The Murders at Impasse Louvain

by Richard Grindal

  The scene is Paris at the turn of the century—the age of gaslight and the heyday of Maxim’s. A fashionable painter, Félix Hassler, is found strangled to death with his wife bound and gagged at his side.

  Madame Hassler, a woman of dubious morals, had also been found with the President of France when he died two years before—in bed. Inspector Gautier tries to solve the case without reviving the old scandal, but soon discovers that the extraordinarily fascinating Madame Hassler is trying to hide something, is lying, and that someone high in power is protecting her.

  The case becomes more and more complex as it is woven into the richly extravagant backdrop of Parisian life in the early 1900’s. Inspector Gautier, whose closest assistant in the case is his delightful French mistress, discovers that his wife has a few secrets of her own, and uncovers some delicious new scandals, one of which involves the notoriously violent Russian ambassador. The climax to this delicately handled, but intricately cold-blooded murder case takes place in Maxim’s adding to the splendor and intoxication of this delightful “period” detective story.

  THE MURDERS AT

  IMPASSE LOUVAIN

  A NOVEL

  By

  RICHARD GRINDAL

  Copyright © 1978 by Richard Grindal

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  The murders at Impasse Louvain.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.G866Mu 1979 [PR6057.R55] 823’.9’14 79-5038

  ISBN 0-312-55343-9

  THE MURDERS AT IMPASSE LOUVAIN

  I

  GAUTIER LAY WITH his eyes closed, awake, but unwilling completely to surrender the luxury of sleep. He could hear his wife, Suzanne, moving in the kitchen but that part of the bed where she had been lying beside him was still warm, so she could not have been up for long. He had at least ten minutes surely before the smell of coffee would come drifting into the bedroom and he would need to go and join her for breakfast.

  His wish to linger on in bed had nothing to do with indolence. Gautier was not a lazy man. For six days a week he would rise without prompting soon after six, giving himself time to walk to headquarters and still arrive there well before most of his colleagues. Even on those weekdays when he was not on duty, he would be out of bed before most people in Paris were leaving for work.

  Sundays were different. The moment of waking on Sunday morning was a time of different sensuous pleasures, each of which had to be savoured slowly: warmth, the comfort of bed, the relaxation of separate muscles, the smell of coffee and fresh bread and above all the silence.

  Although he had lived in the country as a boy, the silence and stillness of Paris early on Sunday morning still astonished Gautier. No sound of horses or cartwheels came from the street outside, nor the shouts of tradesmen offering their produce to cooks and housewives. On weekdays, even though their apartment was on the fourth floor, the voices of the women, arguing about prices, came echoing up, bouncing off the walls of the buildings in the narrow street, seeming louder than life. On Sundays all was still even in the apartment building; no sound of children’s footsteps running down the stairs, no banging of pots and pans by women half-awake, no men’s voices raised in anger. Men, Gautier had noticed, seldom beat their wives on Sundays.

  His enjoyment of these sensations of early morning was sharpened by an unconscious anticipation of other small pleasures to come as Sunday unfurled itself. After breakfast, at Mass, the precise cadences of the Latin responses appealed to his senses even more than the flickering of tall candles and the smell of incense. Later there would be other pleasures: the mild shock to the palate of the first aperitif, the smell of gigot cooked in a subtle blend of herbs, drowsiness after three glasses of red wine and one of very old Calvados, the rumbling laugh of his father-in-law.

  They lunched every Sunday with Suzanne’s parents, her sister and her sister’s husband. The old man had made a bit of money. Starting with a china shop up in Bagnolet, he had expanded and then switched to wholesale selling. Now he had a business supplying china and glass to many of the thousands of cafés and restaurants in Paris. He was not exactly a Chauchard, the millionaire owner of the Louvre department store, nor a Camille Grout, the miller who entertained royalty in his house on Avenue du Bois, but he had enough to take his children and their husbands out to a substantial lunch every Sunday. In winter they would eat at one of the better family restaurants on the Left Bank, but as soon as the weather grew warm enough, they would make an expedition out of Paris and lunch on the banks of the Seine.

  Gautier was thinking about the lunch to come, savouring in his imagination the food and the wine and the delicious sense of indolence which went with them, when he heard a knock at the door of the apartment. Suzanne answered it and presently she called out to him.

  ‘What is it?’ he shouted back.

  ‘A man from the fifteenth arrondissement with a message.’

  Swearing sadly to himself, he pulled on a pair of trousers and went barefoot to the hallway. The uniformed policeman who stood there talking to Suzanne had the lean, dark features of the Midi or perhaps Corsica. Gautier did not recognize him but more than two years had passed since he had been transferred from the commissariat of the fifteenth arrondissement to the headquarters of the Sûreté.

  ‘Well?’ he asked the man.

  ‘There have been two deaths in Impasse Louvain, Inspector. Looks like murder.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The commissaire telephoned the Sûreté. He was told to ask you to go to the house and take charge.’

  ‘But I’m not even on duty today!’

  ‘I understand the instructions came from the director himself.’

  ‘Are you telling me that the Director of the Sûreté has been bothered with this? On a Sunday morning?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, Inspector.’

  After the man had left to return to the commissariat, Gautier dressed. Suzanne found him a clean shirt, then went to pour his coffee. Most wives would have protested or sulked but she never complained when one of the few days they could spend together was disrupted or he was pulled out of bed by some emergency. At times Gautier felt that she was almost too patient, too philosophic. If he had been jealous by disposition, he might have wondered whether she had a lover in the background.

  * * *

  Impasse Louvain was a short cul-de-sac off Rue de Vaugirard, less than ten minutes walk from his home. On his way there Gautier found himself wondering why the name of the street seemed to stir some vague recollection from the past. He could remember passing the corner where it joined Rue de Vaugirard often enough, but was certain that he had never actually entered the cul-de-sac.

  The house to which he had been directed was surrounded by a six-foot wall and a policeman in uniform was standing outside the gate. Apart from this one man the street was empty which meant that the murders—if they were murders—could only have been reported a short time ago. Even on Sundays it did not take long in Paris for curious spectators to gather. Gautier knew the policeman at the gate and stopped to exchange a few words with him.

  ‘Who’s inside?’ He nodded towards the house.

  ‘Commissaire Druot and one of my colleagues.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘A neighbour who reported the deaths and the family doctor. Madame Hassler is in a bad way. It was her husband and her mother who were murdered, you know.’

  ‘Hassler? Not Josephine Hassler?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector.’

  Gautier realized then why the name Impasse Louvain had tugged at his memory. Not many years previously Josephine Hassler had achieved a spectacular notoriety in Paris. She was the wife
of an artist, Félix Hassler, who in spite of the mediocrity of his work, had been commissioned by several wealthy and influential men to paint their portraits. Madame Hassler had built up a modest salon in her house in Impasse Louvain, but it was not in her own drawing-room that her name became linked with scandal but in a place no less exalted than the Elysee Palace.

  The late President of France had died suddenly one evening, according to the medical bulletins of an apoplectic fit. Then members of his staff made it known that Josephine Hassler had been at the palace late in the afternoon of his death, alone with the president in his private apartments. Sentries had seen her leaving, hurriedly and by the main entrance instead of by the side door which she normally used, for she was a regular visitor and supposed to be helping the president to write his memoirs. A servant found a woman’s corset stuffed into a drawer of the president’s desk.

  A rumour was soon circling Paris that the president’s secretary, hearing a woman’s screams, had broken down the locked door of his study and found him dying, his hands still clutching the hair of his naked mistress. Newspapers did not hesitate to print the story, not naming the woman, but stating that she was the wife of a painter whose surname began with the initial ‘H They said too that the president had been taking aphrodisiacs and indulging in sexual pastimes too freely for a man of his age. Government ministers were accused of deliberately concealing the truth from the public and the scandal was a long time dying.

  Remembering this, Gautier understood why the Director of the Sûreté had been informed of the deaths at the house in Impasse Louvain. This was going to be a case that needed careful handling.

  When he passed through the gate in the wall, he found that the house was surrounded by a small garden and a path led round the side, presumably to a servants’ entrance. The front entrance was by way of a verandah and he noticed that the second of the upper floors of the house had unusually large windows which, he guessed, must belong to the painter’s studio.

  The front door was not locked and in the drawing-room beyond the verandah Druot, his former boss in the fifteenth arrondissement, was talking to a plump little man with a grey beard. The drawing-room was all of 60 feet long and about half as broad. At one end there was an enormous chimney piece of carved wood which was flanked on each side by glass-fronted cabinets filled with china and silver. One wall was hung with a Gobelin tapestry depicting the story of Judith and the room also housed a small organ and a grand piano and a mass of potted palms and flowers.

  When Druot saw Gautier he said:

  ‘Ah, Inspector! This is Monsieur Gide who lives in the house opposite. It was he who reported the murders.’

  ‘You have established that they were murders?’

  ‘Hassler was strangled. The doctor isn’t certain about the old lady, but he believes she was asphyxiated when she swallowed her dentures. On the other hand he doesn’t rule out the possibility of a heart attack.’

  ‘And where is Madame Hassler?’

  ‘She’s with the doctor now, suffering from shock. It appears that the gang who broke in to rob the house last night left her bound and gagged in her bed for more than six hours.’

  Was there no one else in the house? The Hasslers have a daughter, I seem to remember.’

  ‘She has been staying in their house outside Paris for the past few days.’

  ‘And servants?’

  ‘The cook is also staying in the country house. There is a manservant as well who was sleeping in the attic room and who says he heard nothing. It was he who found Madame Hassler this morning.’

  The neighbour Gide added: ‘I was passing in the lane outside when I heard him shouting for help from a first-floor window.’

  He was a law-abiding fellow, Gautier decided, of good bourgeois upbringing and probably married to a domineering wife.

  ‘Have you taken any statements?’ Gautier asked Druot.

  ‘No, I’ve left that to you.’ The commissaire was clearly pleased to be passing on this responsibility. Presumably he too had plans for his Sunday. ‘The director wants you to take charge and he has promised to look in himself later.’

  ‘Then I had better go upstairs and take a look at the bodies.’

  ‘Will it be all right if I go now?’ Gide asked. ‘My family will be wondering what has become of me.’

  ‘Certainly, Monsieur, but I may wish to ask you some questions later in the day.’

  Gautier shook hands with him and with Druot and watched the two men leave before he went upstairs. A second uniformed policeman standing at the head of the stairs explained the geography of the house to him. On the first floor there were three bedrooms, one each for Félix Hassler and his wife who no longer shared a bed and a smaller room for their daughter Marguerite. Josephine had evidently spent the previous night in this latter bedroom, having given up her own room, which was a good deal larger, to her elderly mother. A small boudoir separated the bedrooms of the two women and at the end of the corridor, next to Hassler’s room, there was a bathroom.

  Hassler’s body, covered now by a blanket, was still lying where it had been found in the doorway between his bedroom and the bathroom. Lifting the blanket, Gautier saw a man of about 60 with a bullet-shaped head and grizzled hair, cropped short. He was wearing a long nightshirt and lay with his legs bent under his thighs as though he had died in a kneeling position and had then slumped over to one side. His face was distorted in the grimace of strangulation and a rope was knotted round his neck. His ankles and wrists were bound with cord.

  Gautier noticed that the rope did not appear to be biting into the throat of the dead man. Curious, he took hold of it between one thumb and forefinger and found he could slide the loop quite easily up and down Hassler’s neck. He found a slight discolouration of the flesh under the place where the rope had been, but it had left no mark to speak of and certainly not the deep weal that one would have expected.

  He passed through the bathroom and into the bedroom on the other side of the corridor. The body of an old woman who must have been Josephine Hassler’s mother, lay on the bed, arms folded across the breast in an attitude that would have seemed peaceful had it not been for the colour of the face and the rigid stare of death in the eyes. A piece of cottonwool had been stuffed into her mouth and more lay on the pillow by her head. Her ankles were also bound.

  The policeman stood guard on the landing outside the door of the third bedroom and Gautier asked him:

  ‘Is the doctor still with Madame Hassler?’

  ‘Yes, Inspector.’

  ‘And where is the manservant?’

  ‘I last saw him downstairs in the kitchen at the back of the house.’

  ‘What do they call him?’

  ‘Mansard. Remy Mansard.’

  Gautier went downstairs. Mansard was slim and fair-haired, with that air of innocence which is sometimes taken for good looks but which could equally be a sign of stupidity. He was wearing beige trousers and a green-and-gold-striped waistcoat and was pretending, not very convincingly, to polish a basket of household silver. When Gautier came into the kitchen he stood up quickly.

  ‘Sit down,’ Gautier said and taking a chair he sat down opposite Mansard across the table. ‘You’re the one who shouted for help out of the window this morning?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Then tell me exactly what happened.’

  The manservant’s narration of the morning’s events, disjointed and repetitive, would have been difficult enough to follow even without his heavy accent, almost a patois, which Gautier recognized as coming from Normandy. The essential facts were that Mansard had woken at six o’clock. On his way downstairs to light the kitchen stove, a task he was expected to carry out when the cook was away, he heard a muffled cry from the room of the Hasslers’ daughter. Inside he had found the mistress of the house bound to the bed, distraught and talking feverishly about a gang of robbers with revolvers who had broken into her room at midnight and threatened her. Her wrists had been bound to th
e head of the bed and her ankles to the bedrail at the bottom. One end of the rope tying her wrists was also knotted round her neck.

  Mansard had undone the knots at her wrists and she had then told him to go and get help. So he had gone first to Hassler’s room thinking to wake his master and found Hassler’s body. Remembering that Madame Hassler’s mother had also been sleeping in the house, he had then tried the remaining bedroom and discovered her dead body as well. Horrified he had rushed to the nearest window, thrown it open and shouted for help. The neighbour Monsieur Gide had been passing in the lane outside and it was he who had telephoned for the police.

  When Mansard had finished, Gautier asked him: ‘Tell me, was your mistress gagged when you found her?’

  ‘Not when I went into her room, but she had been gagged and had managed just at that moment to spit the cottonwool out. I noticed that a large lump of it was lying on the pillow beside her head.’

  ‘This rope round her neck. Do you think the thieves had meant to strangle her like your master?’

  ‘Oh no, Monsieur! It was really knotted quite loosely. And the ropes round her wrists and ankles were not at all tightly knotted. I remember thinking as I undid them that with a little effort she might have been able to free herself.’

  Leaving him with the cutlery to clean, Gautier went back to the drawing-room and found the telephone. Telephones were still rare in Paris but his wife’s parents had recently treated themselves to the luxury of one. He put a call through to them, explained that he had been called out on duty, that there was no chance at all of his being able to join the family for lunch and that they should warn Suzanne it might well be late that night before he returned home. As he was finishing the call he saw Courtrand, the Director of the Sûreté, coming into the house through the verandah.

  ‘This is a nasty business, Gautier,’ the director said. ‘How are your enquiries progressing?’

  ‘I’ve looked at the two bodies and I’ve questioned the manservant.’