At The Villa Rose

"Yes, yes. Quite so," said Hanaud. "Go on, my friend."

"The interior of the room gaped black," Perrichet resumed. "I

crept up to the window at the side of the wall and dashed my

lantern into the room. The window, however, was in a recess which

opened into the room through an arch, and at each side of the arch

curtains were draped. The curtains were not closed, but between

them I could see nothing but a strip of the room. I stepped

carefully in, taking heed not to walk on the patch of grass before

the window. The light of my lantern showed me a chair overturned

upon the floor, and to my right, below the middle one of the three

windows in the right-hand side wall, a woman lying huddled upon

the floor. It was Mme. Dauvray. She was dressed. There was a

little mud upon her shoes, as though she had walked after the rain

had ceased. Monsieur will remember that two heavy showers fell

last evening between six and eight."

"Yes," said Hanaud, nodding his approval.

"She was quite dead. Her face was terribly swollen and black, and

a piece of thin strong cord was knotted so tightly about her neck

and had sunk so deeply into her flesh that at first I did not see

it. For Mme. Dauvray was stout."

"Then what did you do?" asked Hanaud.

"I went to the telephone which was in the hall and rang up the

police. Then I crept upstairs very cautiously, trying the doors. I

came upon no one until I reached the room under the roof where the

light was burning; there I found Helene Vauquier, the maid,

snoring in bed in a terrible fashion."

The four men turned a bend in the road. A few paces away a knot of

people stood before a gate which a sergent-de-ville guarded.

"But here we are at the villa," said Hanaud.

They all looked up and, from a window at the corner upon the first

floor a man looked out and drew in his head.

"That is M. Besnard, the Commissaire of our police in Aix," said

Perrichet.

"And the window from which he looked," said Hanaud, "must be the

window of that room in which you saw the bright light at half-past

nine on your first round?"

"Yes, m'sieur," said Perrichet; "that is the window."

They stopped at the gate. Perrichet spoke to the sergent-de-ville,

who at once held the gate open. The party passed into the garden

of the villa.