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Updated: June 22, 2025
Helene went over to him and laid her hand upon his shoulder and shook him. "Do you go and get her jewels out of the safe," she said, and she spoke with a rough friendliness. "You promised you would blindfold the girl," he cried hoarsely. Helene Vauquier laughed. "Did I?" she said. "Well, what does it matter?" "There would have been no need to " And his voice broke off shudderingly.
The train of her delicate green frock swept the floor. She was dressed as Helene Vauquier had described. Her gloved hands were tightly bound behind her back, her feet were crossed so that she could not have stood, and her ankles were cruelly strapped together.
"I went to the telephone which was in the hall and rang up the police. Then I crept upstairs very cautiously, trying the doors. I came upon no one until I reached the room under the roof where the light was burning; there I found Helene Vauquier, the maid, snoring in bed in a terrible fashion." The four men turned a bend in the road.
His one constant fear was lest he should be turned out of the room. The Commissaire diverted wrath from him however. "What he means by pseudonym," he said to Helene Vauquier, explaining Mr. Ricardo to her as Mr. Ricardo had presumed to explain Hanaud, "is a false name. Adele may have been, nay, probably was, a false name adopted by this strange woman."
Celia began to struggle furiously, convulsively. She kicked and writhed, and a little tearing sound was heard. One of her shoe-buckles had caught in the thin silk covering of the cushion and slit it. Helene Vauquier let her fall. She felt composedly in her pocket, and drew from it an aluminium flask the same flask which Lemerre was afterward to snatch up in the bedroom in Geneva.
"I understand that. But at times perhaps she won at the Villa des Fleurs?" Helene Vauquier shook her head. "She loved the Villa des Fleurs, but she never played for high sums and often never played at all. If she won a few louis, she was as delighted with her gains and as afraid to lose them again at the tables as if she were of the poorest, and she stopped at once.
She hurries through the empty salon, opens the glass doors, and is gone, leaving the doors open. And the thief, an accomplice of Adele, finds the doors open and hides himself in the salon until Mme. Dauvray returns from the dining-room. You see, that leaves Mlle. Celie innocent." Vauquier leaned forward eagerly, her white face flushing.
Durette descended the stairs; Hanaud came back to the others. "I have told him to fetch a cab," he said, "and convey Helene Vauquier to her friends." Then he looked at Ricardo, and from Ricardo to the Commissaire, while he rubbed his hand backwards and forwards across his shaven chin. "I tell you," he said, "I find this sinister little drama very interesting to me.
The nurse came down alone carrying Helene Vauquier's bag. She placed it in the cab and waited in the doorway. "Perhaps Helene Vauquier has fainted," she said anxiously: "she does not come." And she moved towards the stairs. Hanaud took a singularly swift step forward and stopped her.
He buried his face for a moment in his hands. Then he took up the paper again. "As for the rest, Helene Vauquier lied," he cried violently, and he tossed the paper to Hanaud. "What do you make of it?" Hanaud smiled and shook his head. "Did you ever go for a voyage on a ship?" he asked. "Yes; why?"
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