The Essential Maurice Leblanc Collection. Морис Леблан
that door there," he cried to his men, pointing to a side-door on the right, the tradesmen's entrance, giving access to the back of the house. It was locked. There came no sound of movement in the house in answer to the inspector's knocking.
"Where's the concierge?" he said.
The Duke shrugged his shoulders. "There's a housekeeper, too--a woman named Victoire," he said. "Let's hope we don't find them with their throats cut."
"That isn't Lupin's way," said the inspector. "They won't have come to much harm."
"It's not very likely that they'll be in a position to open doors," said the Duke drily.
"Hadn't we better have it broken open and be done with it?"
The inspector hesitated.
"People don't like their doors broken open," he said. "And M. Gournay-Martin--"
"Oh, I'll take the responsibility of that," said the Duke.
"Oh, if you say so, your Grace," said the inspector, with a brisk relief. "Henri, go to Ragoneau, the locksmith in the Rue Theobald. Bring him here as quickly as ever you can get him."
"Tell him it's a couple of louis if he's here inside of ten minutes," said the Duke.
The policeman hurried off. The inspector bent down and searched the steps carefully. He searched the roadway. The Duke lighted a cigarette and watched him. The house of the millionaire stood next but one to the corner of a street which ran at right angles to the one in which it stood, and the corner house was empty. The inspector searched the road, then he went round the corner. The other policeman went along the road, searching in the opposite direction. The Duke leant against the door and smoked on patiently. He showed none of the weariness of a man who has spent the night in a long and anxious drive in a rickety motor-car. His eyes were bright and clear; he looked as fresh as if he had come from his bed after a long night's rest. If he had not found the South Pole, he had at any rate brought back fine powers of endurance from his expedition in search of it.
The inspector came back, wearing a disappointed air.
"Have you found anything?" said the Duke.
"Nothing," said the inspector.
He came up the steps and hammered again on the door. No one answered his knock. There was a clatter of footsteps, and Henri and the locksmith, a burly, bearded man, his bag of tools slung over his shoulder, came hurrying up. He was not long getting to work, but it was net an easy job. The lock was strong. At the end of five minutes he said that he might spend an hour struggling with the lock itself; should he cut away a piece of the door round it?
"Cut away," said the Duke.
The locksmith changed his tools, and in less than three minutes he had cut away a square piece from the door, a square in which the lock was fixed, and taken it bodily away.
The door opened. The inspector drew his revolver, and entered the house. The Duke followed him. The policemen drew their revolvers, and followed the Duke. The big hall was but dimly lighted. One of the policemen quickly threw back the shutters of the windows and let in the light. The hall was empty, the furniture in perfect order; there were no signs of burglary there.
"The concierge?" said the inspector, and his men hurried through the little door on the right which opened into the concierge's rooms. In half a minute one of them came out and said: "Gagged and bound, and his wife too."
"But the rooms which were to be plundered are upstairs," said the Duke--"the big drawing-rooms on the first floor. Come on; we may be just in time. The scoundrels may not yet have got away."
He ran quickly up the stairs, followed by the inspector, and hurried along the corridor to the door of the big drawing-room. He threw it open, and stopped dead on the threshold. He had arrived too late.
The room was in disorder. Chairs were overturned, there were empty spaces on the wall where the finest pictures of the millionaire had been hung. The window facing the door was wide open. The shutters were broken; one of them was hanging crookedly from only its bottom hinge. The top of a ladder rose above the window-sill, and beside it, astraddle the sill, was an Empire card-table, half inside the room, half out. On the hearth-rug, before a large tapestry fire-screen, which masked the wide fireplace, built in imitation of the big, wide fireplaces of our ancestors, and rose to the level of the chimney-piece-a magnificent chimney-piece in carved oak-were some chairs tied together ready to be removed.
The Duke and the inspector ran to the window, and looked down into the garden. It was empty. At the further end of it, on the other side of its wall, rose the scaffolding of a house a-building. The burglars had found every convenience to their hand-a strong ladder, an egress through the door in the garden wall, and then through the gap formed by the house in Process of erection, which had rendered them independent of the narrow passage between the Walls of the gardens, which debouched into a side-street on the right.
The Duke turned from the window, glanced at the wall opposite, then, as if something had caught his eye, went quickly to it.
"Look here," he said, and he pointed to the middle of one of the empty spaces in which a picture had hung.
There, written neatly in blue chalk, were the words:
ARSENE LUPIN
"This is a job for Guerchard," said the inspector. "But I had better get an examining magistrate to take the matter in hand first." And he ran to the telephone.
The Duke opened the folding doors which led into the second drawing-room. The shutters of the windows were open, and it was plain that Arsene Lupin had plundered it also of everything that had struck his fancy. In the gaps between the pictures on the walls was again the signature "Arsene Lupin."
The inspector was shouting impatiently into the telephone, bidding a servant wake her master instantly. He did not leave the telephone till he was sure that she had done so, that her master was actually awake, and had been informed of the crime. The Duke sat down in an easy chair and waited for him.
When he had finished telephoning, the inspector began to search the two rooms for traces of the burglars. He found nothing, not even a finger-mark.
When he had gone through the two rooms he said, "The next thing to do is to find the house-keeper. She may be sleeping still--she may not even have heard the noise of the burglars."
"I find all this extremely interesting," said the Duke; and he followed the inspector out of the room.
The inspector called up the two policemen, who had been freeing the concierge and going through the rooms on the ground-floor. They did not then examine any more of the rooms on the first floor to discover if they also had been plundered. They went straight up to the top of the house, the servants' quarters.
The inspector called, "Victoire! Victoire!" two or three times; but there was no answer.
They opened the door of room after room and looked in, the inspector taking the rooms on the right, the policemen the rooms on the left.
"Here we are," said one of the policemen. "This room's been recently occupied." They looked in, and saw that the bed was unmade. Plainly Victoire had slept in it.
"Where can she be?" said the Duke.
"Be?" said the inspector. "I expect she's with the burglars--an accomplice."
"I gather that M. Gournay-Martin had the greatest confidence in her," said the Duke.
"He'll have less now," said the inspector drily. "It's generally the confidential ones who let their masters down."
The inspector and his men set about a thorough search of the house. They found the other rooms undisturbed. In half an hour they had established the fact that the burglars had confined