Wyllard's Weird: A Novel

by M. E. Braddon

"Because she was the only witness of his crime. She alone would have the power to identify him as the murderer."

"You forget that it is just that power which the poor girl lost during her illness. The fever deprived her of memory."

"That effect of the fever may not have been permanent. The agitation which she showed at the mention of her aunt's name—when Sister Gudule questioned her about the silk handkerchief given to her by Marie Prévol—would indicate that memory was not a blank. And again, if she had forgotten the person of the murderer, or even the fact of the murder, he would not know that, and would regard her existence as a source of danger to himself."

Félix Drubarde smiled the superior smile of experience reproving folly.

"And you think that after having allowed this one witness of his crime to exist unmolested for ten years, the assassin all at once took it into his head to murder her; that with this view he carried her to your barbarous province of Cornuailles, and there flung her over an embankment. I am tempted to paraphrase the Scripture, Monsieur, and to exclaim, 'Are there not viaducts and embankments in this vast France of ours, that a man should go to the remote west of your little England in order to commit murder in that particular fashion!'"

Heathcote felt that the police-officer had the best of the argument.

"I grant that it would have been a clumsy method of getting rid of the girl," he said, "but murder has been clumsily done before to-day, and imagination can conceive no crime so improbable as not to be paralleled by fact. However, it is perhaps too soon to speculate that the murderer of Marie Prévol was also the murderer of Léonie Lemarque. What we have to do is to find out the reason of the girl's journey to England. But before we set about that task, I should like you to tell me what steps you took in your endeavour to trace the murderer after the examination before the Juge d'Instruction."

"I looked over the case in my note-book last night, as I was prepared for you to ask for those details," replied Drubarde. "It was a case that interested me profoundly, all the more so, perhaps, because I made so little headway in my investigations. My first endeavour was to trace the murderer's proceedings immediately after the crime. He must have made his escape from Saint-Germain somehow, unless he had killed himself in some obscure corner of the wood. Even then the finding of the body would have been a question of so many days, weeks, or months. Alive, it would have been impossible for him to remain in hiding in the forest for a week, as the wood was searched thoroughly during the three days immediately succeeding the murder. On the third day a hat was found in a boggy bit of ground, ever so far from the scene of the crime. The hat was a gentleman's hat, but it had been lying three days and nights in a bog. It had been rained upon for two days out of the three—there was no maker's name—no indication by which the owner of the hat could be traced. That it had been found so far off seemed to me to prove that the murderer had been roaming the wood in a wild and disordered frame of mind, and walking at a tremendous pace, or he could never have got over the distance between the time when he was seen by the waiter at the Henri Quatre, to turn the corner of the terrace, and the period of the murder."

"You believe, then, that the man seen by the waiter was actually the murderer?"

"I have no doubt of it. That spasmodic walk, that hesitancy, the looking back, and then hurrying on—all these indicated a mind engaged upon some agitating theme. The man was seen watching the window inside which Marie Prévol and her admirer were seated. He moved away when he saw himself observed. He had disguised himself as much as he could by turning up the collar of his coat; and who can doubt that this was the same man who had been seen by Léonie in the railway-station, watching Marie Prévol and her lover from behind the door of the waiting-room? The dark spectacles were part of a disguise. These are all details that point to one conclusion. The finding of the hat induced me to visit every shop in Saint-Germain where a hat could be bought. It was clear that the murderer could not have gone far from the forest bare-headed, without attracting attention. He must have procured a hat somehow; and it was not long before I ascertained that a hat had been bought late on that very evening. At a shop in an out-of-the-way corner of the town I was told that a boy, a gamin, had come in on the night of the murder, and had asked for a cloth travelling-cap. He had chosen one with flaps to protect the ears, a form of cap intended to give the utmost protection from cold. He paid for his purchase with a napoleon, and seemed in a great hurry to be gone, not even stopping to count his change. The shopkeeper had wondered at such a little ragamuffin being intrusted with a purchase of the kind. The man had been on the point of closing his shop, and therefore was quite positive as to the hour. It was his invariable habit to put up his shutters at nine o'clock, and the clock was striking as the boy came to the door of the shop, breathless and heated, as if he had been running for some distance."