XVII
ON THE SLABS OF THE MORGUE
As he turned at the far side of the Pont St. Louis, Doctor Ardel, thecelebrated medical jurist, caught sight of M. Fuselier, the magistrate,chatting with Inspector Juve in front of the Morgue.
"I am behind-hand, gentlemen. So sorry to have made you wait."
M. Fuselier and Juve crossed the tiny court and entered thesemi-circular lecture-room, where daily lessons in medical jurisprudenceare given to the students and the head men of the detective policeforce.
Doctor Ardel, piloting his guests, did the honours.
"The place is not exactly gay; in fact, it has an ill reputation; butanyhow, gentlemen, it is at your disposition. M. Fuselier, you will beable to investigate in peace: M. Juve, you will be at liberty to put anyquestions you choose to your client."
The doctor spoke in a loud voice, emphasising each word with a jollylaugh, good natured, devoid of malice, yet making an unpleasantimpression on his two visitors less at home than he in the gruesomeabode they had just entered.
"You will excuse me," he went on, "if I leave you for a couple ofminutes to put on an overall and my rubber gloves?"
The doctor gone, the two instinctively felt a vague need to talk tocounteract the doleful atmosphere the Morgue seemed to exhale, where somany unclaimed corpses, so much human flotsam, had come to sleep underthe inquiring eyes of the crowd, before being given to the common ditch,being no more than an entry in a register and a date: "Body found so andso, buried so and so."
"Tell me, my dear Juve," asked M. Fuselier. "This morning directly I gotyour message I at once acceded to your wish and asked Ardel to have usboth here this afternoon, but I hardly understand your object. What haveyou come here for?"
Juve, with both hands in his pockets, was walking up and down before thedissecting table. At the Magistrate's question he stopped short, and,turning to M. Fuselier, replied:
"Why have I come here? I scarcely know myself. It's everything ornothing. The key to the puzzle. I tell you, M. Fuselier, things arebecoming increasingly tragic and baffling."
"How's that?"
"The part played by Josephine is less and less clear. She is Loupart'smistress; she informs against him, is fired at by him, then, accordingto Fandor, becomes in some manner his accomplice in a robbery so daringthat you must search the annals of American criminality to find itslike."
"You refer to the train affair?"
"Yes. Now, leaving Josephine on one side, we are confronted with twoenigmas. Doctor Chaleck, a man of the world, a scholar, crops up asleader of a band of criminals. What we know for certain about him isthat he fired at Josephine, that he was concerned in the affair of thedocks--no more. There remains Loupart; and about him being the realculprit we know nothing. There is no proof that he killed the woman. Inorder to prove that we should have to know who that woman is and why shewas killed, and also how. The how and why of the crime alone mightchance to give us the answer."
"What trail are you following?"
"That of the dead woman. The body we are about to examine will determineme in which quarter to direct my search."
M. Fuselier, looking at the detective with a penetrating eye, asked:
"You surely haven't the notion of suspecting Fantomas?"
"You are right, M. Fuselier," he replied. "Behind Loupart, behindChaleck, everywhere and always it is Fantomas I am looking for."
Whatever information the detective was about to impart to the magistratewas cut short by the return of Doctor Ardel. That gentleman, in donningthe uniform of the expert, had resumed an appearance of professionalgravity.
"We are going to work now, gentlemen," he announced. "I need not remindyou, of course, that the body you are about to see, that of the womanfound in the Cite Frochot, has already undergone certain changes due todecomposition, which have modified its aspect."
So saying, Dr. Ardel pressed a button and gave an attendant thenecessary order. "Be so good as to bring the body from room No. 6."
Some minutes later a folding door in the wall opened and two men pusheda truck into the middle of the hall upon which lay the corpse of theunknown.
"I now give over the dead woman to you to identify," declared DoctorArdel. "My examination has been carried out and my part as expert isover--I am ready to hand in my report."
Fuselier and Juve bent long over the slab upon which the body had beenplaced.
"Alas!" cried Juve, "how recognise anything in this countenancedestroyed by pitch? What discover in these crushed limbs, this humanform, which is now a shapeless mass?" And, turning to Dr. Ardel, hequestioned:
"Professor, what did you learn from your autopsy?"
"Nothing, or very little," replied the doctor. "Death was not due to oneblow more than another. A general effusion of blood took placeeverywhere at once."
"Everywhere at once? What do you mean by that?" questioned Juve.
"Gentlemen, that is the exact truth. In dissecting this body I wassurprised to find all the blood vessels burst, the heart, the veins, thearteries, even the lung cells. More than this, the very bones arebroken, splintered into a vast number of little pieces. Lastly, both onthe limbs and over the whole body I find a general ecchymosis, reachingfrom the top of the neck to the lower extremities."
"But," objected Juve, who feared the professor might linger overtechnical details too complex for him, "what general notion does thissuggest to you as to the cause of death?"
"A strange idea, M. Juve, and one it is not easy for me to define. Youmight say that the body of this woman had passed under the grinders of aroller! The body is 'rolled,' that is just the word, crushed all over,and there is no point where the pressure might be conjectured to havebeen greatest."
M. Fuselier looked at Juve.
"What can we deduce from that?" he asked.
"Professor Ardel demonstrates scientifically the same doubts to which arough inspection led me. How did the murderer go to work? It becomesmore and more of a mystery."
"It is so much so," declared Professor Ardel, "that even by postulatingthe worst complications I really cannot conceive of any machine capableof thus crushing a human being."
"I do not believe," declared the magistrate, "that we have any more tosee here. It is plain, Juve, that this corpse cannot furnish any cluesto you and me for the inquest."
"The corpse, no," cried Juve, "but there is something else."
Then, turning to the professor, he asked:
"Could you have brought to us the clothes this woman wore?"
"Quite easily."
From a bag that an attendant handed him Juve drew out the garments ofthe dead woman. The shoes were by a good maker, the silk stockings withopen-work embroidery, the chemise and the drawers were of fine linen andthe corset was well cut.
"Nothing," he cried, "not a mark on this linen nor even the name of theshop where it was bought."
He examined her petticoat, her bodice, a sort of elegant blouse, trimmedwith lace, and the velvet collar which had several spots of blood uponit. He then drew a small penknife from his pocket and, kneeling on thefloor, proceeded to probe the seams. Suddenly he uttered a muffledexclamation:
"Ah! What's this?" From the lining of the bodice he drew out a thin rollof paper, crumpled, stained with blood, torn unfortunately.
"Goodness of God in whom I trust--I do not wish to die with this remorse--I do not wish to risk his killing me to destroy this secret--I write this confession, I will tell him it is deposited in a safe place--yes, I was the cause of the death of that hapless actor! Yes, Valgrand paid for the crime which Gurn committed.... Yes, I sent Valgrand to the scaffold by making him pass for Gurn--Gurn who killed Lord Beltham, Gurn, who I sometimes think must be Fantomas!"
Juve read these lines in an agitated voice, and as he came to thesignature he turned pale and was obliged to stop.
"What is the matter?"
"It is signed--'Lady Beltham.'"
In order that Doctor Ardel, un
derstanding nothing of Juve's agitation,might grasp that import of the paper just discovered he would have hadto call to mind the appalling tragedy which three years before hadstirred the whole world with its bloody vicissitude and mystery, one notsolved to that hour.
"Lady Beltham!"
At that name Juve called up the whole blood-curdling past! He saw infancy the English lady[A] whose husband was murdered by the CanadianGurn, who perhaps was her lover.
And Juve, following his train of thought, pondered that he had accusedthis same lady of having, to save her lover, the very day the guillotinewas erected on the boulevard, found means to send in his stead theinnocent actor, Valgrand.
And here in connection with this affair of the Cite Frochot he foundLady Beltham involved in the puzzle of which he was so keenly seekingthe key.
Juve again read the momentous paper he had just unearthed.
"By Jove, it was plain," ran his thought, "the lady, criminal though shemight be, was first and foremost Fantomas' passionate inamorata. Andthis paper he held in his hands was the tail end of her confession--theremains of a document in which in a fit of moral distress she had avowedher remorse and made known the truth."
And taking line by line the cryptic statement, Juve asked himselffurther:
"What do these phrases signify? How extract the whole truth from thesefew words? 'I do not want him to kill me in order to destroy thatsecret'! When Lady Beltham wrote that she was angry with Gurn. Thenagain what did this other doubtful expression mean?--'Gurn who Isometimes fancy may be Fantomas.' She did not know then the preciseidentity of her lover! Oh, the wretch! To what depths had she sunk?"
Then as he put this query to himself, Juve shook from head to foot. Likea thunderclap he thought he grasped the truth he had followed soeagerly. What had become of Lady Beltham? Must he not come to theconclusion that this woman whose face had been crushed out of allrecognition by the murderer was none other than the lady? How elseexplain the discovery in her bodice of the betraying document? Who butshe could have had it in her possession? Who else could have sosedulously concealed it?
Juve read over another clause: "I will tell him it is deposited in asafe place."
Feverishly Juve took up the garments trailing on the ground, carefullyexplored the fabric, made a minute search.
"It is impossible," he thought, "that I should not find anotherdocument. The beginning of this confession--I must have it!"
All at once he stopped short in his search. "Curse it all!" And hepointed out to M. Fuselier, disguised in the lining of a loose pocket inthe petticoat--a fresh hiding place, but torn and alas! empty.
This woman had split up her confession into several portions. And if shewas killed it was certainly to strip her of these compromising papers.Well, the murderer had attained his object.
"Look, Fuselier, this empty 'cache' is the proof of what I put forward,and chance alone allowed the page concealed in the collar of this bodiceto fall into my hands."
Long did the detective still grope and ponder, heedless of thequestions the professor and the magistrate kept asking him. He rose atlast, and with a distracted gesture took the arm of M. Fuselier, anddragged him before the stone slab on which the corpse, but recentlyunknown, smiled a ghastly smile.
"M. Fuselier, the dead woman has spoken. She is Lady Beltham. This isthe body of Lady Beltham!"
The magistrate recoiled in horror. He murmured:
"But who then can Doctor Chaleck be? Who can Loupart be?"
Juve replied without hesitation.
"Ask Fantomas the names of his accomplices!"
And leaving him and Doctor Ardel without any farewell Juve rushed fromthe Morgue, his features so distorted that as they passed him peopledrew aside, amazed and murmuring:
"A madman or a murderer!"