Other escapees were picked clean by army ants in the jungle and there were other spinechilling accounts of starving convicts killing and cannibalising their fellow fugitives. It did not stop some of the more inventive young convicts from attempting to succeed where so many others failed. They resembled all convicts and murderers in particular on that account. But the odds, as always, were stacked against them.
A couple of days after arrival there was a roll call and the prisoners were given their camp numbers and a medical inspection to ascertain whether they were fit for work. Very few if any failed this test. There was no purpose in the examination. Just another farcical ritual.
At the end of the week, all were distributed among the labour camps in the jungle. Whether a convict was young or old, feeble or strong, serving a sentence for life or five years, they were all sent to the same backbreaking task.
Most were accustomed to a city life in temperate zones. Men who had never held an axe in their hand were put to work in the camps, chopping down huge trees in the heart of the tropics. The true message of Camp de la Transportation became obvious. It signalled the first stage of a ghastly routine, full of privation and pain, the occupation of a hell that not even Satan himself could have invented.
The Commandant’s speech soon showed the lies at its heart. Nothing he uttered contained the least whit of truth. It was instead a community, built on the concept of slave labour and all that entailed, the very worst of penal settlements the world over.
There was a regime of punishment, as a matter of daily routine, not designed simply to grind the convict into submission but in effect to kill him in a manner which would make the guillotine a merciful option.
In the morning at half past five while it was still dark, the guards roused the prisoners. Tools were distributed and the convicts trooped off in gangs to the jungle. Soon the more troublesome or notorious among them would be transferred to the islands.
There was a specific target given by the administration. One stere, the equivalent of one cubic metre, of lumber for each man per day. The convict had to chop down the tree, cut it up into pieces and pile his stere in a designated spot. This was often hundreds of yards from any place where there was standing timber. He was given four days in which to learn how to do the work; on the fifth day if he had not completed the task, he was given only dry bread when he returned from the jungle.
The convicts worked without the supervision of the guards who showed up at three in the afternoon and visited the spot where the steres were to be stacked to check if the impossible targets were met. Those who had not finished were faced with empty stomachs as a reward. They had been given half a pint of coffee for breakfast and then despatched to carry out a backbreaking monotonous task. Drenched in perspiration, they struck with what strength they could muster at trees so durable that the blade of the axe bounced off the surface.
They worked under a blazing sun, liquid pumping out of every pore, attacked constantly by mosquitoes and other insects, frantically trying to reach the target by the appointed time of the guards’ visit. As well as the early morning coffee, they were given at noon 26 ounces of bread and a pint of broth which contained no meat or vegetables. At night, two ounces of rice or dry beans or peas. Even resting they would be in a constant state of hunger. Considering the workload, the food was deliberately rationed with the purpose of quickly destroying the bodies of the toiling men.
They were rapidly ground into the earth and their health broke down. They became ill and those who did not survive the brief hospitalisation finished up in the communal cemetery at St Laurent called the Bamboos. They were effectively murdered by the authorities without the possibility of any official retribution. It was a form of mass extermination.
The convicts laboured under horrendous tropical conditions, burnt by the sun, drenched by the monsoon rain. They were undernourished, badly housed and treated with indifference and cruelty. Men would wake up in the morning, feet soaked in blood having been bitten by vampire bats, full of tiny insects which had burrowed into their skin. They suffered from infection and blood poisoning and a pervading sense of utter despair.
He, like the older men, was soon broken in body and spirit and harboured thoughts of ending it all by suicide. But hope, of what they did not know, kept a vigil and they attempted to soldier on even though melting in despair. He remembered in the midst of desperation that he was born only one year after this colony had been established as an institution of unimagined punishment. In a matter of weeks, many were deranged by all sorts of confused thoughts and emotions.
There was further irony for him, quite apart from the fact it was much harder for men of education than those who had not known anything but squalor, filth or promiscuity in their previous lives. They had no light after 8 o’clock, but using sardine tins, a little oil and a rag they could see enough to play cards. The men gambled furiously for the money that they kept secured in their bodies. They were unscrupulous, ruthless, and rows occurred frequently and were settled with knives.
The morning after, when the dormitory was opened, a body was often found, but no threats, inducements of any kind including extra punishment would lead to a betrayal of the killer.
Every prisoner was worn out from fatigue on top of all the other adversities of the climate and incarceration. Many could not sleep with the anticipation of another day of hellish labour and privation. None were excused work. All were devoured by big black ants as well as all the other bugs. In the barracks they were stifled by the stink of sweat and excrement. Many had to sleep with one eye open in order not to be robbed or killed.
The mental and physical suffering was amplified by the constant threat of illness and the fact of companions perishing all around them. Reduced to a daily struggle for existence, they shut themselves up within themselves for refuge, miserably lonely and full of despair and hopelessness in the knowledge that there would be no escape from or end to this daily hell.
Many suffered from deep depression, haunted by moments when the past surged into their consciousness and their minds were tortured by everything they had lost.
Whatever the nature of their crimes, how could such punishment be justified? Even for the hardened and the recidivists, those supposedly born into and made for evil acts, many of whose social circumstances allowed for no other way of life, this fate was hardly deserved. It engendered hatred and distrust in a community damned from every angle. In the bagne, it was every man for himself.
The only liaisons were sexual and forced on younger convicts by older ones who would have been degenerate in any circumstance. They started with rape and then forced submission. The younger men were known as mômes (meaning: kid, brat, fool). These were considered the “pets” of the older ones, “pet” being a singularly inappropriate way of describing their role. The mômes who did not comply were sometimes murdered so no other degenerate could lay hands on him, or at other times in a fit of jealousy. Here was human behaviour at its most squalid and sickening.
The majority had some trace of decency, but there were those born under a bad sign and whose behaviour and actions added to the stinking pollution of the lives of the prisoners.
For most, their past life was constantly replayed like reels in their minds and there was no outlet for the ultimate anguish such reflections bring as companionship and friendship were almost non-existent in an environment in which survival was paramount. The only collectiveness was for illegal enterprise, gang-fighting and escape. But even then trust between the players was at a premium and suspicion a far greater motivating force. Thus violence and murder was another factor of life as if the regime and climate were not enough in the constant war of attrition on life.
Mutual trust was unattainable and therefore meaningful exchange of confidence or problems was non-existent. The convict withdrew into his shell, deprived of the comfort of any support, and lived a life stripped of all reasonable sentiment.
Any other civilised nation would have given them a
chance to mend their ways and remake their lives, instead of sending them on a torturous path to inevitable death. Some of them committed a first crime out of bravado, stupidity or sheer necessity, caught in a cycle of circumstance and influenced by environment as so often happens, and were not in any conventional sense criminals.
They had lost a gamble with the odds stacked against them. Lady Fortune had turned her back on them and they were now locked up like animals in close quarters with assassins, thieves and perverts.
There was a man by the name of Bayard in his 25th year in the prison colony. He had been in the terrible Oraput timber camp about which the well-known anthem of the prison camp had been composed – the poet himself had died there. He was called to sing the song incessantly. Set to the tune of a hymn to the Eucharist it told of the life and the miseries of the convicts who worked and died in the death camp of the jungle.
There goes the bell! Up all of you! Five o’clock
fellows!
The night mists are still hanging over Oraput,
And foul bats, drunk and heavy with our blood,
Are flapping towards their hiding places for the day.
A fearful awakening for most of us; our spirits
For a little while have been drifting under kinder
skies.
But the infernal bell has called us pitilessly back
To another day’s suffering in this Hell.
There was another, Peploch, condemned to five years’ hard labour in 1902. He was given 36 supplementary punishments for escape attempts. He would die in the camp.
The more literate convicts were asked to write letters for those who might be barely able to read but could not write. Very few wrote to relatives or friends, because there was nothing to report other than the misery of their existence. Many poor prisoners, deluding themselves constantly, sent letters to the Ministry for Justice looking for a pardon. They were a waste of time and were always turned down. But maybe the act of writing gave them a glimmer of hope.
The turnkeys were convicts, mostly Arabs, and detailed to help the guards. They opened and locked the doors of the cells. They searched the men at the command of the guards and sometimes took their place when necessary. They were also useful to the convicts as they passed on many forbidden items to them in return for money.
Since 1852, conditions had not changed, nor any aspect of the administration of the penal colony. It was a world removed from France and so did not touch on the public’s consciousness or conscience. Apart from Dreyfus’s experience there, further publicised in his book Five Years of My Life: 1894-1899, the only previous time a spotlight was thrown on the doings of the colony was after the 1894 Cayenne Massacre when the administration, it was alleged, had ‘engineered a provocation’ in order to rid themselves of a vocal rebellious group of anarchists. One anarchist was killed by a guard, then he himself was killed in retaliation. A man hunt began and some 16 unarmed anarchists were shot down in cold blood and the bodies fed to the sharks.
There was a scandal but nevertheless the death, misery and torture continued unabated through the different generations of the human cargo transported to the nearest thing to hell on earth. The administration stuck steadfastly to their task of maintaining an inhuman and degrading regime without the tiniest trace of care or compassion for the condemned men.
They were either incapable of pity or had suppressed it for the sake of their own survival. Not for the first or last time in history, in the name of justice a system of unremitting cruelty was inflicted. There was no liberty, equality or fraternity for the inhabitants of Devil’s Island.
8
LE CRIME
MARSEILLES, AUGUST 1907
This was indeed a crime scene, but of course there was the original one, yet to be examined. Dupin instructed Froissart to return to headquarters and acquire a vehicle and two extra policemen to help with the removal of the trunk and inform Dr Dufour of their impending task.
He could interview the porter Beraud who delivered the trunk, but decided to wait. Bad news travels fast and he did not need the press just yet. When Pons returned from the Hôtel du Louvre with the couple, in a cab driven by a man called Bizot, he reported that they had tried to bribe him to avoid coming to the station. Dupin was surprised to see a man and woman in clearly middle age – not what he expected – he introduced himself.
“Charles Dupin, Préfecture, Marseilles. Is this your trunk?”
“Yes,” replied the man.
“Your names, please.”
“Sir Vere and Lady Goold.”
Dupin opened the trunk. The man appeared to faint and was held up by the woman. She seemed to ignore the contents.
The detective paused and put back the top of the trunk.
“I think that we should back go to your hotel. Hôtel du Louvre, I believe?”
“Yes,” replied the man.
“To find the rest of the body?”
The man and woman made no reply.
Dupin ordered his team to accompany him with the couple to the Hôtel du Louvre.
But first there was the task of transporting the trunk to the police station. Froissart soon returned with a vehicle. Pons arranged for an entrance at the rear leading into the goods yard off the Boulevard Voltaire to be opened and the vehicle drove in there. The newly arrived policemen then removed the trunk from the rack, wheeled it out and lifted it into the vehicle. They drove off. Pons opened the door to the platforms and it was business as usual.
Dupin, Froissart, Lazare and the Goolds descended the monumental staircase at the front of the station onto the Boulevard D’Athènes, and from there departed for the Hôtel du Louvre.
For Charles Dupin it was the beginning of another long day’s journey into night. But he was galvanised and his personal time had no meaning for him. The immediate future had been plotted for him. In this he had no choice and that was the way he liked his life – like the tide, brought on by the flow.
When they entered the suite in the hotel, the brown-haired stout woman became enervated and the man asked if he could have a drink, which was allowed. He raised a glass of whisky to his lips with shaking hands, finished and immediately filled another one.
Dupin requested that they sit down, but not before Lady Goold protested loudly.
“This is outrageous. I don’t know why you are here! What are we supposed to have done? We know nothing about the trunk – anyone could have put our name on it.”
“Unlikely,” replied Dupin, at ease. “Next you will be suggesting that someone murdered a woman and placed her dismembered body in your trunk without your knowledge? I think not.”
The man was obviously in a state of distress, gulping whisky down.
“Believe me, it is not as it seems,” he said. “We are innocent. It was someone else that – ”
“Shut up!” screamed his wife.
He looked at her, silent, and slurped down his drink.
Dupin said nothing for a minute and then asked Lazare to search the bedroom and bathroom.
“You can’t, you can’t!” screamed the woman, leaping up from her chair.
Dupin rose slowly. “Yes, I can,” he replied firmly.
Her husband buried his head in his hands and sobbed quietly.
The detective could hardly believe that this wreck of a man, obviously the worse for prolonged consumption of alcohol, was capable of murder and then the effort required to dismember a body with instruments not designed for such a task. Indeed, if he had been asked to imagine the perpetrators he could not have come up in his mind’s eye with such an unlikely pair.
The woman was rotund, middle-aged and not unattractive. Matronly, but with a hard edge. Pons had said that she had fallen when alighting from the cab after it had pulled up outside the station, but felt that there was something calculated in her action. She would be giving nothing away under questioning. Even so she would have a lot of explaining to do, even if she had concocted some story to cover the awful discovery.
For a small few moments the victim had disappeared from his mental radar, but not for long.
Lazare returned to them with a large valise in his hands. He was as pale as the early morning sun. He laid it down on the floor.
Dupin approached it. The open top revealed the head of a woman with chestnut-brown hair, and beneath that a pair of bloodied legs, cut off at the upper thighs. All underneath what appeared to be a bloodstained sheet or a dress with ragged edges, suggesting that it had been torn.
“Who is this?” he asked firmly.
The woman remained silent. Her eyes were averted from the dreadful partial remains. The man became agitated, folding and unfolding his arms, not knowing what to do with his hands.
“Madame Levin,” the man uttered with a croak. “Emma Levin.”
“A person known to you both?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” he replied.
A silence ensued, broken only by the opening and closing of the shutters of the camera. Froissart finished and moved aside. Dupin allowed the silence to stretch and thus render the couple even more uncomfortable, if that were possible.
“I am detaining you, Sir Goold and Lady Goold, for questioning in relation to the murder of Emma Levin. You will now accompany us to the Préfecture to be examined on the matter.”
He gestured to Lazare to close and remove the valise and its ghastly contents. Froissart handcuffed the pair. Dupin went on to the landing and summoned a member of the staff who then brought the party down a back staircase and to an exit at the rear of the hotel.
At the police station Dupin pulled up a chair opposite the couple and sat down. The man was attempting to disguise his shaking hands by wringing them together. He looked in a bad condition. The woman held her head haughtily in the air, but the Inspector could see the small beginnings of her discomfort as she glanced momentarily at his two colleagues, now sentinels in her eyes.
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 15
