Murder Most Merry (66 page)

“It’s very important, Mademoiselle. It may even be a matter of life and death. Yes, please. See if you can find out. Ask everybody who’s in the building now. What? Yes, I know it’s Christmas Day. It’s Christmas Day here, too, but we have to carry on just the same.”

Between his teeth he muttered, “Silly little bitch!”

He could hear the linotypes clicking as he held the line, waiting for her answer.

“Yes. What? Three weeks ago. A young boy—”

Olivier went pale in the face. His eyes dropped, and during the rest of the conversation he stared obstinately at his hands.

“He didn’t telephone? Came round himself. At what time? On a Thursday, you say. What did he want? Asked if Olivier Lecœur worked there? What? What was he told?”

Looking up, Olivier saw a flush spread over his brother’s face before he banged down the receiver.

“Francois went there one Thursday afternoon. He must have suspected something. They told him you hadn’t been working there for some time.”

There was no point in repeating what he had heard. What they’d said to the boy was: “We chucked the old fool out weeks ago.”

Perhaps not out of cruelty. They may not have thought it was the man’s son they were speaking to.

“Do you begin to understand, Olivier?”

Did he realize that the situation was the reverse of what he had imagined? He had been going off at night, armed with his little box of sandwiches, keeping up an elaborate pretense. And in the end he had been the one to be taken in!

The boy had found him out. And wasn’t it only fair to suppose that he had seen through the Uncle Gedeon story, too?

He hadn’t said a word. He had simply fallen in with the game.

No one dared say anything for fear of saying too much, for fear of evoking images that would be heartrending.

A father and a son each lying to avoid hurting the other.

They had to look at it through the eyes of the child, with all childhood’s tragic earnestness. His father kisses him good night and goes off to the job that doesn’t really exist, saying: “Sleep well. There’ll be a surprise for you in the morning.”

A radio. It could only be that. And didn’t he know that his father’s pockets were empty? Did he try to go to sleep? Or did he get up as soon as his father had gone, to sit miserably staring out of the window obsessed by one thought?
His father had no money—yet he was going to buy him a radio!

To the accompaniment, in all probability, of a full-throated Czech choir singing their national songs on the other side of the thin wall!

The Inspector sighed and knocked out his pipe on his heel.

“It looks as though he saw you at Madame Fayet’s.”

Olivier nodded.

“We’ll check up on this, but it seems likely that, looking down from his window, he wouldn’t see very far into the room.”

“That’s quite right.”

“Could he have seen you leave the room?”

“No. The door’s on the opposite side from the window.”

“Do you remember going near the window?”

“At one time I was sitting on the windowsill.”

“Was the window open then? We know it was later.”

“It was open a few inches. I’m sure of that, because I moved away from it, as I felt an icy draught on my back. She lived with us for a while, just after our marriage, and I know she couldn’t bear not to have her window open all the year round. You see, she’d been brought up in the country.”

“So there’d be no frost on the panes. He’d certainly have seen you if he was looking.”

A call. Lecœur thrust his contact plug into one of the sockets.

“Yes. What’s that? A boy?”

The other two held their breath.

“Yes. Yes. What? Yes. Send out the
agents cyclistes
. Comb the whole neighborhood. I’ll see about the station. How long ago was it? Half an hour? Couldn’t he have let us know sooner?”

Without losing time over explanations, Lecœur plugged in to the Gare du Nord.

“Hallo! Gare du Nord! Who’s speaking? Ah, Lambert. Listen, this is urgent. Have the station searched from end to end. Ask everybody if they’ve seen a boy of ten wandering about. What? Alone? He may be. Or he may be accompanied. We don’t know. Let me know what you find out. Yes, of course. Grab him at once if you set eyes on him.”

“Did you say accompanied?” asked Olivier anxiously.

“Why not? It’s possible. Anything’s possible. Of course, it may not be him. If it is, we’re half an hour late. It was a small grocer in the Rue de Maubeuge whose shopfront is open onto the street. He saw a boy snatch a couple of oranges and make off. He didn’t run after him. Only later, when a policeman passed, he thought he might as well mention it.”

“Had your son any money?” asked the Inspector.

“Not a sou.”

“Hasn’t he got a money-box?”

“Yes. But I borrowed what was in it two days ago, saying that I didn’t want to change a banknote.”

A pathetic little confession, but what did things like that matter now?

“Don’t you think it would be better if I went to the Gare du Nord myself?”

“I doubt if it would help, and we may need you here.”

They were almost prisoners in that room. With its direct links with every nerve center of Paris, that was the place where any news would first arrive. Even in his room in the Police Judiciaire, the Inspector would be less well placed. He had thought of going back there, but now at last took off his overcoat, deciding to see the job through where he was.

“If he had no money, he couldn’t take a bus or the Métro. Nor could he go into a cafe or use a public telephone. He probably hasn’t had anything to eat since his supper last night.”

“But what can he be doing?” exclaimed Olivier, becoming more and more nervous. “And why should he have sent me to the Gare d’Austerlitz?”

“Perhaps to help you get away,” grunted Saillard.

“Get away? Me?”

“Listen. The boy knows you’re down and out. Yet you’re going to buy him a little radio. I’m not reproaching you. I’m just looking at the facts. He leans on the windowsill and sees you with the old woman he knows to be a moneylender. What does he conclude?”

“I see.”

“That you’ve gone to her to borrow money. He may be touched by it, he may be saddened—we don’t know. He goes back to bed and to sleep.”

“You think so?”

“I’m pretty sure of it. Anyhow, we’ve no reason to think he left the house then.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Let’s say he goes back to sleep, then. But he wakes up early, as children mostly do on Christmas Day. And the first thing he notices is the frost on the window. The first frost this winter, don’t forget that. He wants to look at it, to touch it.”

A faint smile flickered across Andre Lecœur’s face. This massive Inspector hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be a boy.

“He scratches a bit of it away with his nails. It won’t be difficult to get confirmation, for once the frost is tampered with it can’t form again in quite the same pattern. What does he notice then? That in the buildings opposite one window is lit up, and one only—the window of the room in which a few hours before he had seen his father. It’s guesswork, of course, but I don’t mind betting he saw the body, or part of it. If he’d merely seen a foot it would have been enough to startle him.”

“You mean to say—” began Olivier, wide-eyed.

“That he thought you’d killed her. As I did myself—for a moment. And very likely not her only. Just think for a minute. The man who’s been committing all these murders is a man. like you, who wanders about at night. His victims live in the poorer quarters of Paris, like Madame Fayet in the Rue Michat. Does the boy know anything of how you’ve been spending your nights since you lost your job? No. All that he has to go on is that he has seen you in the murdered woman’s room. Would it be surprising if his imagination got to work?

“You said just now that you sat on the windowsill. Might it be there that you put down your box of sandwiches?”

“Now I come to think of it, yes. I’m practically sure.”

“Then he saw it. And he’s quite old enough to know what the police would think when they saw it lying there. Is your name on it?”

“Yes. Scratched on the lid.”

“You see! He thought you’d be coming home as usual between seven and eight. The thing was to get you as quickly as possible out of the danger zone.”

“You mean—by writing me that note?”

“Yes. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t refer to the murder without compromising you. Then he thought of Uncle Gedeon. Whether he believed in his existence or not doesn’t matter. He knew you’d go to the Gare d’Austerlitz.”

“But he’s not yet eleven!”

“Boys of that age know a lot more than you think. Doesn’t he read detective stories?”

“Yes.”

“Of course he does. They all do. If they don’t read them, they get them on the radio. Perhaps that’s why he wanted a set of his own so badly.”

“It’s true.”

“He couldn’t stay in the flat to wait for you, for he had something more important to do. He had to get hold of that box. I suppose he knew the courtyard well. He’d played there, hadn’t he?”

“At one time, yes. With the concierge’s little girl.”

“So he’d know about the rainwater pipes, may even have climbed up them for sport.”

“Very well,” said Olivier, suddenly calm, “let’s say he gets into the room and takes the box. He wouldn’t need to climb down the way he’d come. He could simply walk out of the flat and out of the house. You can open the house door from inside without knocking up the concierge. You say it was at about six o’clock, don’t you?”

“I see what you’re driving at,” grunted the Inspector. “Even at a leisurely pace, it would hardly have taken him two hours to walk to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Yet he wasn’t there.”

Leaving them to thrash it out, Lecœur was busy telephoning.

“No news yet?”

And the man at the Gare du Nord answered, “Nothing so far. We’ve pounced on any number of boys, but none of them was Francois Lecœur.”

Admittedly, any street boy could have pinched a couple of oranges and taken to his heels. The same couldn’t be said for the broken glass of the telephone pillars, however. Andre Lecœur looked once again at the column with the seven crosses, as though some clue might suddenly emerge from them. He had never thought himself much cleverer than his brother. Where he scored was in patience and perseverance.

“If the box of sandwiches is ever found, it’ll be at the bottom of the Seine near the Pont Mirabeau,” he said.

Steps in the corridor. On an ordinary day they would not have been noticed, but in the stillness of a Christmas morning everyone listened.

It was an
agent cycliste
, who produced a bloodstained blue-check handkerchief, the one that had been found among the glass splinters at the seventh telephone pillar.

“That’s his, all right,” said the boy’s father.

“He must have been followed,” said the Inspector. “If he’d had time, he wouldn’t merely have broken the glass. He’d have said something.”

“Who by?” asked Olivier, who was the only one not to understand. “Who’d want to follow him?” he asked. “And why should he call the police?”

They hesitated to put him wise. In the end it was his brother who explained:

“When he went to the old woman’s he thought you were the murderer. When he came away, he knew you weren’t. He knew—”

“Knew what?”

“He knew who was. Do you understand now? He found out something, though we don’t know what. He wants to tell us about it, but someone’s stopping him.”

“You mean?”

“I mean that Francois is after the murderer or the murderer is after him. One is following, one is followed—we don’t know which. By the way, Inspector, is there a reward offered?”

“A handsome reward was offered after the third murder and it was doubled last week. It’s been in all the papers.”

“Then my guess,” said Andre Lecœur. “is that it’s the kid who’s doing the following. Only in that case—”

It was twelve o’clock, four hours since they’d lost track of him. Unless, of course, it was he who had snaffled the oranges in the Rue Maubeuge.

Might not this be his great moment? Andre Lecœur had read somewhere that even to the dullest and most uneventful lives such a moment comes sooner or later.

He had never had a particularly high opinion of himself or of his abilities. When people asked him why he’d chosen so dreary and monotonous a job rather than one in, say, the Brigade des Homicides, he would answer: “I suppose I’m lazy.”

Sometimes he would add:

“I’m scared of being knocked about.”

As a matter of fact, he was neither lazy nor a coward. If he lacked anything it was brains.

He knew it. All he had learned at school had cost him a great effort. The police exams that others took so easily in their stride, he had only passed by dint of perseverance.