Jerry Winton later swore that he had taken his eyes off Davos only for a second. This was true. Jerry, in fact, had glanced back along the Avenue des Phares behind him and was heartened to see the figure of a policeman some distance away. What made him look quickly back again was a noise from the cul-de-sac, a noise that was something between a cough and a scream, bubbling up horribly under the rain; and afterwards the thud of a body on asphalt.
One moment Davos had been on his feet. The next moment he was lying on his side on the pavement, and kicking.
Overhead the beam of the lighthouse wheeled again. Jerry, reaching Davos in a run of half a dozen long strides, saw the whole scene picked out by that momentary light. Davos’s fingers still clutched, or tried to clutch, the well-filled wallet Jerry had last seen at the Casino. His tan topcoat was now dark with rain. His heels scraped on the pavement, for he had been stabbed through the back of the neck with a heavy knife whose polished-metal handle projected four inches. Then the wallet slipped out of his fingers, and splashed into a puddle, for the man died.
Jerry Winton looked, and did not believe his own eyes. Mechanically he reached down and picked up the wallet out of the puddle, shaking it. He backed away as he heard running footfalls pound into the cul-de-sac, and he saw the flying waterproof of a policeman.
“Halt there!” the law shouted in French. The policeman, a dim shape under the waterproof, pulled up short and stared. After seeing what was on the pavement, he made a noise like a man hit in the stomach.
Jerry pulled his wits together and conned over his French for the proper phrases.
“His – this wallet,” said Jerry, extending it.
“So I see.”
“He is dead.”
“That would appear obvious,” agreed the other, with a kind of snort. “Well! Give it to me. Quick, quick, quick! His wallet.”
The policeman extended his hand, snapping the fingers. He added: “No stupidities, if you please! I am prepared for you.”
“But I didn’t kill him.”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Man, you don’t think -?”
He broke off. The trouble was that it had happened too rapidly. Jerry’s feeling was that of one who meets a super-salesman and under whirlwind tactics is persuaded to buy some huge and useless article before he realizes what the talk is all about.
For here was a minor miracle. He had seen the man Davos stabbed under his eyes. Davos had been stabbed by a straight blow from behind, the heavy knife entering in a straight line sloping a little upwards, as though the blow had been struck from the direction of the pavement. Yet at the same time Davos had been alone in an empty cul-de-sac as bare as a biscuit-box.
“It is not my business to think,” said the policeman curtly. “I make my notes and I report to my commissaire. Now!” He withdrew into the shelter of the dim-lit doorway, his wary eye fixed on Jerry, and whipped out his notebook. “Let us have no nonsense. You killed this man and attempted to rob him. I saw you.”
“No!”
“You were alone with him in this court. I saw as much myself.”
“Yes, that is true.”
“Good; he admits it! You saw no one else in the court?”
“No.”
“Justement. Could any assassin have approached without being seen?”
Jerry, even as he saw the bleak eye grow bleaker, had to admit that this was impossible. On two sides were blank brick walls; on the third side was a house whose door or windows, he could swear, had not opened a crack. In the second’s space of time while he looked away, no murderer could have approached, stabbed Davos, and got back to cover again. There was no cover. This was so apparent that Jerry could not even think of a reasonable lie. He merely stuttered.
“I do not know what happened,” he insisted. “One minute he was there, and then he fell. I saw nobody.” Then a light opened in his mind. “Wait! That knife there – it must have been thrown at him.”
Rich and sardonic humour stared at him from the doorway. “Thrown, you say? Thrown from where?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Jerry. The light went out. Again he stared at blank brick walls, and at the house from whose sealed front no knife could have been thrown.
“Consider,” pursued his companion, in an agony of logic, “the position of the knife. This gentleman was walking with his back to you?”
“Yes.”
“Good; we progress.” He pointed. “The knife enters the back of his neck in a straight line. It enters from the direction where you were standing. Could it have been thrown past you from the entrance to the court?”
“No. Impossible.”
“No. That is evident,” blared his companion. “I cannot listen to any more stupidities. I indulge you because you are English and we have orders to indulge the English. But this goes beyond reason! You will go with me to the Hotel de Ville. Look at the note-case in his hand. Does he offer it to you and say: ‘Monsieur, honour me by accepting my note-case’?”
“No. He had it in his own hand.”
“He had it in his own hand, say you. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Jerry broke off, both because the story of his losses at the Casino must now come out with deadly significance, and because they heard the rattle of a door being unlocked. The door of the doctor’s house opened; and out stepped the fair-haired girl whom Jerry had last seen at the Casino.
Beside the door the brass name-plate read, “Dr Edouard Hébert,” with consulting hours inscribed underneath, and an aggressive, “Speaks English.” Behind the girl, craning his neck, stood a bristly middle-aged man of immense dignity. His truculent eyeglasses had a broad black ribbon which seemed to form a kind of electrical circuit with the ends of his brushed-up moustache.
But Jerry Winton was not looking at Dr Hébert. He was looking at the girl. In addition to a light fur coat, she now wore a cream-coloured scarf drawn over her hair; she had in one hand a tiny box, wrapped in white paper. Her smooth, worried face, her long, pale-blue eyes, seemed to reflect the expression of the dead man staring back at her from the pavement. She jerked back, bumping into the policeman. She put her hand on Dr Hébert’s arm. With her other hand she pointed sharply to Davos.
“That’s the man!” she cried.
M. Goron, prefect of Police, was a comfortable man, a round, catlike amiable sort of man, famous for his manners. Crime, rare in La Bandelette, distressed him. But he was also an able man. At one o’clock in the morning he sat in his office at the town hall examining his fingernails and creaking back and forth in a squeaky swivel chair whose noise had begun to get on Jerry Winton’s nerves.
The girl, who for the tenth time had given her name as Eleanor Hood, was insistent.
“M. Goron!”
“Mademoiselle?” said the prefect politely, and seemed to wake out of a dream.
Eleanor Hood turned round and gave Jerry Winton a despairing look.
“I only wish to know,” she urged, in excellent French, “why we are here, Dr Hébert and I. And Mr Winton too, if it comes to that.” This time the look she gave Jerry was one of smiling companionship: a human sort of look, which warmed that miscreant. “But as for us – why? It is not as though we were witnesses. I have told you why I was at Dr Hébert’s house.”
“Mademoiselle’s father,” murmured M. Goron.
“Yes. He is ill. Dr Hébert has been treating him for several days, and he had another attack at the Casino to-night. Mr Winton will confirm that.”
Jerry nodded. The old boy at the table, he reflected, had certainly looked ill.
“I took my father back to our hotel, the Brittany, at half-past eleven,” the girl went on, speaking with great intensity. “I tried to communicate with Dr Hébert by telephone. I could not reach him. So I went to his house; it is only a short distance from the hotel. On the way I kept seeing that man – the man you call Davos. I thought he was following me. He seemed to be looking at me from behind every tree. That is why I said, ‘That’s the man,’ when I saw him lying on the pavement with his eyes open. His eyes did not even blink when the rain struck them. It was a horrible sight. I was upset. Do you blame me?”