“You are correct in thinking that the British authorities have reasons for not taking proceedings against you. Therefore, they propose to let you return to your own country.”
“And give up my Club? Abandon my good fortune at its height? I am not a very great fool, Sir Frank Tarleton.”
My chief raised a finger. Captain Charles sounded his whistle and Brigadier Samson stepped through the door.
Slowly the woman recoiled on herself, seeming actually to grow smaller in the act. The Brigadier gave her a careless nod.
“You have dyed your hair, Leonie Marchand, since I saw you last, but you haven’t changed your finger-print, you know. And you are still wanted for the murder in the Rue Lausanne.”
It was not a woman, it was a wild cat that sprang at Sir Frank with tearing nails and spitting teeth. I was just too late, but the French detective who knew the nature of the animal, was just in time; and he wasn’t hampered by any false sentiment. His methods were not particularly pleasant to watch, but they were effective. I think Charles rather envied him.
The methods of the French criminal courts also seem to be effective. At all events when I read the newspaper report of the trial at which Leonie Marchand was sentenced to imprisonment for life, it contained no hint of any scandal about any royal personage.
Sir Frank Tarleton was none the worse for the little shock he had experienced, and for which he rather blamed himself afterwards. He ought not to have waited to see the arrest, he admitted to me, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to see the real woman come out. He hadn’t liked the sight.
“It lay between Madame and you from the first, as far as I could see,” he explained to me, as we were walking away together down Tarifa Road. “I never believed the waiter’s story for a moment. The idea that a man who knew his life to be in danger would go on coming to the Club and trust to a foreign waiter to prevent him from being poisoned, was ridiculous in my eyes. It was clear that the story had been put into his mouth by someone; and when Madame told a similar story, about Weathered having asked her to pour out his drinks herself, it was easy to see who was the inventor. It was a case of cleverness over-reaching itself. The theory that Weathered had been poisoned by one of his patients whom he was blackmailing was quite plausible in itself; as we know, it was very nearly being the true theory. If she had left it there and confined herself to saying what she said to Mrs. Weathered, that she knew he had enemies in the Club who would be glad of his death, I might not have suspected her. But when she took such pains to represent the whole place as a nest of assassins with herself and Gerard as guardian angels watching over the threatened man, I began to smell a rat.
“I had no suspicion of Mrs. Weathered; I don’t see how I could have had at that stage. Madame Bonnell’s motives were just what would make a woman of her stamp commit a crime. Sarah Neobard put it in a nutshell when she said she was a woman who would do anything for money. The Domino Club was doing well, and Weathered wasn’t necessary to it any longer. In fact, he was beginning to be in the way. She spoke the truth, probably, in saying that she lived in fear of a scene of some kind. At the same time, I doubt if she would ever have ventured to poison him herself if the means hadn’t been put into her hands. Here is the real murderer.”