Béchoux. In silence, and exuding a kind of aura of intense respectability, he ushered the inspector into the drawing-room, then softly withdrew.

Béchoux took up his stand at a window from which he could survey the entire extent of the Place du Trocadéro without himself being seen from the street. For a long while he scrutinized the people passing to and fro in the busy square below.

There was no sign of the gipsy girl, nor of the wily “Barnett” in whom Béchoux declared he had recognized Arsène Lupin.

Neither of the suspects showed up all that day, nor the day after.

During his self-imposed vigil, Béchoux sometimes had the company of General Desroques. The latter was tall, lean, grey-haired—the typical retired cavalry officer who has spent much of his life outdoors, and is in the habit of giving orders and having them promptly obeyed. Ordinarily taciturn, the general was one of those men who, when deeply moved, will lay aside some of their customary reserve. The charge against his son had wounded him terribly. Not only was he firmly convinced of Jean’s innocence, but he was certain that the young man was the victim of one of those mysterious political plots which occasionally blot the fair fame of every state.

Although undetermined as to whence the blow had come, the old man stood at bay—like a lion defending its cub.

“Jean would not, could not, do such a thing,” he declared. “The boy’s only fault is that he is over-scrupulous, absurdly quixotic. He is perfectly capable of sacrificing his own interests to some exaggerated idea of honor. He is the sort of person who would unhesitatingly shoulder a friend’s guilt and let the culprit go free. I am so sure of what I say, that I’m not going to see Jean in his cell. I won’t pay the slightest attention to what his lawyer says, or to what they print in the newspapers. Pack of lies, probably! The boy’s innocent, whether he says so or not. And I’m going to prove it, whether he likes it or not! We all have our own idea of what’s our duty. He thinks he ought to keep his mouth shut. Well and good. But I know I ought to clear his name, no matter who gets hurt in the process!”

One day, when the reporters were harrying him with questions, the general burst out:

“Do you really want to know what I think? Jean never kidnaped any one. The woman followed him of her own free will. He won’t admit it, because he is trying to shield her reputation. But if the facts come to light—and, believe me, they will—we shall find that my son and she knew each other and were probably on terms of intimacy. And I’m going to get to the bottom of things, whatever the result!”

Now, while Béchoux crouched, like Sister Anne, at his window, and kept watch on the square, the general would come in and sit near him. Then the old man would go over the case and review the deadlock reached by himself and the police.

“You and I, my friend, are after the same thing,” he would say, “but someone else is after it, too! I have friends who are in the know, and they tell me Veraldy has offered a fabulous reward to anyone who will solve the mystery of his wife’s death. He and my son’s political opponents are convinced that Jean is guilty. What we all want to find, though for very different reasons, is that photograph! Veraldy and his friends believe that if they can lay hands on it they will have proof of Jean’s guilt. I know that it will prove him innocent!”

From Béchoux’s point of view, what the photograph might or might not prove was the least of his worries. His task was limited to getting hold of it for his chief. Any possible sequel had almost ceased to interest him.

Meanwhile, day after day, he sat at his window watching for the gipsy girl who never came, filled with anguished speculation as to Barnett’s activities, and listening inattentively to the general’s eternal monologue about his hopes and plans and disappointments.

One day old Desroques seemed unusually thoughtful. He obviously imagined he had hit on a fresh clue, or, at any rate, a new factor in the tragic problem. After a prolonged silence he addressed Béchoux at his post:

“Inspector, my friends and I have come to the conclusion that the only human being who can possibly throw any light on how the photograph disappeared is the policeman who stopped my son in his flight the day he was arrested. It’s rather curious that he has never been called to give evidence. His name has never appeared in the press. In fact, but for the energetic inquiries of my friends, I should not now be in possession of”—he paused significantly—“certain information!”

Inspector Béchoux looked distinctly uncomfortable, but did not speak. The general resumed:

“We now know that this policeman was added to the group of men sent here from headquarters quite accidentally, just as they were leaving the police-station of this district on their way here. They rather doubted whether their numbers were strong enough in case my son offered violent resistance, and this policeman apparently offered to join them with some alacrity. They gladly accepted his assistance.

“My friends have not been able to ascertain the identity of that policeman. For some reason or other none of your colleagues has been willing or able to tell us. Yet we are certain that the higher officials at the préfecture know who he is, and have been questioning him daily. We have reason to believe that he has been under strict surveillance ever since the arrest of my son. That he was taken to the police-station immediately after the disappearance of the photograph and searched; that he has not been allowed home; that he is, in fact, a prisoner. And we have more than an inkling of the reason for the strict reticence of the police on his account!” The general bent nearer to Béchoux, a certain triumph overspreading his hawklike features.

Outwardly calm and indifferent, Béchoux was quaking inwardly. But he said nothing, feeling it wisest to let the general put all his cards on the table.

“What do you say,” said the general, “to the suggestion that the mysterious policeman was, to say the least of it, rather a peculiar character to have got into the police force at all? A nice story it would make for the newspapers—and not particularly creditable. Ho, ho!” He waggled a gouty finger under the inspector’s nose.

Still Béchoux was silent.

“Well,” said the general, “it isn’t going to further my son’s interests to make a laughing-stock of the police force. But what I do demand as a right is that I may be allowed to question this policeman myself. Your people haven’t been able to get anything out of him. I think I may be more successful.”

“And if I say that you cannot have this interview?” Béchoux’s voice was cold and level as chilled steel.

“In that case, inspector, I shall—regretfully, of course—communicate with the editor of a well-known daily in regard to this somewhat curious ornament of the police force!”

“No need for that, general.” Béchoux forced a smile. “There is no objection at all to your interviewing Constable Rimbourg—er, the policeman in question. I shall have pleasure in arranging for him to come along!”

In truth, Béchoux was not particularly unwilling in the matter. His own plans had proved fruitless. He was absolutely without information about Barnett’s movements, and quite in the dark as to his adversary’s connection with the case. In the past, Barnett had always met him openly, albeit under the guise of lending his aid. Barnett had even been noticeably to the fore throughout the cases on which he had “coöperated” with the inspector. Béchoux had an uneasy feeling that this time, for some reason of his own, Barnett was working under cover, ready to burst out at any moment with a startling and probably unwelcome dénouement of the whole affair. And then it would be too late to circumvent him!

His superiors gave Béchoux carte blanche to go ahead. Two days later, Sylvestre, the general’s rotund man-servant, gravely ushered Béchoux and Constable Rimbourg into the drawing-room.

The constable was a very ordinary looking man—not at all the sort of figure to suggest a mystery. His eyes and mouth betrayed his weariness. He had been put through something of a “third degree” over the missing photograph. He was in uniform, with the customary revolver in a black leather case, and the policeman’s baton—that world-wide symbol of law and order.

The general came in, and the three men sat a long while in conference. But no fresh light was shed on the problem of the photograph. Rimbourg was respectful, stolidly sympathetic, ready with his answers. But he denied having seen anything of any photograph.

Then the general changed the trend of his interrogations. Abruptly he asked:

“When did you first meet my son?”

“We did our military service together, sir,” was the surprising answer.

“You said nothing of this,” cried Béchoux.

“I was not asked about it, inspector,” replied the man.

“I must tell you, general,” said Béchoux, “that one of the reasons for our very strict surveillance of Constable Rimbourg was that he obtained his appointment through your son’s influence!”

“What?” cried the general “But it has been freely hinted that this man, Rimbourg——” He broke off, suddenly thoughtful. Then he asked the constable: “What was your profession before you joined the police force?”

“I did various odd jobs, sir. I was carpenter and scene-shifter for a touring company. I travelled round with a circus. I was lift-man in a hotel.”

“Why did you leave the hotel?”

“I tired of the job, sir.” Rimbourg’s voice was infinitely respectful, but there was a slight flicker in his eyes that belied his stolid calm.

“And you found the police force suited you?”

“Oh, perfectly, sir.”

The general gave a disheartened shrug of dismissal.

“Thank you, thank you; that will do for the present, I think,” he said. “I wish I could believe what you tell me, but frankly, I cannot help feeling you are keeping something back. Your previous acquaintance with my son is certainly an extraordinary coincidence, and I think, Inspector Béchoux, if I were you, I would investigate Constable Rimbourg’s past a bit more closely. Find out why he left that job as lift-man. And remember what I said before about the suggestion that he is, perhaps, a curious kind of constable altogether. Look up some of the cases in which he has been concerned—it might prove illuminating!” He rang the bell. “Sylvestre, give Monsieur Rimbourg a drink before he goes.” The door closed. “He’ll be quite safe with my man,” the general told Béchoux, as he poured out a glass of wine for the inspector. Then, raising his own glass:

“Here’s to my son’s speedy liberation,” he said.

For a second Béchoux could have sworn he saw a gleam of triumphant merriment in the general’s eye. A most uncalled-for emotion, surely, and yet....