Cynthia Manson (ed) (16 page)

Janvier had
returned, looking fresher than the men there in spite of his night’s vigil.

“She tried to slam
the door in my face, but I’d taken the precaution of sticking my foot in. She
doesn’t know anything. She says he’s been handing over his pay every month.”

“That’s why he had
to steal. He didn’t need big sums. In fact, he wouldn’t have known what to do
with them. What’s she like?”

“Small and dark,
with piercing eyes. Her hair’s dyed a sort of blue. She must have eczema or
something of the sort—she wears mittens.”

“Did you get a
photo of him?”

“There was one on
the dining-room sideboard. She wouldn’t give it to me, so I just took it.”

A heavy-built,
florid man, with bulging eyes, who in his youth had probably been the village
beau and had conserved an air of stupid arrogance. The photograph was some
years old. No doubt he looked quite different now.

“She didn’t give
you any idea where he was likely to be, did she?”

“As far as I could
make out, except at night, when he was supposed to be at work, she kept him
pretty well tied to her apron strings. I talked to the concierge, who told me
he was scared stiff of his wife. Often she’s seen him stagger home in the
morning, then suddenly pull himself together when he went upstairs. He goes out
shopping with his wife. In fact, he never goes out alone in the daytime. If she
goes out when he’s in bed, she locks him in.”

“What do you think,
Lecœur?”

“I’m wondering
whether my nephew and he aren’t together.”

“What do you mean?”

“They weren’t
together at the beginning, or Loubet would have stopped the boy giving the
alarm. There must have been some distance between them. One was following the
other.”

“Which way round?”

“When the kid
climbed up the drainpipe, he thought his father was guilty. Otherwise, why
should he have sent him off to the Gare d’Austerlitz, where no doubt he
intended to join him after getting rid of the sandwich tin?”

“It looks like it.”

“No, Andre.
Francois could never have thought—”

“Leave this alone.
You don’t understand. At that time the crime had certainly been committed.
Francois wouldn’t have dreamed of burgling someone’s flat for a tin box if it
hadn’t been that he’d seen the body.”

“From his window,”
put in Janvier, “he could see most of the legs.”

“What we don’t know
is whether the murderer was still there.”

“I can’t believe he
was,” said Saillard. “If he had been, he’d have kept out of sight, let the boy
get into the room, and then done the same to him as he’d done to the old
woman.”

“Look here,
Olivier. When you got home this morning, was the light on?”

“Yes.”

“In the boy’s
room?”

“Yes. It was the
first thing I noticed. It gave me a shock. I thought perhaps he was ill.”

“So the murderer
very likely saw it and feared his crime had had a witness. He certainly
wouldn’t have expected anyone to climb up the drainpipe. He must have rushed
straight out of the house.”

“And waited outside
to see what would happen.”

Guesswork! Yes. But
that was all they could do. The important thing was to guess right. For that
you had to put yourself in the other chap’s place and think as he had thought.
The rest was a matter of patrols, of the hundreds of policemen scattered all
over Paris, and, lastly, of luck.

“Rather than go down
the way he’d come, the boy must have left the house by the entrance in the Rue
Michat.”

“Just a moment,
Inspector. By that time he probably knew that his father wasn’t the murderer.”

“Why?”

“Janvier said just
now that Madame Fayet lost a lot of blood. If it had been his father, the blood
would have had time to dry up more or less. It was some nine hours since
Francois had seen him in the room. It was on leaving the house that he found
out who had done it, whether it was Loubet or not. The latter wouldn’t know
whether the boy had seen him up in the room. Francois would have been scared
and taken to his heels.”

This time it was
the boy’s father who interrupted. “No. Not if he knew there was a big reward
offered. Not if he knew I’d lost my job. Not if he’d seen me go to the old
woman to borrow some money.”

The Inspector and
Andre Lecœur exchanged glances. They had to admit Olivier was right, and it
made them afraid.

No. it had to be
pictured otherwise. A dark, deserted street in an outlying quarter of Paris two
hours before dawn.

On the other hand,
the ex-policeman, obsessed by his sense of grievance, who had just committed
his ninth murder to revenge himself on the society that had spurned him, and
perhaps still more to prove to himself he was still a man by defying the whole
police force—indeed, the whole world.

Was he drunk again?
On a night like that, when the bars were open long after their usual closing
time, he had no doubt had more than ever. And in that dark, silent street, what
did he see with his bulging drink-inflamed eyes? A young boy, the first person
who had found him out, and who would now—

“I’d like to know
whether he’s got a gun on him,” sighed the Inspector.

Janvier answered at
once:

“I asked his wife.
It seems he always carries one about. An automatic pistol, but it’s not
loaded.”

“How can she know
that?”

“Once or twice,
when he was more than usually drunk, he rounded on her, threatening her with
the gun. After that, she got hold of his ammunition and locked it up, telling
him an unloaded pistol was quite enough to frighten people without his having
to fire it.”

Had those two
really stalked each other through the streets of Paris? A strange sort of duel
in which the man had the strength and the boy the speed?

The boy may well
have been scared, but the man stood for something precious enough to push fear
into the background: a fortune and the end of his father’s worries and humiliations.

Having got so far,
there wasn’t a lot more to be said by the little group of people waiting in the
Préfecture de Police. They sat gazing at the street-plan with a picture in
their minds of a boy following a man, the boy no doubt keeping his distance.
Everyone else was sleeping. There was no one in the streets who could be a help
to the one or a menace to the other. Had Loubet produced his gun in an attempt
to frighten the boy away?

When people woke up
and began coming out into the streets, what would the boy do then? Would he
rush up to the first person he met and start screaming “Murder”?

“Yes. It was Loubet
who walked in front,” said Saillard slowly.

“And it was I,” put
in Andre Lecœur, “who told the boy all about the pillar telephone system.”

The little crosses
came to life. What had at first been mysterious was now almost simple. But it
was tragic.

The child was
risking his skin to save his father. Tears were slowly trickling down the
latter’s face. He made no attempt to hide them.

He was in a strange
place, surrounded by outlandish objects, and by people who talked to him as
though he wasn’t there, as though he was someone else. And his brother was
among these people, a brother he could hardly recognize and whom he regarded
with instinctive respect.

Even when they did
speak, it wasn’t necessary to say much. They understood each other. A word
sufficed.

“Loubet couldn’t go
home, of course.”

Andre Lecœur smiled
suddenly as a thought struck him.

“It didn’t occur to
him that Francois hadn’t a centime in his pocket. He could have escaped by
diving into the Métro.”

No. That wouldn’t
hold water. The boy had seen him and would give his description.

Place du Trocadéro,
the Etoile. The time was passing. It was practically broad daylight. People
were up and about. Why hadn’t Francois called for help? Anyhow, with people in
the streets it was no longer possible for Loubet to kill him.

The Inspector was
deep in thought.

“For one reason or
another,” he murmured, “I think they’re going about together now.”

At the same moment,
a lamp lit up on the wall. As though he knew it would be for him, Lecœur
answered in place of Bedeau.

“Yes. I thought as
much.”

“It’s about the two
oranges. They found an Arab boy asleep in the third-class waiting room at the
Gare du Nord. He still had the oranges in his pockets. He’d run away from home
because his father had beaten him.”

“Do you think Bib’s
dead?”

“If he was dead,
Loubet would have gone home, as he would no longer have anything to fear.”

So the struggle was
still going on somewhere in this now sunny Paris in which families were
sauntering along the boulevards taking the air.

It would be the
fear of losing him in the crowd that had brought Francois close to his quarry.
Why didn’t he call for help? No doubt because Loubet had threatened him with
his gun. “One word from you. my lad, and I’ll empty this into your guts.”

So each was
pursuing his own goal: for the one to shake off the boy somehow, for the other
to watch for the moment when the murderer was off his guard and give the alarm
before he had time to shoot.

It was a matter of
life and death.

“Loubet isn’t
likely to be in the center of the town, where policemen are too plentiful for
his liking, to say nothing of the fact that many of them know him by sight.”

Their most likely
direction from the Etoile was towards Montmartre—not to the amusement quarter,
but to the remoter and quieter parts.

It was half past
two. Had they had anything to eat? Had Loubet, with his mind set on escape,
been able to resist the temptation to drink?

“Monsieur le
Commissaire—”

Andre Lecœur
couldn’t speak with the assurance he would have liked. He couldn’t get rid of
the feeling that he was an upstart, if not a usurper.

“I know there are
thousands of little bars in Paris. But if we chose the more likely districts
and put plenty of men on the job—”

Not only were all
the men there roped in, but Saillard got through to the Police Judiciaire,
where there were six men on duty, and set every one of them to work on six
different telephone lines.

“Hallo! Is that the
Bar des Amis? In the course of the day have you seen a middle-aged man
accompanied by a boy of ten? The man’s wearing a black overcoat and a—”

Again Lecœur made
little crosses, not in his notebook this time, but in the telephone directory.
There were ten pages of bars, some of them with the weirdest names.

A plan of Paris was
spread out on a table all ready and it was in a little alley of ill-repute
behind the Place Clichy that the Inspector was able to make the first mark in
red chalk.

“Yes, there was a
man of that description here about twelve o’clock. He drank three glasses of
Calvados and ordered a glass of white wine for the boy. The boy didn’t want to
drink at first, but he did in the end and he wolfed a couple of eggs.”

By the way Olivier Lecœur’s
face lit up, you might have thought he heard his boy’s voice.

“You don’t know
which way they went?”

“Towards the
Boulevard des Batignolles, I think. The man looked as though he’d already had
one or two before he came in.”

“Hallo! Zanzi-Bar?
Have you at any time seen a—”

It became a
refrain. As soon as one man had finished, the same words, or practically the
same, were repeated by his neighbor.

Rue Damrémont.
Montmartre again, only farther out this time. One-thirty. Loubet had broken a
glass, his movements by this time being somewhat clumsy. The boy got up and
made off in the direction of the lavatory, but when the man followed, he
thought better of it and went back to his seat.

“Yes. The boy did
look a bit frightened. As for the man, he was laughing and smirking as though
he was enjoying a huge joke.”

“Do you hear that,
Olivier? Bib was still there at one-forty.”

Andre Lecœur dared
not say what was in his mind. The struggle was nearing its climax. Now that
Loubet had really started drinking if was just a question of time. The only
thing was: would the boy wait long enough?

It was all very
well for Madame Loubet to say the gun wasn’t loaded. The butt of an automatic
was quite hard enough to crack a boy’s skull.

His eyes wandered
to his brother, and he had a vision of what Olivier might well have come to if
his asthma hadn’t prevented him drinking.

“Hallo! Yes. Where?
Boulevard Ney?”

They had reached
the outskirts of Paris. The ex-Sergeant seemed still to have his wits about
him. Little by little, in easy stages, he was leading the boy to one of those
outlying districts where there were still empty building sites and desolate
spaces.