“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.

CHAPTER IV

AT THE VILLA

The drive curved between trees and high bushes towards the back of the house, and as the party advanced along it a small, trim, soldier-like man, with a pointed beard, came to meet them.  It was the man who had looked out from the window, Louis Besnard, the Commissaire of Police.

“You are coming, then, to help us, M. Hanaud!” he cried, extending his hands.  “You will find no jealousy here; no spirit amongst us of anything but good will; no desire except one to carry out your suggestions.  All we wish is that the murderers should be discovered.  Mon Dieu, what a crime!  And so young a girl to be involved in it!  But what will you?”