Now this man had been seen entering the train, he had been seen sitting at the window, and Saulomon had collected his ticket some ten minutes before. The door was not bolted then. But the door was bolted now, and no murderer could have gone through that door. Nor could a murderer have come through the window. One of the windows was down some inches, but no human being could have squeezed thorugh that space, even if anyone could have reached the window—for it was twelve feet from the ground, and the idea of a murderer clinging to the side of a train was impossible. The other windows were locked.
Two days later, the Parisian police discovered the murdered man’s identity. He was traveling under a forged passport as a lawyer from Marseilles; his real name was Mercier, and he was probably the deftest diamond-smuggler in Europe.
II
There was a conference of puzzled people in the office of M. Villon, he of the great, bald mechanical head and small body, who may be remembered as having worked with M. Henri Bencolin in the LaGarde murder case. He had never forgiven Bencolin for tricking him into smoking the cigarette which held the identity of the woman spy, Sylvie St. Marie; but that was all meaningless ancient history now. For M. le Comte de Villon was now promoted to the position of juge d’ instruction, the most dreaded police official in France, whose cross-examination of suspects is a process which even American third-degree experts are forced to admire. And now Bencolin was away; for some months he had been in the United States on a police mission. Villon was in sole charge of the Blue Arrow mystery; very spiteful in his quiet, ponderous way, with his pin-point eyes and big flabby hands.
