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To get hold of that sum, to obtain riches, luxury, power, and the means of buying health and strength from the world's great healers, all that he had to do was first to put away the different persons who stood between the inheritance and Florence, and then, when all the obstacles were overcome, to make Florence his wife. "Jean Vernocq went to work.
The plan succeeded. "There was only one hitch at the present time: the intervention of Inspector Vérot. Inspector Vérot died. And there was only one danger in the future: the intervention of myself, Don Luis Perenna, whose conduct Vernocq was bound to foresee, as I was the residuary legatee by the terms of Cosmo Mornington's will.
This letter constitutes a genuine and indisputable will in favor of Jean Vernocq. "As Florence was Cosmo Mornington's legal and settled heiress by the mere fact of her presence at yesterday's meeting with the documents proving her descent from the Roussel family, her death caused her rights to pass to her own legal and settled heir.
This danger Vernocq tried to avert first by giving me the house on the Place du Palais-Bourbon to live in and Florence Levasseur as a secretary, and next by making four attempts to have me assassinated by Gaston Sauverand. "He therefore held all the threads of the tragedy in his hands.
I might even say that it was too late, for Jean Vernocq began by sending me to the bottom of a well, and by crushing Florence under a block of stone." "Oh, so you're dead, are you?" "Yes, Monsieur le Président." "But why did that villain want to do away with Florence Levasseur? Her death destroyed his indispensable scheme of matrimony."
"Jean Vernocq would have come into the money without the possibility of any litigation. And, as you would have been obliged to discharge him after his arrest, for lack of evidence against him, he would have led a quiet life, with fourteen murders on his conscience I have added them up but with a hundred million francs in his pocket. To a monster of his stamp, the one made up for the other."
"So everything was going well for him. The police pursued me. The police pursued Florence. No one suspected him. And the date fixed for the payment of the inheritance was at hand. "This was two days ago. At that time, Jean Vernocq was in the midst of the fray. He was ill and had obtained admission to the nursing-home in the Avenue des Ternes.
By hunting around, Jean Vernocq ended by discovering first a photograph of Florence and then Florence herself. "He made himself useful to her and pretended to be devoted to her, giving up his whole life to her service. At that time he did not yet know what profit he could derive from the papers stolen from the girl or from his relations with her. "Suddenly everything became different.
"In this way and with a single effort, anonymously, so to speak, and without appearing in the business, without Fauville's even suspecting the action brought to bear upon him, Jean Vernocq procured the deaths of Fauville and his son, and got rid of Marie and Sauverand by the devilish expedient of causing the charge of murder, of which no one could accuse him, to fall upon them.
Here is a third memorandum, which is just a copy of the two found in the eighth volume of Shakespeare and which proves that Jean Vernocq, to whom that set of Shakespeare belonged, knew all about Fauville's machination. Here are his correspondence with Caceres, the Peruvian attaché, and the letters denouncing myself and Sergeant Mazeroux, which he intended to send to the press. Here
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