alone, could carry the pastor’s body out of his room?”
“I am very strong.”
“How did you arrange it that there should be no traces of blood to betray you?”
“I waited until the body had stiffened, then I tied up the wound and carried him down into the crypt.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t want to leave him in that horrid pool of blood.”
“You were sorry for him then?”
“Why, yes; it looked so horrid to see him lying there—and he had always been so good to me. He was so good to me that very evening when I entered his study.
“He recognised you?
“Certainly. He sprang up from his chair when I came in through the passage from the church. I saw that he was startled, but he smiled at me and reached out his hand to me and said: ‘What brings you here, my dear Cardillac?’ And then I struck. I wanted him to die with that smile on his lips. It is beautiful to see a man die smiling, it shows that he has not been afraid of death. He was dead at once. I always kill that way—I know just how to strike and where. I killed more than a hundred people years ago in Paris, and I didn’t leave one of them the time for even a sigh. I was renowned for that—I had a kind heart and a sure hand.”
Muller interrupted the dreadful imaginings of the madman with a question. “You got into the house through the crypt?”
“Yes, through the crypt. I found the window one night when I was prowling around in the churchyard. When I knew that the pastor was to be the next, I cut through the window bars. Gyuri went into the church one day when nobody was there and found out that it was easy to lift the stone over the entrance to the crypt. He also learned that the doors from the church to the vestry were never locked. I knew how to find the passageway, because I had been through it several times on my visits to the rectory. But it was a mere chance that the door into the pastor’s study was unlocked.”
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