Landru's Secret
Page 19
Gilbert failed to mention all the factors that had caused Anna to make a mess of her unhappy life: her bankrupt, alcoholic husband, her abandonment by the father of her illegitimate daughter, her dread that her parents might get to hear about the little girl. In his glib account, Gilbert merely remarked Anna had been determined to “remake her life” after the break-up of her affair with a man called Monsieur Bernard, the girl’s probable father.
Gilbert began his examination of Landru by observing that Anna had lied about her true age when she answered Landru’s lonely hearts advert in May 1915.
Landru was shocked by the judge’s lack of gallantry. “That is something I would never have said, monsieur le président.”
Gilbert tartly reminded Landru of his complaint that Berthe Héon had also lied about her age.
(“Laughter”: Le Petit Parisien)
Landru denied that Anna had ever been his mistress. The question did not arise, he explained wearily, because he had only been interested in selling her furniture.
“But you brought her to Gambais.”
“She was aimiable, educated, even literary. It was perfectly natural that, taking pleasure in her agreeable company, I thought of bringing her to the country on public holidays.”
Landru refused to accept that Anna had ever slept at the apartment they had shared in the summer and autumn of 1916 on Rue de Châteaudun, near the Gare du Nord. “If she ever came there, it was only to get a little rest and certainly without spending the night,” he declared. He insisted that Anna had introduced him to her family as a furniture dealer and “comrade”, not as her husband-to-be. “It made no difference to me if she gave strangers the impression that I was her fiancé, but to her family, ah! non!”
Landru claimed to have no memory of Anna’s last visit to Gambais on Boxing Day, 1916. Gilbert remarked that Landru had noted the purchase that day of two train tickets to Houdan, the station nearest Gambais.
Landru thought for a moment. “It’s possible,” he conceded.
“Can you explain why you bought a return ticket and a single ticket?”
Landru stretched his arms in front of him, palm down, as if he were inspecting his fingernails. Finally he looked up. He had bought a return ticket because his business commitments prevented him staying longer in Gambais. However, “it wasn’t the same situation for Mme Collomb. At that moment, she did not have an apartment. To purchase a return for her would have been impolite.”
“Did she remain in Gambais?”
“No, she left, but I can’t remember when.”
“You returned to Gambais on 3 January [1917].”
“It’s possible, I don’t remember,” said Landru, irritated by Gilbert’s forensic enquiry. “I never suspected that a day would come when I’d be asked such precise questions about matters I consider of no importance.”
“Eh bien!” Gilbert exclaimed. “It appears that Mme Collomb disappeared on 27 December. So, precisely on that date, one finds the figure ‘4’. What does that mean?”
“It was a mnemotechnical indication, useful at the time, but I cannot remember what it signified.”
Landru heard some stifled laughter coming from the gallery. This disturbance was too much, he protested, when he was doing his best to put the record straight.
“Each time the prosecution finds a figure in my carnet, this figure corresponds to a murder,” he went on. “One finds the number 4 and that’s it: Landru killed at 4 o’clock. Well, permit me to tell you, monsieur le président, it’s a singular interpretation.”
Landru would not reveal what had happened to Anna because it was a confidential matter. “The wall is closed, monsieur le président,” he cautioned Gilbert, as if he were standing on high principle. “I will not say any more.”
Gilbert pressed Landru about his attempts in early 1917 to fool Anna’s friends and family into believing she was in southern France.
Landru said it had been Anna’s idea to repay the small debt to her friend who ran a liquor store. “She had a fertile imagination,” Landru explained, “and it was me who got my son [Maurice] to execute the commission in the way that Mme Collomb had indicated.”
According to Landru, Anna had also dreamt up the ruse of placing a basket of flowers with her name card outside her family’s apartment. Landru said he had merely been obeying her orders when he enlisted his younger son Charles to deliver the package.
Gilbert said that the “Nice” postmark on the package was a fake. The whole confection, including Anna’s visiting card, had been assembled in Paris, Gilbert suggested to Landru.
Entirely wrong, Landru replied; he protested most earnestly against this misrepresentation of the facts.
“So Mme Collomb was therefore in Nice at this time?”
“Maybe.”
Step by step, Gilbert worked through the financial records Landru had kept in his carnet during the months leading up to Anna’s disappearance. Gilbert showed how the sums entering Landru’s account exactly matched the sums leaving Anna’s bank, with her written consent.
Godefroy requested the floor, granted by Gilbert. It was true, was it not, Godefroy asked Landru laboriously, that Mme Landru had forged Anna’s signature on some of the bank documents.
Mme Landru was none of the court’s business, Landru objected.
“Don’t complain about justice in regard to your wife, Landru,” Godefroy warned. “She has been treated with indulgence.”
“How dare you pursue a woman who was only acting on her husband’s orders.” Landru stood to attention like a soldier and thumped his chest. “The wife owes obedience to her husband.”
(“Laughter”: Le Petit Parisien)
***
After the interval, the court wrestled once more with the identity of the mystery woman seen with Landru at 45 Avenue des Ternes. Lesbazeilles, the bank manager, returned to the witness stand, looking nervous. Having checked his original police interview, Lesbazeilles conceded that there had been a woman with Landru in the apartment when he delivered the cheque for Marie Angélique Guillin’s cashed-in investments. However, Lesbazeilles did not recognise her from Marie-Angélique’s photograph.
Moro used Lesbazeilles’ correction of his testimony to draw some “troubling” inferences for the jury. It was not simply that the police, to whom Moro paid “full tribute”, had failed to establish the woman’s identity. They had failed as well to track down Anna’s former lover Monsieur Bernard, or even her illegitimate daughter, supposedly placed in a convent in San Remo.
“What is more,” Moro continued, “the police have failed to find a single one of the missing women. I do not draw from these failures, for the moment, any conclusion, but I have the right to say that these uncertainties will, most definitely, make an impression on messieurs les jurés.”
***
The court returned to the case of Anna Collomb. Mme Davril, Anna’s friend in the insurance company typing pool, added force to Moro’s thrust about the gaps in Anna’s case by confirming that Monsieur Bernard had “flesh and bones”. She reiterated: “He exists, I have seen him.”
“And even he can’t be located by the police!” Moro exclaimed. “It’s not just Landru’s fiancées that they can’t find.”
Anna’s younger sister Ryno, who had combined with Célestine’s housemaid sister Marie to force Landru’s arrest, was the next witness. In a possibly deliberate coup de théâtre, Ryno was dressed in full mourning – not for Anna, but for her recently deceased father. She refused to be photographed, but when she flung back her veil, an artist drew her profile as she looked up towards the judges’ bench. Her eyes were half closed, her lips were half open and her dark, straight hair fell back from her exposed neck; the picture was deliberately sexual.
Ryno wanted to show that she had no fear of Landru. After taking the oath, she looked coolly across at him, challenging him to hold her gaze. He turned away, avoiding her eyes throughout her testimony, which she delivered “with dignity”, Le Journal reported.
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She wished to tell the court the story of Anna’s relationship with Landru from her point of view.
“Very soon, I noticed a great change in the character of my sister,” Ryno said. “She seemed to be under Landru’s influence.”
Moro demanded the floor. Gilbert yielded, assuming that Moro wanted to object to Ryno’s subjective remark. Instead, Moro shifted the discussion on to sensitive territory for Ryno.
“Your sister, madame, did she not have a relative in San Remo?” Moro enquired, alluding to Anna’s illegitimate daughter.
Ryno hesitated. “I don’t know,” she lied, contradicting what she had told the police.
“It is possible for me to insist,” Moro said firmly. He looked at Ryno, who stared straight back at him. Moro sat down, prudently deciding he had nothing to gain from bullying Ryno.
Nudged by Gilbert, Ryno explained why she rapidly realised that the basket of flowers left outside her parents’ apartment was a trick to make the family believe that Anna was in southern France.
“This delivery of flowers gave me an apprehension that my sister was dead,” Ryno declared. “There was no reason why she would have left us with no news for we had the tenderest of relations with her.”
Moro could have asked Ryno what first-hand evidence she could produce that Anna was dead. He held back, sensing that Ryno had the jury’s full sympathy. For the prosecution, Godefroy chose not to question Ryno about her patient detective work in pursuit of Landru, which reflected so badly on the authorities. She was thanked and dismissed, making way for her widowed mother.
Mme Moreau, dressed in full mourning, bore the twin loss of her husband and eldest daughter heavily. She was 68 but looked much older, as she sat down uneasily on the chair that was brought for her. When she lifted her veil, her face creased with anxiety at the spectacle around her. She began to cry.
At last she pulled herself together, waving aside Gilbert’s suggestion that the court should adjourn. There was really only one thing she wanted to say, Mme Moreau murmured:
“My daughter [Anna] had a premonition that something bad would happen to her because the last time she came to see me at Christmas 1916, she left sobbing. She complained that her fiancé owed her money.”
At the same Christmas lunch, Mme Moreau experienced her own “premonition” about Anna when she learned that Anna’s fiancé used a false name to claim his refugee’s allowance. Her fears had not been mistaken, Mme Moreau said. “My daughter was murdered on 26 or 27 December.”
Godefroy chose this unsuitable moment to ask the clearly distressed Mme Moreau a delicate question about Anna’s “loose” morals.
“Were you aware that your daughter had another liaison?” Godefroy enquired, alluding to the elusive Monsieur Bernard.
“She would never have told me,” Mme Moreau retorted. “Besides, I wouldn’t have tolerated such a thing.”
In truth, Mme Moreau had her own secret, known only to her family. As a young woman, she had had an illegitimate daughter, born almost five years before her marriage to Eugène Moreau. She and her lover, probably Eugène, had called their baby girl Anna.
Mme Moreau was gently led from the court. The next witness, Anna’s former concierge Mme Leffray, was quite old, very deaf, and talkative.
“Did Mme Collomb have a ‘moral interest’ in San Remo?” Moro asked, referring obliquely to Anna’s little daughter.
“Oui!” Mme Leffray shouted.
With Gilbert’s permission, Moro approached the witness stand to explain to Mme Leffray that he wished to ask her about the various men whom the concierge had seen spending the night with Anna. It would be kind if Mme Leffray could lower her voice a little to spare the feelings of Mme Moreau and her daughter.
“Immediately, the honest chatterbox cupped her left hand and gesturing with her right, began to relay us with a series of tales which – hélas – did not reach the ears of the press benches!” the correspondent from L’Humanité lamented.
***
Day Eight: Tuesday, 15 November
Freezing rain swept across Versailles on Tuesday morning, drenching the crowds on the street outside the Palais de Justice. Each day the queues to attend the trial had steadily lengthened, far beyond the court’s official capacity of about 250 seats. At midday, when the doors opened, people began jostling and shoving, desperate to gain an entry ticket to watch the Bluebeard of Gambais fight for his life.
Today, Gilbert reached Andrée Babelay, the 19-year-old nanny who had vanished at Gambais in the spring of 1917. Gilbert hinted that this extrovert girl might have been open to offers from strange men. “She had no money,” Le Journal reported, picking up on Gilbert’s insinuation, “yet when she went out, her get-up was extremely elegant and one could mistake her profession very easily.”
Landru presented himself in relation to Andrée as a benevolent gentleman helping a young woman in distress.
“I met her on the metro, I saw she was sad, almost crying,” Landru told Gilbert. “She said that she was all alone in the world, having quarrelled with her mother, and that she had just left her job. I tried to comfort her with kind words.”
He had taken Andrée “out of charity” to an apartment he rented near the Gare du Nord. There, she had “fallen ill” and Landru had thought that a few days in the country might do her the world of good. “Andrée was suffering,” he explained. “She was still half child, half young woman; the idea of the countryside delighted her.”
Gilbert asked the familiar question: Why did he buy a single ticket for Andrée and a return ticket for himself?
“Because she needed to rest there.”
What of the “fatal” entry in Landru’s carnet on 12 April 1917: “4 o’clock, evening”?
Landru said he had merely noted the time of the cab service from Gambais to Houdan.
Gilbert corrected him; the cab did not leave at this hour.
“Did Andrée come back to Paris?” Gilbert asked.
“Yes, and then she got another job as a maid through an employment bureau. I don’t know exactly where.”
Gilbert pressed Landru further. Why had he kept Andrée’s birth certificate, her family papers and various sentimental possessions? Surely, she would have taken these items to her new place of employment.
“She feared the indiscretions of the other servants,” Landru replied. He paused a moment and then decided to embellish his answer:
“Andrée was indiscreet herself. One day, she opened a little chest in which I had placed the papers of other people who had confided them to me. This was what gave her the idea to entrust her own documents to me.”
Moro could not disguise his shock at Landru’s rash disclosure, while Godefroy also gave a start. Gilbert carried on, apparently unaware of Landru’s blunder, even as Landru “paled, and tried to stutter back” what he had just said.
It took Gilbert several minutes to realise his oversight, possibly following a note from one of his assistant judges.
“You have just told us that Andrée had the curiosity to look in your chest at the papers of earlier missing women,” Gilbert remarked. “Perhaps the court will find that this imprudence by her was not unconnected with her disappearance.”
Landru repeated that he did not know where Andrée had gone.
The foreman of the jury, a farmer from a village near Gambais, had a question for Landru: “Why did you bring home with you, without any further formalities, a young woman whom you did not know?”
“Because her sorrow had moved me to sympathy.”
“Why didn’t you ask for Mlle Babelay’s address when she left you definitively?” the juror followed up.
“Out of a sense of delicacy,” Landru said. “She owed me money.” Godefroy got up, exasperated by Landru’s evasions. “Andrée Babelay looked through your papers and she is dead. Jeanne Cuchet also looked through your papers and she is also dead.”
For an instant Landru wavered; and then in an “exquisitely courteous” voice he said:
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“Will you allow me, for my part, to ask why the police have not been able to find the employment bureau where Mlle Babelay went?”
“It is for you to say,” Godefroy said angrily. “You alone are in a position to know.”
“Non! I will say nothing. I have nothing to say. You accuse me, it’s for you to prove it!”
Godefroy slammed his fist on the lectern. “But you don’t even reply to the jurors who are your judges! That is more serious. I will provide the details and I will demonstrate them to you,” Godefroy added with heavy menace.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Landru replied.
Gilbert stilled the laughter from the audience at Landru’s riposte and asked the clerk of the court to bring Andrée’s mother to the witness stand.
Mme Victorine Colin, dressed in her best coat and hat, had trod a terrible road following Andrée’s disappearance. She had repeatedly visited the central Paris morgue, demanding to see the latest unidentified female corpses in the hope that one of them was Andrée. Eventually the morgue had lost patience with this woman who would not take no for an answer. An official had shown Mme Colin photographs of 67 anonymous female corpses deposited at the morgue since 1914. Mme Colin was sure that one of the faces staring blankly back at her was Andrée. She was wrong. The police eventually identified the body as a suicide who had thrown herself into the Seine.
She stood to take the oath, declining Gilbert’s offer of a chair, for she was determined to show a brave, unyielding face to Andrée’s killer.
“May I know how Landru came to know my daughter?” Mme Colin asked Gilbert politely.
“Landru, you heard the question,” Gilbert said. “Do you wish to reply?”
“I will leave you with this responsibility, monsieur le président.”
Gilbert recapped Landru’s testimony, including Andrée’s alleged row with her mother, making clear this was not the prosecution’s narrative.
“It could not have happened like that,” Mme Colin said firmly. On the day Landru met Andrée, she had gone out to the cinema with her mother and sisters, a picture of happiness.