"There is something here, gentlemen, which I do not understand."
Mr. Ricardo heard some one beside him draw a deep breath, and turned. Wethermill stood at his elbow. A faint colour had come back to his cheeks, his eyes were fixed intently upon Hanaud’s face.
"What do you think?" he asked; and Hanaud replied brusquely:
"It’s not my business to hold opinions, monsieur; my business is to make sure."
There was one point, and only one, of which he had made every one in that room sure. He had started confident. Here was a sordid crime, easily understood. But in that room he had read something which had troubled him, which had raised the sordid crime on to some higher and perplexing level.
"Then M. Fleuriot after all might be right?" asked the Commissaire timidly.
Hanaud stared at him for a second, then smiled.
"L’affaire Dreyfus?" he cried. "Oh la, la, la! No, but there is something else."
What was that something? Ricardo asked himself. He looked once more about the room. He did not find his answer, but he caught sight of an ornament upon the wall which drove the question from his mind. The ornament, if so it could be called, was a painted tambourine with a bunch of bright ribbons tied to the rim; and it was hung upon the wall between the settee and the fireplace at about the height of a man’s head. Of course it might be no more than it seemed to be-a rather gaudy and vulgar toy, such as a woman like Mme. Dauvray would be very likely to choose in order to dress her walls. But it swept Ricardo’s thoughts back of a sudden to the concert-hall at Leamington and the apparatus of a spiritualistic show. After all, he reflected triumphantly, Hanaud had not noticed everything, and as he made the reflection Hanaud’s voice broke in to corroborate him.
"We have seen everything here; let us go upstairs," he said. "We will first visit the room of Mlle. Celie. Then we will question the maid, Helene Vauquier."