"Yes, yes. Quite so," said Hanaud. "Go on, my friend."
"The interior of the room gaped black," Perrichet resumed. "I
crept up to the window at the side of the wall and dashed my
lantern into the room. The window, however, was in a recess which
opened into the room through an arch, and at each side of the arch
curtains were draped. The curtains were not closed, but between
them I could see nothing but a strip of the room. I stepped
carefully in, taking heed not to walk on the patch of grass before
the window. The light of my lantern showed me a chair overturned
upon the floor, and to my right, below the middle one of the three
windows in the right-hand side wall, a woman lying huddled upon
the floor. It was Mme. Dauvray. She was dressed. There was a
little mud upon her shoes, as though she had walked after the rain
had ceased. Monsieur will remember that two heavy showers fell
last evening between six and eight."
"Yes," said Hanaud, nodding his approval.
"She was quite dead. Her face was terribly swollen and black, and
a piece of thin strong cord was knotted so tightly about her neck
and had sunk so deeply into her flesh that at first I did not see
it. For Mme. Dauvray was stout."
"Then what did you do?" asked Hanaud.
"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. A few paces away a knot of
people stood before a gate which a sergent-de-ville guarded.
"But here we are at the villa," said Hanaud.
They all looked up and, from a window at the corner upon the first
floor a man looked out and drew in his head.
"That is M. Besnard, the Commissaire of our police in Aix," said
Perrichet.
"And the window from which he looked," said Hanaud, "must be the
window of that room in which you saw the bright light at half-past
nine on your first round?"
"Yes, m'sieur," said Perrichet; "that is the window."
They stopped at the gate. Perrichet spoke to the sergent-de-ville,
who at once held the gate open. The party passed into the garden
of the villa.