L'Homme à la peau de bique

Maurice Leblanc

One Sunday, as they were leaving church, the inhabitants of Saint-Nicolas saw a car arrive at full speed, an open limousine, which nearly entered the crowd and continued its frantic zigzagging race towards the Morgues forest. A few people had time to catch a glimpse of the driver, a man wearing a fur hat and large pilot's goggles, sitting on a bench covered with a goatskin and next to whom a woman moaned, her head covered in blood. We followed the tracks and found the car overturned on a bend, then the body of a woman whose face had been crushed under a block of stone. No trace of the driver. No license plate. We learned later that the previous evening, the same limousine, with the curtains down, had been spotted, with a couple, three hundred kilometers away. But soon, eighteen kilometers from Saint-Nicolas, in the brambles, at the bottom of a meadow, a shepherd discovers the corpse of a man in putrefaction. His head is also mush and there is nothing to identify him either. The mystery thickens, the police and the newspapers put forward various hypotheses. A newspaper that concluded that even Arsène Lupin would give up, receives a strange telegram that ends thus: "The drama of Saint-Nicolas is a mystery for a child in a wet nurse. Signed: Arsène Lupin"...