The Beast Within - Emile Zola [213]
Cabuche was questioned again and again, gradually becoming ensnared in the skilful web of Denizet’s investigation, completely unaware of the traps that were being set for him to fall into. He stuck to his original story. He was walking along the road, enjoying the cool night air, when someone brushed past him, running off into the dark so fast that he couldn’t even say which way he went. He had been worried and when he went to look at the house he noticed that the front door had been left wide open. He had eventually decided to go upstairs and had found the woman, dead but still warm, looking at him with her eyes wide open. He had put her on the bed, thinking she was still alive, and had covered himself in blood. That was all he knew. He repeated it over and over again, never changing a single detail, as if he were simply rehearsing a predetermined story. When they tried to get him to say anything different, he became frightened and fell silent, like a man of low intelligence who didn’t understand what he was being asked. The first time Monsieur Denizet asked him whether he had been in love with the victim, he blushed violently, like a young boy being told off the first time he had kissed a girl. Cabuche denied it; he had never allowed himself to think of sleeping with her, as if it were something dreadful and unspeakable, yet at the same time something delicate and mysterious, something hidden away at the bottom of his heart, which he could reveal to no one. No, he hadn’t been in love with her, and he hadn’t wanted to sleep with her. He refused to say anything; to talk of such things now she was dead seemed to him to be a sacrilege. But his persistent denial of something that several witnesses had testified to also went against him. Naturally, according to the prosecution, he had a vested interest in concealing the insane attraction he felt towards the unfortunate woman he was to kill in order to satisfy his desire. When the examining magistrate, putting all the evidence together, attempted to force an admission from him by directly accusing him of murder and rape, Cabuche flew into a blind rage, protesting his innocence. How could he have killed her to have sex with her? He worshipped her like a saint! The police had to be called in to restrain him; he was saying he’d kill the whole damned lot of them. Cabuche, concluded Monsieur Denizet, was the most dangerous sort of villain — a devious character, but one who was betrayed by his own violent temper, which in the end plainly attested to the crimes he was attempting to deny.
It was at this point in the investigation, with Cabuche losing his temper every time he was accused of murder and shouting that it was the other man, the unknown person who had run away, that Monsieur Denizet made an important discovery, which transformed the whole affair and put an entirely new complexion on things. Monsieur Denizet had always claimed to have a nose for the truth. Some instinct prompted him to conduct another search of Cabuche’s hovel. Behind one of the beams he found a little hiding place containing a woman’s handkerchiefs and gloves, and underneath them a gold watch, which to his great delight he recognized immediately. It was President Grandmorin’s watch, the one he had spent so much time trying to track down before, a large watch engraved with two initials intertwined and, on the inside of the case, the maker’s number, 2516. This discovery