"Are you sure of that?" cried Ricardo. "How can you be? You were
at the station with me. What makes you sure?"
Hanaud produced a brown kid glove from his pocket.
"This."
"That is your glove; you told me so yesterday."
"I told you so," replied Hanaud calmly; "but it is not my glove.
It is Wethermill's; there are his initials stamped upon the
lining--see? I picked up that glove in your room, after we had
returned from the station. It was not there before. He went to
your rooms. No doubt he searched for a telegram. Fortunately he
did not examine your letters, or Marthe Gobin would never have
spoken to us as she did after she was dead," "Then what did he do?" asked Ricardo eagerly; and, though Hanaud
had been with him at the entrance to the station all this while,
he asked the question in absolute confidence that the true answer
would be given to him.
"He returned to the verandah wondering what he should do. He saw
us come back from the station in the motor-car and go up to your
room. We were alone. Marthe Gobin, then, was following. There was
his chance. Marthe Gobin must not reach us, must not tell her news
to us. He ran down the garden steps to the gate. No one could see
him from the hotel. Very likely he hid behind the trees, whence he
could watch the road. A cab comes up the hill; there's a woman in
it--not quite the kind of woman who stays at your hotel, M.
Ricardo. Yet she must be going to your hotel, for the road ends.
The driver is nodding on his box, refusing to pay any heed to his
fare lest again she should bid him hurry. His horse is moving at a
walk. Wethermill puts his head in at the window and asks if she
has come to see M. Ricardo. Anxious for her four thousand francs,
she answers 'Yes.' Perhaps he steps into the cab, perhaps as he
walks by the side he strikes, and strikes hard and strikes surely.
Long before the cab reaches the hotel he is back again on the
verandah."
"Yes," said Ricardo, "it's the daring of which you spoke which
made the crime possible--the same daring which made him seek your
help. That was unexampled."
"No," replied Hanaud. "There's an historic crime in your own
country, monsieur. Cries for help were heard in a by-street of a
town. When people ran to answer them, a man was found kneeling by
a corpse. It was the kneeling man who cried for help, but it was
also the kneeling man who did the murder. I remembered that when I
first began to suspect Harry Wethermill."