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For instance, your friend Dalbreque, eh? Nice goings on his are! You saw the paper yesterday. A fellow who has robbed and murdered people and carried off a woman at Le Havre ...!"
Dalbreque, hit in the leg and the chest, pitched forward and fell. "Thank you, sir," said the inspector to Renine introducing himself. "We owe a lot to you." "It seems to me that you've done for the fellow," said Renine. "Who is he?" "One Dalbreque, a scoundrel for whom we were looking." Renine was beside himself. Hortense had joined him by this time; and he growled: "The silly fools!
Your name's Dalbreque, or, at least, that's the name under which you acted in The Happy Princess and under which the police are looking for you as being the murderer of Bourguet the jeweller, the man who stole a motor-car and forty thousand francs from the World's Cinema Company and the man who abducted a woman at Le Havre. All this is known and proved ... and here's the upshot.
He found it easily, switched on his electric torch, rummaged in the dark corners and brought Hortense back to the entrance: "There's nothing inside," he said, "but here is the evidence which I was looking for. Dalbreque was obsessed by the recollection of the film, but so was Rose Andree. The Happy Princess had broken off the tips of the branches on the way through the forest.
But the search led to no discovery. "Oh, hang it all!" said Renine, who had taken his part in the hunt. "How can it have happened?" "How do I know?" spluttered the inspector in despair. "I left my three men watching in the next room. I found them this morning fast asleep, stupefied by some narcotic which had been mixed with their wine! And the Dalbreque bird had flown!" "Which way?"
"Set her going and pull her up in front of the terrace outside the cafe, right against the boxes so as to block the exit. As for you," he continued, addressing Dalbreque, "you're to jump on your machine and, instead of making off along the road, cross the yard. At the end of the yard is a passage leading into a lane. There you will be free.
"Is a prisoner on the other bank, on the Jumieges peninsula. You see the famous abbey from here." They ran aground on a beach of big pebbles covered with slime. "And it can't be very far away," he added. "Dalbreque did not spend the whole night running about." A tow-path followed the deserted bank. Another path led away from it.
"Through the window. There were evidently accomplices, with ropes and a ladder. And, as Dalbreque had a broken leg, they carried him off on the stretcher itself." "They left no traces?" "No traces of footsteps, true. The rain has messed everything up. But they went through the yard, because the stretcher's there." "You'll find him, Mr. Inspector, there's no doubt of that.
But the man who comes to see you every evening is wanted by the police. His name is Georges Dalbreque. He killed Bourguet the jeweller." The accusation made her start with indignation and she exclaimed: "It's a lie! An infamous fabrication of the newspapers! Georges was in Paris on the night of the murder. He can prove it." "He stole a motor car and forty thousand francs in notes."
Up to the present, Rose Andree's disappearance does not seem to have become known. Before it does and before the police identify the woman carried off by Dalbreque with the woman who did not turn up to claim her cabin, we will get on Rose Andree's track." There was not much said on the journey. At four o'clock Hortense and Renine reached Rouen. But here Renine changed his road.
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