Mister Memory

by Marcus Sedgwick

  ‘I was dead,’ she said, and there was a world of unspoken meaning behind it. For a moment, the man who’d shot Bishop hesitated. Petit took his chance, leaping towards the other policeman, even as he shot Ondine.

  Petit’s former clumsiness did not return to trouble him; he knocked his man down swiftly, with a clean blow to his throat. But there were two of them, and the other stepped back and in the same instant fired into Petit’s chest, throwing him on to the floor. This same man turned his gun back on Bishop, firing once into his forehead, and it all happened so fast that there was not even time for anyone to make a sound.

  Petit lay on the floor of the truck, his life running out of him. To outward appearances, he was already dead, but he could still hear, he could still think.

  The man he’d knocked to the ground stood up, rubbing his throat.

  ‘Quick,’ he said, because the shots had been heard, the brakes of the train were grinding. He knelt down and unlocked Bishop’s cuffs, then put his gun, which had fired only once, into Bishop’s dead hand. His friend fumbled in Petit’s jacket pocket and found a bundle of cash, money extorted by the dead couple from Delorme, to be returned to him. He searched the rest of Petit’s pockets, hunting for something else perhaps, but found nothing.

  By the time the train came to a halt at the far end of the station yard, and the platform guards arrived, the scene was set: the attempted escape, the inspector taken in the struggle, the American dispatched, and the girl caught by a wild shot.

  Petit knew he was dying, and yet he did not die unhappily. The actions of the men from Paris proved he was right about everything: that they were involved in covering up Delorme’s deeds, and that the Prefect was behind it. But more than that, as Petit lay with his eyes closed on the floor of the mail carriage, and his life left him, he had only one thought in his head, the memory of one person. Into his mind’s eye came Marie, clearer than ever, as clear as the last time they had been together in life. And Petit was happy, because he knew he could give up struggling and fighting, that he could let go of all the questions about what to do, and how to be and how to live on without her, for he would be reunited with her, very, very soon.

  In Paris, in his café, Cavard wonders about Petit’s final moments. He orders a small jug of wine, and pours himself a large glass. Wordlessly he raises this generous measure to Petit’s memory and drains it. Then he vows to bring Paul Delorme down, and yet he is afraid, he is more afraid than he has been in a long while.

  Cavard guesses that Petit would have only kept in touch with him. Having taken the decision to trust him with the telegram, Petit wouldn’t have been stupid enough to risk bringing anyone else into the business. So Petit must have requested that Guérin, the Chief of Police in Lyon, ask Cavard himself to arrange the dispatch of officers from Paris. Since Cavard never got that request, he now knows that Delorme’s corruption reaches across the Boulevard de Justice and into the ranks of his own men.

  A FEW WORDS ABOUT MAGIC

  Is Paris a fairy tale? If so, then all the world is too. The magical is all around us, though hidden and disguised so as to make it very hard to notice. It becomes un-commonplace. Yet still it’s there if you look hard enough, and in the right way.

  Morel has been working closer than ever with Marcel. With a flash of insight, he has been testing out other aspects of his personality, though at first Marcel is uncommunicative. The news that Ondine is not dead, that she merely pretended to die, that she tricked him into thinking he had killed her, is too much for him. Days pass. More days, and still Marcel cannot fathom how and why it can have occurred. How much did she have to hate him, he wonders, in order for her to do such a thing? What does that say about him? Is he truly so bad? He believes he must be, and days pass as he broods on that. All the time, something else bothers him too, something he has to accept: namely, that he didn’t know the gun was loaded with blanks. When he pulled the trigger, he believed the gun to be loaded with live ammunition. So what does that say about him?

  Marcel continues to torture himself with such thoughts, but Morel persists. One day, as the doctor walks across the gardens of the Salpêtrière, it occurs to him that by focusing exclusively on Marcel’s memory he has treated him more like a slide under the microscope than a person. It is clear that there are other unusual things about Marcel, not just his memory. There is, of course, this inability to lie, something that still has not been disproven. And maybe there are other things too, which perhaps hold the answer, the key to his outrageous memory. Morel’s theory is that rather than trying to walk through the front gates of the castle, there is some small sally port to the side or rear that will allow easier access, undefended. Thus he has switched his efforts to testing other aspects of Marcel, the man.

  There is, for example, the question of his problem-solving abilities, for, at times, Marcel shows prodigious skill with puzzles in logic or mathematics.

  ‘A man and his wife,’ Morel said to Marcel one day, ‘are picking mushrooms in the forest. The husband says to the wife, “Give me seven of your mushrooms and I’ll have twice as many as you!” To which the wife replies, “No, give me seven of yours and we’ll have the same amount.” Now,’ Morel finishes, ‘how many mushrooms does each of them have?’

  Marcel stared at Morel for a moment, and Morel was wondering whether he should have told him he was setting him a puzzle, or what all this business about forests was, for that was the kind of thing that could very easily fox him, when Marcel replied.

  ‘She has thirty-five and he has forty-nine.’

  Morel was impressed. ‘Very good, Marcel. Very good. Most impressive.’

  Morel was indeed impressed. He had tried that puzzle out on Chief Physician Raymond the day before and he had needed pencil and paper and ten minutes to figure it out. But when Morel asked Marcel to explain how he solved it, it took him fifteen minutes of a long and rambling story about the husband and wife and the forest and how tired they were and what their baskets were like and that it was a sunny day but shady under the trees and how when the husband bent over from tiredness and sat down next to the basket and then said ‘aha!’ that at the same moment he, that is to say Marcel, suddenly saw the answer, saw them handing mushrooms to each other, along with many more details of the forest around them.

  All in all it takes Marcel about a thousand times longer to explain his method than it actually took him to think it. Nevertheless, the answer is correct and his speed impressive. Morel tries him with other puzzles, with similar results, although occasionally he would get derailed by the images he saw as he worked through a problem.

  On another occasion, Morel read a poem to Marcel, a simple poem, one learned by children in school. His patient was absolutely unable to grasp its meaning. Morel explained that the poem was about a man treading grapes, a man whose greed is aroused by the sight of the river of what will become wine, and no longer finds himself satisfied with his humble life. Marcel seemed stupefied by this explanation, and read the poem over to himself again and again, and was soon lost in a reverie from which he did not recover for some hours. Perhaps Morel’s choice of subject matter was a foolish one, because after all this world of grapes and wine was the one in which Marcel had grown up.

  Morel continues to broaden his investigations, all the while learning more and more, and begins to glimpse a fuller picture of Marcel in the process.

  There is, after all, the question of Marcel’s beliefs. He once claimed, for example, to be able to raise or lower his temperature at will, he even claimed to be able to lower the heat in one hand while raising it in his other. Morel tried to verify such claims with a thermometer, and though he saw some changes, he did not satisfy himself that the results were undeniable. Marcel also claimed to be able to cure himself. If he was able to concentrate properly upon some developing illness, he could imagine that it would pass, he said, and it would indeed pass. Of this, Morel could make no test, and he was more struck by what Marcel had to say about it in general.


  ‘For me, there’s no great difference between the things I imagine and what exists in reality. Often, if I imagine a thing is going to happen, it does. Of course, I realise it could just be coincidence, just chance, but deep down I think it’s because I pictured it that way.’

  How many moments were there in his life, Morel wondered, when his imagination succeeded in convincing him of something, even though his reason ought to have thrust it aside? Some grain of magic would remain, tucked away in some remote part of his awareness, some naively magical thought. And how many nooks and crannies were there to the man’s mind where imagination would become reality, as in a fairy tale?

  Such were Morel’s musings upon Marcel, and this was the new direction that his work was about to take, when it all came abruptly to an end.

  They come for Marcel one cold and dark afternoon in the first week of December. A fuss at the gatehouse escalates, so that Morel hears their approach even as he works with Marcel in the chamber. Moments later, the door opens and Miskov stands looking flustered and angry behind three men: two gardiens, and someone who clearly is in charge of them, a man in plain clothes, the type, Morel can see immediately, who knows he need listen to no one but himself.

  Miskov begs Morel’s understanding, that these are policemen and would not take no for answer when told they need an appointment to see anyone, that they cannot just come in to the hospital.

  Morel draws himself up. With his sense of propriety aroused, and his anger set, he rails against these intruders, but they are not overawed by a shortish and elderly doctor with a white beard and watery eyes. The man in plain clothes announces himself to be the Commissaire of the 6th, and that he has an order signed by no lesser person than Prefect Delorme; they are to remove Marcel Després to the station house, where he is to be held indefinitely.

  ‘You cannot do this!’ Morel declares. ‘You have no jurisdiction here! You have no right to take a patient of mine!’

  It all does no good. Within minutes, Marcel is being escorted to the gates of the hospital, where he’s bundled into a waiting Black Maria, which speeds away into the dark streets.

  At the commissariat, the station house of the 6th arrondissement, Marcel is shut up in the same cell he was placed in nearly six months before, upon his arrest. He sits on the low, hard bench fixed to the wall and disappears into his mind, while outside two guards keep watch.

  A few hours later, there is a visit from a man who calls himself Peletier. He explains to Marcel something about who he is, which Marcel doesn’t understand. He only understands that he is no longer under arrest for the murder of his wife, but instead for the rape and murder of Lucie, a crime he concocted and enacted with two parties, now deceased.

  So, for the second time, Marcel learns that Ondine is dead. He thought he had killed her, in a jealous fit of rage. Months passed before he learned from the doctor that he had not, something he was still struggling to comprehend, and now, he learns in a moment, unexplained, that she is dead again.

  It is too much. Unable to bear it, Marcel vanishes into himself once more. Questions pile in, question after question, yet above them all is one more prevalent than the others, which colours everything else he is thinking. He is now on trial for a murder he knows he did not commit. He did not kill anyone, it seems, and definitely not Lucie. Yet he had killed Ondine. He had thought he had, and even though he has now been shown to be innocent, it does not remove the fact, the very obvious and appalling fact, that at the time he pulled the trigger of the gun, he wanted to kill her. And if he wanted to, what does it matter whether he actually did it or not? The logic of that puzzle seems undeniable.

  If he is to be tried for the death of Lucie, which he fully believes he did not do, then so be it. In his mind, he is still guilty of murdering Ondine, for he pulled that trigger, he pulled it five times, and at that moment, he wanted her dead.

  Such thoughts torture Marcel as he sits in the cell, and his mind works so feverishly that it blots out everything else. He is, for example, completely unaware of a conversation that takes place outside in the office of the commissariat, even though it is plain for all to hear through the walls. At the conclusion of this discussion, the door to the cells opens, and a third policeman joins the other two.

  He nods at them, silently; they nod back, a little bemused.

  Marcel sees nothing.

  A LETTER FROM THE DEAD

  Cavard has not been idle. Far from it; he has been very busy indeed, yet he has been extremely careful not to let his activities be seen. He knows that there are men in his department, in the Sûreté itself, who are in Delorme’s pocket. This does not surprise him: the Prefect must have made some allies in his time as Commissaire, and no doubt he found it expedient to maintain these allegiances when he moved across the Boulevard de Justice into the Préfecture. The real question for Cavard is who these people are, but he recognises that this is a longer struggle than he has the time and energy for, so, instead, he turns the problem on its head, and asks himself whom he knows he can trust.

  There are three inspectors he knows of. He believes he can trust them for they all quietly share a sympathy with the same branch of politics that he does, the extremes of which were repressed so brutally less than thirty years ago during the time of the Commune – the politics of the left. No one now declares themselves to be a Communard, and Cavard is no exception. Yet he knows from his time before he was made chef that there are a few men, like him, who still believe in the principles behind that movement, that the people should rule the state, not the other way around. Of course, to the outside world, all policemen are politically neutral. In practice, there are leanings and there are factions, the very same divisions that Delorme has made good use of in rising so far, so fast.

  Cavard has briefed these three inspectors, privately, outside the walls of the Quai des Orfèvres, and has charged them with bringing him information about Peletier. It is from these three inspectors that Cavard learns that Delorme has had Després moved out of the hospital and placed back into a cell in the 6th.

  This in itself is a stroke of fortune. Delorme would really be pushing things to have Després taken to a station house in an arrondissement other than the one where his crime was committed, and this is lucky indeed for Cavard, because though Delorme has Peletier in his control, and many others besides, the Commissaire of the 6th is an old friend of Cavard’s. Yes, he will do what he’s ordered to by the Prefect, but it does at least allow Cavard to send a man or two of his own to keep watch on Després as he sits in the cell. For Delorme is not the only one with contacts in another man’s department; Cavard himself has cultivated a few contacts in the municipal police force, and it is time to make use of them. There is, after all, no need to allow a repeat of the incident on the train at Dijon, Cavard reasons, no need at all.

  As it is, Cavard is left to ponder this move of Delorme’s. First, he had Marcel plucked from the station house and placed in a hospital, declaring him to be criminally insane. Now, nearly six months later, he overturns his own decision and has the prisoner removed from the Salpêtrière and re-arrested, this time for the rape and murder of the other cabaret worker, Lucie Rey. This makes no sense to Cavard, and it troubles him greatly.

  He knows that Petit was right: that Delorme has something to hide: his connection to the dead Ondine Després. All Cavard can conclude is that matters have developed. That things, unknown to him, have been changing. That it must have been enough to have Després locked up and isolated from the criminal justice system all those months ago. Yet now, something has forced Delorme’s hand, something powerful enough for him to have three people murdered – for Cavard is in no doubt that Delorme is behind the deaths of Petit, Ondine and Bishop – and to bring Després himself back into the realm of the law. But why?

  That is what is nagging at Cavard, but even as it does, there is another suspicion eating away at him: he is certain that Delorme will be having him watched. It is not possible that Delorme would not take this
step – both men know that they dislike each other, and that some bigger battle than the murder of a nude dancer is at hand. Cavard was an inspector himself once; he is now the Chef of the Sûreté. He knows how things are done, he knows the fundamentals of policing. The press and the lurid detective novels that people buy in cheap editions have one view of the work of the police inspector. To their way of thinking, crimes are solved by the application of the mind; the quick-witted policeman and the wealth of modern techniques at his disposal are all that is required to unravel even the most complex of cases and catch the criminal. Clues are found, theories followed, evidence is measured and studied, and the guilty are caught and brought to justice.

  In practice, Cavard knows, things are rather different. All this fuss about Bertillon and his system of bodily measurement, for example. Cavard’s nose wrinkles as he thinks of it. Bertillon is a bit of an idiot, whose system was only trialled because his father pulled some strings. As far as Cavard can tell it has done almost nothing to aid and abet the methods of the Parisian policeman to date. Thank God they have not yet succumbed to this business with fingerprints, he thinks. What nonsense is that? Do criminals generally walk around the scenes of their crimes with paint on their hands? And so what if everyone’s prints are different; how to keep track of them all? Cavard knows that there are other, younger minds in the department who are pushing for all such new scientific developments, and yes, maybe he is stuck in the past, but for now he would rather rely on the only two proven methods at his disposal: namely surveillance and bribery. Of bribery, there is little to be said; if only the press, if only the public knew that ninety per cent of crimes solved are solved by one criminal informing on another, and that the wheels of that process are oiled by money, they would have a very different view of the police inspector. Cavard knows full well that were the truth known, it would be divisive, explosive. Even within the police, different factions hold opposing views about the morals of using criminals to solve crimes. Cavard does not make such judgements, he only knows that without bribery, and sometimes more physical coercion, criminals would not inform on each other. And once a tip-off has been extracted, then the only other really useful tool the policeman has comes into effect – surveillance. So much can be gained by careful, covert watching, but it is a slow business sometimes, and an expensive one in terms of manpower.