Landru's Secret
Page 5
There was only one oddity about Gambais, which Landru could see as he left the village and headed north-west across open countryside towards Houdan. The village church, visible on the horizon, was almost a mile beyond Gambais, an ancient, rather ugly hulk surrounded by a graveyard.
About 250 metres before the church, Landru dismounted by a set of iron gates; here was the property he had seen advertised for rent in a newspaper. As agreed, the village cobbler who acted as janitor was waiting to show him around. Landru introduced himself as Raoul Dupont, an automobile salesman based in Paris, and the cobbler unlocked the gates.
The Villa Tric, built in 1904, was named after its owner, a local entrepreneur called Tric who had since left the area with his family. It was a boxy, twostorey red-brick building, half-hidden from the road behind a perimeter wall and with no immediate neighbours. The nearest house was the sexton’s cottage by the church, further along the road to Houdan.
No tenant had lived at the villa for almost four years and damp was starting to peel away the wallpaper in the living room that led off to the left of the hallway. The ground floor “bathroom” on this side of the house was equally dispiriting, with a musty basin and toilet, but no bath. Across the hallway, a dining room at the rear and a small connecting kitchen had been stripped of all fixtures and fittings, including the oven. From the kitchen, stone steps led down to a windowless cellar and coal store. Upstairs, three drafty unfurnished bedrooms sat beneath a large attic.
The cobbler unlocked the kitchen door at the back of the house and they went out into a small enclosure. Here, Landru inspected the outdoor pantry and laundry and then passed through a wicker gate that led onto a large unkempt lawn, stretching a full 70 metres down to the end of the garden. In the far corner, facing the church, he had a good look at a large open shelter or “hangar” with two adjoining locked sheds.
He could see there were disadvantages. The house was not well protected from intruders and nosy passers-by, because the low perimeter wall on the side facing Gambais was in poor repair and only extended 20 metres back from the road. The rest of the garden was bounded by a rough fence until it reached the hangar, where another brick wall offered better concealment on the side looking towards the church.
Landru made his judgement. He informed the cobbler that he would take the house and make arrangements in the next few days to sign the rental contract with Monsieur Tric, who lived south of Paris.
***
Several days later, Landru and Berthe caught the train to Garancières. He bought a one-way ticket for her and a return ticket for himself, duly noted in his carnet. Berthe must have been travelling light, because Landru made her walk all the way from the station to the villa in her new shoes, a distance of more than ten kilometres.
Berthe may have realised something was wrong when she saw there was no oven in the kitchen. Although the weather was cold, Landru did not feel any great urgency to put this matter right. He finally got round to buying a little oven in Houdan on 31 December, along with some coal, having returned to Paris in the meantime. Shortly afterwards, Mme Dalouin received a postcard purportedly signed by Berthe with the solitary oneword greeting, “Bonjour”. Mme Dalouin was perplexed; she was sure the writing was not in Berthe’s rough, unschooled hand.
Several of Berthe’s former neighbours in Ermont also thought it odd when they received similarly dubious postcards from her. One of them was thoroughly annoyed with Berthe, who had never sent the money she had promised for her pet Nénette’s dog food. Over time, these friends and acquaintances steadily forgot all about Berthe and her unlikely fiancé. Everyone assumed the couple were now married and happily settled in Tunis.
Only one person still remembered Berthe on a regular basis. Most Sundays, a young woman made sure to visit the grave of her best friend Marcelle, Berthe’s late daughter. Juliette Auger had got to know Marcelle when they had both worked together in the same shoe shop. She had promised Berthe that she would look after Marcelle’s resting place while Berthe was in Tunisia.
Juliette had not liked Berthe’s fiancé on the only occasion she had met him, and each time she visited Marcelle’s grave, her hostility towards him increased. This wealthy entrepreneur had promised Berthe that he would pay for Marcelle to have a proper marble tombstone. And yet here Juliette was, still placing flowers on poor Marcelle’s rough tomb, which only had a cheap cross to honour her memory. Juliette could not forgive Berthe’s monsieur for his callousness. One day, Juliette thought, she would like to get her own back on him.
Chapter 5
Madame Sombrero
Landru was too busy in the first half of 1916 to keep detailed day-byday records in his carnet. In late May or early June a bicyclist riding by the Villa Tric on a clear, moonlit night noticed a grey, tradesman’s camionnette parked outside the front gates. More curiously, the cyclist saw and smelt foul white smoke churning out of the chimney and the glow of a fire in the kitchen. Later, by a pond in the forest near Gambais, the cyclist saw the camionnette pull up and a bearded man get out. He lugged some heavy package over to the far side of the pond where he dropped it in the water and then returned to the car. After the car had gone, the cyclist decided the man must have been a poacher concealing his catch.
Around this time, a local woman, walking in the same part of the forest, glimpsed the man from a distance, working away in a hole he appeared to have dug. The man looked up and gave her such a stare that she hurried off without seeing what he was doing.
Mme Andrieux, the butcher’s wife in Gambais, knew all about the ladies who came and went at the villa. She especially remembered how one of them flounced into the shop in the spring of 1916, wearing only a pair of blue pyjamas and white buskin boots. The woman was the typist Anna Collomb, who had resumed her affair with Landru in the spring. On this shopping trip, Anna also bought a postcard of Gambais and its environs to send to her younger sister Ryno. Helpfully, Anna drew an ‘X’ above the Villa Tric, so Ryno could pinpoint the house where Anna was staying.
Ryno had not yet met Anna’s fiancé. One day, alluding to Anna’s poor track record with men, Ryno asked her sister if she was sure this “Frémyet” would make her happy. Of course, Anna replied briskly, adding that “she did not wish to be unhappy, as she had been with Monsieur Collomb.” The normally taciturn Anna then mentioned something her fiancé had told her that instantly raised Ryno’s doubts about his credentials. According to Anna, the affluent Frémyet used the false name of Cuchet when claiming his means-tested refugee’s allowance, so he could receive the full entitlement. Ryno was shocked, realising that Anna’s fiancé must be using fake identity papers, a serious criminal offence. Full of suspicion, Ryno demanded to meet this devious man to check him out properly. Anna reluctantly agreed, but then kept making lame excuses for why she could not introduce her fiancé to Ryno.
As usual, Landru explained to Anna that he could not get married until he had obtained replacements for his “real” identity papers, which he said he had left behind in Lille when the Germans arrived. Anna was still prepared to live with him, moving in the spring of 1916 to an apartment he had rented on Rue de Châteaudun, a short walk from her old apartment on Rue Rodier.
In doing so, Anna ended her long on-off relationship with a man called Monsieur Bernard, the probable father of her little girl. There was no evidence that Anna had placed her daughter in the care of nuns in Italy, a rather unlikely tale that she told a friend in the typing pool where she worked. Only two facts were clear: the real father – in all likelihood Bernard – had disowned the girl; and Landru had given Anna the impression that he would adopt her daughter once they were married.
This prospect did not seem to make Anna any happier, despite her assurances to Ryno. It was as if she felt trapped between a fiancé she could not entirely trust and the hard truth that a woman in her mid-forties – even one as pretty as Anna – had limited choices in Paris’s wartime marriage market, given the dearth of eligible men.
She was dri
nking that summer, buying her favourite tipple, eau de vie, from a woman friend who ran a wine shop near Anna’s office. Landru, who did not drink, watched Anna in the evening getting quietly sozzled. At the liquor store, the manageress thought Anna lacked “her usual gaiety” when they talked about her forthcoming marriage.
A businessman friend, probably another of Anna’s former lovers, was alarmed by the “great change” in her behaviour and appearance after she told him about her marriage plans. “She was less soignée [presentable], more reserved, and sometimes she had a strange look about her,” he said. He cautioned Anna to tread carefully with a man she hardly knew, but Anna would not listen. “She told me that her marriage was decided, even as she seemed to get less enthusiastic about it.”
***
From their fifth-floor apartment on Rue de Châteaudun, Anna and Landru looked down on streets awash with wounded and mutilated young soldiers. Every hour, trains pulled into the Gare du Nord and the adjacent Gare de l’Est, offloading their latest human cargo from the front onto waiting ambulances and taxis for transport to Salpêtrière, Val-de-Grâce and the city’s other historic hospitals, already crammed with casualties. The glittering Grand Palais at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, dedicated “to the glory of French art”, now served as a gigantic operating theatre, employing sculptors to make moulds for prosthetic limbs. In warm weather, men with bandaged stumps for arms or legs recovered from their amputations on the street outside.
Landru was at large in this city of male cripples, harvesting women. He was using his carnet more these days, jotting down every romantic purchase he deemed significant – flowers, hacksaws, bonbons, coal – and still he could not keep up. Increasingly, he resorted to what he called “mnemotechnical indications”; little codenames, numbers, phrases and hieroglyphics that only he could decipher.
As he trawled the city, homely, faithful Célestine Buisson was also back in his sights. Célestine was thrilled that summer when he began calling again at her apartment. One Sunday, she invited her younger housemaid sister Marie to stay a little longer in order to meet the charming “Monsieur Frémyet”. Marie did not say so, but she found Célestine’s “very friendly, very obliging” fiancé just a little too unctuous. In Marie’s view, it did not quite add up that this cultured man, with his fancy manners and vocabulary, had fallen for Célestine, who had never read a book in her life.
A few weeks after this visit by Marie, Célestine’s 20-year-old son Gaston came to stay with his mother. Gaston had just been discharged from the army because of poor eyesight, possibly due to a mustard gas attack. His misfortune had not deterred Landru, alias Frémyet, from expressing his displeasure at Gaston’s presence. Célestine panicked, writing her fiancé a letter as soon as he had gone.
“Mon Cherie,” Célestine began, getting her genders mixed up: “I am not calm for I am afraid that you are annoyed about the subject of my son. … I will tell you frankly that I would prefer to be with you and cherish you always. I love him very much but you surpass him for I know he will not stay always with me so I prefer not to have him at all since my sister can take him.”
This was not true, as Célestine knew. Neither Marie, a lowly servant, nor her other sister Catherine, a mother with a husband at the front, was in a position to look after Gaston. Under Landru’s sway, even Célestine was becoming a dissembler.
Still more meetings with lonely women piled up in Landru’s carnet. One day, Landru made a rendezvous by the Medici fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg to check out a 43-year-old nurse.
“You don’t interest me at all,” Landru snapped, eyeing her up and down. “You don’t even have the advantage of being pretty.”
He hurried off, disgusted at how she had wasted his precious time.
He needed more women, as many as he could find, to sift and select, file and discard. On 13 September 1916, he placed another lonely hearts advert in La Presse, a popular Paris evening paper.
***
Sometime that evening, Anne-Marie Pascal, known to her family as Annette, paid 50 centimes for a copy of La Presse and turned as usual to the lonely hearts adverts at the foot of page two. She read:
Monsieur, 47, savings of 4,000 francs, desires marriage with person with simple tastes, similar age and situation. Apply to Forest, bureau 61, Paris.
In her reply to Landru, Annette described herself as a 36-year-old widow. Somewhat scatterbrained, Annette had accidentally added a year to her age and then she had lied. Annette was not a widow but an impoverished divorcée, who lived with her white angora cat Minette in a tiny attic apartment on a street confusingly called Villa Stendhal, a block east of the Père-Lachaise cemetery. She worked from home as a dressmaker on contract for a small Paris fashion house.
When she stepped outdoors, Annette looked what she longed to be: an elegant lady who lunched, svelte and dark-haired, sweeping around the quartier in one of her slinky home-made dresses and her favourite widebrimmed hat. “Mme Sombrero”, as her neighbours called Annette, was a skilfully coutured illusion, for what she wanted more than anything else was a “vieux monsieur” (sugar daddy), loaded with money, who could keep her in this style.
Some locals thought Annette might be a prostitute, given her unashamed promiscuity. Among her various lovers were “petit Marcel”, a teenage ticket collector on the Paris metro, “grand Marcel”, a commercial salesman serving at the front, and a fellow she nicknamed “Hayose”, also in uniform. One neighbour disapproved so strongly of Annette’s affair with “petit Marcel” that he or she took to sending her crude, threatening postcards. “So you old snub-nosed whore,” the anonymous correspondent scrawled, “you’re always out and about with your handsome young man, you old camel, you old cow.”
Annette’s much older sister Louise, 48, was the only person who knew the full, sad story of Annette’s chaotic life to date. Both Annette’s parents had died soon after her birth in Toulouse and Louise, whom Annette called “maman”, had brought her up. Louise had married and settled in the Mediterranean port of Toulon, bringing Annette with her, and then Annette had lost her way.
Annette’s own marriage in 1903 had gradually disintegrated following the death of her baby boy in infancy. Abandoned by her husband, Annette may have turned to part-time prostitution to make ends meet, because in 1912 she was fined in Toulon for a minor offence, possibly soliciting. This police record in a naval port seething with prostitutes may also explain why Annette moved to Paris several months later, hoping to kick over her traces. After a series of short-term lets, she eventually rented her attic apartment on Villa Stendhal and set up shop as a couturière.
Such was the complicated background of the woman who stood outside her local metro station a few days after spotting Landru’s advert in La Presse, dressed as agreed in a blue jacket and grey, wide-brimmed hat. Unknown to Landru, alias Forest, Annette also put in her handbag the little emergency note that her “maman” Louise insisted she must carry with her at all times. It read:
In case of accident, alert my family, my sister, Mme Fauchet, 10 rue de la Fraternité, Toulon, Var.
“Lucien Forest” suggested they should go for a promenade in order to get to know each other better. He was a bachelor, he explained, the owner of a factory in the small town of Rocroi, next to the Belgian border, now sadly occupied by the Germans. After fleeing Rocroi, he had opened another factory involved in war work just north of Paris, whose location and purpose he was not permitted by the government to divulge. It was all very top secret, as was his home address, which he could not under any circumstances give to Mlle Pascal. Instead, she should send all correspondence to “Monsieur Berzieux”, care of the Iris matrimonial agency.
At the end of their little walk, Landru fixed another rendezvous with Annette and once he was out of sight, wrote an aide memoire in his carnet:
Pascal Anne, 36, widow for the past five years, no children, young appearance, tailored, sombrero hat.
He took a fortnight to make his move. On the morning of
4 October, a cloudy day, Landru bought a bunch of flowers and rang Annette’s doorbell at Villa Stendhal. After his visit, Annette wrote him a letter.
“Mon cher ami,” Annette began with curious formality, thanking him for his “great attentiveness” towards her:
All my desires that you asked of me as much as to dictate you I will not be able any less to formulate them, now that the act is accomplished, for I have lost your respect and the great respect that you address to me each day. I consider myself in your eyes as no more than a vulgar mistress, too bad for me, I have only to suffer the yoke and I no longer believe I have the right to love you as such.
After this contorted preamble, Annette got to the point. She was about to travel to Toulon on one of her regular visits to see her sister Louise and was transparently desperate not to lose touch with “Monsieur Forest” while she was away. Annette begged him to write to her chez Mme Fauchet, 10 rue de la Fraternité, Toulon.
Landru did write, saying how much he missed her. In reply, Annette failed to tell him that she planned to return to Paris with a female companion.
Louise’s 20-year-old daughter Marie-Jeanne, pretty, worldly and selfassured, had two good reasons for leaving Toulon to live for a while with Annette. Marie-Jeanne’s boyfriend was serving in the navy and rarely visited Toulon on shore leave. In addition, there were few wartime jobs in Toulon for a clever working-class girl like Marie-Jeanne, short of joining the prostitutes who swarmed around the docks. All things considered, Marie-Jeanne was quite content to spend some time in Paris, helping Annette make dresses while keeping a quiet eye on her scatty, wayward aunt.