Dollon is dead – dead as a door nail – dead beyond dispute, because fifty men have seen him dead; dead, because the Dépôt doctors have certified his death!”

Daylight was fading; evening was coming on; Fandor was still turning the whole affair over in his mind.

Every now and again he murmured:

“Fantômas! Fantômas is at the heart this extraordinary, this uncanny affair! Fantômas is in it…

Fantômas! ”

CHAPTER FOUR : A SURPRISING ITINERARY

Jérôme Fandor had passed a bad night!

Visions of horror had continually arisen in his troubled mind. Between nightmare after nightmare he had heard all the horrors of the night sound out in the darkness and the glimmering dawn. Then he had fallen into a heavy sleep, which had left him on awaking broken with fatigue.

He had soused his face in cold water, and this had calmed his nerves; then he had dressed quickly. When eight o’clock struck he was at his writing-table, thinking things over: It’s no laughing matter. I thought at first that the Dollon affair was quite ordinary; but I am mistaken. The warning I received last night leaves me no doubts on that score. Since the guilty person thinks it necessary to ask me to keep quiet, it is evident he fears my intervention; if he is afraid of that, it is because it must be hurtful to him; if disastrous to him, a criminal, it is evident that it must be useful to honest folk. My duty then is to go straight ahead at all costs....

There was another motive besides that of duty which incited him to follow more closely the twists of the rue Norvins drama, a motive still indefinite, vague, but nevertheless terribly strong...

Jérôme Fandor had sworn to Elizabeth Dollon that he would get at the truth.

He recalled the girl’s entreaty, her emotion; and when he closed his eyes, now and again, he seemed to see before him the tall, graceful, fair and fascinating sister of the vanished artist.... All Fandor would admit to himself was a chivalrous feeling towards her – Elizabeth Dollon was deserving of his support – that was all!

The journalist spent the entire morning seated at his writing-table, his head between his hands, smoking cigarette after cigarette, arranging his plans for investigating the Dollon case:

“What I have to find out is how the dead man left the Dépôt. It is the first discovery to be made, the first impossibility to be explained – yes, but how am I to set about it?”

Suddenly Fandor jumped up, marched rapidly up and down his room, whistled a few bars of a popular melody, and in his exuberant gaiety attempted an operatic air in a voice deplorably out of tune.