t his knife with some difficulty, he began to hack at the wickerwork.
Dry and pliant, the interlaced rods did not long resist the saw's steel
teeth. It took him a bare ten minutes to make an opening, sufficiently
large to push his head and shoulders through: the rest of his body
followed easily. Such was his haste to be free, that he tore, not only
his clothes, but his elbows and hands, on the jagged ends of the broken
wickerwork: large drops of blood fell on the flooring.

"Bah! I've got off cheaply!" cried Fandor, standing up to relax his
cramped muscles and stretching his aching legs and arms.

"Unless I am jolly well mistaken, I am lord of all I survey. I am alone
in my glory! There's not a soul in the place! Good luck indeed!"

He turned for a last look at his broken prison house, the cage in which
he had spent such exciting hours. He suddenly stiffened and drew back: a
nervous trembling seized him--the nervous trembling due to sudden shock.
Between the trunk which had been dumped down in the centre of a large
square room, without a scrap of furniture in it, and the window, through
whose shutters the rays of morning sunshine shone, Fandor had caught
sight of a body lying on the floor--a man's body! Fandor leapt forward.
Was this same cunning criminal feigning sleep for some evil purpose?
Standing over that motionless figure, Fandor bent and touched one of the
man's hands: it was ice-cold and rigid. The man was dead!

To see his face was imperative: it was turned towards the floor. With
difficulty Fandor raised the head and shoulders, for they were unusually
large and strongly built. Fandor glanced at the face and suddenly
withdrew his hand: the corpse fell back on the floor with a thud!

"Thomery!" murmured Fandor. "Why, it's Thomery!"

It was the well-known sugar refiner's body. The face was purple, the
tongue protruding. Round his neck was tied a tricoloured scarf, the
scarf of a police inspector! Was this the murderer's ironic touch?

Fandor sank down quite overcome. He tried to collect his thoughts.

"A disgusting joke this! If someone should take into his head to enter
the room at this moment, what kind of explanation could I give? Here I
am, alone with the dead body of a man I know, and in a room I don't
know, in a neighbourhood whose whereabouts I know no more than the man
in the moon."

"Where am I?... In whose house?... For what purpose?... Have those
beauties of last night no suspicion of the trut