Landru's Secret
Page 9
Before leaving Paris, Annette went to find “Petit Marcel”, the teenage metro conductor who had dreamed of marrying her. “After many tears”, he accepted that Annette was irrevocably engaged to another man. “We have parted good friends and also with his parents,” she told Louise.
***
Rain was falling when Annette and Landru reached Houdan, late on Thursday afternoon. Annette looked out of place on the station forecourt, dressed smartly in a black satin dress, black velvet hat, and green overcoat with fur trimming. Somewhere in this get-up she had concealed her trusted SOS note: “In case of accident, alert my family, my sister, Mme Fauchet, 10 rue de la Fraternité, Toulon, Var.”
She was not carrying much luggage – just a mustard yellow suitcase in one hand and a wicker basket in the other, for she had brought Minette to keep her company. They caught the local horse-and-cab service between Houdan and Gambais which passed the Villa Tric. On their arrival, they ate a quick dinner of meat and bread, purchased before they left Paris. Then they went upstairs to bed with Minette, who spent the night frozen with fear beneath the eiderdown.
In the morning the weather was still grey and chilly. Annette stayed indoors, writing at least two letters to confirm her safe arrival, while neglecting to provide a proper address.
“Here I am in my new home, with my petit Lucien, who is all kindness,” she told Louise. “I am so happy to be with him, although this will be a big change from the active, busy life one leads in Paris.”
Annette also wrote to Mme Carbonnel, an older woman friend and fellow seamstress who had seen her and Minette off the day before at the Gare de Montparnasse. Annette confided that she found it “a little strange here, it is so quiet”. Still, she added cheerily, she was enjoying the fresh air.
Not long after finishing these letters, something happened to alarm Annette. She now wrote a second, one-line note to Louise, slipped in the same envelope:
“If I don’t send you any news, be worried and hurry to find out what has happened to me.”
The note, unlike the letter, was never sent.
At 5.15 pm, Landru recorded the time in his carnet. He then grabbed Minette, strangled the miserable animal and took the corpse out to the garden for burial.
Chapter 8
The Fatal List
Landru was not a smoker but he bought a packet of cigarettes for Fernande on his way to Rue de Rochechouart to spend the night with her. His little apartment was becoming a real home from home for him and Fernande. He had his bust of Beethoven, his Japanese-style lamp, his volumes of Balzac and Victor Hugo and a nice big table where he could spend his evenings sketching his plans for a new automobile radiator. It was going to make him a fortune, he told Fernande.
She was happy enough, despite “Lucien” breaking his promise to marry her by Easter. Perhaps in recompense, he had begun to pay her an allowance, and she had given up her job as a fur shop assistant. Fernande could now spend long hours dreaming about how she would resume her theatrical career as soon as the war was over.
Landru had no trouble fooling Fernande about his frequent “business trips” out of Paris. One such journey in April or May, probably to Gambais, purportedly concerned a service contract with US forces based to the east of the city.
“Four long days without seeing you!” he wrote to Fernande. “… How much time has it been since we were apart for so long! But is it really a separation, since all my thoughts are close to you.”
Fernande’s mother was more of a problem. Mme Segret was still smarting from his refusal to let her stay at his villa during the bombardment of Paris. She began to suspect he was an imposter when Easter came and went while he continued to trot out his familiar excuse about lost identity papers. Shortly after Easter, Mme Segret dragged Fernande along to the Paris office of the exiled mairie of Rocroi, the little town on the Belgian border where Landru, alias Guillet, claimed to own a factory. A quick check of the municipal files found no record of anyone called Lucien Guillet.
Mme Segret was emphatic: the relationship with this conman had to end, she told Fernande. “Guillet” was summoned to Mme Segret’s apartment but he merely shrugged when she confronted him with her discovery. Obviously the mairie had been unable to evacuate all its files when the Germans invaded, he told her matter-of-factly. The same evening, he took Fernande out to the Opéra-Comique to make up for the needless distress her mother had caused her.
***
During the spring and early summer of 1918, the Germans attempted to blast their way through the British and French lines north of Paris. At times, the front came alarmingly close to the city but on 11 June the French counter-attacked near Compiègne, halting the German advance. Soon the road would be open, not to Paris, but to the occupied cities and towns of northern France, blowing Landru’s cover.
Mme Segret chose this moment to take Fernande to stay with relatives in Burgundy, well away from Landru. He went in search of company to share his bed at Rue de Rochechouart, patrolling the metro or hanging around factory gates to pick up girls. “Mlle L.” (her full name was never revealed) noticed him stalking her one evening as she went home after her shift:
“He finally approached me and asked where I worked and whether he could wait for me at the end of the day by the exit to my factory.”
Keen to land this “vieux monsieur”, she agreed to “clean” his apartment at Rue de Rochechouart one morning. The arrangement did not work out as she expected. He did not take her to bed, but locked the door on her and went out, supposedly to his office. Landru returned at midday, took her to lunch at a nearby restaurant and then sent her on her way with some money for the cleaning. For the next appointment, he locked her all day in the apartment, with enough food for lunch and supper. In the evening, he took her to a music hall and then back to Rue de Rochechouart, where she at last spent the night with him.
Mlle L. now pushed her luck too far. She confided to him that her family was hard-up, bringing an abrupt end to the cleaning job and the nights at Rue de Rochechouart. Landru had also made an error in underestimating this worldly working girl. She knew exactly where to find him and would not be shaken off so easily.
***
On 8 August, around 120,000 British, French and Dominion troops, supported by several hundred tanks, forced a 15-mile gap in the German lines south of Amiens. The Germans were finally on the run and so was Landru: for as summer turned to autumn, he moved into unfamiliar territory, besieged by a series of women who held the upper hand.
In early September, Fernande returned to Paris and moved back in at Rue de Rochechouart. Mme Segret’s plan to separate the couple had failed. One day, when Landru was out, Fernande answered the door to a young woman who refused to introduce herself. She came again when Landru was in and he went onto the landing to talk to her, shutting the apartment door so Fernande could not hear them.
His caller was Mlle L., his former “cleaning woman”, who claimed she was now pregnant with his baby. What, she asked, was Monsieur Guillet going to do about her, the baby, and the three of them generally? Her ruse worked. Landru agreed to give her an allowance and started spending the odd night with her, possibly at another room he rented near Rue de Rochechouart.
Like Fernande, Mlle L. had no idea that Landru was almost broke by the autumn of 1918, ruined by his extensive liabilities. He was paying several “allowances” to different women, and also had to find cash for the rent on at least three apartments, the house at Gambais, the garage space in Clichy, and a network of storage depots around Paris.
Squeezed from all directions, Landru turned to Mme Jeanne Falque, twice divorced, still only 42, well off, and minded to marry again. Once again, he miscalculated.
Mme Falque, whom he met via a matrimonial agency, had substantial savings and lived in a comfortable apartment only a short walk from Rue de Rochechouart. Landru, alias Guillet, took tea with her in late September. Soon Mme Falque was travelling down to Gambais with her new fiancé to admire his country estate.<
br />
The visit did not go well. Mme Falque shivered in the back garden while they ate an open-air picnic, unimpressed by everything. She broke off their engagement as soon as they got back to Paris.
***
Early on 11 November, a detachment of Italian soldiers “liberated” Lucien Guillet’s purported home town of Rocroi, which in reality had already been abandoned by the Germans. The Italians were only just in time to claim their victory, because at 11.00 am the armistice came into force. At Rue de Rochechouart Landru grumbled to Fernande that the war had finished too soon. Seeing the startled look on her face, he rambled on that “the cessation of hostilities” would create numerous difficulties for various military contracts he had negotiated.
Having failed with Mme Falque, Landru was scrambling for cash. On 14 December, President Woodrow Wilson’s train pulled into Paris at the start of a triumphal tour of Europe, the prelude to the peace conference due to begin in Paris a month later. As Wilson and his entourage checked into the Hotel Crillon, Landru hurried over to his garage in Clichy to cadge 40 francs off a man who also rented space there.
This hand-to-mouth existence could not last. In the run-up to Christmas, Landru somehow managed to persuade Mme Falque to see him again. Once the ice was broken, he tried to con her into letting him “invest” her savings. She told him to get lost. Landru next asked if she could advance him a loan. Mme Falque said she would consider the matter. After a week, she came back with a proposal apparently designed to pay him back for the lies he had told her about his country estate: she would lend him 900 francs for a month, at a punitive interest rate of 26 per cent. “Monsieur Guillet” could take it or leave it, Mme Falque said. He took it.
***
At this crisis in his financial affairs, Landru’s eye alighted irrationally on a debt-ridden prostitute.
Every day, 37-year-old Marie-Thérèse Marchadier walked her two little Belgian griffon dogs along the Rue Saint-Jacques, joking to passers-by that she much preferred dogs to men. Originally from Bordeaux, Marie-Thérèse also kept a pet canary, which matched the flamboyant green and yellow dresses and hats she liked to wear. The rest of her story depended on whom to believe.
Her best friend Yvonne Le Gallo, another prostitute, said she had lent Marie-Thérèse several thousand francs to lease other rooms in Marie-Thérèse’s apartment block during the war. Marie-Thérèse’s idea was to sublet the rooms, but her venture had flopped, leaving her heavily in debt to Yvonne, with no means to pay.
A “broker” and possible pimp called Moret, who later claimed to know Landru as a second-hand furniture dealer, said he had first introduced Landru to Marie-Thérèse in October 1918. According to Moret, the financially stretched prostitute had stuck a note on her apartment door, announcing the sale of her furniture.
The truth about how Landru met Marie-Thérèse may have been simpler. She had spent time during the war in Le Havre, a port that Landru knew well, and more recently in the town of Beauvais, 90 kilometres north of Paris, where Landru had also stayed on at least one occasion. It is therefore possible that when Landru went to Marie-Thérèse’s apartment on Christmas Day he knew her already and wanted sex. What he lacked was money to pay her. A deal needed to be struck between two people who were short of cash.
Events moved fast. On 27 December, Marie-Thérèse told her concierge that she was engaged to a man who had “the hots” for her; she would soon be leaving for his house in the country. She also told her friend Yvonne, who later said casually that Marie-Thérèse had “a mania for marriage”, implying that she was a veteran of previous “engagements” with other messieurs.
On New Year’s Eve, Landru passed by Mme Falque’s apartment: Could he perhaps borrow an additional 3,000 francs from her, just to tide him over? He did not tell Mme Falque that this sum would allow him to “buy” some of Marie-Thérèse’s furniture.
According to Mme Falque, she insisted that Landru first had to show her his garage in Clichy, so she could see for herself what kind of business he was running. Once there, she grudgingly agreed to lend him the money at the same extortionate interest rate, provided he could produce his identity papers. Landru, alias Guillet, went off to fetch his papers, only to return half an hour later empty-handed. He had just made a phone call, Landru told Mme Falque, and realised that he could borrow the cash from someone else.
***
New Year’s Day dawned, cloudy and mild. At 9.30 am, France’s Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau arrived at the Elysée Palace with the rest of his cabinet to present their greetings for 1919 to President Raymond Poincaré (whom Clemenceau loathed). Landru had a similar New Year’s duty, or so he told Fernande. He put on his best dark suit and bowler hat, informing her that he was off to wish his boss at Paris police headquarters a happy New Year. Pressed by Fernande, Landru revealed that he was, in reality, an undercover detective.
While he was out, a letter arrived from Marie-Thérèse, who told him that she asked “for nothing better than to live in the countryside”. On 2 January, Landru made a note to “bring to Hermitage [Villa Tric]: Petrol, lighting fuel, coal, small tongs, iron grate”. On 7 January, Marie-Thérèse went down to Gambais for the day, telling another prostitute friend on her return to Paris about her future country home. Landru remained in Gambais for a few days, so short of money that he had to borrow the price of his return train fare to Paris from the village cobbler who acted as the villa’s janitor. Meanwhile, Marie-Thérèse sold some of her furniture and paid a few bills, leaving her with 1,800 francs in cash.
In this dizzying round of transactions, Landru next cleared all the furniture out of Marie-Thérèse’s apartment and her sublet rooms, assisted by his silent teenage “apprentice” and his fellow tenant at the garage in Clichy.
On 13 January, Landru and Marie-Thérèse left for the Gare Saint-Lazare, in time to catch the afternoon train to one of the stations serving Gambais. She stood on the platform, resplendent in a bright green hat, yellow suitcase in one hand, bird cage in the other, as her pet canary twittered in terror. Beside her, Landru held three yapping griffon dogs on a lead; the third dog, called Auguste, had been lent by Marie-Thérèse’s friend Yvonne to give Marie-Thérèse a little more animal company in this gentleman’s desolate house. Marie-Thérèse was also carrying more than 1,000 francs in cash, the residue from her furniture sale.
Landru had to buy two single tickets, lacking the money for his usual return fare or the price of the cab at Houdan. Instead, they got off the train at either Garancières or Tacoignières, walking in damp, misty weather across country to the villa. Next morning, Marie-Thérèse was seen walking her adored griffons in the village, indifferent to the stares she attracted. Then she was gone.
***
Landru’s memory was becoming more and more “rebellious”, as he put it a few months later:
I have reached a point where I am obliged to write down everything that I need to recall, even the smallest things. At certain moments, my life flows before me like a dream without it being possible for me to say if it really happened to me or another person. At other times the details come back to me with a clarity and precision which make me suppose that the facts have just happened or, having lived another existence at another time in other places, I had died, and, coming back to life as another person, I had kept the memory.
Shortly after dealing with Marie-Thérèse, he found a blank page in his carnet. In his neatest handwriting, he drew up a list, trying to make his “rebellious” memory obey him. It read:
Cuchet, J. Idem
Brésil
Crozatier
Havre
Collomb
Babelay
Buisson
Jaume
Pascal
Marchadier
He left it there, since no one else came to mind.
***
Célestine Buisson’s housemaid sister Marie Lacoste was back on Landru’s trail. For more than a year, Marie had tried hard to put Célestine’s disappeara
nce out of her mind. In Marie’s thinking, Célestine had gone off in a sulk, offended by Marie’s correct assessment that her sister’s fiancé was a fraudster. So be it, Marie told herself, as she made the beds and washed the dishes at her employer’s house near the Rue du Rivoli.
In December 1918, Célestine’s blind son Gaston dictated another letter to Marie from his home in Biarritz. Gaston explained that he had suffered a serious accident and needed to contact his mother, who had not replied when he had once again written to her. Could Aunt Marie try one last time to see if she could track down Célestine?
Marie went to the apartment near the Porte de Clignancourt where she supposed that Célestine was still living, either with or without her so-called fiancé. She was dismayed to learn from the concierge that Célestine had left in the summer of 1917 and never been seen since. The concierge added that not long after Célestine’s departure, a younger woman (Fernande) had spent the night at the apartment with Mme Buisson’s monsieur. He had then returned in October 1917 to hand in Mme Buisson’s notice and clear her furniture.
Marie sensed that “Frémyet” might be worse than a swindler, perhaps even a murderer. She was so alarmed that she painstakingly prepared a dossier, containing all the information she knew about Célestine’s relationship with “Frémyet”. Despite her lack of education, Marie was a born sleuth. She described Landru’s appearance, his sinister house at Gambais, his fleecing of Célestine, and his efforts to persuade Marie that her sister was still alive – in sum, everything the police might need to pursue and arrest this man.
On 11 January 1919, Marie took her dossier to a nearby police station, bringing along her fellow maid Laure Bonhoure, who remembered “Frémyet” very well. In Laure’s considered opinion, the man looked downright fishy.
The officer who saw Marie and Laure said he could not help at all. He explained that Mlle Lacoste would need to direct her enquiry to the authorities in Gambais, where Mme Buisson had last been seen. It was not a matter for the Paris police.