Murder Most Merry (68 page)

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never had the slightest desire to ring him up. Is that all? Can I go back to my game of bridge?”

The Inspector had already snatched up the telephone directory and was looking for Loubet’s number. He rang up himself. There was now a tacit understanding between him and Lecœur. They shared the same hope, the same trembling eagerness, while Olivier, realizing that something important was going on, came and stood near them.

Without being invited, Andre did something he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that morning. He picked up the second earphone to listen in. The bell rang in the flat in the Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. It rang for a long time, as though the place was deserted, and his anxiety was becoming acute when at last it stopped and a voice answered.

Thank Heaven! It was a woman’s voice, an elderly one. “Is that you at last? Where are you?”

“Hallo! This isn’t your husband here. Madame.”

“Has he met with an accident?”

From the hopefulness of her tone, it sounded as though she had long been expecting one and wouldn’t be sorry when it happened.

“It is Madame Loubet I’m speaking to, isn’t it?”

“Who else would it be?”

“Your husband’s not at home?”

“First of all, who are you?”

“Inspector Saillard.”

“ What do you want him for?”

The Inspector put his hand over the mouthpiece to say to Lecœur: “Get through to Janvier. Tell him to dash round there as quick as he can.”

“Didn’t your husband come home this morning?”

“You ought to know! I thought the police knew everything!”

“Does it often happen?”

“That’s his business, isn’t it?”

No doubt she hated her drunkard of a husband, but now that he was threatened she was ready to stand up for him.

“I suppose you know he no longer belongs to the police force.”

“Perhaps he found a cleaner job.”

“When did he stop working for the Agence Argus?”

“What’s that? What are you getting at?”

“I assure you, Madame, your husband was dismissed from the Agence Argus over two months ago.”

“You’re lying.”

“Which means that for these last two months he’s been going off to work every evening.”

“Where else would he be going? To the Folies Bergère?”

“Have you any idea why he hasn’t come back today? He hasn’t telephoned, has he?”

She must have been afraid of saying the wrong thing, for she rang off without another word.

When the Inspector put his receiver down, he turned round to see Lecœur standing behind him, looking away. In a shaky voice, the latter said:

“Janvier’s on his way now.”

He was treated as an equal. He knew it wouldn’t last, that tomorrow, sitting at his switchboard, he would be once more but a small cog in the huge wheel.

The others simply didn’t count—not even his brother, whose timid eyes darted from one to the other uncomprehendingly, wondering why, if his boy’s life was in danger, they talked so much instead of doing something.

Twice he had to pluck at Andre’s sleeve to get a word in edgewise.

“Let me go and look for him myself,” he begged.

What could he do? The hunt had widened now. A description of ex-Sergeant Loubet had been passed to all police stations and patrols.

It was no longer only a boy of ten who was being looked for, but also a man of fifty-eight, probably the worse for drink, dressed in a black overcoat with a velvet collar and an old grey-felt hat, a man who knew his Paris like the palm of his hand, and who was acquainted with the police.

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.