The count agreed with a nod. Once again, the young man was teaching his elders. M. Filleul showed himself a good sportsman.
“There’s no doubt about it, my dear sir,” he exclaimed. “I’m beginning to think your school-fellows were not quite wrong. By Jove, what an eye! What intuition! If this goes on, there will be nothing left for M. Ganimard and me to do.”
“Oh, none of this part was so very complicated!”
“You mean to say that the rest was more so I remember, in fact, that, when we first met you seemed to know all about it. Let me see, a far as I recollect, you said that you knew the name of the murderer.”
“So I do.”
“Well, then, who killed Jean Daval? Is the man alive? Where is he hiding?”
“There is a misunderstanding between us, Monsieur le Juge d’Instruction, or, rather, you have misunderstood the facts from the beginning The murderer and the runaway are two distinct persons.”
“What’s that?” exclaimed M. Filleul. “The man whom M. de Gesvres saw in the boudoir and struggled with, the man whom the young ladies saw in the drawing-room and whom Mlle. de Saint-Véran shot at, the man who fell in the park and whom we are looking for: do you suggest that he is not the man who killed Jean Daval?”
“I do.”
“Have you discovered the traces of a third accomplice who disappeared before the arrival of the young ladies?”