At nine o'clock in the evening, the police commissary entered the garden
with his secretary and a policeman. The municipal physician, Monsieur
Hibry, arrived simultaneously. Already, thanks to the industry of Madame
Simonneau, who was always interested in matters of supply, the house
exhaled a violent smell of carbolic and was blazing with the candles
which she had lit. Madame Simonneau was bustling to and fro, actuated by
an urgent desire to procure a crucifix and a bough of consecrated
box-wood for the dead. The doctor examined the corpse by the light of a
candle.

He was a bulky man with a ruddy complexion. He breathed noisily. He had
just dined.

"The bullet, a large calibre bullet," he said, "penetrated by way of the
palatal vault, traversed the brain and finally fractured the left
parietal bone, carrying away a portion of the cerebral substance, and
blowing out a piece of the skull. Death was instantaneous."

He returned the candle to Madame Simonneau and continued:

"Splinters of the skull were projected to a certain distance. They will
probably be found in the garden. I should conjecture that the bullet was
round-nosed. A conical bullet would have caused less destruction."

However, the commissary. Monsieur Josse-Arbrissel, a tall, thin man with
a long grey moustache, seemed neither to see nor to hear. A dog was
howling outside the garden gate.

"The direction of the wound," said the doctor, "as well as the fingers