Гастон Леру – The Mystery of the Yellow Room (страница 4)

The editor of the Matin added to this interview the following lines:

We have, without interrupting him, allowed Daddy Jacques to recount to us roughly all he knows about the crime of the Yellow Room. We have reproduced it in his own words, only sparing the reader the continual lamentations with which he garnished his narrative. It is quite understood, Daddy Jacques, quite understood, that you are very fond of your masters; and you want them to know it, and never cease repeating it—especially since the discovery of your revolver. It is your right, and we see no harm in it. We should have liked to put some further questions to Daddy Jacques—Jacques-Louis Moustier—but the inquiry of the examining magistrate, which is being carried on at the château, makes it impossible for us to gain admission at the Glandier; and, as to the oak wood, it is guarded by a wide circle of policemen, who are jealously watching all traces that can lead to the pavilion, and that may perhaps lead to the discovery of the assassin.

We have also wished to question the concierges, but they are invisible. Finally, we have waited in a roadside inn, not far from the gate of the château, for the departure of Monsieur de Marquet, the magistrate of Corbeil. At half-past five we saw him and his clerk and, before he was able to enter his carriage, had an opportunity to ask him the following question:

‘Can you, Monsieur de Marquet, give us any information as to this affair, without inconvenience to the course of your inquiry?’

‘It is impossible for us to do it,’ replied Monsieur de Marquet. ‘I can only say that it is the strangest affair I have ever known. The more we think we know something, the further we are from knowing anything!’

We asked Monsieur de Marquet to be good enough to explain his last words; and this is what he said—the importance of which no one will fail to recognize:

‘If nothing is added to the material facts so far established, I fear that the mystery which surrounds the abominable crime of which Mademoiselle Stangerson has been the victim will never be brought to light; but it is to be hoped, for the sake of our human reason, that the examination of the walls, and of the ceiling of the Yellow Room—an examination which I shall tomorrow intrust to the builder who constructed the pavilion four years ago—will afford us the proof that may not discourage us. For the problem is this: we know by what way the assassin gained admission—he entered by the door and hid himself under the bed, awaiting Mademoiselle Stangerson. But how did he leave? How did he escape? If no trap, no secret door, no hiding place, no opening of any sort is found; if the examination of the walls—even to the demolition of the pavilion—does not reveal any passage practicable—not only for a human being, but for any being whatsoever—if the ceiling shows no crack, if the floor hides no underground passage, one must really believe in the Devil, as Daddy Jacques says!’

And the anonymous writer in the Matin added in this article—which I have selected as the most interesting of all those that were published on the subject of this affair—that the examining magistrate appeared to place a peculiar significance to the last sentence: ‘One must really believe in the Devil, as Jacques says.’

The article concluded with these lines:

We wanted to know what Daddy Jacques meant by the cry of the Bête du bon Dieu. The landlord of the Donjon Inn explained to us that it is the particularly sinister cry which is uttered sometimes at night by the cat of an old woman—Mother Angenoux, as she is called in the country. Mother Angenoux is a sort of saint, who lives in a hut in the heart of the forest, not far from the grotto of Sainte-Geneviève.

The Yellow Room, the Bête du bon Dieu, Mother Angenoux, the Devil, Sainte-Geneviève, Daddy Jacques—here is a well entangled crime which the stroke of a pickaxe in the wall may disentangle for us tomorrow. Let us at least hope that, for the sake of our human reason, as the examining magistrate says. Meanwhile, it is expected that Mademoiselle Stangerson—who has not ceased to be delirious and only pronounces one word distinctly, ‘Murderer! Murderer!’—will not live through the night.’

In conclusion, and at a late hour, the same journal announced that the Chief of the Sûreté had telegraphed to the famous detective, Frédéric Larsan, who had been sent to London for an affair of stolen securities, to return immediately to Paris.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH JOSEPH ROULETABILLE APPEARS FOR THE FIRST TIME

I REMEMBER as well as if it had occurred yesterday, the entry of young Rouletabille into my bedroom that morning. It was about eight o’clock and I was still in bed reading the article in the Matin relative to the Glandier crime.

But, before going further, it is time that I present my friend to the reader.

I first knew Joseph Rouletabille when he was a young reporter. At that time I was a beginner at the Bar and often met him in the corridors of examining magistrates, when I had gone to get a ‘permit to communicate’ for the prison of Mazas, or for Saint-Lazare. He had, as they say, ‘a good nut’. He seemed to have taken his head—round as a bullet—out of a box of marbles, and it is from that, I think, that his comrades of the press—all determined billiard-players—had given him that nickname, which was to stick to him and be made illustrious by him. He was always as red as a tomato, now gay as a lark, now grave as a judge. How, while still so young—he was only sixteen and a half years old when I saw him for the first time—had he already won his way on the press? That was what everybody who came into contact with him might have asked, if they had not known his history. At the time of the affair of the woman cut in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to one of the editors of the Epoque—a paper then rivalling the Matin for information—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it. To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of a number engaged by the administration of the city of Paris, owing to an overflow of the Seine.

When the editor-in-chief was in possession of the precious foot and informed as to the train of intelligent deductions the boy had been led to make, he was divided between the admiration he felt for such detective cunning in a brain of a lad of sixteen years, and delight at being able to exhibit, in the ‘morgue window’ of his paper, the left foot of the Rue Oberskampf.

‘This foot,’ he cried, ‘will make a great headline.’

Then, when he had confided the gruesome packet to the medical lawyer attached to the journal, he asked the lad, who was shortly to become famous as Rouletabille, what he would expect to earn as a general reporter on the Epoque?

‘Two hundred francs a month,’ the youngster replied modestly, hardly able to breathe from surprise at the proposal.

‘You shall have two hundred and fifty,’ said the editor-in-chief; ‘only you must tell everybody that you have been engaged on the paper for a month. Let it be quite understood that it was not you but the Epoque that discovered the left foot of the Rue Oberskampf. Here, my young friend, the man is nothing, the paper everything.’

Having said this, he begged the new reporter to retire, but before the youth had reached the door he called him back to ask his name. The other replied:

‘Joseph Josephine.’

‘That’s not a name,’ said the editor-in-chief, ‘but since you will not be required to sign what you write it is of no consequence.’

The boy-faced reporter speedily made himself many friends, for he was serviceable and gifted with a good humour that enchanted the most severe-tempered and disarmed the most zealous of his companions. At the Bar café, where the reporters assembled before going to any of the courts, or to the Prefecture, in search of their news of crime, he began to win a reputation as an unraveller of intricate and obscure affairs which found its way to the office of the Chief of the Sûreté. When a case was worth the trouble and Rouletabille—he had already been given his nickname—had been started on the scent by his editor-in-chief, he often got the better of the most famous detective.

It was at the Bar café that I became intimately acquainted with him. Criminal lawyers and journalists are not enemies, the former need advertisement, the latter information. We chatted together, and I soon warmed towards him. His intelligence was so keen, and so original! And he had a quality of thought such as I have never found in any other person.

Some time after this I was put in charge of the law news of the Cri du Boulevard. My entry into journalism could not but strengthen the ties which united me to Rouletabille. After a while, my new friend being allowed to carry out an idea of a judicial correspondence column, which he was allowed to sign ‘Business’, in the Epoque, I was often able to furnish him with the legal information of which he stood in need.