CHAPTER XXII

HELLIER’S chambers in Clifford’s Inn were a part of the past. So was the staircase that led to them.

Generations of lawyers and rats and the fogs of two hundred or so Novembers had left their traces on wall and ceiling, on floors that sagged, and stairs that groaned, and doors that jammed, and chimneys that smoked.

On windy nights one heard all sorts of quaint arguments in the chimney and behind the wainscoting. Steps of defunct lawyers sounded in the passage outside and sitting by the flickering fire-light before the lamp was lit you might, were you an imaginative man, have heard or seen pretty much anything your fancy willed.

The rooms had a smell of their own, quite peculiar to themselves and not unpleasant to an antiquarian mind.

A smell of must, or was it rats, or was it dead and gone lawyers? a faint, faint perfume, which, if one could bottle, one might label “Clifford’s Inn,” just as M. Warrick labels his productions, “Ess Bouquet,” or “New-mown Hay.”

Hellier’s sitting-room was a comfortable enough place despite the doors that would not open except when kicked, or at their own caprice, the skeleton-suggesting cupboards, the creaking floor and the sounds and scents of age.

There were plenty of books for one thing, a few good engravings, a comfortable easy chair, a hospitable-looking tobacco jar, a cigar cabinet not too big and not too small, a bright brass kettle on the hob, a canister of green tea in one of the musty-fusty smelling cupboards and a tantalus case on the table where Archbald’s Lunacy reposed from its labours of teaching under a volume of Baudelaire.

Evidently it was the room of a barrister with tastes of his own.

Hellier, since leaving Boulogne some weeks ago, with the dossier of the Lefarge case in his pocket, had spent some days in Paris.

He had gone into the case with that thoroughness which a man only exhibits when urged by either of the two great motive powers of life, ambition or love.

He had obtained an introduction to M. Hamard, he had interviewed the detectives who had been engaged on the case, he had pored over files of newspapers, and from M. Hamard, from the detectives, from the printed reports, he had obtained only the one dreary and reiterated statement: “M. Lefarge is guilty. The case admits of no other verdict. The thing is conclusively proved and the affair is closed.”

He had returned to London and there again carefully sifted the evidence alone in his rooms in Clifford’s Inn. Reviewing the whole matter, he could not but come to the conclusion arrived at by M. Hamard, the detectives and the newspapers. He could not but say to himself: “However much I wish to believe the contrary, I must believe what is the fact. M. Lefarge was guilty of as cruel and calculated and cold-blooded a murder as was ever committed by man.”

This was bad, for his love for Cécile Lefarge had grown into a passion. One talks and laughs about heartache, but heartache is a pain beside which all other pains are trifles. To be possessed by the image of a woman, to love her and to know that she returns one’s love, to be separated from her, to live without her and without assured hope of possessing her is the cruellest torture ever inflicted by an all-wise Providence on man.

Love is not blind, it confers the brightest and clearest vision to the person it possesses. Hellier knew quite well, knew for a certainty, that, till this cloud was cleared from her father’s name, Cécile Lefarge would never marry.

She was the daughter of an assassin. He was quite prepared to forget the fact. She could never do so. It was a penalty laid upon her by fate and she would not palter with the fact, and unless her father’s name was, by some miracle, cleared, she would go to her grave as she was, upheld by that iron determination which women alone possess when the passions are concerned and which is at once the most beautiful and the most terrible trait in women.

And the thing was hopeless, for M. Lefarge’s name could never be cleared, so Hellier told himself, as he sat gloomily over the fire in his sitting-room at Clifford’s Inn.

During his research in Paris he had come across several facts in connexion with the case that struck him especially.

One was that the head of the murdered man, Müller, had never been recovered.

Another was of a different nature. In a copy of the Petit Journal, dated some weeks after the day upon which the Lefarge tragedy had occurred, he had come across the details of a murder committed in the neighbourhood of Montmartre. The victim was an old man named Mesnier; he had been killed in a most brutal manner and for no object apparently.

Mesnier lived in the Rue d’Antibes, a squalid street near the Moulin Rouge. A man had been seen leaving his room and, as Mesnier had no visitors as a rule, and the man had been seen leaving the room within a very short time after the assassination occurred, the man was presumably the criminal.

Alphonse Karr, the witness, an ex-waiter of the Théatre-Concert Européen of Montmartre, said that he would have sworn that this man was Wilhelm Müller, whom he had often seen at the chat noir, only for the fact that he knew that Müller was dead.

This paragraph greatly interested Hellier and he searched on through the files of the Petit Journal in hopes of finding more details of the case. He found none.

But he found a headline that interested him in a copy of the Petit Journal, dated some days after the murder of Mesnier. It ran:

“Another motiveless murder.”

It related to the murder of a woman named Sabatier, who had been found strangled in a field near Paris.

There was no possible motive for the crime, the woman had a purse in her hand containing twenty-five francs. The purse had not been taken, no violence had been done to her, if we except the fact that she had been strangled as though by some violent maniac.

“This case,” said the Petit Journal, “recalls that of the old man, Mesnier, recorded by us some days since, in each the victim was strangled, evidently by the grip of a powerful hand; in each there was no motive for the crime, for it will be remembered that Mesnier had received his quarterly annuity and the money, a fairly large sum, was lying intact upon the table.”

Hellier, just by chance before dropping the file of the paper, turned a page, and came upon the detail of another crime.

A child had been strangled on the high road leading to Villeneuve St George’s, in the broad light of day.

A labourer had seen the occurrence from a distance. He saw the figure of a man, he saw the child. He thought the man was playing with the child. Then he saw the child lying on the high road and the man running away across a field. He could give no definite description of the man. He was about the middle height and dressed in dark clothes.

The case recalled the Sabatier case and the case of Mesnier.

Hellier searched on through the files of the paper. There was nothing more. The assassin had vanished and was never captured, no similar crimes were recorded. All these crimes had most probably been committed by the same man. They ceased suddenly and were not repeated, they had been committed for no apparent reason, most probably by some lunatic, whose mania was destruction.

What had become of the lunatic, why had this sudden mania seized him? why had it suddenly ceased? These questions were never answered. The thing was one of those unsolved mysteries, with which the pigeon-holes of the prefecture are stocked.

Hellier searched no more. The fact that Karr, the ex-café waiter, had fancied a resemblance between the supposed assassin and Müller, the fact of the similarity between the three crimes lay in his memory but they did not stir his imagination.

Even love could not hide from him the fact that Lefarge was guilty and Müller dead, and Cécile Lefarge the daughter of an assassin.