The Four False Weapons (The Monsieur Bencolin Mysteries, 5) by John Dickson Carr

Author:John Dickson Carr [Carr, John Dickson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480472761
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-03-24T23:00:00+00:00

12 Bencolin’s Mood

SLEEP. A DEEP BED, fashioned with the epic comfort of France; the leaves of tall windows standing open, pushing up heavy lace curtains at an ungainly angle, with just an edge of street-light showing through, and just a rustle of breeze; the vast, high stillness that lies on Paris at night, broken only by the faint whish of a car passing in the street below; a fragrance of trees outside the window, and then a sinking into sleep. It was the one thing in the world Richard Curtis wanted most. It was also one of the things he seemed least likely to get. At a quarter past twelve he was stepping out of Bencolin’s car before the Hotel Crillon in the Place de la Concorde.

“You’ll never get to see Mrs. Toller tonight,” he declared; “it’s too late.”

But Bencolin had been obstinate, not to say gloomy. He had insisted first on a brandy, which they took along the way; and Curtis never forgot him sitting at the pavement table under its awning, his long legs thrust out, his face grown Mephistophelian with ill-humor under the soft black hat.

“The mystery of Hercule,” he said. “First blood is undoubtedly to Jean-Baptiste Robinson. I should have noticed that. I observed Hercule’s behavior; but I laid it to other causes. It would seem that my wits are growing thick with inaction. So it was a tall woman, was it?”

“It’s a strong theory, anyway.”

“You noticed no flaws in it?”

“I noticed one flaw in Dupin’s facts,” said Curtis, taking the paper out of his pocket. “It may or may not be an important one; important, I should say. It concerns what he has to say about the clothes in the dressing-room. Now, he’s quite right about the peach-colored negligée hung up untouched—so far as you can tell—in the wardrobe. But he’s completely wrong about the slippers. He says there were no slippers anywhere, and bases one of his most essential deductions on it. Either he’s falsifying the facts, or somebody took the slippers away. But, when I first looked into the dressing-room this morning, there was a pair of yellow satin mules standing under the dressing-table.”

“I took them away,” said Bencolin. “Keep your mind fixed on that dressing-table: with the slippers under it, and the jar of vanishing-cream whose lid is off, and the round wet mark made by the heel of a bottle, and the stiletto in the drawer—where Hortense says she placed it. These things form the beginning of my case, which is somewhat different from M. Robinson’s. I profoundly distrust these cases which are based on, ‘only a woman would have done this,’ or ‘only a man would have done that.’ All the same, that article in L’Intelligence is going to cause a stir. We had better go on to the Crillon and see Mrs. Toller.”

Despite Curtis’s prediction that they would not get in, they were welcomed. When they went into the foyer of the hotel, a harassed clerk at the Réception on the left was speaking with anxiety into a telephone.

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