The Hollow Needle | Page 7

the same trophy in the drawing room from which my niece,
Mlle. de Saint-Veran, snatched the gun. As for the chauffeur's cap, that
evidently belongs to the murderer."
M. Filleul examined certain further details in the room, put a few
questions to the doctor and then asked M. de Gesvres to tell him what
he had seen and heard. The count worded his story as follows:
"Jean Daval woke me up. I had been sleeping badly, for that matter,
with gleams of consciousness in which I seemed to hear noises, when,
suddenly opening my eyes, I saw Daval standing at the foot of my bed,

with his candle in his hand and fully dressed--as he is now, for he often
worked late into the night. He seemed greatly excited and said, in a low
voice: 'There's some one in the drawing room.' I heard a noise myself. I
got up and softly pushed the door leading to this boudoir. At the same
moment, the door over there, which opens into the big drawing room,
was thrown back and a man appeared who leaped at me and stunned me
with a blow on the temple. I am telling you this without any details,
Monsieur le Juge d'Instruction, for the simple reason that I remember
only the principal facts, and that these facts followed upon one another
with extraordinary swiftness."
"And after that?--"
"After that, I don't know--I fainted. When I came to, Daval lay
stretched by my side, mortally wounded."
"At first sight, do you suspect no one?"
"No one."
"You have no enemy?"
"I know of none."
"Nor M. Daval either?"
"Daval! An enemy? He was the best creature that ever lived. M. Daval
was my secretary for twenty years and, I may say, my confidant; and I
have never seen him surrounded with anything but love and
friendship."
"Still, there has been a burglary and there has been a murder: there
must be a motive for all that."
"The motive? Why, it was robbery pure and simple."
"Robbery? Have you been robbed of something, then?"
"No, nothing."

"In that case--?"
"In that case, if they have stolen nothing and if nothing is missing, they
at least took something away."
"What?"
"I don't know. But my daughter and my niece will tell you, with
absolute certainty, that they saw two men in succession cross the park
and that those two men were carrying fairly heavy loads."
"The young ladies--"
"The young ladies may have been dreaming, you think? I should be
tempted to believe it, for I have been exhausting myself in inquiries and
suppositions ever since this morning. However, it is easy enough to
question them."
The two cousins were sent for to the big drawing room. Suzanne, still
quite pale and trembling, could hardly speak. Raymonde, who was
more energetic, more of a man, better looking, too, with the golden
glint in her brown eyes, described the events of the night and the part
which she had played in them.
"So I may take it, mademoiselle, that your evidence is positive?"
"Absolutely. The men who went across the park were carrying things
away with them."
"And the third man?"
"He went from here empty-handed."
"Could you describe him to us?"
"He kept on dazzling us with the light of his lantern. All that I could
say is that he is tall and heavily built."
"Is that how he appeared to you, mademoiselle?" asked the magistrate,

turning to Suzanne de Gesvres.
"Yes--or, rather, no," said Suzanne, reflecting. "I thought he was about
the middle height and slender."
M. Filleul smiled; he was accustomed to differences of opinion and
sight in witnesses to one and the same fact:
"So we have to do, on the one hand, with a man, the one in the drawing
room, who is, at the same time, tall and short, stout and thin, and, on
the other, with two men, those in the park, who are accused of
removing from that drawing room objects--which are still here!"
M. Filleul was a magistrate of the ironic school, as he himself would
say. He was also a very ambitious magistrate and one who did not
object to an audience nor to an occasion to display his tactful resource
in public, as was shown by the increasing number of persons who now
crowded into the room. The journalists had been joined by the farmer
and his son, the gardener and his wife, the indoor servants of the
chateau and the two cabmen who had driven the flies from Dieppe.
M. Filleul continued:
"There is also the question of agreeing upon the way in which the third
person disappeared. Was this the gun you fired, mademoiselle, and
from this window?"
"Yes. The man reached the tombstone which is almost buried under the