by Merry Murder
Without losing time over explanations, Lecœur plugged in to the Gare du Nord.
“Hallo! Gare du Nord! Who’s speaking? Ah, Lambert. Listen, this is urgent. Have the station searched from end to end. Ask everybody if they’ve seen a boy of ten wandering about. What? Alone? He may be. Or he may be accompanied. We don’t know. Let me know what you find out. Yes, of course. Grab him at once if you set eyes on him.”
“Did you say accompanied?” asked Olivier anxiously.
“Why not? It’s possible. Anything’s possible. Of course, it may not be him. If it is, we’re half an hour late. It was a small grocer in the Rue de Maubeuge whose shopfront is open onto the street. He saw a boy snatch a couple of oranges and make off. He didn’t run after him. Only later, when a policeman passed, he thought he might as well mention it.”
“Had your son any money?” asked the Inspector.
“Not a sou.”
“Hasn’t he got a money-box?”
“Yes. But I borrowed what was in it two days ago, saying that I didn’t want to change a banknote.”
A pathetic little confession, but what did things like that matter now?
“Don’t you think it would be better if I went to the Gare du Nord myself?”
“I doubt if it would help, and we may need you here.”
They were almost prisoners in that room. With its direct links with every nerve center of Paris, that was the place where any news would first arrive. Even in his room in the Police Judiciaire, the Inspector would be less well placed. He had thought of going back there, but now at last took off his overcoat, deciding to see the job through where he was.
“If he had no money, he couldn’t take a bus or the Métro. Nor could he go into a cafe or use a public telephone. He probably hasn’t had anything to eat since his supper last night.”
“But what can he be doing?” exclaimed Olivier, becoming more and more nervous. “And why should he have sent me to the Gare d’Austerlitz?”
“Perhaps to help you get away,” grunted Saillard.
“Get away? Me?”
“Listen. The boy knows you’re down and out. Yet you’re going to buy him a little radio. I’m not reproaching you. I’m just looking at the facts. He leans on the windowsill and sees you with the old woman he knows to be a moneylender. What does he conclude?”
“I see.”
“That you’ve gone to her to borrow money. He may be touched by it, he may be saddened—we don’t know. He goes back to bed and to sleep.”
“You think so?”
“I’m pretty sure of it. Anyhow, we’ve no reason to think he left the house then.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Let’s say he goes back to sleep, then. But he wakes up early, as children mostly do on Christmas Day. And the first thing he notices is the frost on the window. The first frost this winter, don’t forget that. He wants to look at it, to touch it.”
A faint smile flickered across Andre Lecœur’s face. This massive Inspector hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be a boy.
“He scratches a bit of it away with his nails. It won’t be difficult to get confirmation, for once the frost is tampered with it can’t form again in quite the same pattern. What does he notice then? That in the buildings opposite one window is lit up, and one only—the window of the room in which a few hours before he had seen his father. It’s guesswork, of course, but I don’t mind betting he saw the body, or part of it. If he’d merely seen a foot it would have been enough to startle him.”
“You mean to say—” began Olivier, wide-eyed.
“That he thought you’d killed her. As I did myself—for a moment. And very likely not her only. Just think for a minute. The man who’s been committing all these murders is a man. like you, who wanders about at night. His victims live in the poorer quarters of Paris, like Madame Fayet in the Rue Michat. Does the boy know anything of how you’ve been spending your nights since you lost your job? No. All that he has to go on is that he has seen you in the murdered woman’s room. Would it be surprising if his imagination got to work?
“You said just now that you sat on the windowsill. Might it be there that you put down your box of sandwiches?”
“Now I come to think of it, yes. I’m practically sure.”
“Then he saw it. And he’s quite old enough to know what the police would think when they saw it lying there. Is your name on it?”
“Yes. Scratched on the lid.”
“You see! He thought you’d be coming home as usual between seven and eight. The thing was to get you as quickly as possible out of the danger zone.”
“You mean—by writing me that note?”
“Yes. He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t refer to the murder without compromising you. Then he thought of Uncle Gedeon. Whether he believed in his existence or not doesn’t matter. He knew you’d go to the Gare d’Austerlitz.”
“But he’s not yet eleven!”
“Boys of that age know a lot more than you think. Doesn’t he read detective stories?”
“Yes.”
“Of course he does. They all do. If they don’t read them, they get them on the radio. Perhaps that’s why he wanted a set of his own so badly.”
“It’s true.”
“He couldn’t stay in the flat to wait for you, for he had something more important to do. He had to get hold of that box. I suppose he knew the courtyard well. He’d played there, hadn’t he?”
“At one time, yes. With the concierge’s little girl.”
“So he’d know about the rainwater pipes, may even have climbed up them for sport.”
“Very well,” said Olivier, suddenly calm, “let’s say he gets into the room and takes the box. He wouldn’t need to climb down the way he’d come. He could simply walk out of the flat and out of the house. You can open the house door from inside without knocking up the concierge. You say it was at about six o’clock, don’t you?”
“I see what you’re driving at,” grunted the Inspector. “Even at a leisurely pace, it would hardly have taken him two hours to walk to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Yet he wasn’t there.”
Leaving them to thrash it out, Lecœur was busy telephoning.
“No news yet?”
And the man at the Gare du Nord answered, “Nothing so far. We’ve pounced on any number of boys, but none of them was Francois Lecœur.”
Admittedly, any street boy could have pinched a couple of oranges and taken to his heels. The same couldn’t be said for the broken glass of the telephone pillars, however. Andre Lecœur looked once again at the column with the seven crosses, as though some clue might suddenly emerge from them. He had never thought himself much cleverer than his brother. Where he scored was in patience and perseverance.
“If the box of sandwiches is ever found, it’ll be at the bottom of the Seine near the Pont Mirabeau,” he said.
Steps in the corridor. On an ordinary day they would not have been noticed, but in the stillness of a Christmas morning everyone listened.
It was an agent cycliste, who produced a bloodstained blue-check handkerchief, the one that had been found among the glass splinters at the seventh telephone pillar.
“That’s his, all right,” said the boy’s father.
“He must have been followed,” said the Inspector. “If he’d had time, he wouldn’t merely have broken the glass. He’d have said something.”
“Who by?” asked Olivier, who was the only one not to understand. “Who’d want to follow him?” he asked. “And why should he call the police?”
They hesitated to put him wise. In the end it was his brother who explained:
“When he went to the old woman’s he thought you were the murderer. When he came away, he knew you weren’t. He knew—”
“Knew what?”
“He knew who was. Do you understand now? He found out something, though we don’t know what. He wants to tell us about it, but someone’s stopping him.”
“You mean?”
“I
mean that Francois is after the murderer or the murderer is after him. One is following, one is followed—we don’t know which. By the way, Inspector, is there a reward offered?”
“A handsome reward was offered after the third murder and it was doubled last week. It’s been in all the papers.”
“Then my guess,” said Andre Lecœur. “is that it’s the kid who’s doing the following. Only in that case—”
It was twelve o’clock, four hours since they’d lost track of him. Unless, of course, it was he who had snaffled the oranges in the Rue Maubeuge.
Might not this be his great moment? Andre Lecœur had read somewhere that even to the dullest and most uneventful lives such a moment comes sooner or later.
He had never had a particularly high opinion of himself or of his abilities. When people asked him why he’d chosen so dreary and monotonous a job rather than one in, say, the Brigade des Homicides, he would answer: “I suppose I’m lazy.”
Sometimes he would add:
“I’m scared of being knocked about.”
As a matter of fact, he was neither lazy nor a coward. If he lacked anything it was brains.
He knew it. All he had learned at school had cost him a great effort. The police exams that others took so easily in their stride, he had only passed by dint of perseverance.
Was it a consciousness of his own shortcomings that had kept him single? Possibly. It seemed to him that the sort of woman he would want to marry would be his superior, and he didn’t relish the idea of playing second fiddle in the home.
But he wasn’t thinking of all this now. Indeed, if this was his moment of greatness, it was stealing upon him unawares.
Another team arrived, those of the second day shift looking very fresh and well groomed in their Sunday clothes. They had been celebrating Christmas with their families, and they brought in with them, as it were, a whiff of good viands and liqueurs.
Old Bedeau had taken his place at the switchboard, but Lecœur made no move to go.
“I’ll stay on a bit.” he said simply.
Inspector Saillard had gone for a quick lunch at the Brasserie Dauphine just around the corner, leaving strict injunctions that he was to be fetched at once if anything happened. Janvier was back at the Quai des Orfèvres, writing up his report.
If Lecœur was tired, he didn’t notice it. He certainly wasn’t sleepy and couldn’t bear the thought of going home to bed. He had plenty of stamina. Once, when there were riots in the Place de la Concorde, he had done thirty-six hours nonstop, and on another occasion, during a general strike, they had all camped in the room for four days and nights.
His brother showed the strain more. He was getting jumpy again.
“I’m going,” he announced suddenly.
“Where to?”
“To find Bib.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’ll start round the Gare du Nord.”
“How do you know it was Bib who stole the oranges? He may be at the other end of Paris. We might get news at any minute. You’d better stay.”
“I can’t stand this waiting.”
He was nevertheless persuaded to. He was given a chair in a corner. He refused to lie down. His eyes were red with anxiety and fatigue. He sat fidgeting, looking rather as, when a boy, he had been put in the corner.
With more self-control, Andre forced himself to take some rest. Next to the big room was a little one with a wash-basin, where they hung their coats and which was provided with a couple of camp beds on which the nuiteux could lie down during a quiet hour.
He shut his eyes, but only for a moment. Then his hand felt for the little notebook with never left him, and lying on his back he began to turn over the pages.
There were nothing but crosses, columns and columns of tiny little crosses which, month after month, year after year, he had accumulated, Heaven knows why. Just to satisfy something inside him. After all, other people keep a diary—or the most meticulous household accounts, even when they don’t need to economize at all.
Those crosses told the story of the night life of Paris.
“Some coffee, Lecœur?”
“Thanks.”
Feeling rather out of touch where he was. he dragged his camp bed into the big room, placing it in a position from which he could see the wall-plan. There he sipped his coffee, after which he stretched himself out again, sometimes studying his notebook, sometimes lying with his eyes shut. Now and again he stole a glance at his brother, who sat hunched in his chair with drooping shoulders, the twitching of his long white fingers being the only sign of the torture he was enduring.
There were hundreds of men now, not only in Paris but in the suburbs, keeping their eyes skinned for the boy whose description had been circulated. Sometimes false hopes were raised, only to be dashed when the exact particulars were given.
Lecœur shut his eyes again, but opened them suddenly next moment, as though he had actually dozed off. He glanced at the clock, then looked round for the Inspector.
“Hasn’t Saillard got back yet?” he asked, getting to his feet.
“I expect he’s looked in at the Quai des Orfèvres.”
Olivier stared at his brother, surprised to see him pacing up and down the room. The latter was so absorbed in his thoughts that he hardly noticed that the sun had broken through the clouds, bathing Paris on that Christmas afternoon in a glow of light more like that of spring.
While thinking, he listened, and it wasn’t long before he heard Inspector Saillard’s heavy tread outside.
“You’d better go and get some sandwiches,” he said to his brother. “Get some for me, too.”
“What kind?”
“Ham. Anything. Whatever you find.”
Olivier went out, after a parting glance at the map, relieved, in spite of his anxiety, to be doing something.
The men of the afternoon shift knew little of what was afoot, except that the killer had done another job the previous night and that there was a general hunt for a small boy. For them, the case couldn’t have the flavor it had for those who were involved. At the switchboard. Bedeau was doing a crossword with his earphones on his head, breaking off from time to time for the classic: “Hallo! Austerlitz. Your car’s out.”
A body fished out of the Seine. You couldn’t have a Christmas without
that!
“Could I have a word with you, Inspector?”
The camp bed was back in the cloakroom. It was there that Lecœur led the chief of the homicide squad.
“I hope you won’t mind my butting in. I know it isn’t for me to make suggestions. But, about the killer—”
He had his little notebook in his hand. He must have known its contents almost by heart.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since this morning and—” A little while ago, while he was lying down, it had seemed so clear, but now that he had to explain things, it was difficult to put them in logical order.
“It’s like this. First of all, I noticed that all the murders were committed after two in the morning, most of them after three.”
He could see by the look on the Inspector’s face that he hadn’t exactly scored a hit, and he hurried on:
“I’ve been looking up the time of other murders over the past three years. They were nearly always between ten in the evening and two in the morning.”
Neither did that observation seem to make much impression. Why not take the bull by the horns and say straight out what was on his mind?
‘Just now. looking at my brother, it occurred to me that the man you’re looking for might be a man like him. As a matter of fact, I, too, for a moment wondered whether it wasn’t him. Wait a moment—”
That was better. The look of polite boredom had gone from Saillard’s
face.
“If I’d had more experience in this sort of work I’d be able to explain myself better. But you’ll see in a moment. A man who’s killed eight people one after the other is, if not a madman, at an
y rate a man who’s been thrown off his balance. He might have had a sudden shock. Take my brother, for instance. When he lost his job it upset him so much that he preferred to live in a tissue of lies rather than let his son—”
No. Put into words, it all sounded very clumsy. “When a man suddenly loses everything he has in life—” “He doesn’t necessarily go mad.”
“I’m not saying he’s actually mad. But imagine a person so full of resentment that he considers himself justified in revenging himself on his fellow-men. I don’t need to point out to you, Inspector, that other murderers always kill in much the same way. This one has used a hammer, a knife, a spanner, and one woman he strangled. And he’s never been seen, never left a clue. Wherever he lives in Paris, he must have walked miles and miles at night when there was no transport available, sometimes, when the alarm had been given, with the police on the lookout, questioning everybody they found in the streets. How is it he avoided them?”
He was certain he was on the right track. If only Saillard would hear him
out.
The Inspector sat on one of the camp beds. The cloakroom was small, and as Lecœur paced up and down in front of him he could do no more than three paces each way.
“This morning, for instance, assuming he was with the boy, he went halfway across Paris, keeping out of sight of every police station and every traffic point where there’d be a man on duty.”
“You mean he knows the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Arrondissements by heart?”
“And not those only. At least two there, the Twelfth and the Twentieth, as he showed on previous occasions. He didn’t choose his victims haphazardly. He knew they lived alone and could be done in without any great risk.”
What a nuisance! There was his brother, saying: “Here are the sandwiches, Andre.”
“Thanks. Go ahead, will you? Don’t wait for me. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
He bundled Olivier back into his corner and returned to the cloakroom. He didn’t want him to hear.
“If he’s used a different weapon each time, it’s because he knows it will puzzle us. He knows that murderers generally have their own way and stick to it.”
The Inspector had risen to his feet and was staring at Andre with a faraway look, as though he was following a train of thought of his own.
