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 drove into 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 seat covered with a goatskin, next to whom a woman moaned, her head covered in blood. People 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. It was 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 decomposing corpse of a man. His head, too, has been smashed to a pulp 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 child's play. Signed: Arsène Lupin"...