The de Bercy Affair

The cab was at the door. She put out her hand, and he shook it; but did not offer to escort her inside the house. It was Furneaux who led her up the steps, and Osborne heard from within a shrill outcry from Mrs. Marsh. Furneaux waited until the door was closed. Then he rejoined Osborne. They went, without exchanging a syllable of talk, to Marlborough Street police-station, where Janoc and his sister were already lodged. Arrived there, Furneaux formally arrested him, "on suspicion," charged with the murder of Rose de Bercy.

"But why now?" asked Osborne again. "What has happened to implicate me now more than before?"

"Oh, many things have happened, and will happen, that as yet you know nothing of," said Furneaux, smiling at the stolid station inspector, a man incapable of any emotion, even of surprise, and Osborne was led away to be searched for concealed weapons, or poison, before being placed in a cell.

Half an hour afterwards Furneaux walked into Winter's quarters. His chief, writing hard, hardly glanced up, and for some time Furneaux stood looking at his one-time friend with the eyes of a scientist who contemplates a new fossil.

"Well, I have Osborne safe," he said at last.

"You have, have you?" muttered Winter, scribbling rapidly; but a flush of anger rose on his forehead, and he added: "It will cost you your reputation, my good fellow!"

"Is that all?" cried Furneaux mockingly. "Why, I was looking out for worse things than that!"

Winter threw down his pen.

"You informed me last night," he snarled, "that by this hour Miss Marsh would have returned to her home. I need not ask – "

"I have just taken her there," remarked the other coolly.

Winter was thoroughly nonplused. Everybody, everything, seemed to be mad. He was staring at Furneaux when Clarke entered. The newcomer's hat was tilted a little backward, and there was an air of business-like haste in him from the creak of his boot soles to the drops of perspiration shining on his brow. He contrived to hold himself back just long enough to say, "Hello, Furneaux!" and then his burden of news broke from him:

"Well, I've got Janoc under lock and key all right."

"Oh, you've got somebody, too, have you?" groaned Winter. "And on what charge, pray, have you collared Janoc?"

"Why, what a question!" cried Clarke. "Didn't I tell you, sir – ?"

"So true," said Winter; "I had almost forgotten. You've grabbed Janoc, and the genius of Mr. Furneaux is sated by arresting Mr. Osborne – "

Clarke slapped his thigh vigorously, doubling up in a paroxysm of laughter.

"Osborne! Oh, not Osborne at this time of day!" He leered at Furneaux in comic wonder – he, who had never dared question aught done by the little man, save in the safe privacy of his thoughts.

"And I have arrested Pauline," said Winter in grim irony.

"Who has?" asked Clarke, suddenly agape.

"I, I say. Pauline is my prize. I wouldn't be left out in the cold." And he added bitterly: "We've all got one! —all guilty! – a lovely story it will make for the newspapers. I suppose, to keep up the screaming farce, that we each ought to contrive to have our prisoner tried in a different court!"

Clarke's hands went akimbo. He swelled visibly, grew larger, taller, and looked down from his Olympus at the others.

"But I never dream at night," he cried. "When I arrest a man for murder he is going to be hanged. You see, Janoc has confessed– that's all: he has confessed!"

Winter leaped up.

"Confessed!" he hissed, unable to believe his ears.

"That's just it," said Clarke – "confessed!"

"But Pauline has confessed, too!" Winter almost screamed, confronting his subordinate like an adversary.

And while Clarke shrank, and gaped in dumb wonder, Furneaux, looking from one to the other, burst out laughing. Never a word he said, but turned in his quick way to leave the room. He was already in the corridor when Winter shouted:

"Come back, Furneaux!"

"Not I," was the defiant retort.

"Come back, or I shall have you brought back!"

Winter was in a white rage, but Furneaux pressed on daringly, whistling a tune, and never looking round. Clarke, momentarily expecting the roof of Scotland Yard to fall in, gazed from Furneaux to Winter and from Winter to Furneaux until the diminutive Jersey man had vanished round an angle of a long passage.

But nothing happened. Winter was beaten to his knees, and he knew it.

CHAPTER XV

CLEARING THE AIR

Winter was far too strong a man to remain long buried in the pit of humiliation into which Furneaux, aided unwittingly by Clarke, had cast him. The sounds of Furneaux's jaunty footsteps had barely died away before he shoved aside the papers on which he had been engaged previously, and reached across the table for a box of cigars.

He took one, and shoved the box towards Clarke, whose face was still glistening in evidence of his rush from Marlborough Street police-station.

"Here, you crack-pate!" he said, "smoke; it may clear your silly head."

"But I can't repeat too often that Janoc has confessed —confessed!" and Clarke's voice rose almost to a squeal on that final word.

"So has his sister confessed. In an hour or two, when the silence and horror of a cell have done their work, we shall have Osborne confessing, too. Oh, man, man, can't you see that Furneaux has twisted each of us round his little finger?"

"But – sir – "

"Yes, I know," cried Winter, in a fume of wrath and smoke. "Believe these foreign idiots and we shall be hearing of a masked tribunal, glistening with daggers, a brace of revolvers in every belt – a dozen or more infuriated conspirators, cloaked in gaberdines, gathered in a West End flat, while a red-headed woman harangues them. Furneaux has fooled us, I tell you – deliberately brought the Yard into discredit – made us the laughing-stock of the public. Oh, I shall never – "

He pulled himself up, for Clarke was listening with the ears of a rabbit. Luckily, the detective's ideas were too self-concentrated to extract much food for thought from these disjointed outpourings.

"I don't wish to seem wanting in respect, sir," he said doggedly, "but have you forgotten the diary? Why, Rose de Bercy herself wrote that she would be killed either by C. E. F. or Janoc. Now – "

"Did she mention Janoc?" interrupted Winter sharply. "In what passage? I certainly have forgotten that."

Clarke, stubborn as a mule, stuck to his point, though he felt that he had committed himself.

"Perhaps I did wrong," he growled savagely, "but I couldn't help myself. You were against me all along, sir – now, weren't you?"

No answer. Winter waited, and did not even look at him.

"What was I to do?" he went on in desperation. "You took me off the job just as I was getting keen in it. Then I happened upon Janoc, and found his sister, and when I came across that blacked-out name in the diary I scraped it and sponged it until I could read what was written beneath. The name was Janoc!"

"Was it?" said Winter, gazing at him at last with a species of contempt. "And to throw dust in my eyes – in the eyes of your superior officer – you inked it out again?"

"You wouldn't believe," muttered Clarke. "Why, you don't know half this story. I haven't told you yet how I found the daggers – "