The Eight Strokes of the Clock, Maurice Leblanc [summer books TXT] 📗

The man hid himself behind a clump of trees. From time to time, the screen displayed, on an enormously enlarged scale, his fiercely rolling eyes or his murderous hands with their huge thumbs.

“The man frightens me,” said Hortense. “He is really terrifying.”

“Because he’s acting on his own account,” said Rénine. “You must understand that, in the space of three or four months that appears to separate the dates at which the two films were made, his passion has made progress; and to him it is not the princess who is coming but Rose Andrée.”

The man crouched low. The victim approached, gaily and unsuspectingly. She passed, heard a sound, stopped and looked about her with a smiling air which became attentive, then uneasy, and then more and more anxious. The woodcutter had pushed aside the branches and was coming through the copse.

They were now standing face to face. He opened his arms as though to seize her. She tried to scream, to call out for help; but the arms closed around her before she could offer the slightest resistance. Then he threw her over his shoulder and began to run.

“Are you satisfied?” whispered Rénine. “Do you think that this fourth-rate actor would have had all that strength and energy if it had been any other woman than Rose Andrée?”

Meanwhile the woodcutter was crossing the skirt of a forest and plunging through great trees and masses of rocks. After setting the princess down, he cleared the entrance to a cave which the daylight entered by a slanting crevice.

A succession of views displayed the husband’s despair, the search and the discovery of some small branches which had been broken by the princess and which showed the path that had been taken. Then came the final scene, with the terrible struggle between the man and the woman when the woman, vanquished and exhausted, is flung to the ground, the sudden arrival of the husband and the shot that puts an end to the brute’s life.⁠ ⁠…

“Well,” said Rénine, when they had left the picture-palace⁠—and he spoke with a certain gravity⁠—“I maintain that the daughter of your old piano-teacher has been in danger ever since the day when that last scene was filmed. I maintain that this scene represents not so much an assault by the man of the woods on the Happy Princess as a violent and frantic attack by an actor on the woman he desires. Certainly it all happened within the bounds prescribed by the part and nobody saw anything in it⁠—nobody except perhaps Rose Andrée herself⁠—but I, for my part, have detected flashes of passion which leave not a doubt in my mind. I have seen glances that betrayed the wish and even the intention to commit murder. I have seen clenched hands, ready to strangle, in short, a score of details which prove to me that, at that time, the man’s instinct was urging him to kill the woman who could never be his.”

“And it all amounts to what?”

“We must protect Rose Andrée if she is still in danger and if it is not too late.”

“And to do this?”

“We must get hold of further information.”

“From whom?”

“From the World’s Cinema Company, which made the film. I will go to them tomorrow morning. Will you wait for me in your flat about lunchtime?”

At heart, Hortense was still sceptical. All these manifestations of passion, of which she denied neither the ardour nor the ferocity, seemed to her to be the rational behaviour of a good actor. She had seen nothing of the terrible tragedy which Rénine contended that he had divined; and she wondered whether he was not erring through an excess of imagination.

“Well,” she asked, next day, not without a touch of irony, “how far have you got? Have you made a good bag? Anything mysterious? Anything thrilling?”

“Pretty good.”

“Oh, really? And your so-called lover.⁠ ⁠…”

“Is one Dalbrèque, originally a scene-painter, who played the butler in the first part of the film and the man of the woods in the second and was so much appreciated that they engaged him for a new film. Consequently, he has been acting lately. He was acting near Paris. But, on the morning of Friday the 18th of September, he broke into the garage of the World’s Cinema Company and made off with a magnificent car and forty thousand francs in money. Information was lodged with the police; and on the Sunday the car was found a little way outside Dreux. And up to now the enquiry has revealed two things, which will appear in the papers tomorrow: first, Dalbrèque is alleged to have committed a murder which created a great stir last year, the murder of Bourguet, the jeweller; secondly, on the day after his two robberies, Dalbrèque was driving through Le Havre in a motorcar with two men who helped him to carry off, in broad daylight and in a crowded street, a lady whose identity has not yet been discovered.”

“Rose Andrée?” asked Hortense, uneasily.

“I have just been to Rose Andrée’s: the World’s Cinema Company gave me her address. Rose Andrée spent this summer travelling and then stayed for a fortnight in the Seine-inférieure, where she has a small place of her own, the actual cottage in The Happy Princess. On receiving an invitation from America to do a film there, she came back to Paris, registered her luggage at the Gare Saint-Lazare and left on Friday the 18th of September, intending to sleep at Le Havre and take Saturday’s boat.”

“Friday the 18th,” muttered Hortense, “the same day on which that man.⁠ ⁠…”

“And it was on the Saturday that a woman was carried off by him at Le Havre. I looked in at the Compagnie Transatlantique and a brief investigation showed that Rose Andrée had booked a cabin but that the cabin remained unoccupied. The passenger did not turn up.”

“This is frightful. She has been carried off. You were right.”

“I fear so.”

“What have you decided to do?”

“Adolphe, my chauffeur, is outside with the car. Let us go