Bird in a Cage

by Frédéric Dard

  “Do you think that’s the only reason?”

  “Tell me about that goods lift.”

  “It goes up two floors, in fact. The factory has been designed quite rationally. Gluing is done on the first floor and packaging on the second. When he designed the premises my husband wanted the lift to serve both the factory and the flat and that’s why it has doors on both sides.”

  “So?”

  “This evening I unscrewed and took out the switch for the second floor as an ultimate precaution, to make sure my ‘visitor-witness’ wouldn’t even imagine there was a second floor.”

  “But you took me up to the second floor on my first visit! How did you manage that?”

  “I had a child-sized thimble which I could insert in lieu of the second-floor switch. The tip of the thimble just fitted inside the switch-hole on the control panel. Logically I would need to go to the second floor once only, since the tragedy would be discovered on the second visit…”

  “My congratulations. You are very cunning.”

  I wondered, as I looked at her, how Machiavellian scheming and meticulous planning of such a high order could have sprung forth from that woman’s soul.

  “And I switched the bulbs in the hall and the lift with broken ones.”

  Now she needed to go the whole hog. She wanted to impress me.

  “When you came the first time carrying Lucienne in your arms I stopped the lift a little short of the floor. I did the same on your third visit when you came with that man from the church… Do you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because our flat on the first floor is not exactly level with the first floor of the factory. Since the lift was installed primarily for the factory, there’s a step up when you get out of it on the flat side. But on the second floor the flat and the factory floors are on the same level. So I had to create an artificial step by halting the lift a bit before its normal level.”

  “Bravo. That can’t have been easy in complete darkness.”

  “I spent nights practising it when I was here on my own. It’s turned into a kind of reflex. I’m now able to stop the lift within an inch of the same place.”

  ‘When I was here on my own…’ That set me thinking what this woman’s life must have been like, in these industrial premises, with her rejected daughter.

  She had indeed had all the time she needed to design a murder. To gear herself up for it, and also to set the wheels in motion. To take it on like a job…

  “How come the door of the second-floor flat wasn’t locked? I only had to turn the handle to get in.”

  “For safety’s sake.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I only pretended to use a key on each occasion. In fact I used the key to the downstairs flat to fiddle around with the lock up here, so as to create the illusion. I was afraid that in the police inquiry they would start by asking for my set of keys and that the upstairs key would attract their attention. Because my husband didn’t have a key to this flat, and I was afraid they would compare our two sets.”

  I let go of Mme Dravet’s hand.

  “And to think I nearly wrecked such a perfect and meticulous plan.”

  She nodded.

  “Yes. I stumbled on the only man in the area I couldn’t use as a witness. When you confessed who… who you were, I could almost have killed myself… I was back to square one.”

  “So did you go back to square one?”

  “Only it was getting very risky, because the body was cooling down. That’s why I did what I had to, to stay out with Ferrie for several hours. It was the only possible solution: to add lots of time, so they wouldn’t be able to establish the time of death with any precision… I dragged Ferrie off to a noisy place where we made an exhibition of ourselves. We put on paper hats, threw streamers, drank champagne. He said it was the best Christmas party he’d ever been to.”

  She drooped from weariness.

  “Do you think they’ll do an autopsy?”

  “If they’re in any doubt, they surely will.”

  “Allegedly, the capsules don’t leave any traces. There’s just the issue of the trajectory… But I think I got that right…”

  Her voice was calm and her face looked like that of any other sensible young woman. They made it hard to believe what she’d done and especially the circumstances in which she had done it.

  “As for the timing,” she went on, “who could possibly query it if there’s no autopsy! And even if there is one! Ferrie testified that the lounge was empty when we went out. He testified that he never let me out of his sight. He testified that he found my husband’s body at the same time as I did.”

  She stood up and came right up to my knees. She put her hand under my chin.

  “Now, you are the only danger I face. What does it feel like to hold somebody’s life in your hands?”

  She was asking me?

  For it was she who had killed a man.

  And I had killed a woman.

  10

  The Cloth Bird

  “So why did you kill him?”

  She shook her head.

  “I would rather not explain. Because of my daughter. Jérôme was so odious to that child…”

  I blurted out:

  “You’re not going to tell me you wanted to put that man’s corpse in her Christmas stocking?”

  She uttered a cruel laugh.

  “No, I’m not going to say that. But you know, Albert, you’re not too far from the truth!”

  She remembered my first name! That’s all it takes to win over a man. Up to that point I’d felt vaguely humiliated by being made a mug of by that woman. But wasn’t it really fate herself that had thrust the role upon me? Wasn’t it only a convoluted set of circumstances even more delicately engineered than the murder of Dravet that had brought me to the table next to hers in the restaurant?

  The previous day I’d woken up in prison a thousand kilometres away and yet an unlikely web of apparently minor, random events had led me inexorably to that encounter.

  “Your act in the church was sheer genius.”

  “I got the idea from you. When you telephoned I was in Lucienne’s room. I was watching her sleep and wondering how some mothers manage to do away with themselves along with their children. I was trying to find the recipe for such an awful thing. When I saw you standing in the crowd when I was being carried out of the church, I almost screamed in despair.”

  “Tell me, did you mention me in your statement?”

  “Ferrie talked about you. But as you weren’t present when the body was found, the police didn’t seem to give it much weight…”

  “Will they be back?”

  “Probably. I got lumbered with relatives and with prosecutors who hadn’t woken up properly. They’d all had too much to drink and too little sleep. It was a nightmare… I think the coast will be clear until noon. They all need to get some sleep, don’t they?”

  “You came up here to clear the room out?”

  “Yes. I don’t have a lot of time to do it…”

  She was waiting for my verdict. Mme Dravet had spoken the plain truth when she said I had her life in my hands.

  I cast my now enlightened eyes around the room. It wasn’t a real room now, just a stage set. A set reproducing every detail of the lounge where the tragedy had occurred.

  “What are you going to do with the furniture?”

  “The armchair makes a pair with the one downstairs. It’s the one I’m supposed to have taken out to make room for the Christmas tree. I just have to get it down into one of the other rooms, the dining room for instance, the police hardly went into it… And I was going to put the bottles away in the kitchen. The gramophone and the drinks trolley are to be smashed up and burned in the huge central heating furnace, along with the tree. Only the sofa can stay here. I sewed a cover for it in a different colour that alters its appearance quite radically…”

  “OK, good,” I decided. “Let’s get on with it!”

  I
was well aware she was hoping I would keep my mouth shut, but she hadn’t been expecting me to offer any help. My decision to do so gave her quite a fright.

  I looked at the time. I felt very much in control of myself. The murder was a masterpiece of its kind and I wanted to make my own contribution to it.

  It was almost eight. Would we be granted an hour’s respite?

  With Mme Dravet’s help I carried the armchair, the drinks trolley, the gramophone and the low table it stood on into the goods lift.

  We put the armchair in the first-floor dining room as she had planned. Then we went down to the basement. Dismantling the trolley, the gramophone and the low table was child’s play. Especially because, given the size of the boiler’s firebox, we didn’t need to break them up into small pieces.

  When it had all been consumed by the flames and the metal insides of the gramophone had been reduced to a small tangle of blackened steel, I replenished the boiler with coal.

  We were as red as scalded tomatoes when we got back up to the second floor. We still had to strip the tree of the various trinkets that were hung on it and then saw it up so we could burn it. We got to work without talking to each other. We kept at it with feverish, dizzying haste. The more the room ceased to look like the one on the floor below, the more we became aware of the thinness of the ice on which we were skating. A policeman could turn up any moment and find me in the Dravets’ flat, or have a mind to search the house from the bottom… to the top!

  She uttered a little cry when she came upon my cage with the cloth bird. She looked at it suspiciously.

  I then told her where the decoration came from and she started to weep. She sat on the sofa and sobbed convulsively, clutching the flimsy gewgaw to her breast.

  “Why are you crying like that?” I asked her when she began to calm down.

  “Because of you, Albert. I’m thinking of you buying that in a shop all on your own, without knowing what you would do with it.”

  She was capable of planning her husband’s death for weeks on end, she was capable of firing a bullet at point blank range into a sleeping man’s brain, and yet she was weeping over a trinket that symbolized my loneliness.

  “I don’t want you to throw it away.”

  “But how can you put it on the other tree if the room is sealed?”

  “I’ll hang it over Lucienne’s bed. I don’t know if a woman like me has any right to believe in lucky charms, but it seems to me that’s what this little bird is. I believe it will protect my daughter…”

  And then she went downstairs straight away with the glitter-dusted cardboard cage. I still had to split off the branches from the tree. I went down to the basement to do that. When I opened the firebox to throw in the wood, thick black smoke poured out. And each time I opened the cast-iron door, a suffocating cloud smelling of tree resin swirled out from the grate.

  The glass baubles we’d put in a little box looked like very precious eggs. I stuffed them into the boiler in one go and they burst with the sound of crushed biscuit.

  I swept up the green pine needles on the basement floor. After that I went upstairs. As I reached the main door on the landing of the first floor, I heard Mme Dravet’s voice. I thought she was on the telephone, and went inside with measured step. That’s when I heard a man’s voice, too. I wanted to beat a retreat, only I could hear someone coming up the stairs behind me. I was trapped. In front of me was a visitor in full flow in the dining room. Behind me, new arrivals.

  Straight opposite was the “lounge of tragedy” with its door sealed with pieces of wax the colour of dried blood.

  I played my last card. I tiptoed down the corridor to the nearest door, the child’s bedroom.

  I don’t think it’s possible to enter a room more quickly or more surreptitiously than I did that time.

  The girl’s room was in grey half-light. My silvered cage was hanging from the bedpost. Lucienne’s breathing was light and regular. This little room was touchingly stuffy.

  A few inches away, footsteps made the floorboards creak. Voices hummed.

  Someone would surely come in eventually. I cast around for a hiding place but didn’t find one. There was nothing in the room apart from the bed, a small painted wardrobe and a pile of toys.

  Was it my presence that disturbed the child’s sleep, or the comings and goings in the next room? Suddenly she let out a cry. It sounded like a high-pitched lament of a vaguely animal kind.

  I’d been through too many strong feelings that night. That cry cut into me like a surgeon’s knife into anaesthetized flesh.

  “It’s my daughter waking up,” Mme Dravet explained to whoever was there. She was on her way. With someone.

  I threw myself behind the bed. I must have stuck out on both sides. Once again I was putting my head in the sand.

  The door opened. The mother came in. There was a man with her, but he stayed at the door, and that’s what saved me. As she came up to the bed Mme Dravet saw me, and I saw just how much self-control she possessed.

  She didn’t stray from her path, picked up the child, and went out with her in such a way as to give me maximum cover from the door.

  I was left on my own in the room with its grinning plywood Donald Ducks. On my own except for the blue and yellow cloth bird swinging away on its perch.

  11

  Lost Property

  I’d almost lost track of time when they left, as I had done in the cab of the lorry during the night. In any case I wasn’t entirely sure they had all gone. I only learned for certain when Mme Dravet started chanting outside the door what she had to tell me in a way that didn’t arouse the child’s attention.

  There we are, they’ve all gone, tra la

  I’m taking her into the kitchen now

  Go into the lounge will you please

  Then I can get her back to bed, tra la

  That’s how I was able to leave the bedroom without being seen by Lucienne. Her mother was with me a minute later.

  She looked very downcast.

  “You were as scared as I was, weren’t you?” I stuttered as I put my arms around her.

  She cuddled up to me in complete surrender. She was done in.

  “They rang the bell. I thought you had heard from the basement and had hidden down there.”

  “I didn’t hear a thing. I was a split second away from walking right into them. What were they after?”

  “To check up on things, they said. They took off the seals, and then resealed the lounge. I don’t know what they did in there; while some of them were at it, others were questioning me in the dining room.”

  “About me?”

  “Actually, yes, they did refer to you. But most of it was about my husband’s girlfriend.”

  “What did they want to know?”

  “Not much about you: how did I know you; do you remember coming out of the church; do you remember the people who came up to you. I said I knew absolutely nothing about you, that it’s quite possible you noticed me but there was nothing mutual about it.”

  “That was the right thing to say. What about the girlfriend?”

  “Well, that was an inquisition. They wanted to know if I was aware of the affair, and so forth, you know what I mean.”

  “I hope I do.”

  I sneaked a kiss in her hair.

  “They didn’t go upstairs?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God. Let’s go up and finish it off. Are you sure none of them has stayed behind in the building?”

  “I saw them all as far as the main gate and locked it securely behind them.”

  “Did they question Lucienne as well?”

  “Not at all. One of the detectives even asked me if he could give her a chocolate wrapped in gold paper that he had in his pocket.”

  “All good. Let’s go up.”

  I’d started to feel it was my murder too. I’d accepted it and made it my own.

  All we still had to do was to put the dust cover on the second-floor sofa and
sweep up with care. I took on the lowly task of sweeping while Mme Dravet added a supremely elegant twist to the scene change by rehanging the heavy curtains inside out. She’d put in a white lining, so with the lining facing in they completed the room’s empty, blank look.

  “Where’s the dust cover for the sofa?”

  “Under the seat cushions!”

  She had really left nothing to chance. I swiftly pulled out the cushions and yes, there was the cover, neatly folded lengthwise. But as I picked it up something fell out: a cheap, flat plastic slipcase with a transparent panel, such as you put an ID card in. What was in it was a registration document in the name of a certain Paul Ferrie, residing in Paris, for a Citroën delivery van.

  I looked at the document with a worried eye.

  “What is it?” Mme Dravet asked.

  I handed her the mock-crocodile slipcase.

  “The fool lost his registration card by lolling on the sofa on his first visit here.”

  She didn’t move, and stood there looking hard at the document as if it represented a tricky problem for her to solve.

  “You look concerned,” I mumbled uneasily.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m thinking that Ferrie is going to notice he’s lost a thing that he needs and he’s going to wonder where he might have dropped it.”

  “And so?”

  She didn’t answer straight away. She was a thorough woman who thought things all the way through.

  “So nothing. He’ll certainly come back here to look for it.”

  “Probably, but that’s not a risk. Now take a look…”

  I picked up the dust cover and draped it over the sofa. I tucked the edges under the seat cushions and smoothed it over the back. I pushed it to the back of the room with my knee. It now looked like a flat undergoing redecoration. Absolutely nothing like the lounge one level down, apart from the floor plan and the colour of the walls.