The Beast Within - Emile Zola [212]
The hearings in the Roubaud case were due to begin on the Monday, in Rouen. For Denizet, the examining magistrate, the investigation had been a signal triumph; people in legal circles could not speak highly enough of the way he had brought such a complicated and involved case to so successful a conclusion. It was a masterpiece of astute analysis, they said, a superb, logical reconstruction of the truth; in short, a triumph of creative imagination.
The first thing that Denizet did when he arrived on the scene of the crime at La Croix-de-Maufras, a few hours after Séverine’s murder, was to have Cabuche arrested. Everything clearly pointed to him being the murderer — the fact that he was covered in blood, and the damning evidence of Roubaud and Misard, who described how they had found him in the room with the body, alone and distraught. When questioned and asked to explain why and how he came to be there, Cabuche had mumbled some tale that Denizet simply dismissed with a shrug of his shoulders, so naive and predictable did it seem. It was just the sort of story he had been expecting; he had heard it so many times before — the fictitious murderer, the invented criminal, whom the real criminal claimed to have heard running off into the night. If this mysterious person was still running, he would be well away by now, wouldn’t he! When asked what he was doing outside the house at such a late hour, Cabuche became flustered and couldn’t give a straight answer, eventually claiming that he was just out for a walk. It was childish. How could Denizet take this unknown intruder seriously — committing a murder and then running away, leaving all the doors of the house open, without touching a thing or helping himself to even a handkerchief? Where had he come from? Why had he killed her? From the very beginning of his inquiry, however, the judge had known about Jacques’s affair with the victim and was concerned to establish his whereabouts on the day of the murder. But, in addition to Cabuche’s own testimony that he had accompanied Jacques to Barentin, to catch the 4.14 train, the hotel proprietor in Rouen was quite adamant that her guest had gone to bed straight after his evening meal and had not left his room until the next morning, at about seven o’clock. Surely a lover does not murder the woman he loves for no reason at all, when there has never been the slightest disagreement between them. It would be absurd! It was unthinkable! There was only one possible murderer, the obvious murderer — the man they had arrested, the man found in the room with his hands covered in blood and the knife lying on the floor at his feet, the inhuman beast who was trying to spin him a ridiculous fairy story.
Having come to this conclusion, however, although convinced he was right, and even though his instinct, which, he said, he always relied on more than actual proof, told him that Cabuche was indeed the murderer, Monsieur Denizet encountered a minor difficulty. An initial search of Cabuche’s hovel in the Bécourt woods had revealed nothing. It had proved impossible to establish theft as a motive, and he needed to find some other reason for the murder. Then, quite by chance, during the course of one of his interviews, Misard had put him on the track. Misard said that one night he had seen Cabuche climbing over a wall to watch Madame Roubaud through the window as she was going to bed. When Jacques was questioned about Cabuche, he simply stated what he knew: Cabuche secretly adored her, he followed her everywhere, he always wanted to be near her and he would do anything for her. To Denizet, it seemed obvious; Cabuche had been driven by pure animal instinct. Everything fell into place perfectly. He had let himself in through the front door — he may even have had a key — he had left the door open in his unseemly haste, and there had been a struggle, after which he had murdered her and finally