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By Root 1350 0

to abandon his endeavours. He waited expectantly for a letter from the ministry, for a word of advice or some indication to proceed. But none came. So he had decided to resume his investigation. He had already made a number of arrests but had not had sufficient evidence to take matters further. Now, however, as he read through the details of President Grandmorin’s will, he recalled something he had vaguely suspected at the very beginning of his inquiries - the possibility that the murder had been committed by the Roubauds. The will was a quagmire of strange bequests, but among them was one stipulating that Séverine should inherit a house at La Croix-de-Maufras. Instantly a motive for the murder, which he had hitherto sought in vain, suggested itself; the Roubauds, knowing the contents of the will, could have murdered their benefactor in order to get their hands on the property as soon as possible. The thought had played on his mind increasingly ever since Monsieur Camy-Lamotte had mentioned Madame Roubaud as someone he had met some time ago at the President’s château, when she was a girl. But the whole thing seemed implausible, and from both a practical and moral point of view the case was fraught with difficulties. The more he tried to pursue this line of investigation, the more he came up against things that simply did not fit into the classic pattern of a murder inquiry. It didn’t make sense; there was no underlying motive, no prime cause that made it all fall into place.

There was, of course, another line of inquiry which he had not yet discounted, namely the possibility, suggested by Roubaud himself, that, in the rush for seats just before the train left Rouen, someone had managed to get into the coupé - the mythical killer that the police had failed to track down and whom the opposition newspapers were constantly joking about. His initial inquiry had sought to identify the appearance of this individual, at Rouen where he had boarded the train, and at Barentin where he must have got out, but nothing definite had emerged; some witnesses insisted that no one could possibly have forced their way into the reserved coupé, and others had given the most contradictory accounts. It was beginning to appear that this line of inquiry too would lead nowhere. But then, as he was questioning Misard, the crossing keeper, Denizet quite by chance came to hear of the tragic story of Cabuche and Louisette, the girl who had been assaulted by the President, who had run away to her lover’s cottage and who had apparently died there. For Denizet this had come as a flash of light in the dark; he could now establish a clear-cut case against the murderer. All the necessary ingredients were there - death threats made against the victim by Cabuche, a previous record of violence, and an unconvincing alibi that could not be proved. The day before, in a sudden moment of inspiration, Denizet had had Cabuche secretly arrested in his shack in the woods. A pair of bloodstained trousers had been found there. Denizet was careful not to let himself get too carried away with the new idea that was beginning to take shape in his mind, and he had certainly not abandoned his Roubaud hypothesis, but he was none the less delighted to think that he alone had been canny enough to put his finger on the real killer. It was in order to establish firm evidence for his suspicions that he had that morning recalled a number of witnesses who had already given evidence on the day following the crime.

The entrance to the magistrate’s office was from the Rue Jeanne d‘Arc. It was in an old building which had seen better days, tacked incongruously on to one side of what had once been the palace of the Dukes of Normandy and now served as the law courts. It was a large, gloomy room on the ground floor, with so little natural light that in winter a lamp had to be lit as early as three o’clock in the afternoon. The walls were hung with faded green wallpaper, and the furniture consisted simply of two armchairs, four other chairs, the magistrate’s desk and a smaller desk for the clerk.