Rouletabille and the Mystery of the Yellow Room Read online

  When the Green Man had come in, the innkeeper had reacted violently, but he quickly regained his composure and said:

  “I haven’t got any cider. I served my last two bottles to these gentlemen.”

  “Then give me a glass of white wine,” said the Green Man, without showing the least surprise.

  “I haven’t got any white wine either. I’m out of everything.”

  Then Père Mathieu repeated in a surly voice:

  “I haven’t got anything to drink.”

  “How is Madame Mathieu?”

  Upon hearing this question, Père Mathieu clenched his fists and rushed towards his nemesis, looking so angry that I became concerned that he might hit him. But instead, he replied:

  “She’s quite well, thank you.”

  So the young woman with the large, soft eyes whom we’d seen earlier was the wife of this loathsome, ill-mannered brute, whose jealousy seemed only to emphasize his physical ugliness.

  Slamming the door behind him, the innkeeper left the room. Mère Angenoux was still standing, leaning on her stick, the cat at her feet.

  The Green Man asked her:

  “Have you been ill, Mère Angenoux? We haven’t seen you for a week.”

  “Yes, Monsieur. I’ve only been able to get up three times to go to pray to Sainte Genevieve, our good patroness, but I’ve spent the rest of my time lying on my cot, with no one to care for me but my Holy Beast!”

  “She hasn’t left your bedside?”

  “No, neither by day nor by night.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “As I am of Our Lord in Heaven.”

  “Then how was it, Mère Angenoux, that, during night of the attack on Mademoiselle Stangerson, everyone heard the cry of your Holy Beast?”

  Mère Angenoux planted herself in front of the gamekeeper and struck the floor with her stick.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “But shall I tell you something? There are no two cats in the world that cry like that. Well, on that night, I, too, heard the cry of the Holy Beast outside—and yet, she was there, lying on my knees, and she didn’t meow once, I swear. I crossed myself when I heard that cry, just as if I’d heard the Devil himself!”

  I was looking at the gamekeeper when he asked that last question, and I am much mistaken if I didn’t detect an evil smile on his lips.

  At that moment, the noise of a loud quarrel reached us. We even thought we heard the dull sound of blows, as if someone was being beaten. The Green Man quickly rose and hurried to the side door; but it was opened by the innkeeper who appeared, and said:

  “Don’t alarm yourself, Monsieur. It’s only my wife. She’s got a toothache.” And he laughed. Then he added: “Mère Angenoux, here are some scraps for your cat.”

  He held out a bag to the old woman, who took it eagerly and went out, closely followed by her beast.

  “Then you won’t serve me?” asked the Green Man.

  Père Mathieu no longer tried to contain the expression of hatred on his face.

  “I’ve got nothing for you! Nothing! Get out!”

  The Green Man quietly refilled his pipe, lit it, bowed to us, and went out. No sooner was he over the threshold than Père Mathieu slammed the door behind him. Then, he turned toward us. His eyes were bloodshot and he was frothing at the mouth. He shook his fist at the door which he had just shut on the man he so obviously hated.

  “I don’t know who you really are,” he said, “or how you know the words ‘I’d like some blood pudding,’ but if you’re looking for the man who almost killed the Mademoiselle at the Chateau, you need look no further: it’s him!”

  After speaking these words, Père Mathieu immediately left. Rouletabille returned to the fireplace and said:

  “Now we’ll grill our steak. How do you like the cider? It’s a little tart, but I like it that way.”

  We saw no more of Père Mathieu that day. Total silence reigned at the inn when we left, after placing five francs on the table in payment for our lunch.

  Rouletabille at once set off on a three mile walk around Professor Stangerson’s estate. He halted for some ten minutes at a crossroad where the main road from Epinay to Corbeil intersected with a smaller road, black with soot, located near some charcoal-burners’ huts in the forest of Sainte Genevieve. There, he told me that the perpetrator had certainly passed that way, before entering the grounds and concealing himself in the little clump of trees because of the sooty marks he had left behind with his cheap boots.

  “So you don’t think that the gamekeeper was involved in this business?” I asked.

  “We shall see about that later,” Rouletabille replied. “For the moment, I’m not interested in what the innkeeper said. The man was obviously obsessed by his hatred. But I didn’t choose to have lunch at the Auberge du Donjon because of the Green Man.”

  After that, Rouletabille, taking great precautions, approached the small house which stood next to the main gate and was the home of Monsieur and Madame Bernier, the caretakers who had been arrested earlier. I followed him. With the skill of an acrobat, he got into the house through an upper window which had been left open. He came out ten minutes later, saying only “Good grief!”—an expression which, in his mouth, could mean many things.

  We were about to take the road leading to the Chateau, when a considerable stir at the gate attracted our attention. A carriage had just arrived and some people were coming from the Chateau to meet it. Rouletabille pointed out to me a gentleman who descended from it.

  “That’s the Chief of the Sûreté” he said. “Now we shall see what Monsieur Larsan has up his sleeve, and whether he is so much cleverer than everybody else.”

  The carriage of the Chief of the Sûreté was followed by three other vehicles containing reporters, who also sought to enter the estate. But the two gendarmes stationed at the gate had evidently received orders to refuse admission to anybody. The Chief of the Sûreté calmed their impatience by promising to give the press, that very evening, all the information he could, without interfering with the judicial investigation.

  Chapter Eleven

  In Which Frederic Larsan Explains

  How the Perpetrator Was Able To Leave

  the Yellow Room

  Among the mass of papers, legal documents, memoirs, and newspaper cuttings which I have collected relating to the Mystery of the Yellow Room, there is one particularly interesting piece. It is a report of the reconstruction that took place that afternoon in the laboratory of Professor Stangerson for Monsieur Dax, the Chief of the Sûreté.

  This report was written by Monsieur Maleine, the Investigating Magistrate’s clerk and court recorder, who, like his superior, entertained literary ambitions. This piece was to be included in a book of his memoirs, to be entitled My Investigations, which was never published. A copy of it was handed to me by Monsieur Maleine himself some time after the astonishing conclusion of this case, surely unique in judicial history.

  This memoir isn’t simply a dry transcription of questions and answers, like the previous document; Monsieur Maleine often interspersed his report with his own personal reflections, which makes it even more interesting.

  Monsieur Maleine’s Memoirs

  For the last hour, Monsieur de Marquet, the Investigating Magistrate, and I had been standing inside the Yellow Room in the company of the builder who had constructed the pavilion according to Professor Stangerson’s designs. The man had brought a workman with him. Monsieur de Marquet had the walls entirely laid bare, that is to say, he had them stripped of the saffron-colored paper which had covered them. Random blows of a pick satisfied him of the absence of any kind of secret passage. The floor and the ceiling were equally thoroughly probed. We found nothing. There was nothing to be found. Monsieur de Marquet appeared to be delighted by the results and never tired of telling the builder:

  “What a case! What a case! Mark my words, Monsieur, we’ll never find out how the perpetrator was able to get out of here!”

/>   The Magistrate was beaming because he genuinely enjoyed the puzzle, but then, he remembered that it was his duty to try to find an answer to it. So he called the Brigadier in charge of the gendarmes.

  “Brigadier,” he said, “will you please go to the Chateau and ask Professor Stangerson and Monsieur Darzac to join us in the laboratory? Bring Père Jacques too, and have two of your men fetch the caretakers.”

  Five minutes later, everyone stood in the laboratory. The Chief of the Sûreté, who had just arrived at Glandier, joined us. I was seated at Professor Stangerson’s desk, ready to take notes, when Monsieur de Marquet made the following speech—as original as it was unexpected:

  “With your permission, gentlemen, since police questioning hasn’t led us anywhere so far, we will, for this once, abandon that traditional method. I’m not going to have you appear before me one at a time. Instead, we’ll all remain here together, just as we are: Professor Stangerson, Monsieur Darzac, Père Jacques, Monsieur and Madame Bernier, Monsieur Dax, my clerk and I. And we’ll be on the same footing, as it were. The caretakers, for this occasion, may forget that they’re under arrest. We’re just going to have a conversation… Yes, a conversation. Since we’re at the scene of the crime, what else could we talk about but that crime! So let’s talk, freely, intelligently or otherwise, as long as we all speak our minds. There’s no need to worry about formalities, since they’ve been useless so far. I’ll start with a prayer to the God of Chance to inspire our conversation. Let’s begin...”

  Then, passing before me, he said in a low voice:

  “What do you think of my speech, eh? What a scene! Could you have ever thought of something like that? I’ll get an entire act out of it in my next vaudeville.”

  And he rubbed his hands together gleefully.

  I looked at Professor Stangerson. The hope he had felt after talking with the doctor, who believed that Mademoiselle Stangerson would recover from her wounds, had not erased from his noble features the signs of the great suffering which he had endured.

  That man had believed his daughter was dead, and he was still shaken over it. His soft, clear blue eyes expressed only endless sorrow. I had had many opportunities in the past to see Professor Stangerson at public ceremonies, and I had always been struck by his gaze, pure as that of a child—the dreamlike, sublime and mystical stare of geniuses and madmen.

  On those occasions, his daughter had always been at his side. It was said they were inseparable and they had been sharing the same labors for many years. This virginal young woman, who was 35 at the time, although she looked not a day older than 30, had devoted her entire life to science. Many admired the beauty of her proud features which remained intact, without a wrinkle, victorious over time and passions. Who could have predicted that, one day, I would be seated at her bedside taking notes, that I would see her, on the point of death, painfully recounting the most monstrous and most mysterious crime of my entire career? Who could have predicted that I would be, that very afternoon, listening to her despairing father trying in vain to explain how his daughter’s assailant had escaped? Why bury yourselves with work in an obscure retreat in the depths of woods, if it won’t protect you from the vicissitudes of life and death usually reserved for those who succumb to the charms of city life?11

  “Now, Professor Stangerson,” said Monsieur de Marquet, commandingly, “would you mind placing yourself exactly where you were when Mademoiselle Stangerson left you to go to her room?”

  The Professor rose and went to stand about 20 inches away from the door of the Yellow Room. He then said in an even voice, without any trace of emotion—a voice which I can only describe as a dead voice:

  “I was here. At about 11 p.m., after I had conducted a small chemical experiment in the furnace, I moved my desk to this spot, because Père Jacques, who had spent the entire evening cleaning my instruments, needed the extra space. My daughter had been working at the same desk as I. When she left to go to her room, after kissing me and bidding Père Jacques good night, she had to squeeze, with some difficulty, between the desk and the door. So I was indeed quite close to the scene of the crime.”

  “What happened to the desk?” I asked, following my superior’s orders and interjecting myself into the conversation. “When you heard the cry of ‘murder,’ followed by the gunshots, what did you do with the desk?”

  Père Jacques answered:

  “We pushed it back against the wall there, close to where it is right now, in order to get to the door.”

  I followed up my line of reasoning, even though I regarded it only as a weak hypothesis:

  “With the desk so close to the door, might not a man coming out of the Yellow Room be able to hide under it and thus not be noticed?”

  “You’re forgetting,” interrupted Professor Stangerson wearily, “that my daughter had locked and bolted her door, that it had remained fastened, that we vainly tried to force it open when we heard the noise of the struggle between the murderer and my poor child, and that we heard her cries as she was being strangled by the very fingers which left their red mark upon her throat. Quick as the attack was, we were no less quick in getting to this door which was the only thing separating us from the tragedy.”

  I stood up and went to take a closer look at the door, which I examined with the greatest care. Then I returned to my seat feeling disappointed.

  “If the lower panel of the door,” I said, “could be removed without the whole door being necessarily opened, our problem would be solved. But, unfortunately, I can confirm, after an examination of the door, that it’s made of a single piece of oak. It’s still massively strong, even after the damage inflicted upon it by those who forced it open.”

  “Yes,” said Père Jacques. “It’s an old door which we brought from the Chateau. They don’t make them like that anymore. We had to use this iron bar to pry it open, the four of us. Even Madame Bernier, brave woman that she is, helped us. It pains me to see her and her husband under arrest,” he added for the Magistrate’s benefit.

  Père Jacques had no sooner uttered these words of support and protest than tears and lamentations broke out from the two caretakers. I never saw any accused cry more bitterly. I felt quite nauseated.12 Even if they were innocent, I couldn’t understand how they could show such a lack of dignity in the face of misfortune. A composed bearing at such times is much better than tears and groans, which, more often than not, are feigned and hypocritical.

  “Enough sniveling,” said Monsieur de Marquet. “In your own interest, tell us what you were doing under the windows of the pavilion when your mistress was being attacked, for you were close to the pavilion when Père Jacques met you.”

  “We were coming to help!” they whined.

  “If only we could lay hands on that villain, we’d teach him a lesson he’d never forget!” the woman gurgled between her sobs.

  As before, we were unable to get a sensible statement out of them. They persisted in their denials and swore, by God and all the Saints in Heaven, that they were in bed when they heard the sound of the gunshot.

  “It wasn’t one, but two shots that were fired!” said the Magistrate, annoyed. “Don’t you realize that you’re lying? If you’d heard one shot, you would have heard the other.”

  “But, Monsieur, we only heard the second shot. We must’ve been asleep when the first shot was fired.”

  “I’m sure that two shots were fired,” said Père Jacques. “My revolver was fully loaded. We found two cartridges, two bullets, and heard two shots behind the door. Isn’t that right, Professor?”

  “Yes,” replied the Professor. “There were indeed two shots, one dull, the other sharp and ringing.”

  “Why do you persist in lying?” said Monsieur de Marquet to the caretakers. “Do you think the police are fools? Everything indicates that you were out and near the pavilion at the time of the attempted murder. What were you doing there? You don’t want to answer? Your very silence is proof of your complicity. And as far as I am concerned
,” he added, turning to Professor Stangerson, “I can only explain the escape of the perpetrator by the fact that he was helped by these two. As soon as the door was forced open, while you were busy taking care of your wounded daughter, Monsieur Bernier and his wife facilitated the perpetrator’s flight. He must have hid behind them, reached the window in the vestibule, and sprang out into the grounds. Monsieur Bernier then closed the window behind him and fastened the shutters, because they couldn’t have closed and fastened themselves. That’s my theory. If anyone here has any other idea, let him state it.”

  Professor Stangerson intervened:

  “What you say is impossible, Monsieur. I don’t believe in either the guilt or the complicity of my caretakers, even though I confess I don’t understand what they were doing in the grounds at that late hour of the night. I say it’s impossible, purely because Madame Bernier held the lamp and didn’t move from the threshold of the Yellow Room, and also because, as soon as the door was forced open, I threw myself on my knees beside my daughter. Therefore, no one could have left or entered the room by that door without stepping over her body and pushing me out of the way! Finally, it’s also impossible because Père Jacques and Monsieur Bernier could cast a single glance around the room and under the bed, as I had done myself on entering, and see that there was nobody there, except my daughter lying on the floor.”

  “What do you think, Monsieur Darzac?” asked the Magistrate. “You’ve said nothing so far.”

  Monsieur Darzac replied that he had no thoughts on this matter.

  Monsieur Dax, the Chief of the Sûreté, who, until then, had only been listening and looking at the room, deigned to speak at last:

  “While we look for the perpetrator, we should also find out what his motive was. Perhaps that might advance us a little?”

  “Certainly,” said Monsieur de Marquet. “The attempt on Mademoiselle Stangerson’s life seems to me to have been motivated by strong passion. The footprints left behind by the perpetrator, the common handkerchief and the awful béret indicate that he must belong to one of the lower classes of society. Perhaps the caretakers might have more light to throw on this subject…”