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By Root 1384 0

and got into the train at the last minute, turned out to be a perfectly respectable couple who lived at Petit-Couronne;8 they stated that they had both gone straight to sleep and hadn’t seen a thing. As for the woman dressed in black sitting silently in the corner of the compartment, she had vanished into thin air like a ghost; it had proved absolutely impossible to trace her. All sorts of other people had been asked to give evidence, in an attempt to identify passengers who had left the train that evening at Barentin, since that was where the murderer must have alighted. All the tickets had been checked and all the passengers were accounted for except one - a tall man with a blue handkerchief tied across his face. Some said he was wearing an overcoat and others said he was wearing working clothes. On this one man alone, who had disappeared like someone in a dream, the dossier contained three hundred and ten separate statements, all of them so vague that each was contradicted by another.

To make things yet more complicated, the dossier contained a number of legal documents. There was the official report drawn up by the clerk of the court, who had accompanied the public prosecutor and the examining magistrate to the scene of the crime, a voluminous description of the exact point on the railway line at which the body had been found, including the position it was lying in, the clothes it was wearing, and the items found in the pockets, whereby the identity of the victim had been established. Then there was the report of the doctor, who had likewise visited the scene, a long description in highly technical language of the wound to the victim’s throat, a single deep incision made with some sort of cutting implement, presumably a knife. There were other reports and documents concerning the removal of the body to the hospital in Rouen, and the length of time it had been kept there before its unexpectedly swift decomposition had obliged the authorities to return it to the family. Out of this huge mountain of paperwork, however, there emerged only two or three points of any real significance. Firstly, among the contents of Grandmorin’s pockets, they had found neither his watch nor a little wallet, which should have contained ten one-thousand-franc notes, money which the President owed his sister, Madame Bonnehon, and which she was expecting. This might have suggested robbery as the motive for the killing, had not a ring with a large inset diamond been left on the victim’s finger, which prompted a string of other hypotheses. Unfortunately, the numbers of the banknotes were not known. There was, however, information about the watch; it was a large pocket-watch with a winder, the case was engraved with the President’s two initials intertwined, and inside was the maker’s number - 2.516. Finally, the murder weapon, the knife used by the killer, had been the object of extensive searches along the railway line, in the adjoining undergrowth and anywhere else it might possibly have been thrown, but without success. The murderer must have hidden the knife in the same place as the banknotes and the watch. The only thing that had been found, one hundred metres down the line from the station at Barentin, was the victim’s travelling rug, which had been thrown from the train to prevent it being used as evidence. The rug was included amongst the exhibits.

As Monsieur and Madame Lachesnaye walked into the magistrate’s office, Monsieur Denizet was standing in front of his desk rereading a transcript of one of the earlier interviews, which his clerk had just found for him in the file. The magistrate was a man of short stature, quite well built, clean-shaven and with hair that was prematurely grey. His heavy jowls, square jaw and broad nose bore the waxed fixity of a mask, an impression further accentuated by his drooping eyelids, which half covered his big, bright eyes. The store of wisdom and expertise on which he prided himself found expression in his mouth; it was the mouth of an actor who has been trained to perform feelings on a public stage,