The de Bercy Affair. Tracy Louis

soon regained a partial consciousness. It was difficult to understand her broken words, but, such as they were, they sent the man in hot haste to the flat on the first floor. The outer and inner doors were wide open, as was the door of the drawing-room, and sufficient daylight streamed in through two lofty windows to reveal something of the horror that had robbed the housemaid of her wits.

      The unfortunate Frenchwoman was lying on her back in the center of the room, and the hall-porter's hurried scrutiny found that she had been done to death with a brutal ferocity, her face almost unrecognizable.

      Not until the return of the French maid, Pauline, from the exhibition, could it be determined beyond doubt that robbery was not the motive of the crime, for she was able to assure the police that her mistress's jewels were untouched. A gold purse was found on a table close to the body, a bracelet sparkled on a wrist cruelly bruised, and a brooch fastened at the neck the loose wrap worn as a preliminary to dressing for the evening.

      Owing to the breakdown of the only servant actually present in the flat at the time of the murder, it was impossible to learn anything intelligible beyond the girl's raving cry that "Mr. Osborne did it." Still, there was apparently little difficulty in realizing what had happened. The housemaid had been startled while at supper, either by a shriek or some noise of moving furniture, had gone to the drawing-room, given one glance at the terrifying spectacle that met her eyes, and was straightway bereft of her wits.

      The Chief Inspector was turning over in his mind the puzzling features of the affair when his automobile swept swiftly out of the traffic and glare of Knightsbridge into the quiet street in which stood Feldisham Mansions. A policeman had just strolled along the pavement to disperse a group of curious people gathered near the entrance, so Winter stopped his cab at a little distance and alighted unobserved.

      He walked rapidly inside and found the hall-porter at his post. When the man learnt the visitor's identity he seemed surprised.

      "Mr. Clarke has bin here all day, sir," he said, "and, as soon as he left, another gentleman kem, though I must say he hasn't bothered me much – " this with a touch of resentment, for the hall-porter's self-importance was enhanced by his connection with the tragedy.

      "Another gentleman!" – this was incomprehensible, since Clarke would surely place a constable in charge of the flat. "What name did he give?"

      "He's up there at this minnit, sir, an' here's his card."

      Winter read: "Mr. Charles Furneaux, Criminal Investigation Department, Scotland Yard."

      "Well, I'm jiggered!" he muttered, and he added fuel to the fire of the hall-porter's annoyance by disregarding the elevator and rushing up the stairs, three steps at a time.

      CHAPTER II

      DARKNESS

      Winter felt at once relieved and displeased. Twice during the hour had his authority been disregarded. He was willing to ignore Clarke's method of doling out important facts because such was the man's secretive nature. But Furneaux! The urgent messages sent to every place where they might reach him, each and all summoned him to Scotland Yard without the slightest reference to the Feldisham Mansions crime. It was with a stiff upper lip, therefore, that the Chief Inspector acknowledged the salute of the constable who admitted him to the ill-fated Frenchwoman's abode. Furneaux was his friend, Furneaux might be admirable, Furneaux was the right man in the right place, but Furneaux must first receive an official reminder of the claims of discipline.

      The subdued electric lights in the hall revealed within a vista of Oriental color blended with Western ideals of comfort. Two exquisitely fashioned lamps of hammered iron, rifled from a Pekin temple, softened by their dragons and lotus leaves the glare of the high-powered globes within them. Praying carpets, frayed by the deserts of Araby, covered the geometric design of a parquet floor, and bright-hued draperies of Mirzapur hid the rigid outlines of British carpentry. A perfume of joss-sticks still clung to the air: it suggested the apartments of a Sultana rather than the bower of a fashionable lady in the West End of London.

      First impressions are powerful, and Winter acknowledged the spell of the unusual here, but his impassive face showed no sign of this when he asked the constable the whereabouts of Mr. Furneaux.

      "In there, sir," said the man, pointing to a door.

      Winter noted instantly that the floor creaked beneath his light tread. The rugs deadened his footsteps, but the parquetry complained of his weight. It was, he perceived, almost impossible for anyone to traverse an old flooring of that type without revealing the fact to ordinarily acute ears. Once when his heel fell on the bare wood, it rang with a sharp yet hollow note. It seemed, somehow, that the place was empty – that it missed its presiding spirit.

      Oddly enough, as he remembered afterwards, he hesitated with outstretched hand in front of the closed door. He was doubtful whether or not to knock. As a matter of fact, he did tap slightly on a panel before turning the handle. Then he received his second vague impression of a new and strange element in the history of a crime. The room was in complete darkness.

      Though Winter never admitted the existence of nerves, he did not even try to conceal from his own consciousness that he started distinctly when he looked into a blackness rendered all the more striking by the glimpse of a few feet of floor revealed by the off-shine from the hall-light.

      "Are you here, Furneaux?" he forced himself to say quickly.

      "Ah, that you, Winter!" came a voice from the interior. "Yes, I was dreaming in the dusk, I think. Let me give you a light."

      "Dusk, you call it? Gad, it's like a vault!"

      Winter's right hand had found the electric switches, and two clusters of lamps on wall-brackets leaped alight. Furneaux was standing, his hands behind his back, almost in the center, but the Chief Inspector gathered that the room's silent occupant had been seated in a corner farthest removed from the windows, and that his head had been propped on his clenched hands, for the dull red marks of his knuckles were still visible on both cheeks.

      Each was aware of a whiff of surprise.

      "Queer trick, sitting in the dark," Furneaux remarked, his eyes on the floor. "I – find I collect my wits better that way – sometimes. Sometimes, one cannot have light enough: for instance, the moment I saw fear in Lady Holt's face I knew that her diamonds had been stolen by herself – "

      Winter reflected that light was equally unkind to Furneaux as to "Lady Holt," for the dapper little man looked pallid and ill at ease in this flood of electric brilliancy.

      There was a silence. Then Furneaux volunteered the remark: "In this instance, thought is needed, not observation. One might gaze at that for twenty years, but it would not reveal the cause of Mademoiselle de Bercy's murder."

      "That" was a dark stain near the center of the golden-brown carpet. Winter bent a professional eye on it, but his mind was assimilating two new ideas. In the first place, Furneaux was not the cheery colleague whose perky chatterings were his most deadly weapons when lulling a rogue into fancied security. In the second, he himself had not been prepared for the transit from a hall of Eastern gorgeousness to a room fastidiously correct in its reproduction of the period labeled by connoisseurs "after Louis XV."

      The moment was not ripe for an inquiry anent Furneaux's object in hastening to Feldisham Mansions without first reporting himself. Winter somehow felt that the question would jar just then and there, and though not forgotten, it was waived; still, there was a hint of it in his next comment.

      "I must confess I am glad to find you here," he said. "Clarke has cleared the ground somewhat, but – er – he has a heavy hand, and I have turned him on to a new job – Anarchists."

      He half expected an answering gleam of fun in the dark eyes lifted to his, for these two were close friends at all seasons; but Furneaux seemed not even to hear! His lips muttered:

      "I – wonder."

      "Wonder what?"

      "What purpose could be served by this girl's death. Who bore her such a bitter grudge that not even her death would sate their hatred, but they must try also to destroy her beauty?"

      Now, the Chief Inspector had learnt that everyone who