The hands of the large clock at the Gare du Nord were pointing to three minutes before eight next morning as Inspector Burnley walked up the steps of the entrance. Lefarge was there before him and the two men greeted each other warmly. ‘I have a police box cart here,’ said Lefarge. ‘Give me your papers and we’ll have the cask out in a brace of shakes.’
Burnley handed them over and they went to the luggage bureau. Lefarge’s card had a magical effect, and in a very few minutes the sacking-covered barrel had been found and loaded on to the cart. Lefarge instructed the driver.
‘I want that taken to a street off the rue de la Convention at Grenelle. You might start now and stop at the Grenelle end of the Pont Mirabeau. Wait there until I come for you. I suppose it will take you an hour or more?’
‘It’ll take more than an hour and a half, monsieur,’ replied the man. ‘It is a long way and this cart is very heavy.’
‘Very well, just do the best you can.’
The man touched his cap and moved off with his load.
‘Are we in any hurry?’ asked Burnley.
‘No, we have to kill time until he gets there. Why do you ask?’
‘Nothing, except that if we have time enough, let’s go down directly to the river and take a boat. I always enjoy the Seine boats.’
‘As a matter of fact so do I,’ replied Lefarge. ‘You get the air and the motion is pleasanter and more silent than a bus. They are not so slow either when you consider the stops.’
They took a bus which brought them southwards through the Louvre, and, alighting at the Pont des Arts, caught a steamer going to Suresnes. The morning was fresh and exquisitely clear. The sun, immediately behind them at first, crept slowly round to the left as they followed the curve of the river. Burnley sat admiring perhaps for the fiftieth time the graceful architecture of the bridges, justly celebrated as the finest of any city in the world. He gazed with fresh interest and pleasure also on the buildings they were carried past, from the huge pile of the Louvre on the right bank to the great terrace of the Quai d’Orsay on the left, and from the Trocadero and the palaces of the Champs élysées back to the thin tapering shaft of the Eiffel Tower. How well he remembered a visit that he and Lefarge had paid to the restaurant on the lower stage of this latter when they lunched at the next table to Madame Marcelle, the young and attractive looking woman who had murdered her English husband by repeated doses of a slow and irritant poison. He had just turned to remind his companion of the circumstance when the latter’s voice broke in on his thoughts.
‘I went back to the S?reté after we parted last night. I thought it better to make sure of the cart this morning, and I also looked up our records about this firm of monumental sculptors. It seems that it is not a very large concern, and all the power is vested in the hands of M. Paul Thévenet, the managing director. It is an old establishment and apparently eminently respectable, and has a perfectly clean record so far as we are concerned.’
‘Well, that’s so much to the good.’
They disembarked at the Pont Mirabeau and, crossing to the south side and finding a tolerably decent looking café, sat down at one of the little tables on the pavement behind a screen of shrubs in pots.
‘We can see the end of the bridge from here, so we may wait comfortably until the cart appears,’ said Lefarge, when he had ordered a couple of bocks.
They sat on in the pleasant sun, smoking and reading the morning papers. Nearly an hour passed before the cart came into view slowly crossing the bridge. Then they left their places at the café and, signing to the driver to follow, walked down the rue de la Convention, and turned into the rue Provence. Nearly opposite, a little way down the street, was the place of which they were in search.
Its frontage ran the whole length of the second block, and consisted partly of a rather ancient looking four-story factory or warehouse and partly of a high wall, evidently surrounding a yard. At the end of the building this wall was pierced by a gateway leading into the yard, and just inside was a door in the end wall of the building, labelled ‘Bureau.’
Having instructed the driver to wait outside the gate, they pushed open the small door and asked to see M. Thévenet on private business. After a delay of a few minutes a clerk ushered them into his room.
The managing director was an elderly man, small and rather wizened, with a white moustache, and a dry but courteous manner. He rose as the detectives entered, wished them good-morning, and asked what he could do for them.
‘I must apologise for not sending in my card, M. Thévenet,’ began Lefarge, presenting it, ‘but, as the matter in question is somewhat delicate, I preferred that your staff should not know my profession.’
M. Thévenet bowed.
‘This, sir,’ went on Lefarge, ‘is my colleague, Mr. Burnley of the London police, and he is anxious for some information, if you would be so kind as to let him have it.’
‘I will be pleased to answer any questions I can. I speak English if Mr. Burnley would prefer it.’
‘I thank you,’ said Burnley. ‘The matter is rather a serious one. It is briefly this. On Monday last—four days ago—a cask arrived in London from Paris. Some circumstances with which I need not trouble you aroused the suspicions of the police, with the result that the cask was seized and opened. In it were found, packed in sawdust, two things, firstly, ￡52 10s. in English gold, and secondly the body of a youngish woman, evidently of good position, and evidently murdered by being throttled by a pair of human hands.’
‘Horrible!’ ejaculated the little man.
‘The cask was of very peculiar construction, the woodwork being at least twice as heavy as that of an ordinary wine cask and secured by strong iron bands. And, sir, the point that has brought us to you is that your firm’s name was stencilled on it after the words “Return to,” and it was addressed on one of your firm’s labels.’
The little man sprang to his feet.
‘Our cask? Our label?’ he cried, in evident astonishment. ‘Do I understand you to say, sir, that the cask containing this body was sent out by us?’
‘No, sir,’ returned Burnley, ‘I did not say that. I simply say that it arrived bearing your name and label. I am in total ignorance of how or when the body was put in. That is what I am over from London to investigate.’
‘But the thing is utterly incredible,’ said M. Thévenet, pacing up and down the room. ‘No, no,’ he added, with a wave of his hand as Burnley would have spoken, ‘I don’t mean that I doubt your word. But I cannot but feel that there must be a terrible mistake.’
‘It is only right to add, s............