The Dream Killer of Paris (2 page)

I walked from the Gare du Nord to the capital’s historical centre. As well as Nerval’s books, I had taken care to slip into my bag a guide to modern and ancient Paris written in the 1920s which I had bought from a second-hand dealer in Boston. In the middle of the book was a very colourful map and every time I consulted it I circled in pen the names of the main roads, bridges, squares and monuments which captured my imagination.

Whistling, I headed down Boulevard de Magenta and then Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis before turning down Rue Réaumur on to Boulevard de Sébastopol. At the top of Rue de Turbigo, I made my way through narrow streets with delightfully evocative names: Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, Rue Brisemiche, and so on.

At the bend in Rue Saint-Bon, I reached Tour Saint-Jacques, so dear to Nerval. The monument was all that remained of the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie whose refurbishment had been paid for by Nicolas Flamel, the famous alchemist.

The tower took pride of place in the middle of a small square filled with trees and flowers. Somewhere in this garden was the spot where the poet had come to hang himself that night in January 1855. Unless it was fifty yards further along where the solemn Théâtre des Nations had since been built
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. In Nerval’s time, the area didn’t have the respectable feel it has today. It had been a jumble of dark alleyways and sordid passageways where scoundrels and
down-and
-outs
loitered. That was before Baron Haussmann’s engineers ‘civilised’ Old Paris for ever.

The day after Nerval’s death, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Roger de Beauvoir and, to a lesser extent, Arsène Houssaye expressed serious doubts about the suicide theory. They thought that their friend had been the victim of one of the local ruffians.

I remember talking one evening, in a pub in Aldgate, to a music hall lighting engineer who had worked in Paris a few years earlier at the Théâtre des Nations. According to him, when work had been carried out in the building’s basement at the beginning of the 1910s, engineers, comparing the city maps with those of sixty years before, had noticed that the bars of the cellar window where Nerval had been found hanged at the end of a thin rope corresponded exactly to the current position of the prompter’s box. What’s more, if the usherettes were to be believed, on some evenings the poet’s ghost wandered between the rows of stalls after the performance. There was even a story that Sarah Bernhardt’s prompter was the ghost in person. However, I suspect that my companion, who was partial to whisky, was trying to pull the wool over my eyes to some extent.

I rested for a few minutes on a bench in Square Saint-Jacques, opposite the tower, and then, as evening began to fall, started looking for a hotel.

Having briefly studied the neighbourhood, I decided on an establishment in Rue de la Verrerie next to the church of Saint-Merri where the writer of the future had been christened, and a stone’s throw from the building in Rue Saint-Martin where he’d been born on 22 May 1808.

I went up to my room to drop off my luggage. The walls and ceiling were crisscrossed with beams and the rustic furniture didn’t seem to have been replaced since the days of Rue de la
Vieille-Lanterne
.

It was the perfect place for me. Here I could easily immerse myself in the writer’s work, wander where he had wandered at night, try to understand what had been going through his mind and perhaps even establish the exact circumstances of his death.

‘I am the other,’ he had written in the margin of a book
4
.

I
wanted to be
him
for a few days.

The next day, Wednesday 17 October, after a disturbed night of fraught and chaotic dreams which I was unable to remember upon waking, and a quick morning stroll on the banks of the Seine, I spent much of the day in my room, reading Nerval’s biography. It was long past midday when I eventually decided to go out for lunch at the Café des Innocents. A hundred and fifty years earlier it had been the site of a cemetery of the same name. At the end of the fourteenth century, on a panel there Nicolas Flamel (him again) had had a ‘man in black’ drawn on one of its pillars, directly facing the alchemic figures supposedly taken from the book of Abraham the Jew.

In Paris, more than anywhere else, history had left its mark on the present. For those who were able to
see
, reality consisted of more than just the fieeting con tours of beings and things. Wherever the eyes of those who could see fell, on the corner of every street, on nearly every wall, between every join in the cobblestones, they could perceive another layer beneath the superficial layer of reality. It looked similar but was very different and slightly out of step, a little like the anaglyphs whose technique Louis Lumière was refining in his workshops in order to screen three-dimensional films. Perhaps one day, simply wearing a pair of stereoscopic glasses in the street would make a new view of life possible – richer, more profound, more real, carved out of the depths of time, where past and present would be visible simultaneously.

After lunch I pushed the remains of my meal away and opened
Aristide Marie’s book, which I always had with me. On one of the last pages, an extract from the register of the morgue (then located
north-east
of Pont Saint-Michel on Rue du Marché-Neuf ) was reproduced with the observations made by the state pathologist, Dr Devergie, on 26 January. Also reproduced was the complete text of the death certificate drawn up on 29 January at the town hall in the ninth arrondissement. These were about the only facts available. Thirty pages earlier, in a very obscure sentence, Aristide Marie intimated that documents from the investigation had been destroyed. What had happened? Was there any hope of ever finding them again?

For now, I intended to visit the archives of the new Forensic Institute at Place Mazas near Quai de la Rapée.

As the weather remained fine, I decided to walk along the Seine. Emerging on to Rue de Rivoli, I had just reached Tour Saint-Jacques, in front of Cavelier’s statue of Pascal, when I heard someone behind me calling my name.

‘Singleton! Singleton! Is that you?’

‘Inspector Fourier!’ I exclaimed, delighted to see the familiar face of the detective from the Sûreté, who was striding towards me.

‘Ah, my friend!’ he cried breathlessly, warmly shaking my outstretched hand. ‘But it’s Superintendent now, you know. I’ve been promoted!’

‘Of course, how could I have forgotten! This summer the
Daily Mail
reported at length on the exploits of Superintendent Fourier. That great figure of the Paris police force who managed to put behind bars the famous Bosco, big-time thief and the kind of colourful, elusive character only to be found in France!’

‘Well, well!’ he exclaimed, smoothing the long, solitary lock of hair which ran from one side of his head to the other. ‘I’m delighted to see that the reputation of our men is starting to cross the Channel. Give it a little time and Scotland Yard will be visiting our offices in
Rue des Saussaies to study our methods. In any case, my dear friend, without you and your faithful partner I don’t think we would ever have got the better of the infamous Billancourt studios killer.’

I won’t dwell on the case of the Cut-throat with the Broken Watch which I referred to earlier. One of these days I intend to gather together all the documents and notes made at the time and write the whole story down. In the meantime, all the reader needs to know is that in the winter of 1933 James and I made the acquaintance of the kind and scrupulous Edmond Fourier from the Sûreté Générale. Although the investigation had been particularly sensitive (the idea of working with two amateur detectives was nothing less than sacrilege for some members of his organisation), Fourier, who had initiated the collaboration, always demonstrated full confidence in us. In the end, it served him well.

With his customary tweed suit, tweed overcoat, thin moustache, bowler hat and swordstick, Superintendent Fourier was the archetypal French policeman. He was a mixture of Juve, Tirauclair and Chantecoq!
5
When I was with him I felt as though the shadow of Fantômas was about to appear on a rooftop or that the agile dandy overtaking us on the pavement was none other than Arsène Lupin returning from another burglary at a prince’s residence or the Crédit Lyonnais on Boulevard des Italiens.

Edmond Fourier was about fifty-four or fifty-five and the son of ironmongers from the Franche-Comté region but he had lived in Paris, in Rue Cadet, for a long time. His humble origins had taught him common sense and realism, which often paid off. He had joined the Sûreté Générale at the age of twenty-seven, a few years after Prime Minister Clemenceau had set up his
brigades mobiles
, the famous Tiger Brigades, to counterbalance the
all-powerful
Préfecture de Police. Fourier was one of the stars of the Sûreté which, since its creation in 1820, had always suffered from
comparisons with its rival. The large-scale reorganisation of the State’s police force the previous April had also seen the resources and remit of the Sûreté increase considerably so that it now had national powers. The staff of the Sûreté and the Préfecture were not quite ready to bury the hatchet but the new set-up did at least give each institution precise boundaries.
6

‘But I see no sign of that wag Trelawney,’ remarked Fourier, pretending to look left and right over his shoulder in case my
six-foot
-three friend was hiding in the policeman’s short shadow.

‘James stayed in London but he’ll be joining me soon. At the moment, I imagine he’s finding it very difficult to resist the siren call of your city.’

‘Do I take it then that you are … uh … what one might call “on holiday”?’

All of a sudden his deceptively disinterested tone made me realise that meeting Superintendent Fourier like this wasn’t simply a coincidence. Although he undoubtedly had all the qualities required of a detective, his acting skills left much to be desired. I remembered that the evening before, as I had left a brasserie on Rue Saint-Martin near my hotel, and then again that morning during a short stroll among the booksellers on Quai de Montebello, I had noticed a thickset individual with a broken nose like a boxer and short black crew cut hair whom I vaguely recognised but couldn’t place at the time. Now, the detective’s mischievous expression instantly provided me with the fellow’s name: Raymond Dupuytren who worked for Superintendent Fourier at the Sûreté Nationale and whom I’d met on several occasions in January 1933.

The French police had certainly not improved in the field of domestic espionage. When the press wanted to mock it, didn’t they refer to it as the
national secret
?

‘Come, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense any 
longer. Tell me why you wanted to see me – I know you’ve been following me. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to ask me to come to Rue des Saussaies?’

‘Ha ha! I see I still can’t get anything past you! As for making you come to the Sûreté, there was no point. I got wind that you’d left the Hôtel Saint-Merri and since I happened to be near Île de la Cité this afternoon, it seemed natural to pay you a little courtesy visit.’

‘Only this time you almost missed me. I was about to go to Bercy.’

‘You’re right, my dear friend! Anyway, enough of this banter! I imagine you’re still fond of cases which baffle even the most intelligent of men?’

‘Well …’

‘I’m investigating a rather strange case that would appeal to you! The death of the Marquis de Brindillac. Have you heard about it?’

‘No.’

‘How come? Haven’t you read the papers?’

‘Since I arrived I haven’t opened a single one. Strange as it may sound, you see me before you but it’s just an illusion. In reality, I’m in 1855. Busy solving an incredible mystery.’

‘How frustrating!’ said the detective, who knew my liking for long literary excursions. ‘I don’t know what kind of case you’re dealing with but you should know that events every bit as extraordinary are happening in 1934.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘It’ll be worth it, I promise. You’ve never heard anything like it, even in a novel.’

‘Don’t get carried away!’

‘Give me half an hour, Singleton. Just enough time to bring you up to date.’

‘You’re making my mouth water, Superintendent! Go on then, tell me what’s happened.’

We sat in a café on Rue de Rivoli. Through the window I could see the vast form of the Hôtel de Ville and, in front, the old Place de Grève where so many villains had been quartered in the Middle Ages and much of the nobility had been decapitated during the Revolution.

‘Four days ago,’ began Fourier, savouring his first sip of an excellent red wine from Burgundy, ‘the old Marquis de Brindillac was found dead in his bedroom at his home, Château B—, between Dourdan and Étampes in the Paris region. He was a renowned physiologist, highly thought of by his peers, who spent his life studying the human brain and particularly the mysteries of sleep. A jovial and passionate man, he was also rather eccentric. He had always been interested in analysing and understanding dreams, something which had led him to a fairly unorthodox kind of research over the past few years. As luck would have it, the fellow died in his sleep!

‘At quarter past ten in the morning on Saturday 13 October, last Saturday that is, the Marquise de Brindillac, whose bedroom is just opposite her husband’s, was worried when he didn’t answer after she knocked on his door. Usually, at that time he had been up for a while and was already hard at work. As the doors to the Marquis’s bedroom, study and library were all locked from the inside (the three rooms lead into each other through connecting doors), she alerted a servant who, with the help of the gardener, forced open the bedroom
door. They found the poor man dead in bed in his nightclothes, the sheets kicked down around his legs. The most incredible thing was the look on his face: it was frozen in an expression of intense fear, a fear very difficult to explain because his eyes were closed, as if the terror had come not from something external, brutally waking him, but, on the contrary, had gripped him from inside sleep itself.

‘A doctor was called, followed a few minutes later by a gendarme. For the doctor there was no doubt that the Marquis had died from heart failure, after a violent panic attack which had weakened him. However, he thought it unlikely that one could die of fright and, given the unusual nature of the tragedy (in all his career he had never seen such an expression of terror on anyone’s face!), he declared that he couldn’t issue a death certificate stating that the Marquis had died of natural causes. Consequently, the gendarme arranged for the body to be removed and the Versailles public prosecutor, who was hurriedly contacted, decided to carry out an autopsy as is required in such a situation.

‘The body was transported to the morgue in Étampes. On Monday morning the pathologist delivered his report and he, too, concluded that the Marquis had died of heart failure caused by a night terror. However, he emphasised that the Marquis de Brindillac was in excellent health when he went to bed, if it can be put that way. No heart or respiratory problems, no sign of bleeding to the brain. The report confirmed that the victim had died of fright but nothing more was known about what had frightened him.

‘But did that really matter? After three days of fruitless investigation, that was what everyone was beginning to wonder. The Marquis was seventy-two; at that age anyone can be unlucky, even if they’re fit and well. A sudden shock and that’s it! And anyway, perhaps we were mistaken in thinking we saw terror on his face? Maybe we should just have seen it as a sign of suffering, the
torment of a body until then lucky in life and which, suddenly, feels abandoned by it. Good heavens, when you die you rarely look happy about it! Between you and me, that opinion was hardly outrageous and those closest to him went along with it: the Marquis’s widow, his colleagues at the Académie des Sciences, who know a thing or two about reports and diagnosis. Why, even his friends at the
Meta-what-sit
Institute, who have made a speciality out of splitting hairs, didn’t call for a more comprehensive investigation.’

‘Do you mean the Institut Métapsychique?’

‘That’s the one. A bunch of cranks, doctors and scientists, often very well known in their fields, who believe in life after death and that man has certain occult powers. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard of it. There’s a similar society in London.’

‘If I am to believe the gendarmes’ report, the poor Marquise appears to regret that the most eccentric aspect of her husband’s character ended up getting the better of him. She’s sure that, in some way, it was these new ideas that killed him. Or, more precisely, the enormous enthusiasm he’d put into his latest research. Although he had retired from his position as a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, he had recently thrown himself into some fairly unconventional work with unbridled energy.’

‘What work was this?’

‘The Marquis – because, despite his status as a doctor of medicine and a professor of physiology, the good man preferred people to use his noble title! – the Marquis claimed, for example, that one could control one’s dreams and move at will through entirely invented dream landscapes.’

‘My word!’

‘Indeed. Anyway, in the light of the results of the local gendarmes’ investigation, on Tuesday the public prosecutor decided to close the case. And that’s when one of those blasted journalists waded in,
digging up a story which goes back three months.’

Fourier took a copy of
Paris-Soir
out of his coat pocket. The newspaper was dated the day before; it had been folded to highlight one article in particular.

The article was signed J.L.

I couldn’t help smiling as I read the journalist’s final statement about the incompetence of the legal system. So that was why Fourier wanted to see me. The police’s methods were being questioned again and the critics had to be silenced. He thought that my experience in complex cases, full of false leads and superficial elements, meant that I would be able to give him a sensible opinion on this unlikely affair.

‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘the other newspapers have just followed
Paris-Soir’
s lead.
Le Matin, Paris-Midi, Le Petit Journal, L’Excelsior, Le Petit Parisien
, they’re all saying the same thing. I was summoned to the chief’s studyearlier. And do you know what? The Versailles public prosecutor has done a complete volte-face. Not only is he not closing the case, he’s opening a preliminary judicial investigation.’

‘Why, for goodness’ sake?’

‘Fear of scandal, of course! It mustn’t be said that the justice system has yet again failed to seek out the truth!
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And what’s more, the Justice Minister has decided that the investigation will be carried out by the Sûreté Nationale. It’s now up to me, in collaboration with the examining magistrate, to shed light on the death of the Marquis de Brindillac. If he did die of fright, we have to find out what
frightened him. The Préfecture has been asked to discreetly reopen the Ducros file. The news hasn’t been made public so as not to give the impression the writer of the article was right but the press will find out soon enough. Ah! It’s a nice snub to the Préfet de Police!’

‘Why isn’t the Préfecture dealing with the Brindillac case?’ I asked, handing back the newspaper.

‘It’s a question of divisional authority. The Préfecture only covers Paris and the Seine
département
. As the Marquis died in his château in Seine-et-Oise, it’s the Sûreté’s responsibility.’

‘And have you been able to find out any more about the poet’s death?’

‘I’ve just left Préfecture headquarters. I had to move heaven and earth to get access to the report but good heavens! I wasn’t going to leave before they showed it to me. In fact the case is similar to the Marquis’s in all respects. Young Ducros died in his sleep, suddenly, as though gripped by extreme fear. The sheets were tangled as if he had tried to fight or free himself from some powerful pressure. But, according to the doctor who came to certify the death, there were no injuries, marks or obvious lesions on his body. His sister, who slept in the next room, had heard him groan in his sleep. She had got up and noticed that he was dreaming. His health was delicate. Those close to him described him as depressive, nervous, tormented, and of a weak constitution. His heart may have given out as a result of an extraordinary kind of hallucination. In those circumstances, his death, however distressing, was not entirely incomprehensible. To put it crudely, he had been living on borrowed time!’

‘Was there an autopsy?’

‘Yes but there again, the results aren’t particularly revealing. The toxicology examination didn’t indicate the presence of any narcotic substances. It’s a pity – that would have solved the problem.’

‘It’s certainly very strange.’

‘In both cases, one thing is certain: the victims died of sudden heart failure related to an unusually intense fear. The doctors called to the scene thought as much and the pathologists confirmed it. So, if they died of fright, well, for heaven’s sake, there must be a reason!’

‘Is it possible to die from a nightmare?’ I wondered aloud, trying to imagine the face of someone stricken by terror in his sleep.

‘I’m not sure about that, but I am sure that the Brindillac case can no longer be considered in isolation. Now the problem must be examined from every angle. It won’t take much for the Sûreté to be accused of botching the job too.’

‘From every angle? So you’re not excluding criminal activity?’

‘Now don’t get carried away, Singleton! Tell me how a murderer could have entered the Marquis’s bedroom. Let me remind you that the doors to his rooms were locked from the inside and the windows too. And as for Ducros, his sister was sleeping next door. If anyone had broken in, she would have realised.’

‘Like me, you read detective novels, Superintendent. The crime is often committed in a locked room: no one can enter, no one can leave and yet someone has been killed.’

‘That is certainly commonplace in England but it is less common here, I can assure you. What’s more, my friend, in your novels things are clear-cut. The victim is found poisoned, stabbed or shot. There are three drops of blood indicating that a crime has been committed. But there’s nothing like that here. In the pathologists’ reports no mention is made of any violence against the scientist or the man of letters.’

‘Was Ducros’s flat locked?’

‘Double locked.’

The superintendent drummed his fingers on the newspaper. ‘This reporter has managed to create havoc! As if we didn’t have enough problems already with the controversy over the death of Minister
Barthou
8
. Not to mention the repercussions of the Stavisky case. The public have a terrible impression of both politicians and the police. One spark is all it would take for the whole thing to blow up.’

A sentence in the newspaper caught my eye. I hadn’t taken in all of the relevant information the first time I read it.

‘Hmm!’ I said, holding a match up to the end of my cigarette holder.

For a few moments I was distracted by the cloud of blue smoke wafting around my head, drifting slowly towards the large electric light on the ceiling.

I had read numerous texts by the Surrealists, particularly those by André Breton (
Nadja
and the two manifestos). I knew that they were fascinated by dreams; indeed dreams were one of their main sources of inspiration. The title of Pierre Ducros’s recent collection clearly indicated that his interest in the study of dreams hadn’t faded either. As for the Marquis de Brindillac, as Fourier had said, he was a scientist who had devoted himself to the analysis of sleep phenomena and whose career had been taking a psychic turn for some time. Both men believed that their dreams were of major importance. Now, they had both died within a few months of each other in extraordinary circumstances, from a violent, incomprehensible fear while their minds wandered through the land of dreams … or nightmares.

Was it just a coincidence? Or was the
Paris-Soir
journalist was right? Was there a mystery surrounding the deaths of Brindillac and Ducros? Or had the journalist just come up with the Deadly Sleep phrase because it made a catchy headline?