In the Shadows of Paris (The Predator Of Batignolles) (25 page)

‘What was his brother’s first name?’

Corcol blinked. ‘How stupid, I can’t remember offhand. Age is affecting my brain. I didn’t see him for a while after his brother died. Then one day I dropped in at his shop. And I went back there. Occasionally I’d stay and watch him operate the presses. We arranged to meet once a month for lunch. It’s distressing imagining him trapped by the flames. It was a terrible blow. What grieves me most is not being able to visit his grave and pay my respects. They assured me at the morgue that there was nothing left of him, or so little…’

‘Did he have a cousin, as the death notice implies?’

‘If he had any relatives, he kept them well hidden. He only mentioned his brother to me. Frankly, this Léopardus is a mystery.’

‘Inspector, do you have any idea what the word Sacrovir might mean?’

‘No. Could it be a new swearword? Delighted to have made your acquaintance, Monsieur Legris. Leave me your card in case I remember the brother’s name.’

Victor returned to his bicycle just in time to save it from being dismantled by a group of kids, and rode off in the direction of Rue des Roses. Was Gustave Corcol a brilliant actor or had he been telling the truth? If so why couldn’t he remember the name of Pierre Andrésy’s brother?

By the time he rode past the artesian well in Place Hébert, Victor was convinced the man was a liar.

Gustave Corcol gulped the smoky air greedily. He was worn out after climbing three flights of stairs. He stood there panting, surveying the industrial landscape at his feet, the railway tracks and workshops, the stations linking the Ceinture lines, where engines stood belching out steam. Infuriated, he tore himself away from the window and paced up and down his two-roomed apartment, which years of living alone had transformed into a hovel. The place had a sour smell of stale sweat and grime, and was strewn with dubious-looking garments and greasy plates. Still, Corcol had decided against hiring a cleaning lady for fear she might stick her nose into his shady affairs.

‘And to think things were going smoothly and now this idiot bookseller is threatening to muck everything up!’ he bawled at his own reflection in the centre of a dusty mirror.

Did Legris know about the part he’d played? It was unlikely. They’d met because of an unfortunate set of circumstances, that blasted Fulbert had given him his address, that was all! No, there was more, otherwise the fellow wouldn’t have been so thick with the Chief of Police’s assistant, that wretched Raoul Pérot. He must come up with a counterattack, and quickly.

He took off his jacket and wiped his brow. This situation was about to turn very nasty. He unlocked a desk drawer and took out a file full of press cuttings. They all implicated Daglan. Daglan was the mysterious cousin Léopardus who had murdered Léopold Grandjean, the designer of the Ambrex shares; Daglan was responsible for the fake suicide of the loud-mouthed actor Leglantier and for the disappearance of the printer Paul Theneuil. He had signed his nickname to this string of crimes and embellished it with cryptic messages that were meant to be humorous. For God’s sake! Why was he getting so worked up when all of these hideous crimes could be laid at the door of the leopard of Batignolles?

His first aim must be to put Daglan out of action before the police got hold of him.

Inspector Corcol hadn’t a cowardly bone in his body. Only recently he’d taken on a band of thugs down by the gasometer in Rue de l’Évangile, an exploit that could have cost him dear. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, despite the scant respect it earned him from his superiors. And yet, at that moment when he clutched in his hand the few short paragraphs bearing the leopard’s signature, fear clouded his judgement, preventing him from thinking clearly. He would have preferred a bloody fight to this uncertainty in the face of an absurd situation.

He screwed up the cuttings and dropped them in the ashtray. His hands were shaking so much that he had difficulty striking a match. He reassured himself as he watched the paper burn, ‘Once Daglan is dead, nobody will be able to trace anything back to me. How ironic that, if I’d stayed on, the Chief of Police might have congratulated me for ridding society of such scum! An act of bravery! Only in four days time, I’ll be far away.’

Gustave Corcol closed his eyes. He imagined his colleagues’ faces when they realised that he’d gone. The miserable wretches, if they only knew!

They would never know, sadly, for he’d have liked nothing better than to show them his contempt. Too bad, his triumph would go unnoticed. Everything he’d always aspired to was within reach. The women who made fun of his physique, ignorant bigwigs, self-important bosses – he’d got them all where he wanted them now. Money bought respect, honour, comfort and pleasure. And he had money. It was waiting for him snug and warm in Brussels, a tidy sum: more than two hundred thousand francs, a hundred and eleven years’ salary! Why worry now that he was almost home and dry?

‘Only four more days and you’ll be gone.’

He pushed back his chair, and slipped on his jacket. He made sure he stepped across the threshold of his hovel right foot first, smiling at his own childish superstition. He knew the fellow’s address on the outskirts of Batignolles. He’d find that petty thief and cook his goose.

Sunday 23 July

Frédéric Daglan had spent the morning wandering from stall to stall at Carreau du Temple market. He’d got hold of a greasy old cap, a pair of down-at-heel army boots, some woollen trousers and, after much searching, an army greatcoat.

He tried them on behind the locked door of Mother Chickweed’s shed. In less than five minutes he was transformed into a shaky old fossil. The worn uniform was too tight, and the cap so big it fell down over his eyes, but the regular strollers who were used to the familiar appearance of the park keeper wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Brigadier Clément would spend part of Monday snoozing in his hut while Théo kept watch outside, and once the operation was over, his uncle would take up his place again.

Frédéric Daglan slipped out of his rags, then, stripped to the waist and wearing only his drawers, he set to work on the key part of his plan.

Smoking a cigarette, he opened a book at the page indicated by a bookmark and began numbering the lines. When all this was over, he wouldn’t return to Rue des Dames or Porte d’Allemagne. He would wait quietly at the lodgings of his latest conquest until things blew over. Nobody would ever think of looking for him there.

Monday 24 July

As usual, Joseph was singing a brisk marching song at the top of his voice as he took down the shutters and opened the shop. This morning’s recital was ‘The Goodbye Song’.

‘“From north to south the warrior’s trumpet…”’ Jojo bellowed, his foot slipping on an envelope on the floor.

He bent down to pick it up.

‘Who put that there? I nearly came a cropper!’

‘Grumbling already? You’ll wake Kenji and he’ll be in a bad mood,’ warned Victor, who had just that moment jumped off his bicycle.

‘Ah, there you are at last, Boss! I’ve been waiting for you since the evening before last!’

‘I was worn out. I went straight back to the stable.’

‘That’s nice, comparing Mademoiselle Tasha to a horse,’ muttered Joseph, removing the last shutter.

‘If you’re going to be grumpy I’ll keep my lips sealed.’

Victor wheeled his bicycle to the back of the shop. Annoyed, Joseph pocketed the letter. Victor reappeared leafing through a novel by J. K. Huysmans and began singing a couplet of his own.

‘Dear Monsieur Gustave, as he drew near, looked straight at me, and said with a leer…’

He stopped and glanced mischievously at his assistant.

‘Come on, Boss, you’re dying to tell me what the fellow said.’

‘And you’re on tenterhooks. All right, I’ll tell you.’

At the end of Victor’s account, Joseph picked up his pen and stroked his cheek with it, distractedly.

‘Something’s not right. Pierre Andrésy couldn’t have been wounded at Reichshoffen, since I happen to know he was nowhere near the battlefields. I remember him telling me as clearly as if it were yesterday. He’d lent me some books by Erckmann-Chatrian:
Madame Thérèse
,
Story of a Conscript in 1813
,
Waterloo
and
Fritz’s Friend.
When I gave them back, I asked him about 1870 and he told me: “War is a dirty business. I’m on the side of those who prefer not to take part in that great celebration of nationalism, thank you very much.”’

‘What does that prove?’

‘Hold on. I told him my father was in the National Guard and spent two months freezing to death on the city ramparts.’

‘I know all that, but what about Pierre Andrésy?’

‘There’s a connection, because as soon as I asked him whether he’d taken part in the fighting, he told me that he’d refused to serve an emperor. “The Republic at a pinch, but the Man of Sedan,
⁵⁵
never!” he declared. In short, he went to England and sneaked back into France during the siege.’

‘I knew it! Corcol is a bare-faced liar. He had the nerve to refer to Pierre Andrésy’s war wound!’

‘The war…The siege of Paris…The Com—Hang on, Boss! I’ve got it! The inscription on his watch! It must be: “Long live the Commune”!’

Victor gave a whistle of admiration. Joseph feigned humility, but inside he was jumping for joy.

‘That means Pierre Andrésy was almost certainly Sacrovir,’ he concluded. ‘In any event, I don’t believe that story about his brother dying in Hôpital Lariboisière for one moment. The bookbinder didn’t have a wife, or children, or any brothers or sisters – just a cousin in the country.’

‘Congratulations on your brilliant deductive reasoning. My only criticism is that you should have told me all this before. I hadn’t a clue you knew anything about his family.’

‘It came out during the course of our conversations. Monsieur Andrésy often confided in me, but it was all jumbled up and I had to piece it together. While I remember, somebody slipped a letter under the door last night.’

While Victor was tearing open the envelope, Kenji, wearing a dark-red dressing gown with white polka dots, leant over the spiral staircase.

‘Is this a bookshop or a drama school? One of you singing, the other declaiming…Has the post come already?’ he muttered.

Squeezing up beside Victor, Joseph was reading the text at the same time.

‘God in heaven, Boss, a coded message!’

Kenji came down to join them, unconcerned about appearing in front of potential customers in his dressing gown.

‘Read it aloud,’ he ordered.

Victor cleared his throat.

‘Dear Monsieur Legris

Will you play with me?

He grew up in Faubourg Saint-Jacques. His elder brother was called Abel. His other brother died insane. The annus horribilis.
WHOSE FAULT IS THIS
?

Come to Batignolles park on Tuesday 25 July between two and six o’clock. I’ll be waiting for you.’

‘Then there’s a series of numbers in groups of four: 5815, 0405, 0303, etc. There are loads of them.’

Joseph managed to snatch the piece of paper and quickly ran up his stepladder in order to ponder this mathematical puzzle. With a shrug of his shoulders, Kenji made for the stairs.

‘I hope you have the sense not to walk straight into what is clearly a trap. However, if you should be tempted to do so, I wash my hands of you,’ he declared, as he went back upstairs.

A door slammed on the first floor and Victor leapt over to the ladder, eyeing the piece of paper like the fabled fox eyeing the crow’s cheese.

‘Do you think you can crack it, Joseph?’

‘Of course! I had a go when I was reading a spy novel set during the War of Secession. The secret services played a crucial role during that campaign, it was fascinating!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s dead easy!’

‘Well, since you’re the expert why not show me?’

‘I will if you let me get down. Here’s how it works. You choose a book and then decide on a page to be used for the coding. Each group of four numbers in the scrambled message corresponds to a letter. The first two numbers refer to the line the letter is in, and the last two to the position of the letter in that line. Are you with me, Boss?’

‘Yes, no, but carry on.’

‘If the number of the line or the position of the letter is less than ten, a zero is placed before the number.’

Joseph scratched his neck.

‘The problem is finding out which book he’s using.’

‘Yes, Monsieur the expert, that might be a help,’ Victor jibed.

‘In any event, the person in the riddle lived a long time ago because he’s referred to in the past tense. Wait a minute, the
annus horribilis
, that’s 1870–1871! And why is “Whose fault is this?” written in capital letters?’

‘It could be the title of a book…Can you dig out
The Life and Times of Victor Hugo
by Alfred Barbou
⁵⁶
for me?’

‘I think we sold it.’

The door bell tinkled, and reluctantly Jojo had to stop deciphering the message and attend to a professor in search of essays on the Renaissance. Victor took the opportunity to scour the bookshop from top to bottom. He was almost certain that ‘Whose Fault is This?’ appeared in
L’Année Terrible
⁵⁷
by Hugo. He found an old edition, and followed the method advocated by his assistant, but he made a hash of it because the poem was interleaved with a couple of engravings. Finally rid of his scholar, Joseph came to the rescue.

‘What if we just use an anthology? We have a standard edition. Yes! I’ve found it!
Here
: “Whose Fault is This?” Grab something to write on.’

Victor reached for an old order book.

‘The poem has fifty-nine lines, Boss. You said 5815. The first two digits give me line 58:
And you would destroy all this.
Are you with me?’