Too much to lose for too little. Because as sure as tobacco was in his pipe, the owners would try to buy him off.
He had only one choice. No other.
He picked up the phone and rang a valued friend but strictly on official business.
In his office at the Préfecture de Police in the Town Hall, central Marseilles, Inspector Charles Dupin was drinking a comforting cup of coffee. He was in an idle mood which was uncharacteristic of the best detective in the port city and indeed in the whole Côte d’Azur. He was well used to the unexpected nature of his job and simply became galvanised when anything came his way.
He loved what he did and considered it not work but a particular study of the human criminal act, most particularly of killing and its consequences. He was an advocate of the relatively new science of criminalistics currently most completely expressed by Hans Gross, the examining magistrate and Professor of Penal Law at the University of Graz. And of course that of Alexandre Lacassagne of the University of Lyons who had established a great reputation in France for criminal investigation and who had taken a young man Edmond Locard, a qualified doctor and lawyer, as his assistant – a young man who in time would become known as the Sherlock Holmes of France and would formulate the basic principle of forensic science: “Every contact leaves a trace.” This became known as Locard’s Exchange Principle. (The young Georges Simenon, detective writer, is known to have attended Locard lectures in 1919 or 1920. He would have been no doubt struck by Locard’s statement that policemen “should have the method of mathematicians and the imagination of poets”.)
For the past three years Dupin had kept in constant contact with Lacassagne and Locard and he recognised that their work would have a huge impact on criminal investigation. Already he was putting into practice Locard’s principles, particularly in the preservation and examination of the crime scene.
Both he and Locard had embraced the methods of Adolphe Bertillon of the Paris Préfecture who had pioneered crime-scene preservation through the use of photography. For this purpose, in the tradition of Bertillon, Dupin had promoted a clerk, Lazare, who had studied art and sketching, as his official photographer. And of course he espoused Bertillon’s anthropometry, the identification system based on physical measurements.
Dupin’s character was in perfect tune with Bertillon’s belief in cool and objective reasoning in his approach to his task and the separation of premise from the process of deduction. He never allowed the weight of his workload or pressure from his superiors to interfere with this method of investigation. And, as the mayor and the police commissaire learned very soon after the Inspector’s appointment, he would brook no interference in the matter of his working agenda.
He was less concerned with the swiftness of his results than the sureness of them. He had also learned to be immune to the clamour and sensational behaviour of the newspapers but knew how to use them when he saw fit. He had learnt to be very careful, because a reporter could and would gut him as quick as a fisherman who had just landed his catch.
Dupin knew, and he drummed it into the psyche of his men, how important it was not to be swayed by gossip on the one hand and the easy and temporary eulogising the reporters and commentators employed. They looked for a hero and a villain but the roles could be easily interchanged. Solve the crime and you play the hero, fail to and you are handed the part of the villain.
He developed a relationship of trust with Pierre Gazeau, editor of Marseille Dimanche, who treated the reporting of crime with seriousness and responsibility, unlike his local counterparts and the national stringers who could be reporting a municipal meeting in the morning, a crime in the afternoon, a sports game or entertainment event in the evening. The same brigade had an alarming habit of falling back on ‘creative journalism’, especially in the face of looming deadlines. Crime came under the category of shock-horror and murder provided the excuse to throw any remaining journalistic ethics down the drain, most graphically by always attempting to predetermine the outcome long before the facts had been established or court process concluded.
Dupin had learnt from experience that when a crime of note is committed, opinions become extreme and that then bias rears its ugly head. The police were sought out and flattered at the early stages of an investigation but could afterwards be set up as a target and sacrificed on the altar of sensation. Dupin knew that he was an object of hatred because he kept the newshounds at a long arm’s length and never let them within a quarter of a mile of a crime scene. The days when they could trample over the scene, contaminate evidence and photograph victims were over. Naturally this created huge resentment among the Fourth Estate and Dupin was perceived as an enemy of the hegemony of the press and so-called freedom. Freedom, as far as the Inspector was concerned, came with responsibility.
Dupin’s best defence was his impeccable record but he knew that one mistake and his reputation would count for nought.
On the other hand he was a realist and crime had become a major target not just for the newspapers but also for the politicians, particularly in Paris, whose duty it was to stem the tide of lawlessness that had increased dramatically during the past decade. Marseilles being the second city and a large port had more than its share of criminal activity.
As a city commission report over two decades before noted, it seemed to be a particularly auspicious site for crime since it had a population at the same time changing and diverse, so different in habits, views and sentiments, and there was, as was said, a constant ferment of “perversity”. As the city and port grew in the interim, crime also accelerated.
Also because of inefficiency, poor resources, corruption, in a matter of five years from the turn of the century the apprehension of armed robbers had halved and one year before, out of 3,700 thefts, almost three-quarters were without suspects. The city was under the control of the Bouche-du-Rhône Department which had a 50% higher theft rate and a 300% higher murder rate than the Department of the Seine.
Marseilles was the scene of spectacular crimes, including murders by organised gangs and regular territorial wars between the controllers of the lucrative trade of prostitution and traffickers from North Africa and the colonies.
And there was the enemy within the force. Dupin had investigated and prosecuted a ring of bent policemen who had been making up to 1,000 francs a month for protection. This added to the corrupt image of the city.
The municipality wanted to double the size of the force and wanted this subsidised by central government without any loss of control of the force for them. Naturally Paris would have nothing to do with such a poor bargain, despite the newspapers and local business looking there for a solution. Dupin and his team could well do without the small-time and oftentimes corrupt control of local influences and knew that their resources, numbers and effectiveness would be vastly increased by central control. They all knew, even though the Préfet was appointed by Paris, he played second fiddle to the mayor who was the effective head of police. The Préfet of the Bouche-du-Rhône depended on the mayor for the staffing of the force, who recommended favourites of his who were invariably accepted. There was one policeman for every 370 citizens and even though this might be considered a good ratio, their duties were not all related to fighting crime. There were visits to boarding houses, lodging houses, inspection of brothels and acting as messengers and guards. In the city, all these obligations having been satisfied, there were only 150 men per shift available for patrol service – one for every 4,500 citizens. Little wonder the criminals were running riot and little wonder that the focus of the top authorities in the capital were on Marseilles.
Thus there were other pressures, emanating from Paris. The previous year the Minister for the Interior, Clemenceau, now Prime Minister, wanted to put the municipal police in the hands of the central state and had earlier this year appointed his right-hand man Célestin Hennion as Director of the Sûreté Générale. The devolution of power to municipal governments in the Third Republic created a bulwark
of resistance to the central state and Clemenceau wanted to break it. He was haranguing Parliament about the need to stem the growth of crime, pass reforms and implement investigation techniques that Dupin had long espoused. In this matter Dupin was at one with the President and Hennion.
Clemenceau had targeted Marseilles because, as Dupin and his bosses the mayor and the commissaire agreed, it was a large city and they controlled a territory three or four times that of the Paris headquarters. Apart from Paris and Lyons, no other French city rivalled Marseilles in size or significance.
So the politicians, knowing full well that the city was overburdened and under-resourced, painted a picture of Marseilles as a city where crime had run amok: “On the Canebière they steal and rob people in broad daylight.”
Dupin knew that he and his team’s record in serious crime was a matter of admiration in Paris and the only insult that could be thrown was in the area of petty crime. Fair enough. Part of the game.
All the same it was clear that the Sûreté wanted control of Marseilles and that would ultimately make the police’s job of fighting crime in the city easier. It was a time for change and this must be embraced. For someone in his position it was also exciting because, in the matter of criminology and forensic policing, France was heading the international forces.
Even though in his view politicians should be left to politics, the police to crime, and never the twain should meet, the Inspector knew the reality was that in France politics was never far from the surface of anything.
He feared that even if Hennion succeeded it would not be long until the bureaucratic umbilical cord would be cut. In this instance de jure would not be de facto. There were plenty of other factors that would intervene to prevent the best intentions of the Paris establishment from being carried out in the immediate sense.
Nevertheless, all parties knew that when Le Tigre and Célestin Hennion were on the case there would be only one result. Yes, all things considered, change would arrive and it was only a matter of time.
In any event, Dupin was a subscriber to Voltaire’s dictum that it is highly dangerous to be right on a matter where the established authorities are wrong. He could play the game and exercise caution and restraint when the situation demanded.
On this August morning he had a lot on his plate but he was determined to enjoy his break and his coffee. His phone rang and he just let it ring. It prompted a memory. At his age memories were increasingly occupying his consciousness, a fact of life which he could not and did not resist. It was the ringing of the phone which prompted the visitation to the past.
He was nine years of age when his father brought him to the Universal Electrical Exposition in Paris. In the Pavilion there were booths in which people could listen to, by telephone, recitals from the Paris Opera House. There were two rooms, each divided into two compartments, fitted out with a dozen headphones through which visitors could hear the music.
As a child he found the effect magical. In the austere, dimly lit rooms, equipped with a row of headphones placed along the walls, there was complete silence. Then as he and his father lifted the two headphones to their ears, they were transported directly to the Opera stage. Closing his eyes, the reality was complete. It was as if he was in the audience listening to the great Krauss, hearing the orchestra and the applause of the audience.
Ever since, music was his greatest delight together with opera and the stage. It was the end of the earth compared to what he did for a living but he was not alone. Lacassagne and Locard were also, outside the parameters of their profession, greatly attached to the arts which provided soothing alternatives to the dark arts of crime and murder.
Dupin reflected on yesterday’s monthly conference in Lyons with his team of police and investigators. They might have preferred to call it a lecture but one which they conceded was never boring. The purpose was to keep them motivated on one hand and abreast of the lead the French had established over the world, including the famous Scotland Yard, in methods of criminal investigation – most particularly in the area of murder.
The address was by Professor Lacassagne who had been accompanied by his assistant, the Inspector’s friend Dr Edmond Locard.
The professor was on every level a fascinating character, a specialist in toxicology, bloodstain-pattern analysis and ballistics. He also had a keen interest in sociology and psychology and the correlation of those disciplines to criminal behaviour.
In appearance he was anything but the academic type, with a large handlebar moustache, the girth of an opera singer and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He had the gait of a circus strongman.
His school at Lyons was widely influential. The basis of his theory was that the social environment was the breeding ground of criminality. The criminal was the microbe and was of no consequence until the conditions were present to enable it to breed. He was of the firm view that society has the criminals that it deserves. He became prominent as a result of his involvement in a number of high-profile cases such as the assassination of President Sadi Carnot, stabbed by the Italian anarchist Caserio, but most publicly by his roles in the conviction of the French serial killer Joseph Vacher and the Gouffé Trunk Murder.
Locard was born in Lyons in 1877. He qualified in medicine in 1902 and then became an assistant to his mentor Lacassagne. He passed the bar examination in 1907 and qualified as an advocate. The criminal courts of the city were housed in the old Palais de Justice, an enormous and impassive building with a sweeping exterior staircase that led down to the Saône river.
A much less salubrious door in the rear of the building led to cramped jail cells and next to them, cluttered rooms bursting with large police files including dossiers on criminals and their activities. Just off the file room, a narrow staircase led up four stories to the pair of attic rooms that would house the first police forensic laboratory assigned to Locard. The basic equipment was a microscope, a spectroscope, a collection of basic chemicals and a Bunsen burner.
Locard was a slim man with an aquiline face, pencil moustache and thick dark-brown hair who was a devotee of music and theatre and wrote reviews on them for Lyons newspapers. He was also a fan of Sherlock Holmes and urged his colleagues and examining magistrates to read Conan Doyle’s works and those of Edgar Allan Poe. Locard, like Holmes, vigorously researched and wrote papers on fingerprints, trace evidence, tobacco, seeds, insects and the host of potential evidence found at crime scenes. His work was responsible for the incarceration of countless criminals.
While the Palais de Justice would house his laboratory, he’d had access to one in the university for many years before. He had what Dr Watson referred to as a “peculiar facility for deduction”. He was influenced by his mentor Lacassagne, Dr Hans Gross the Austrian professor and criminologist, and Alphonse Bertillon of the Préfecture in Paris who introduced the first system for documenting personal identification, firstly on cards with physical and facial characteristics and later added to with photographs. By 1891, Gross pointed to the advantages of fingerprinting over Bertillon’s system. But the Frenchman greatly assisted the development of forensic science by the introduction of photography not just for identification but also at crime scenes with measuring scales recording the size and relationships of evidence. He was routinely sent with investigators to document crime scenes. He photographed bodies of victims and their relationship to significant items of evidence including footprints, stains, tool marks and points of entry.
Bertillon also instructed and lectured students and investigators including Locard. Both he and Gross advocated the application of scientific methods to criminal investigation. This all led to Locard’s conclusion that when any person comes into contact with an object or another person, a cross transfer of physical evidence occurs – Locard’s Exchange Principle. Thus by collecting and analysing such evidence criminals could be tied to both a location of the crime and the victim.
All of the circumstances of the crime must be taken clearly into account and submitted to
a strict logical analysis from the commencement to the last stage of the examination. Locard said that the criminologist re-creates the criminal from the traces the latter leaves behind, just as the archaeologist reconstructs prehistoric beings from his finds.
At the previous day’s conference Professor Lacassagne had outlined the logic of his cautious approach to crime-scene investigation. Everything should be viewed with healthy doubt until proved. Nothing but the facts should determine the path the investigator was to take, thus the importance of crime-scene analysis including the vital post-mortem signs in the corpse.
All theories were to be put to the test, not only by close analysis of the scenes but also by reconstruction of the crimes. Important factors were the collection of physical evidence, objectivity, the employment of logic and the viewing with suspicion of witness and offender statements. The examination and reconstructions should be carried out by logical, sequential frame-by-frame analysis.
Dupin now recalled with pleasure the highlights of the address.
“One can start from the point, for argument’s sake that nothing is ever what it seems. But then it is up to us to prove that is the case. The important thing is to avoid any pre-conceived theory and keep in your mind healthy doubts about everything that is presented to the naked eye. However tempting, never jump to a conclusion. That always arrives at the appointed time and never before.
A simple example. Some 12 years ago I was called to the scene of a death in Lyons. An elderly man was found in bed in the locked bedroom with a head wound and his hand firmly gripping a pistol. There was no evidence of forced entry and two physicians called to the scene stated that the manner of death was clearly suicide. Which seemed a reasonable deduction in the circumstances.
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 12
