“Some one else.”
“It’s a lie!”
“It’s the truth. From the beginning to the end of this business, Marescal, you’ve been mistaken. When I saved this young lady at Beaucourt Station I did not know her. I had only seen her having tea at the confectioner’s on the Boulevard Haussmann and then talking to you on the pavement. It was only at Sainte-Marie that we had a few talks. Now, during those interviews she always avoided any allusion to the murders on the express; and I never questioned her about them. The truth has been established, without her having anything to do with it, thanks to my strenuous efforts, and thanks above all to my conviction, instinctive but as weighty as actual reasoning, that, with a face of that innocence, she was no criminal.”
Marescal shrugged his shoulders with an incredulous air, but did not protest. In spite of everything he was curious to know how this strange person interpreted the facts of the case.
He looked at his watch and smiled. Philippe and the big policemen from Headquarters were drawing near.
Bregeac listened without understanding and stared at Ralph. Aurelie’s anxious eyes never quitted his face. [[226]]
He began, employing, without being aware of it, the words used by Marescal.
“On the twenty-sixth of last April car number five of the Marseilles express was occupied by only four persons. An English woman, of the name of Miss Bakersfield——”
He stopped short suddenly, reflected for some seconds, and began again firmly: “No: that is not the way in which to set out the facts. It is necessary to go further back, to the very source of those facts and to unfold the whole affair, or rather what one might call the two periods in the affair. I ignore certain details in it; but what I do know, along with what one can suppose with practical certainty, is enough to make it clear and connect the facts together without a break.” He paused, then went on more slowly: “About eighteen years ago—I repeat the number Marescal—eighteen years—that is the first period in the story—eighteen years ago at Cherbourg four young men used to meet one another at different cafés with a certain regularity, one of the name of Bregeac, secretary at the Commissariat Maritime, one of the name of Jacques Ancivel, one of the name of Loubeaux, and a fellow of the name of Jodot. The relations between the four were not very intimate and they did not last long, since the last three of them came to loggerheads with the law and the official position of the first, that is to say of Bregeac, did not allow him to frequent [[227]]their society any longer. Moreover, Bregeac married and went to live at Paris.
“He had married a widow, the mother of a little girl called Aurelie d’Asteux. His wife’s father, Etienne d’Asteux, was an old eccentric who lived in the country, an inventor, an inquirer always on the lookout for new facts and who, several times, had just missed acquiring a great fortune or discovering a great secret which gives you a great fortune. Now, some time before the marriage of his daughter with Bregeac, he appeared to have discovered one of those miraculous secrets. At least he lays claim to having done so in the letters he wrote to his daughter; and to prove it to her, he made her come, with the little Aurelie, to visit him. The journey was kept secret but unfortunately Bregeac learned about it, not much later, as Mademoiselle thinks, but almost immediately. He questioned his wife about it. Keeping silent about the essential facts, as she had sworn to her father to do, and refusing to tell him the place they had been to, she made certain admissions which led Bregeac to believe that Etienne d’Asteux had buried a treasure somewhere. Where? And why not reap the benefit of it now?