The Inspector Hanaud by A.E.W. Mason

Author:A.E.W. Mason [Mason, A. E. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Mystery & Detective, Short Stories
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

HANAUD DINES

The small hotel at which Hanaud put up was on the edge of the spacious Place des Quinconces and opposite to the great white memorial to the Girondins. A restaurant occupied the ground floor and Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo sat down by the open window. Outside, a few marble-topped tables and iron chairs were ranged upon the pavement beneath an awning, but two men only were drinking an aperitif at one of them, and they were out of earshot.

“Let us follow their example,” said Hanaud, after he had ordered dinner. “Some vermouth, I think. Yes, I promise you we shall eat well here.”

He tore open a new bright blue packet of Maryland cigarettes and smoked one of the black tubes of tobacco contentedly. Hanaud was not perhaps as marvellous as he invariably, his assistant Moreau generally, and Mr. Ricardo sometimes thought him to be. But he had one quality without which greatness is seldom found. He could disburden himself of all his anxieties the moment there came an interval in his labours. As the clock struck he closed his book and was in the playing-fields. He leaned back in his chair, smoothing out his mind and laving it in the peace of that vast quincunx of trees and of the river running red towards the sunset. Mr. Ricardo, however, had not the professional mind. He must always be busy, and the river with its load of great ships only recalled to him the pastoral reaches beyond the city and set before his eyes a big wicker basket gently rocking nearer and nearer to a bank of grass.

“You must tell me where we go to-night after we have dined,” he cried. “Not to know is more than I can bear.”

Hanaud came out of an abstraction very slowly. “Where do we go?” he repeated, with an air of profound astonishment. He looked anxiously at Ricardo, reached out a hand and felt his pulse. “You ask me that now that all this cloud of mystery is clearing away? There can be but the one place.”

“You can keep it to yourself if you want to, just as I like to keep my pulse to myself,” Mr. Ricardo rejoined sulkily, as he wrenched his hand away.

“Hanaud was wrong,” the detective exclaimed with his detestable habit of speaking of himself in the third person. “Hanaud should have recollected that he was in the proud position of being Mr. Ricardo’s host. Instead he must be the cat with the mouse—not nice—no!” He saw indignation gathering on Mr. Ricardo’s brow at the use of so objectionable a simile, and hastened on: “I tell you where we go. We go to the Chateau Mirandol and we interrupt the Vicomte in the act of writing a most interesting paper on the esoteric rites of the Rosicrucians, to be read to the young ladies of Bordeaux. And then we ask him very politely to show us that upper room where, two nights ago, the lights blazed to so late an hour.

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