Léon and Louise (12 page)

‘Here you are, Monsieur Le Gall, that's the best I can do.'

‘I'm much obliged to you.'

‘You must go now, your wife will have been waiting for you.'

‘Yes.'

‘Waiting a long time.'

‘Yes indeed.'

‘Two hours. You're very late tonight.'

‘Yes.'

‘I can't ever remember you getting home so late. Madame must be worried.'

‘You're right.'

‘Nothing bad happened, that's the main thing. I'll put my calves' liver in the pan now. I never eat until the girls are in bed, then I can do so in peace. Do you like calves' liver in red wine sauce, Monsieur Le Gall?'

‘Very much.'

‘And sautéed potatoes with rosemary?'

‘It's my idea of heaven.'

‘But you've got all you need at home, you lucky man. And you're really sure nothing bad happened?'

‘Absolutely not. I must hurry.'

‘Of course. Madame will be expecting you, and here I am, holding you up with my nonsense about calves' liver.'

‘Oh, you mustn't say that, Madame Rossetos. Calves' liver in red wine sauce isn't nonsense, it's a very serious matter. Especially when sautéed potatoes with rosemary are also involved.'

‘How nicely you put that, Monsieur Le Gall! You're a man of refinement, I always say. Sure you won't have a taste? Just a quick one?'

‘It sounds tempting, but...'

‘Madame will have your supper ready, of course, and I'm holding you up with my chatter.'

‘Some other time.'

‘She's bound to be worried.'

‘Yes, I ought to be going.'

‘Enjoy your evening and my best regards to Madame.'

L
éon carried the strawberry tartlets up to the third floor. The stairs were freshly polished, the bright red stair carpet was free from dust, and the brass stair rods gleamed. He breathed in the scent of wax polish, which gave him a homely feeling of peace and permanency, and listened to the little sounds from the neighbouring flats, which seemed to convey a sense of belonging and security.

He paused outside his door. He could hear his wife singing a ballad in her girlishly high but slightly husky voice. ‘
Si j'étais à ta place, si tu prenais la mienne...
' He waited until the song had died away, then opened the door. Yvonne was standing in the hallway in a pale summer frock far too light for the time of year, arranging a bunch of asters in a vase. She turned to him with a smile.

‘There you are at last! Supper's on the table. The boy's asleep already. I waited supper for you and opened a bottle of wine.'

She took the plate of strawberry tartlets from him, laughing at their sorry state, sent him off to wash his hands with feigned severity and, after a quick sidelong glance at herself in the mirror, tweaked her hair into shape. Léon was surprised; this wasn't the despairing, tormented, captive creature he had left at home that morning, but the singing, laughing young girl he had once fallen in love with.

‘You're looking odd,' she said when supper was over and they'd retired to the living room for coffee and the maltreated strawberry tartlets. ‘Has something happened?'

‘I went to Saint-Sulpice and bought the
tartes aux fraises.
'

‘I know, it was very nice of you. You took your time, though, didn't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Over two hours. Were you held up?'

‘I saw this girl.'

‘What girl?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘You're not sure? You see some girl, but you aren't sure and you're two hours late?'

‘Yes.'

‘My dear, it sounds as if we need to talk.'

‘I think it was Louise.'

‘Which Louise?'

‘Little Louise from Saint-Luc-sur-Marne. You know who I mean.'

‘The girl who died?'

Léon nodded, then gave his wife a detailed description of his encounter in the Métro, his toings and froings along the selfsame tunnel, his doubts on the way home, and the further doubts that had arisen since then. He ended by telling her about his visit to the concierge and his subsequent ascent of the stairs, during which tears had come to his eyes – tears of pity not only for Madame Rossetos but for himself and the world in general.

When he was through, Yvonne got up and went over to the window, where she drew the curtain aside and looked down at the nocturnally silent street.

‘We always knew something like this would happen one day, didn't we?' Her tone was cheerful and there was a faint smile on her lips. Her figure was silhouetted against the lamplight and the falling rain. ‘You'll go looking for this dead girl. You have to make sure.'

‘She doesn't exist any more, Yvonne. Besides, a lot of time has gone by.'

‘You'll go looking for her all the same.'

‘No, I won't.'

‘You'll go looking for her sooner or later. You won't be able to live with the uncertainty.'

‘The certainties I do have are enough for me,' he replied. ‘I don't need any others. I don't chase after other women, you ought to know that.'

‘Because you married me?'

‘Because I'm your husband and you're my wife.'

‘You don't want to do anything wrong, Léon, and that's to your credit. All the same, this business will prey on your mind if you don't get to the bottom of it. I don't want to see you suffer, for my own sake above all. You must look for the girl, I insist.'

Next morning Léon struggled with an urge to ride the Métro back and forth a couple of times, just on the off-chance. In the Place Saint-Michel he abandoned the struggle. Passing beneath the cast-iron art nouveau lamp at the head of the steps, he made his way down into the Métro station. In the hour that followed he encountered a large number of people of both sexes and every age, size and skin colour, as well as a few dogs, a cat in a wickerwork cage, and even a farmer with dull yellow canine eyes and two live sheep, who must have parked his cart at Porte de Châtillon and was taking them by Métro to market at Les Halles. But he never saw a girl with green eyes.

Nobody noticed that he was late for work. The Police Judiciaire's forensic laboratory was situated on the fourth floor of the Quai des Orfèvres building, high above the offices of the
commissariat
, the criminal police headquarters itself, which rang with shouts, lamentations and oaths at all hours of the day and night. In Léon's department, by contrast, peace reigned. There was no smell of rain-sodden police overcoats, or of the sweat of apprehensive suspects under interrogation, or of beer and
choucroute,
or of the sandwiches and cigarettes of crime reporters hanging around in the passages hoping for a scoop. Here it smelt of chlorine and Javel water, ether and acetone. The laboratory abounded in brass and glass and mahogany, and the staff worked with silent concentration to the hiss of Bunsen burners.

They padded around quietly and talked in low voices, and if some clumsy junior should happen to clatter two Erlenmeyer flasks or test tubes together, his colleagues merely raised their eyebrows in annoyance. Here superiors addressed their subordinates formally as ‘
vous
' and politely couched their orders in the interrogative form. Everyone made his own coffee at break time, and no one would have dreamed of even noticing a colleague's belated arrival.

It was ten years since Léon had presented himself at the Police Judiciaire's communications centre, which was situated two floors below the laboratory and one floor above the
commissariat
. In the early weeks he had found it hard to do justice to his function as a Morse expert, because all that counted there was efficiency and he couldn't disguise his incompetence by falling back on a railwayman's smart uniform and a red flag. It had clearly emerged after only one hour's work that Léon hadn't a clue about Morse telegraphy. This he had with difficulty justified to his superiors by vaguely alluding to years off work owing to war service and convalescence after being wounded in action; once he had even pulled his shirt out of his trousers to show off his cicatrized bullet wounds.

But because he proved to be extremely hard-working and pored over the official manuals of the French and international telegraph companies until long after midnight in his attic room in the Batignolles, he quickly overcame his handicap and was accounted a fully qualified telegraphist after only a few months.

However, it was soon borne in on him that Morse telegraphy, once you got the hang of it, was an extremely monotonous occupation with little prospect of variety. As luck would have it, he was rescued from the telegraph office after three years by the deputy director of the Scientific Service, with whom he occasionally had lunch and who offered him an assistant's post in the newly established forensic laboratory.

Léon's change of job did, admittedly, mean a return to a state of utter incompetence, because his total lack of interest in chemistry had consigned him to the bottom of the class at school, and he had completely forgotten the little rudimentary knowledge that had, despite himself, lodged in his brain.

By employing his tried and tested method of imposture, however, he again succeeded in remedying his ignorance in a short space of time. His colleagues forgave his initial clumsiness partly because he was friendly to them all and did not contest anyone's position in the hierarchy. By the autumn of 1928, when his second child was on the way, Léon was among the most senior members of the laboratory staff and accountable to no one. There was a good chance that he would be appointed deputy departmental director in a few years' time.

That morning he had to check a potato gratin sample for traces of arsenic, a procedure he must have carried out a hundred times before. He took the dish containing the supposedly poisoned gratin from the refrigerator, dissolved a knife point of it in hydrogen and poured the solution over a piece of filter paper to which he had previously applied a solution of auric sodium chloride. Although constant repetition had rendered every move he made second nature to him, he exercised due care when handling the samples, every second or third of which actually proved to contain enough poison to be hazardous to health. This time the result was negative. Instead of turning violet under the influence of the potato solution, the auric sodium chloride retained its brown coloration. Léon went to the sink and washed his utensils, then sat down at the black and gold Remington on his desk and typed out a report plus three copies for the investigating magistrate.

In the early years he had taken an interest in the broken vows of fidelity and cooling passions that gave rise to the poisoned potato gratins and pork chops, likewise the stories of avarice, betrayal and revenge. He had tried to imagine the desperation of the poisoners – it was nearly always women who resorted to rat poison, men having other weapons at their disposal in the fight for survival. He had also tried to empathize with the feelings of relief and disappointment entertained by those husbands who had misinterpreted their stomach-aches, giddy spells and fits of sweating as symptoms of poisoning. He used to seek out the detective inspectors on the ground floor and chat with them in order to learn something of the fate of those persons whom he, Léon Le Gall, with his pipettes and stirrers, had either set at liberty or consigned to prison or the scaffold. He had sometimes – unofficially and against his colleagues' advice – visited crime scenes or viewed the homes of female poisoners, paid his respects to their victims in the morgue, and looked into the murderesses' eyes when they were convicted and sentenced.

As time went by, however, he discovered that most of these dramas bore a terribly banal resemblance to each other, and that the same stories of rapacity, brutality and stupidity recurred again and again with only minor variations. After three years in the department at latest, therefore, he confined himself to looking for arsenic, rat poison or cyanide on behalf of the law and left any questions of guilt, motive and fate, as well as punishment, atonement and forgiveness, to others: to the judges in their august robes, or Almighty God in heaven, or the man in the street, or the beer drinkers around their favourite table. This was the attitude of professional detachment which his more experienced colleagues had advised him to adopt from the outset.