The Corpse in the Waxworks: A Paris Mystery by John Dickson Carr

Author:John Dickson Carr [Carr, John Dickson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: serial killer, impossible crime, Golden age crime, 1930s, vintage thriller, Golden Age of Murder, Eiffel tower
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2021-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

11

Some Charming Habits of Red-Nose

Bencolin’s words I scarcely heard. I knew he was speaking on the telephone, but I heard him as one hears a radio programme when absorbed in a book. More than any person I know, he has in his choice of words the power to suggest. A few phrases clang in the mind like bells, and then go reverberating with multitudinous echoes through every corner of that brain, so that spectres are roused. The whitewashed passage, with the green light falling into it, seemed now more ghastly than ever before. The sudden spring of the murderer from his cubbyhole in the dark took on a suggestion of the thoughtless, inexorable savagery of an animal. I could feel the shock of horror, like a blow under the heart, which Claudine Martel must have experienced when the thing, he or she, leapt. And, more terrifying than even the rest was the thought of the dying girl crying the name of her murderer to the senseless walls…

“Madame Duchêne and Monsieur Robiquet.” For the first time I recalled the words. Bencolin had switched on the hanging light over his desk; its yellow pool threw into shadow all the room save the vast flat-topped desk, which was littered to confusion with papers. He sat down in a padded chair behind it, a slouching image with heavy-lidded eyes, face shadowed and lined harshly, and the greying black hair which was parted in the middle and twirled up like horns. One hand lay on the desk, idly. Beside it, as he stared at the door, I saw glittering on the blotter a small silver key.

An attendant ushered in Mme. Duchêne and Robiquet; Bencolin rose to greet them, and indicated chairs beside his desk. Despite bad weather, the woman was exquisitely turned out—sealskin and pearls, her face almost youthful under the wings of a tight black hat. The pouches under her eyes might have been shadows, like her pinched look: she hardly seemed the bedraggled and sharp-featured woman we had seen that morning. Her eyes, I now perceived, were not black; they were of a misty dark grey. With one gloved hand she tapped on the desk a copy of a newspaper, and, as she tapped, her wet face became grey with something like despair…

“Monsieur Bencolin,” she said in her dry voice, “I have taken the liberty of coming to you. Certain insinuations were dropped to me by an inspector of police who called this afternoon. I did not understand them. I should have forgotten them entirely, but… I saw this.” Again she tapped the paper. “I asked Paul to bring me here.”

“Of course,” said Robiquet, nervously. He was bundled into a thick overcoat, and I saw that he was glancing at the silver key.

“The pleasure is mine, madame,” said Bencolin.

She made a gesture, as of brushing politeness aside. “Will you speak to me frankly?”

“About what, madame?”

“About my daughter’s—death. And Claudine Martel’s,” breathlessly. “You did not tell me about that this morning.”

“But why should I,

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