The Phantom of Rue Royale (19 page)

Semacgus was rubbing his hands in glee at Nicolas’s stunned expression.

‘So both the young girls in the house were impregnated!’ said Nicolas. ‘One died in mysterious circumstances, and the other, who must either have been concealing her condition or is unaware of it, is now in’ – he hesitated over the words to use – ‘an indefinable state which has yet to be explained.’

‘Don’t get carried away,’ said the naval surgeon, now serious again. ‘It won’t help. There are no phenomena which cannot be clarified by reason. So, if this maid of yours is flying, don’t take it for a miracle!’

‘But the lives of the saints—’

‘Ah, there he is, the Breton, the adopted son of a canon! You’re not going to convince me with tales told by old women and monks. I look at these apparently unintelligible facts in another way. We doctors of medicine – if I may assume this title, which some dispute
1
– have long observed attacks like this in simple or ill-educated patients, like this girl. To call things by their name,
your patient is suffering from hysteria, the manifestations of which used to be considered works of the devil.’

‘I’m not unfamiliar with the term,’ said Nicolas. ‘But you didn’t see the bed rising.’

‘Come on now, stop wasting your efforts. Over a century ago, Charles Lepois already saw this sickness as originating in the brain. At about the same time, an Englishman named Thomas Sydenham perfected an opium-based remedy called laudanum, which according to him lessened the effects of such attacks. Even before them, Paracelsus defined such attacks of delirium as deviations of the imagination. I agree with them. Man is a world unto himself. His mind deceives his physical nature, not the other way round. Quite apart from the fact that I reject any idea of a malign influence intent on crushing the heart and exciting the body. Mind you, I must admit this house strikes me as
unwholesome
, and I quite understand that it’s turning your head.’

Semacgus’s academic little speech left Nicolas perplexed. His friend, who had not known the torments of the night just past, could have no idea how confused and helpless he felt.

‘Be that as it may, Guillaume,’ he countered, ‘everything must be done to throw light on these mysteries. If you have time, you could do me a favour. Go to Rue Montmartre and ask Monsieur de Noblecourt to let me have his dog Cyrus for tomorrow night. If I am tested to the point where I start to see and hear things that aren’t there, I assume an innocent animal won’t hear or see anything, and that his passivity will confirm your diagnosis. And as I intend to get as much advice as I can from my friends, when you come back I’ll leave you to watch over Miette while I pay a visit to Père Grégoire at the monastery of the Discalced
Carmelites. He’ll be pleased to see me; I’ve been neglecting him lately.’

Reading Nicolas’s mind, Semacgus raised his arms to heaven. ‘After the medicine of the body, the medicine of the soul. You’re off to a bad start … But, of course, I remain at your disposal. I haven’t given up hope of welcoming you back into the legions of nature and truth. And, with that, I must dash off and have something to eat. It seems to me you should do the same.’

‘You’re right. The only thing I’ve eaten in the past twenty-four hours was an omelette.’

‘That’s not very plump, as your friend the good lady of Choisy used to say.
2
May I remind you that an alert mind requires a full stomach. So make sure you get something down you.’

His friend left, and after a last glance at Miette, who was sleeping peacefully, Nicolas went downstairs to the dining room, where Madame Galaine, wearing a
chenille
, was serving coffee to the rest of the family. The two sisters appeared to have calmed down. Charles was not wearing a wig, and his balding head made him look older. After a slight hesitation, he addressed Nicolas.

‘Commissioner, I have a request to submit to you. Given our situation, I believe it is imperative that that my family and I attend one of the Pentecost services at the parish church. It will silence the gossips, and the Lord may answer our prayers for peace to be restored to this house.’

Nicolas consented, thinking all the while that peace would only be restored the day the person responsible for the murder of Élodie was discovered. He would stay with Miette, he said, so that everyone, including Marie Chaffoureau, could perform their religious duties on this solemn day.

Once they had all left the room, he tried to drink a cup of coffee with milk, but his stomach rejected it, because of the skin that had formed on the surface of the liquid – something he had found intolerable ever since he was a small child. But the pump in the courtyard was wonderfully refreshing and rejuvenating on this beautiful, late-spring morning. Deep down, he felt Semacgus was right: the well-being of the body depended on peace of mind and nothing else. But how could he be sure? He went back upstairs to dress and brush his hair. On the stroke of nine, the cook put her head round the door and announced that the family were leaving for the church of Saint-Roch. They were all dressed in mourning clothes. He walked with them to the door of the shop, which they locked from the outside. The commissioner decided to follow through an idea that had come to him when he had realised that he would be alone in the house apart from Naganda, who was locked in his garret, and Miette, who was lying unconscious in her bed. There would never be another such opportunity to look for clues. He decided to begin his search with the bedroom of Monsieur and Madame Galaine.

The door was open. The bed, beneath a canopy of dusty Utrecht velvet, was unmade. Rumpled night clothes lay scattered on the counterpane. Two wing chairs upholstered in the same fabric, a worn carpet, a pedestal table on which stood a carafe of water and two silver tumblers, and a wardrobe so tall that it almost touched the ceiling joists were the outmoded and
somewhat
austere furnishings of the room. The only concession to current fashions was a small writing desk of lemon-tree wood, which seemed, in its magnificence, quite out of place in this antiquated environment. Nicolas was always surprised by the
interiors of other people’s houses. He had made innumerable searches in his ten years as a policeman, and they had given him a complete range of models into which he could classify what he found, but which did not always correspond to the characters and situations he was investigating.

Nicolas got down to work with the methodical determination of a hunter tracking his prey. He first turned his attention to the writing desk. Neither the drawers nor the sliding desk-top were locked. They contained commercial documents, bills and letters, as well as women’s jewellery and ornaments, and a man’s shoe buckles. Nothing of interest. For a moment Nicolas stood there, thinking and stroking the fine wood. Then he took out one of the drawers and plunged his arm inside the desk. He groped about for a long time until he felt a small, jointed piece of wood beneath his fingers. He moved it carefully, and heard two clicks. Two narrow panels opened at the back of the desk, and two little oblong drawers sprang out. One contained a number of
louis d’or
, the other a letter with a broken seal representing two beavers joined by their tails: the emblem of the family business.

He took it out, his heart pounding. Two feelings struggled within him: the curiosity natural to his profession, and the scruples of an honest man forced to pry into family secrets. Once that border was crossed, there was no turning back, and his innocence could never be recaptured. He sat down in one of the wing chairs and opened the letter. He felt such strong emotion that the characters danced before his eyes and he found it hard to concentrate on the words. The handwriting was small, angular, but determined, and the ink was beginning to fade with time.

Nicolas carefully copied this text into his little black notebook, then gently folded the letter and put it back in the secret drawer. He moved the small drawers back behind the panels, replaced the large drawer, and closed the desk. The rest of his search proved fruitless. Élodie’s room – curiously devoid of any personal objects – brought no tangible results, nor did Jean’s. In Geneviève’s little room, Nicolas discovered, hidden among her dolls, a crumpled sheet of paper on which a strange scene had been clumsily drawn. Two men, identically dressed in large cloaks and tall hats, one squeezing a kind of dummy and the other holding a shovel, seemed to be dancing a jig. He put this strange drawing in the pocket of his coat. Was the twice-depicted man Naganda? It seemed very likely.

He finished his inspection in the room shared by the Galaine sisters. Two beds had been pushed together to make one,
occupying
almost all the space in a room cluttered with devotional objects, two
prie-dieus
and a number of religious paintings. There was also a small chest of drawers and a kind of alcove serving as a bathroom, with cupboards hollowed out of the wall for storing linen and clothes. Here and there, stuffed birds stood frozen in weary poses, adding a grim, fusty note to the rank atmosphere.

Suddenly Nicolas heard floorboards creaking in the corridor. Who could it be? He assumed that Miette had woken and got up, but the footsteps were coming closer and the intervals between the creaks indicated rather that whoever it might be was moving very cautiously. His first reaction was to look for a hiding place. The clothes cupboard? Certainly not: the most obvious refuge was always the riskiest. The fireplace? Much too narrow to hide in. Then, in a flash, he noticed that the faded blue-green cloth that
covered the two beds fell all the way to the floor. He quickly slid under the beds and lay flat on his stomach, with his back against the wooden base. In the excitement of the moment, he found it hard to catch his breath, and this was made worse by the fact that his nose was buried in a mass of cloths that lay on the floor. The footsteps had not resumed. The blood pounding in his ears deafened him. A few inches from his face, he discovered a column of tiny ants which seemed to be attracted by the cloths. Quite apart from the rats, vermin and fleas, many houses in the city received visits from these insects in summer.

Now the noise resumed, came closer, very close … In the narrow field of vision allowed by the cloths, Nicolas saw two bare brown feet cautiously advancing. It could only be Naganda, and he guessed that the Indian was also searching the room. Would it occur to him to look under the beds? Nicolas trembled as he saw him coming closer on the right-hand side. The cover was lifted, the bedding roughly searched, then light appeared through the cracks in the wood: the mattress had been raised. The Indian stamped around the room a while longer, then finally walked out. Nicolas waited until silence had returned to this floor of the house. Monsieur Galaine kept Naganda locked up, but had
forgotten
that the Indian had already escaped through the skylight, and that there was nothing to stop him trying again. It would only take a badly closed door or window for him to gain access to the rest of the house. What could he be looking for, if not the famous talisman? After all, he was obsessed with the loss of the necklace on which it had hung, the necklace that had contained the pearl found in the clenched hand of Élodie’s corpse.

Nicolas hoped that his own search would lead to something,
even now that Naganda had gone. He forced himself to continue with all the technique of a professional, which the Indian was not. It was as well that he did so, for in passing his hand under one of the drawers in the chest, he found a small piece of paper stuck to the wood with sealing wax. Carefully, he peeled it off. It was a brief note, which read: 

A pawnbroker? A moneylender? A way for the Galaine sisters to make some additional income? It was not so much the nature of the note which intrigued Nicolas as the date. 31 May was the day after the disaster in Place Louis XV. That pointed to a number of new lines of inquiry. He copied out the receipt, then stuck it back in its place, wetting the little piece of sealing wax with his saliva. At the back of the cupboard he found a soiled pair of women’s shoes. There were stains on the soles, which might be coal, or burnt wood, as well as some bits of straw. To which of the two sisters did they belong? Charlotte, the older of the two, or Camille, the younger? For no particular reason, he remembered the ants. He slid under the beds again and pulled
out some of the cloths. They were narrow strips of linen, stained with thin trails of something yellowish, along which the insects were still moving. Lifting them to his nose, he retched at the strong smell of sour milk. Why had the sisters kept these soiled cloths? A vague idea came into his mind, and he promised himself to think about it later. He put everything back in its place and left the room.