by Adrian Speed
“No,” the cleaner said. Liar I thought. “It’s from over the way, I think. It’s a daft thing. Always slides on the guttering, and hits my window.”
“Can I make you detectives some coffee?” the cleaner asked, and lifted up into sudden motion towards a percolator resting on a cabinet.
Anything to distract us from the cat, I thought. “Thank you, yes please,” I said out loud. How could I visit Paris without having coffee?
“How often do you clean?” I asked, happy to try and keep her mind occupied away from the cat.
“I’m cleaning most hours of the day now my staff have disappeared,” she muttered a few comments about the strikers. “I clean all the public spaces. On my own, takes about three days to get through them all.”
“So you must have seen everyone in the building during that time?”
“I don’t pay much attention to them who works here,” the cleaner said. She plugged in the percolator and it began gurgling. “It doesn’t pay to take too close an interest in them.”
“How many people do you think are in the building right now?”
“Six or seven?” the cleaner shrugged and pulled out some grubby looking mugs from a cabinet. Her rigorous cleaning standards did not appear to extend to her own home in any way. “They all tend to blur together.”
“But you remembered Adélie immediately.”
“Wouldn’t you?” the cleaner grumbled. “Slip of a girl, no respect for her appearance, wearing trousers...” the cleaner trailed away, her eyes flickering towards my own trousers. “None of nobody means anything to me, ’cept her.”
“I see.” The percolator was beginning to shake like a tin shed in a gale and as its crescendo grew my enthusiasm withered. Something went ‘tack’ and the noise of the percolator died.
“Stupid thing,” the cleaner shook it and wiggled its wire. The more she shook and wiggled it the less it seemed to want to turn on. “And that’s another thing broken.” The cleaner sighed and sagged into her chair. “And I won’t be able to get it fixed until the blasted strikes are over. Or we all turn communist.”
“Actually, do you mind if I borrow that?” I asked.
“What? Why? It’s broken.”
“I have an idea.”
The cleaner held a sour expression for a moment, like a toddler who had been asked to share, but eventually she waved her hand at it.
“Take it and be well of it. As long as I get it back before you go.”
“I think,” I said, turning to Sir Reginald, “it’s time we began our interviews.”
Chapter VI
When I returned to the examination room with the director very little had changed. Walter Beauregard had taken out a pack of cards and was entertaining himself building a house of cards on one of the long archival desks. The preening mathematician had left his perch in the corner of the room and had settled into a new roost at a desk and had bent himself over a notebook filled with scribbled works.
“Anyone think they can fix this?” I waved the broken percolator at them as I entered the room. “You’d have the eternal gratitude of the cleaner.”
The first one to stand up was Sylvain, followed by Etienne. Sylvain’s long, delicate fingers took the percolator from me and turned it over carefully. They did not look like the fingers of an experienced electrician. Then again, I wouldn’t have suspected Etienne would try either.
“What happened to it?” Etienne asked.
“It just died,” I shrugged.
“If I could only take it home, I’d have the problem diagnosed in minutes,” Sylvain sighed. He turned to Etienne. “Do you have any tools?”
“I have a few for maintaining the microfilm camera,” Etienne said.
“If you could bring them here I could see what I could do,” Sylvain said. Etienne looked to me and I nodded.
“Director, accompany Etienne to where he keeps his tools and bring them back here. Ah, but first, I need a room nearby where I can conduct interviews privately.”
The director unlocked an office that had belonged to the archivist in charge of this wing before he’d gone on strike. There was just about enough space for a desk and two people, if neither one was interested in breathing. But it would have to do.
“Madeleine first,” I said as I sat myself down behind the desk. It was a strange piece of culture shock to be at a desk without a computer. There wasn’t even a typewriter. The previous owner had left a photograph of their family on the desk however, and I hid my phone behind it for making notes.
Sir Reginald squeezed his way into the far corner of the office, doing an impression of a lamp stand. He had been very quiet so far, which was a good thing. He had another mystery to focus his attention on, but I still missed him jumping in.
Madeleine closed the door behind her and sat down on the other side of the desk. The office didn’t have any windows and was lit only by a dull yellow bulb. The blue light of Sir Reginald’s tablet lit up his face.
“What is that you keep looking at?” Madeleine asked.
“An electronic book,” Sir Reginald replied, and turned it around to show her. A hand written letter filled the screen, to my relief. “It is similar to a microfilm machine, but much smaller.”
“I’ve never seen one of those before,” Madeleine said, with more confusion than curiosity.
“They’ll be all the rage in a few years,” Sir Reginald said and hid his smirk behind the tablet. He added in English “At least, they’ll make people very angry.”
“Don’t mind Sir Reginald,” I said, regaining Madeleine’s attention. “Let’s talk about you.” Madeleine blushed with embarrassment at the idea. “What do you do as an archivist here?”
“I care for the archive,” Madeleine mumbled. “Outside of my conservation duties... I organise requests for access to the archive. I estimate the damage that will be done to the documents and weigh it against the merit of the research and the trust we can put in the requester. It means sometimes they get full access, sometimes they get supervised access and sometimes...”
“Sometimes you say no.”
“I try not to if I can help it, almost everyone requesting access has good reason...” Madeleine bit her lip. She tried to brighten. “But the microfilm conversion is such a good idea. Most requests can be directed to microfilm where it’s available.”
“Do you do all that on your own?”
“Oh no, there are a team of us.”
“Is that what you were doing yesterday?”
“Not... entirely...” Madeleine adjusted her glasses. The old fashioned lenses reflected almost all the light in the room, hiding her behind them. “There haven’t been a lot of requests this month... and we’re not really open anyway...”
“You’re the only member of staff here besides the director, and the cleaner, why didn’t you go home like the others?”
“I had meant to, I had, I had meant to...” Madeleine’s head drooped and she almost seemed to climb inside her own chest cavity. “But... with one thing and another... after I’d finished and tidied everything away... I was the only one left. And it... it didn’t feel right to leave the archive... alone.”
“The academics would still be here,” I said.
“Yes. That’s... that’s one of the things that worried me,” Madeleine said. “And the director stayed. It didn’t feel right to leave while he was still here.”
“Do you know why the director didn’t go home?”
“No, before the riots started I don’t think I said more than ten words to the director,” Madeleine’s mousy voice suggested she preferred the past when she didn’t have to regularly interact with one of the most important figures in her profession. “But maybe... maybe he felt the same as me.”
“Well you were both certainly right to worry,” I said. “If neither of you had stayed there wouldn’t have been a single member of staff to notice the theft of the treaty.”
“Or maybe if there was no-one here there wouldn’t have been a the
ft,” Madeleine said. The thought had crossed my mind.
“So take me through what you did yesterday,” I said, changing the subject to matters that might solve the crime.
“Well... I woke up...”
“Where have you been sleeping?”
“Oh, er argh at a friend’s,” Madeleine said. “My friend lives a few streets away. I have been staying there since the riots began, even before everyone went home or on strike.”
“And you let yourself in through the employee entrance?”
“Yes.”
“So you woke up... and...?”
“I woke up, and got ready, and came to work early. I let myself in and went up to the offices. I’ve been going through old paperwork. It always piles up and nobody has time to file it, until now.”
“And you spent the whole day doing that?”
“At lunch I stopped to listen to the radio for a short while,” Madeleine blushed at the embarrassing revelation that she could ever be distracted from her charge.
“Did you see anyone else?”
“The director, a little bit. Adélie stopped by while Etienne talked to the director,” Madeleine smiled a little at the memory. “Adélie is... quite funny you know.” The first kind word I’d heard anyone say about her so far.
“What time did you finish work?”
“I was preparing to leave at about four thirty, when Etienne burst in saying the treaty had been stolen. After that the director decided that none of us should leave until the detective... you... arrived.”
“So where did you sleep last night?”
“The director pushed a couple of settees together for me in the staff room,” Madeleine wound her hair around her finger. “He was very apologetic about it really.”
“And so you didn’t go anywhere else? Just the offices, the staff room and here?”
“Yes,” Madeleine said and let go of her hair.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” her eyes set hard behind her glasses. I’d struck something there.
“Alright, thank you Madeleine,” I nodded. “Go back to the others, and I’ll call the next one when I’m ready.”
Relief flooded Madeleine’s face. She thanked me, stood up, and left. Once the door was securely closed, I turned to Sir Reginald.
“Thoughts?”
“She’s hiding... something. She wanted to get off the topic of where she’s been staying very quickly.”
“Indeed, but is it something related to the theft?”
“She does not seem keen to tell us,” Sir Reginald sighed. “You will have to push her hard to get a confession out of her, and she is more likely to clam up than spill all.”
“With her personality it could be as little as embarrassment about admitting she needed to visit the toilet.”
“Quite.”
I sighed, and reached a hand out to my phone to tap out my notes as fast as possible, and then went to call in Leopold.
*****
Leopold Chéron sucked on his pipe and struggled to find words. Every now and then he’d take the pipe out and offer me the hope that he might end the interminable silence, but then he’d pop it back into his mouth and roll the end between his teeth. The silence went on long enough even Sir Reginald started glaring over the top of the tablet.
“I’m sorry,” Leopold took the pipe out of his mouth. “But what was your question?”
“I wanted to know what you were doing yesterday,” I spoke slowly to prevent myself exploding like Krakatau.
“Yesterday, yesterday, well, for the last three months now I’ve been building this corpus...” Leopold paused to give his pipe a thorough chewing. “Say now, you’re Québécoise?”
“Yes,” I breathed, trying not to be rude as my exasperation with his slowness began to boil over.
“Fascinating, it’s very subtle.” He gave a look that must be similar to lab rats. “Do you suppress the accent?”
“My family spoke English at home,” I said. “Despite the efforts of the Montreal education system, most of my exposure has been to metropolitan French. Books, films, music, television.” And the internet, but I decided to keep that revelation about the future quiet.
“More common every year,” Leopold shook his head and tutted. “I have to wonder how long it will be before metropolitan French has wiped out all rural dialects, from Occitan to Acadian.”
“I think the iron grip of the Académie Nationale will weaken before long,” I said thinking about the twenty-first century. It wasn’t exactly loose, but it was looser than in 1968. “The Bretons won’t stand for it, if no-one else.”
“Ah, ah, but Breton is a different language, as different from ours as Welsh.” Leopold waved his pipe at me as if he was scolding a pupil. “The dialects are different. They have the same noble lineage as metropolitan French and yet they are treated worse. Indeed, indeed, the Languedoc is closer to Latin than French, isolated from German influence. The dialects have a beauty and character we should not dismiss hastily.” He brought his pipe back to his mouth and nibbled on it. “When the langue d’oil of Paris was considered too vulgar to compose in the troubadours had already used Provençal to write their greatest works. And those works fed some of their beauty back into Parisian French. I’ve been building up a corpus of court documents showing the trend...” He trailed off.
“Is that what you were doing yesterday?” I tried to capitalise on him returning to his topic.
“Yesterday? Yes, I suppose I must have been... yes, yes, now I think on it, that is precisely what I was doing,” Leopold nodded to himself. “Going through the records of Louis XIV, you see. Cardinal Richelieu had begun the Académie Nationale just a few years before Louis XIV came to the throne. It makes Louis’ reign a very valuable resource for a corpus. Mm. Yes, that’s what I was doing.” He put his pipe in his mouth and rolled it around a few times. I wondered how the horn could possibly stand up to him. Or perhaps this was his way of slowly eating the entire pipe, and I’d just caught him in the early stages.
“So where were you building your corpus?”
“Mm... an archive room... a few dozen metres that way,” Leopold pointed in the direction of the archive’s older documents. “Can’t remember the door number at all, I’m afraid.”
“And did you see anyone else?”
“Oh, lots of people go past the window,” Leopold waved his pipe airily, unconcerned he couldn’t remember. “That researcher, what was his name, the one with the girl, they went past a lot.”
“Etienne and Adélie?”
“You’d know better than I, I’m afraid.” He frowned and let his pipe droop. “I did see that girl skulking around now I think on it. Had an ugly expression on that pretty face.”
“About what time was that?”
“A very good question.” Leopold put his pipe into his mouth and sucked on it. That, it seemed, was the end of useful conversation. I rested my head in my hands and gave up.
“Do you ever actually light that pipe?”
“Oh, my faith, certainly not. Ugly habit.”
“Thank you Leopold, you’ve been very helpful, you can go.” I spoke through my hands and Leopold shuffled off.
“Uargh. Whoever stole that treaty picked the perfect time to do it.” I wailed into my hands and tried to compose myself. “The building’s almost empty, and even those who are here are entirely useless.”
“You think they had a choice?” I turned slowly to stare at Sir Reginald. He seemed entirely enthralled in the old documents on the tablet.
“Why wouldn’t they have chosen this time? Like I said, it’s perfect. Between the riots and strikes this building is empty and the police are all preoccupied.”
“Why wouldn’t they, indeed,” Sir Reginald raised his eyes from the tablet and fixed me with a stare. The lock had been hastily bypassed with acid, while the alarm had been carefully bypassed. Maybe they had been in a hurry. Maybe something had meant they needed to throw all caution to the wind.
/>
“Maybe... maybe they expect order is going to be restored. Didn’t the rebels try to march on the Place de la Bastille yesterday?”
“That is what the cleaner said.”
“Try being the operative word...” I rested my thumbnail against my lips while I thought. “I know this rebellion fails but maybe someone else here expects it too, someone who was counting on the rebellion continuing.”
“And who of all those we’ve seen today would be worried by order being restored?”
“Adélie?” I suggested. “The others are all academics, or government workers. Everyone seems certain Adélie is a sympathiser with the rebels. Maybe even a communist.”
“An interesting leap,” Sir Reginald said in an irksome noncommittal monotone.
“You disagree?”
“Well, currently we only have other people’s word,” Sir Reginald said. That was true enough.
“Then I suppose we’ll interview her next.” I stood up and reached for the door handle.
“What was going to happen to the treaty before it was stolen?” Sir Reginald asked just before my hand touched the door.
“How do you mean?” I asked, but my brain was leaping ahead of my mouth. “It was about to be photographed for microfilm.”
Sir Reginald said nothing, but stared.
“Which... which would mean there was a permanent and easily accessible copy of the original,” I said slowly, each sentence felt like stepping out along a tightrope. “So if you’d spent days or weeks scouting out the building, finding an entrance, and bypassing the alarm... and then realised the treaty was about to be copied... and you didn’t want it copied... you’d get it out of there as quickly as possible. You’d risk stealing it in daylight, and throw acid in the lock.”
“Adélie would have known the schedule for the photography,” Sir Reginald said. “She wouldn’t need to panic like that. Unless of course, the schedule unexpectedly speeded up...” Sir Reginald shrugged. “I would talk to Etienne first, about that. And perhaps consider–”
“Who was throwing the most dirt on Adélie? They might have been doing it to throw suspicion off themselves,” I nodded.
