“I’ve been trying to find out all the time that we’ve been chatting . . . and I’ve just discovered the way.”
“Here?”
“This minute; and I expected no less from Ya-Bon. The woman told him of a place in the cabin—look, that open drawer, probably—in which there was a visiting-card with an address on it. Ya-Bon took it and, in order to let me know, pinned the card to the curtain over there. I had seen it already; but it was only this moment that I noticed the pin that fixed it, a gold pin with which I myself fastened the Morocco Cross to Ya-Bon’s breast.”
“What is the address?”
“Amédée Vacherot, 18, Rue Guimard. The Rue Guimard is close to this, which makes me quite sure of the road they took.”
The two men at once went away, leaving the woman’s dead body behind. As Don Luis said, the police must make what they could of it.
As they crossed Berthou’s Wharf they glanced at the recess and Don Luis remarked:
“There’s a ladder missing. We must remember that detail. Siméon has been in there. He’s beginning to make blunders too.”
The car took them to the Rue Guimard, a small street in Passy. No. 18 was a large house let out in flats, of fairly ancient construction. It was two o’clock in the morning when they rang.
A long time elapsed before the door opened; and, as they passed through the carriage-entrance, the porter put his head out of his lodge: