"There, look, it's all in here. With this, the hideous business can be reconstructed…. There are my suspicions first and then my certainties…. Everything, everything … how to trap them and how to do for them…. You'll remember, won't you? A diary bound in drab cloth…. I'm putting it back in the safe."
Gradually his calmness returned. He pushed back the glass case, tidied a few papers, switched on the electric lamp above his bed, put out the lights in the middle of the ceiling, and asked Don Luis and Mazeroux to leave him.
Don Luis, who was walking round the room and examining the iron shutters of the two windows, noticed a door opposite the entrance door and asked the engineer about it.
"I use it for my regular clients," said Fauville, "and sometimes I go out that way."
"Does it open on the garden?"
"Yes."
"Is it properly closed?"
"You can see for yourself; it's locked and bolted with a safety bolt.
Both keys are on my bunch; so is the key of the garden gate."
He placed the bunch of keys on the table with his pocket-book and, after first winding it, his watch.
Don Luis, without troubling to ask permission, took the keys and unfastened the lock and the bolt. A flight of three steps brought him to the garden. He followed the length of the narrow border. Through the ivy he saw and heard the two policemen pacing up and down the boulevard. He tried the lock of the gate. It was fastened.