The Woman of Mystery

by Maurice Leblanc

It yielded nothing. There was no possibility of discovering the least clue to the manner in which the murderer had made his way first into the park, next into the ruins and lastly into the bedroom. As no civilian had passed, were they to conclude that the perpetrator of the two crimes was one of the privates of the 3rd company? Obviously not. And yet what other theory was there to adopt?

Nor did Paul discover anything to tell him of his wife's death or of the place where she was buried. And this was the hardest trial of all.

He encountered the same ignorance among the German wounded as among the prisoners. They had all heard of the execution of a man and two women, but they had all arrived after the execution and after the departure of the troops that occupied the château.

He went on to the village, thinking that they might know something there; that the inhabitants had some news to tell of the lady of the château, of the life she led, of her martyrdom and death. But Ornequin was empty, with not a woman even, not an old man left in it. The enemy must have sent all the inhabitants into Germany, doubtless from the start, with the manifest object of destroying every witness to his actions during the occupation and of creating a desert around the château.

Paul in this way devoted three days to the pursuit of fruitless inquiries.

"And yet," he said to Bernard, "Élisabeth cannot have disappeared entirely. Even if I cannot find her grave, can I not find the least trace of her existence? She lived here. She suffered here. I would give anything for a relic of her."

They had succeeded in fixing upon the exact site of the room in which she used to sleep and even, in the midst of the ruins, the exact heap of stones and plaster that remained of it. It was all mixed up with the wreckage of the ground-floor rooms, into which the first-floor ceilings had been precipitated; and it was in this chaos, under the pile of walls and furniture reduced to dust and fragments, that one morning he picked up a little broken mirror, followed by a tortoise-shell hair-brush, a silver pen-knife and a set of scissors, all of which had belonged to Élisabeth.

But what affected him even more was the discovery of a thick diary, in which he knew that his wife, before her marriage, used to note down her expenses, the errands or visits that had to be remembered and, occasionally, some more private details of her life. Now all that was left of her diary was the binding, with the date, 1914, and the part containing the entries for the first seven months of the year. All the sheets for the last five months had been not torn out but removed separately from the strings that fastened them to the binding.

Paul at once thought to himself:

"They were removed by Élisabeth, removed at her leisure, at a time when there was no hurry and when she merely wished to use those pages for writing on from day to day. What would she want to write? Just those more personal notes which she used formerly to put down in her diary between the entry of a disbursement and a receipt. And as there can have been no accounts to keep since my departure and as her existence was nothing but a hideous tragedy, there is no doubt that she confided her distress to those pages, her complaints, possibly her shrinking from me."