The girl must have lain unconscious for about ten minutes.  When she came to her senses, she dragged herself, terrified, from the room and up to the housekeeper’s apartments, where, being an excitable and nervous creature, she only screamed “Murder!” and immediately fell in a fit of hysterics that lasted three-quarters of an hour.  When at last she came to herself, she told her story, and, the hall-porter having been summoned, Rameau’s rooms were again approached.

The blood still lay on the floor, and the chopper, with which the crime had evidently been committed, rested against the fender; but the body had vanished!  A search was at once made, but no trace of it could be seen anywhere.  It seemed impossible that it could have been carried out of the building, for the hall-porter must at once have noticed anybody leaving with so bulky a burden.  Still, in the building it was not to be found.

When Hewitt was informed of these things on Monday, the police were, of course, still in possession of Rameau’s rooms.  Inspector Nettings, Hewitt was told, was in charge of the case, and as the inspector was an acquaintance of his, and was then in the rooms upstairs, Hewitt went up to see him.

Nettings was pleased to see Hewitt, and invited him to look around the rooms.  “Perhaps you can spot something we have overlooked,” he said.  “Though it’s not a case there can be much doubt about.”

“You think it’s Goujon, don’t you?”

“Think?  Well, rather!  Look here!  As soon as we got here on Saturday, we found this piece of paper and pin on the floor.  We showed it to the housemaid, and then she remembered—­she was too much upset to think of it before—­that when she was in the room the paper was laying on the dead man’s chest—­pinned there, evidently.  It must have dropped off when they removed the body.  It’s a case of half-mad revenge on Goujon’s part, plainly.  See it; you read French, don’t you?”

The paper was a plain, large half-sheet of note-paper, on which a sentence in French was scrawled in red ink in a large, clumsy hand, thus: 

  puni par un vengeur de la tortue.

“Puni par un vengeur de la tortue,” Hewitt repeated musingly. “’Punished by an avenger of the tortoise,’ That seems odd.”

“Well, rather odd.  But you understand the reference, of course.  Have they told you about Rameau’s treatment of Goujon’s pet tortoise?”

“I think it was mentioned among his other pranks.  But this is an extreme revenge for a thing of that sort, and a queer way of announcing it.”

“Oh, he’s mad—­mad with Rameau’s continual ragging and baiting,” Nettings answered.  “Anyway, this is a plain indication—­plain as though he’d left his own signature.  Besides, it’s in his own language—­French.  And there’s his chopper, too.”

“Speaking of signatures,” Hewitt remarked, “perhaps you have already compared this with other specimens of Goujon’s writing?”