The Dark Lady Read online

  I waited a moment for my last sentence to sink in before I continued. “Julien was an accomplished liar. He’d probably never told the truth in his entire life. Every time a deal or a bet went wrong, he’d move on to another city and start all over again. This was why his mother had always expected that one day his crimes would catch up with him.”

  “But are you sure that this Julien was the man we found on the beach?” Lupin asked.

  I told them about my meeting with the postmaster and how the police will probably eventually come to the same conclusion. “I asked Mrs. Lascot not to tell anyone about my visit,” I added. “And she promised that she’d keep my secret. ‘I’d always expected it,’ she said as I was leaving. ‘It hurts to say it about your own child, but bad follows bad.’ Then she said goodbye.”

  Sherlock, Lupin, and I talked for a long time about everything I’d discovered. It was Lupin who eventually tied up all the loose threads. “Bad follows bad,” he began, repeating Mrs. Lascot’s bitter words. “This explains everything. Like Sherlock said, the dead man wasn’t a professional thief, just a person who lived a life of lies, scams, and the occasional theft. He got mixed up with people like Macrì, and maybe people even worse than him. By doing that, he signed his own death warrant.”

  Our investigations into the case of the dead castaway, as it had come to be known in Saint-Malo, were now more or less over. There were certainly still important things to be discovered, like whether it was Macrì or some other thug who ordered the murder of Lascot. But now that we knew what kind of man the dead castaway was, it seemed obvious that his death was the result of getting in over his head with the criminal underworld.

  All three of us were proud of everything we’d discovered during our investigations. We were filled with excitement, and spent hours telling each other again and again about all the bizarre and dangerous things that had happened over the last week.

  I watched the waves breaking lazily before us, slowly growing with the rising tide. In less than an hour, we’d need to row back to the harbor. “Julien Lascot had it coming to him,” I said out of the blue. “The only real victim in it all was Lady Martigny.”

  “I wouldn’t say she was the only victim,” Lupin said from behind me. He was shuffling some cards, trying a trick that his father had shown him.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Lupin quickly counted the cards on the sand in front of him and said, “That’s why it’s not working: one card is missing.” He’d organized them into suits and found that the missing card was the Queen of Spades.

  “That was the same card that Julien Lascot was using as a bookmark in the little red book we found in the hotel room!” I said.

  Sherlock turned as pale as a ghost. He stared at the cards without speaking. It scared me.

  “Sherlock?” I asked, trying to shake off the fear. “Sherlock, what’s wrong?”

  “This isn’t possible. This just isn’t possible,” he said to himself. “It simply is not possible.”

  “What isn’t possible?” I asked. I noticed he was staring at the cards. “Whose cards are those?”

  “They’re my mother’s,” Sherlock answered. He said it so quietly that I hardly heard him.

  Chapter 25

  THREE LADIES

  That Friday I convinced Mr. Nelson to help us. He was to create some diversion to make Sherlock’s mother late to her card game so we had some time to talk to the other players before she arrived.

  We knocked on Lady Martigny’s door and had her servant announce us as “Mrs. Holmes’s children, looking for their mother.” We strolled casually into the sitting room, which, according to the lady of the house, was next door to the room from where Julien Lascot had stolen the necklace.

  “Master Holmes,” said Lady Martigny, recognizing him. But her courteous reception wavered slightly when she saw two strangers in the place of Mycroft and Violet, Sherlock’s brother and sister. However, she was too polite to ask what was going on.

  “I’m afraid that your mother has not yet arrived,” said Lady Martigny, obviously wondering why all these strange children had invaded her sitting room.

  Sherlock gave a slight bow. “I am aware of that, Lady Martigny,” he replied. “Lady Fouchet, Baroness Gibard — I apologize for the interruption.”

  “Well, we haven’t quite started our game yet, Master Holmes,” said Lady Martigny. “As I say, we are still waiting for your mother to arrive.”

  “I fear, however, that some interruption is unavoidable,” said Sherlock. “But first I would like to introduce my friends, Miss Adler and Master Lupin.”

  “Adler?” clucked Baroness Gibard. “By chance are you the daughter of Mr. Leopold Adler?”

  “At your service, Baroness Gibard,” I said.

  “We had a very pleasant Sunday afternoon tea,” the baroness told me.

  I looked around. The three ladies glowed like gold. They were all wearing beautiful jewelry and elegant formal clothes. The room was bright ochre yellow and was hung with tapestries and paintings with gilded frames. On the center table was a beautiful arrangement of lilies. Crystal trays were piled with cakes, soon to be joined by teacups and a teapot.

  “I am afraid, however, that I am not aware of your family, Master Lupin,” Lady Martigny said with a certain arrogance in her voice.

  “I would imagine that you would be aware of the family of my mother, Henriette d’Andresy, and my cousins, the Dreux-Soubises,” Lupin said flatly.

  Lady Fouchet brought her hand to her mouth. “Good heavens! Most certainly I am. Oh, you poor child!”

  Lupin raised an eyebrow and smiled a smile that could have cut through the thick brocade curtains. “Yes,” he said, “I am the son of the famous gymnast who brought ruin upon the d’Andresy family.”

  Lady Fouchet blushed the color of a tomato. “Forgive me, my dear boy. I absolutely did not want to imply any such thing.”

  “Excuse me,” Sherlock interrupted, “but I fear that this discussion is not leading us anywhere. And since time is short, I would like to say that the three of us have given much thought to coming here today to tell you what we have to say. And that we have collected overwhelming evidence to support it all.”

  “Overwhelming evidence, Master Holmes?” repeated Lady Martigny.

  “Exactly, Lady Martigny,” Sherlock said. “And I imagine that you know perfectly well what I’m talking about.” I noticed the two ladies seated at the table exchange glances, and Lady Fouchet’s lip started twitching. I decided it was already obvious which of the three ladies would give in first to Sherlock’s questions.

  “Master Holmes,” Lady Martigny replied, “I am afraid that your words and behavior seem rather inappropriate.”

  “As are yours, if I may be so bold,” said Sherlock. “And I would now ask you to let me speak, because I can assure you that this situation is just as embarrassing for me as it is for you.” I heard Sherlock’s voice shaking from nervousness and realized he was struggling to control himself.

  Lupin stopped Lady Martigny from picking up the bell to call her servants, and politely asked her to sit down.

  “We know what happened with Julien Lascot,” began Sherlock. “Or perhaps I should use the name you knew him by: François Poussin, or perhaps Jacques Lambert.” All three ladies looked visibly shaken. “So, would you prefer to tell us what happened or would you like us to do it for you?”

  “I don’t know what you are alluding to, Master Holmes,” said Lady Martigny, quickly recovering her faculties. “I can’t even begin to imagine the impudence that has led you to my house with —”

  “It was me!” Baroness Gibard cried out.

  “Annette!” snapped Lady Martigny.

  “I confess!” the Baroness continued. “There’s no point trying to keep it a secret any longer! If these children were able to figure it out, how long do you t
hink it will take the police? I cannot live with this guilt! Every night when I dream, I see him!”

  “He’s dead, Annette!” screamed Lady Martigny. “He’s dead!”

  “Yes, yes, he’s dead! You’re right!” she replied. “And I killed him!”

  “It wasn’t you who killed him!” cried Lady Martigny. “It wasn’t your fault!”

  “She’s right, Annette,” said Lady Fouchet, who then turned to me and smiled weakly with embarrassment. “It wasn’t any one of us who killed him. We all did it.” She slowly got up from the table and dropped a deck of cards down on the green cloth. “That’s right, my dear children: three killers in one sitting room!”

  I was shocked. Lupin was, too, by the looks of it. Sherlock, however, seemed not the least bit surprised.

  Lady Martigny then explained that Julien Lascot had introduced himself to her and Lady Fouchet under different names, not knowing that the two were best friends. Lascot’s technique was the same with both: a nice smile, a few polite compliments, flowers, pleasant conversation, and the odd reference to the right people and places in Paris. It was all a ruse to create the impression that he was a rich gentleman in order to get himself admitted into the homes of each of the two ladies.

  Once Lascot was there, he helped himself to their jewels. So Lady Martigny’s necklace wasn’t stolen by an acrobatic thief who’d climbed into her house from the roof, like she’d told the police, but simply by a guest.

  Surprisingly, she’d discovered the theft long before she told the police. By the time Lascot was found dead, the necklace had been gone for more than ten days. Lady Martigny had been trying to find some way of letting her husband know about the theft without admitting to being naive enough to have let a perfect stranger into their house.

  Lady Fouchet had also been one of Lascot’s victims, but her losses had only included a couple of pieces of silverware and some pearl earrings. But when she spoke to Lady Martigny about it, the two quickly figured out that it had been the same man who had tricked and robbed them both. And when they told the third lady, a longtime friend of theirs, they discovered that Lascot had also just had himself introduced to her. Baroness Gibard was exactly the type of woman Lascot preyed on: a fashionable, older lady who was very rich.

  So the three had set a trap for him at a dinner at the home of the baroness. The man had presented himself at her door dressed in fine clothes, including a shirt with a turndown collar, a jacket, cuff links, and a suit — the same clothes he’d been wearing when he was found dead on the beach the day after. Lascot didn’t suspect a thing. He was relaxed, even bold. Thanks to the necklace he’d stolen, he’d paid off his debt to Salvatore Macrì and thought he didn’t have a care in the world. What he hadn’t considered was that secrets don’t stay secrets for long in small resort towns like Saint-Malo where people know more than they pretend.

  Once inside the house, Lascot immediately saw that he’d stumbled into a difficult situation. He was confronted by all three of the ladies. They accused him of theft. He responded by rejecting their accusations. An argument followed. And then there was a scuffle. Baroness Gibard pushed him, and Mr. Lascot stumbled on the edge of a rug. He fell, hitting his head violently on the corner of a table. He died instantly.

  Naturally, the first reaction of two of the ladies was to call the authorities. But Lady Martigny thought otherwise. Since dead men tell no tales, making the accidental death of the thief look like something else would give her the perfect story for hiding the true circumstances of the theft of the necklace from her husband. Both her friends knew that Mr. Martigny would never forgive his wife for letting a stranger enter their home, so they agreed to help her with her plan.

  Baroness Gibard’s home directly overlooked the sea, and the family kept a small boat moored at the private jetty. The three ladies dragged Lascot’s body to the boat, filled his pockets with rocks, and took him out to sea. So that people would think it was suicide, they put a forged suicide note in his pocket. The police, of course, never found it. But since the women were very inexperienced with the sea, they threw the body overboard at a point where the tide took it straight back to shore. As a result, when the body was found, Lady Martigny still hadn’t reported the acrobatic theft of the family jewels to the police.

  But otherwise, the plan had worked perfectly. That is, until we arrived in their sitting room.

  “So what do you intend to do?” Lady Martigny asked Sherlock once the whole story had been told. “Will you tell the police?”

  The question lingered for a long time in the sickly sweet air. These three naive ladies had accidentally killed a man and then tried to hide the body. What they ended up doing, partly because of us, was help Chief Inspector Flebourg uncover an entire criminal network. A network that even had members of the local police working for it. This has led to the capture of numerous criminals, although not the people who were behind Lascot’s death.

  “What do we intend to do?” answered Sherlock. “Just one thing: discover the whole truth, right down to the smallest details that still need to be explained.” Without a word, he disappeared into the hallway.

  A moment later, a dark shape emerged from the shadows of the hallway. I screamed, startling Lady Martigny and her guests, and I grabbed Lupin by the arm. It was the hooded man I’d seen on the beach! What was he doing there? Who was he?

  The answers came quickly. From under the blue hood came a laugh and, a moment later, the face of Sherlock Holmes.

  “Sherlock, you’re a fool!” I exclaimed angrily.

  “Sorry if I don’t share your opinion, my dear Irene,” he answered. “You might like to know that I’ve just solved the mystery of the man in the blue cloak. Or, more accurately . . . Baroness Gibard!” With a dramatic gesture, he revealed the coat of arms of the noble woman’s family stitched into the hood.

  The baroness looked like she was about to faint. “Oh, I — I do not,” she stammered.

  “Calm down, Baroness,” Lupin said soothingly.

  “After what we did, I was frantic,” the baroness said. “I could not sleep at night, and during the day I constantly paced up and down the beach, hidden beneath that dark cloak. I kept looking out to sea, convinced that at any moment I would see François’ body. And then suddenly my nightmare came true. On the beach, I saw him! I saw him there!” The baroness began sobbing, unable to continue her story. But at least the mystery of the hooded figure had been cleared up.

  But Lady Martigny’s question still hung in the air like an ominous echo: “So what do you intend to do?”

  As if on cue, a breathless Mrs. Holmes burst into the room. She apologized for being delayed, blaming her talkative butler. But then she saw that Sherlock was there. “William? What are you doing here?”

  Lupin and I took a step back, smiling shyly. Sherlock pulled the deck of cards with the missing Queen of Spades out from his pocket. With a forced smile, he said, “We came to bring you these, Mama. You must have dropped them.”

  And then we left.

  Chapter 26

  THE FINAL MYSTERY

  We decided to send a letter to the chief inspector, being very careful that he wouldn’t be able deduce who wrote it. But in the days that followed, nothing seemed to happen. The case of the dead castaway had seemingly been forgotten about. People also stopped talking about the theft of Lady Martigny’s diamond necklace.

  In the weeks after our investigation, the little group of bridge players broke up and Mrs. Holmes had to find new friends with whom to pass the long summer afternoons. The three noblewomen stopped being seen around town, but if that was because they’d been arrested, we never found out.

  As for me and our little group, we’d achieved what we’d set out to do: discover the truth. As for how this truth was used, or who it served, we really didn’t care — not that we could have done anything about that, anyway. Sherlock, Lupin, and I continued to see eac
h other and continued with our training. Théophraste was an excellent teacher, but he also had a dark side that sometimes made me uneasy. I preferred it when there were just the three of us, punching the bag or trying different martial arts techniques.

  Sometimes we’d read the classics we loved the most out loud, performing them in front of Ashcroft Manor. Other times, we would individually perform different sleight-of-hand tricks while the other two tried to discover how they worked.

  We also went fishing with Sherlock’s older brother, who proved to be far nicer than Sherlock had led us to believe. I also met his sister, Violet, and gave her one of my smallest dresses. Our parents never met, and we worked hard to make sure they wouldn’t, for they could have ruined everything in that way that only adults know how to do.

  But there still remained one small, unresolved detail of our first adventure together: the mystery of the Rooftop Thief. The whole thing had worried Lupin terribly, since the man’s incredible acrobatic skills had made him suspect that it was his own father. It wasn’t until many years later that Lupin finally found out the truth about his father: he had never been the Rooftop Thief.

  * * *

  On the night of the next full moon, Sherlock called to me from the street. I joined him immediately via the “Lupin shortcut” — that is, my bedroom window. He led me through the old streets of the town to a house, where he picked the lock to open the door. We followed the stairs up to the roof. He was almost completely silent, only mumbling in response to my questions.

  When we were up on the roof, he sat down, apparently waiting for something. I soon found out what it was. With the rest of the town asleep, we watched as a thin, black silhouette of a man moved slowly across the roof opposite of us. The Rooftop Thief was just a stone’s throw away. He seemed to be both looking at us and ignoring us at the same time.