Cynthia Manson (ed) (14 page)

“Not a sou.”

“Hasn’t he got a money-box?”

“Yes. But I
borrowed what was in it two days ago, saying that I didn’t want to change a
banknote.”

A pathetic little
confession, but what did things like that matter now?

“Don’t you think it
would be better if I went to the Gare du Nord myself?”

“I doubt if it
would help, and we may need you here.”

They were almost
prisoners in that room. With its direct links with every nerve center of Paris,
that was the place where any news would first arrive. Even in his room in the
Police Judiciaire, the Inspector would be less well placed. He had thought of
going back there, but now at last took off his overcoat, deciding to see the
job through where he was.

“If he had no
money, he couldn’t take a bus or the Métro. Nor could he go into a cafe or use
a public telephone. He probably hasn’t had anything to eat since his supper
last night.”

“But what can he be
doing?” exclaimed Olivier, becoming more and more nervous. “And why should he
have sent me to the Gare d’Austerlitz?”

“Perhaps to help
you get away,” grunted Saillard.

“Get away? Me?”

“Listen. The boy
knows you’re down and out. Yet you’re going to buy him a little radio. I’m not
reproaching you. I’m just looking at the facts. He leans on the windowsill and
sees you with the old woman he knows to be a moneylender. What does he
conclude?”

“I see.”

“That you’ve gone
to her to borrow money. He may be touched by it, he may be saddened—we don’t
know. He goes back to bed and to sleep.”

“You think so?”

“I’m pretty sure of
it. Anyhow, we’ve no reason to think he left the house then.”

“No. Of course
not.”

“Let’s say he goes
back to sleep, then. But he wakes up early, as children mostly do on Christmas
Day. And the first thing he notices is the frost on the window. The first frost
this winter, don’t forget that. He wants to look at it, to touch it.”

A faint smile
flickered across Andre Lecœur’s face. This massive Inspector hadn’t forgotten
what it was like to be a boy.

“He scratches a bit
of it away with his nails. It won’t be difficult to get confirmation, for once
the frost is tampered with it can’t form again in quite the same pattern. What
does he notice then? That in the buildings opposite one window is lit up, and
one only—the window of the room in which a few hours before he had seen his
father. It’s guesswork, of course, but I don’t mind betting he saw the body, or
part of it. If he’d merely seen a foot it would have been enough to startle
him.”

“You mean to say—”
began Olivier, wide-eyed.

“That he thought
you’d killed her. As I did myself—for a moment. And very likely not her only.
Just think for a minute. The man who’s been committing all these murders is a
man. like you, who wanders about at night. His victims live in the poorer
quarters of Paris, like Madame Fayet in the Rue Michat. Does the boy know anything
of how you’ve been spending your nights since you lost your job? No. All that
he has to go on is that he has seen you in the murdered woman’s room. Would it
be surprising if his imagination got to work?

“You said just now
that you sat on the windowsill. Might it be there that you put down your box of
sandwiches?”

“Now I come to
think of it, yes. I’m practically sure.”

“Then he saw it.
And he’s quite old enough to know what the police would think when they saw it
lying there. Is your name on it?”

“Yes. Scratched on
the lid.”

“You see! He
thought you’d be coming home as usual between seven and eight. The thing was to
get you as quickly as possible out of the danger zone.”

“You mean—by
writing me that note?”

“Yes. He didn’t
know what to say. He couldn’t refer to the murder without compromising you.
Then he thought of Uncle Gedeon. Whether he believed in his existence or not
doesn’t matter. He knew you’d go to the Gare d’Austerlitz.”

“But he’s not yet
eleven!”

“Boys of that age
know a lot more than you think. Doesn’t he read detective stories?”

“Yes.”

“Of course he does.
They all do. If they don’t read them, they get them on the radio. Perhaps
that’s why he wanted a set of his own so badly.”

“It’s true.”

“He couldn’t stay
in the flat to wait for you, for he had something more important to do. He had
to get hold of that box. I suppose he knew the courtyard well. He’d played
there, hadn’t he?”

“At one time, yes.
With the concierge’s little girl.”

“So he’d know about
the rainwater pipes, may even have climbed up them for sport.”

“Very well,” said
Olivier, suddenly calm, “let’s say he gets into the room and takes the box. He
wouldn’t need to climb down the way he’d come. He could simply walk out of the
flat and out of the house. You can open the house door from inside without
knocking up the concierge. You say it was at about six o’clock, don’t you?”

“I see what you’re
driving at,” grunted the Inspector. “Even at a leisurely pace, it would hardly
have taken him two hours to walk to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Yet he wasn’t
there.”

Leaving them to
thrash it out, Lecœur was busy telephoning.

“No news yet?”

And the man at the
Gare du Nord answered, “Nothing so far. We’ve pounced on any number of boys,
but none of them was Francois Lecœur.”

Admittedly, any
street boy could have pinched a couple of oranges and taken to his heels. The
same couldn’t be said for the broken glass of the telephone pillars, however.
Andre Lecœur looked once again at the column with the seven crosses, as though
some clue might suddenly emerge from them. He had never thought himself much
cleverer than his brother. Where he scored was in patience and perseverance.

“If the box of
sandwiches is ever found, it’ll be at the bottom of the Seine near the Pont
Mirabeau,” he said.

Steps in the
corridor. On an ordinary day they would not have been noticed, but in the
stillness of a Christmas morning everyone listened.

It was an
agent
cycliste
, who produced a bloodstained blue-check handkerchief, the one that
had been found among the glass splinters at the seventh telephone pillar.

“That’s his, all
right,” said the boy’s father.

“He must have been
followed,” said the Inspector. “If he’d had time, he wouldn’t merely have
broken the glass. He’d have said something.”

“Who by?” asked
Olivier, who was the only one not to understand. “Who’d want to follow him?” he
asked. “And why should he call the police?”

They hesitated to
put him wise. In the end it was his brother who explained:

“When he went to
the old woman’s he thought you were the murderer. When he came away, he knew
you weren’t. He knew—”

“Knew what?”

“He knew who was.
Do you understand now? He found out something, though we don’t know what. He
wants to tell us about it, but someone’s stopping him.”

“You mean?”

“I mean that
Francois is after the murderer or the murderer is after him. One is following,
one is followed—we don’t know which. By the way, Inspector, is there a reward
offered?”

“A handsome reward
was offered after the third murder and it was doubled last week. It’s been in
all the papers.”

“Then my guess,”
said Andre Lecœur. “is that it’s the kid who’s doing the following. Only in
that case—”

It was twelve
o’clock, four hours since they’d lost track of him. Unless, of course, it was
he who had snaffled the oranges in the Rue Maubeuge.

Might not this be
his great moment? Andre Lecœur had read somewhere that even to the dullest and
most uneventful lives such a moment comes sooner or later.

He had never had a
particularly high opinion of himself or of his abilities. When people asked him
why he’d chosen so dreary and monotonous a job rather than one in, say, the
Brigade des Homicides, he would answer: “I suppose I’m lazy.”

Sometimes he would
add:

“I’m scared of
being knocked about.”

As a matter of
fact, he was neither lazy nor a coward. If he lacked anything it was brains.

He knew it. All he
had learned at school had cost him a great effort. The police exams that others
took so easily in their stride, he had only passed by dint of perseverance.

Was it a
consciousness of his own shortcomings that had kept him single? Possibly. It
seemed to him that the sort of woman he would want to marry would be his
superior, and he didn’t relish the idea of playing second fiddle in the home.

But he wasn’t
thinking of all this now. Indeed, if this was his moment of greatness, it was
stealing upon him unawares.

Another team
arrived, those of the second day shift looking very fresh and well groomed in
their Sunday clothes. They had been celebrating Christmas with their families,
and they brought in with them, as it were, a whiff of good viands and liqueurs.

Old Bedeau had
taken his place at the switchboard, but Lecœur made no move to go.

“I’ll stay on a
bit.” he said simply.

Inspector Saillard
had gone for a quick lunch at the Brasserie Dauphine just around the corner,
leaving strict injunctions that he was to be fetched at once if anything
happened. Janvier was back at the Quai des Orfèvres, writing up his report.

If Lecœur was
tired, he didn’t notice it. He certainly wasn’t sleepy and couldn’t bear the
thought of going home to bed. He had plenty of stamina. Once, when there were
riots in the Place de la Concorde, he had done thirty-six hours nonstop, and on
another occasion, during a general strike, they had all camped in the room for
four days and nights.

His brother showed
the strain more. He was getting jumpy again.

“I’m going,” he
announced suddenly.

“Where to?”

“To find Bib.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know
exactly. I’ll start round the Gare du Nord.”

“How do you know it
was Bib who stole the oranges? He may be at the other end of Paris. We might
get news at any minute. You’d better stay.”

“I can’t stand this
waiting.”

He was nevertheless
persuaded to. He was given a chair in a corner. He refused to lie down. His
eyes were red with anxiety and fatigue. He sat fidgeting, looking rather as,
when a boy, he had been put in the corner.

With more
self-control, Andre forced himself to take some rest. Next to the big room was
a little one with a wash-basin, where they hung their coats and which was
provided with a couple of camp beds on which the
nuiteux
could lie down
during a quiet hour.

He shut his eyes,
but only for a moment. Then his hand felt for the little notebook with never
left him, and lying on his back he began to turn over the pages.

There were nothing
but crosses, columns and columns of tiny little crosses which, month after
month, year after year, he had accumulated, Heaven knows why. Just to satisfy
something inside him. After all, other people keep a diary—or the most
meticulous household accounts, even when they don’t need to economize at all.

Those crosses told
the story of the night life of Paris.

“Some coffee, Lecœur?”

“Thanks.”

Feeling rather out
of touch where he was. he dragged his camp bed into the big room, placing it in
a position from which he could see the wall-plan. There he sipped his coffee,
after which he stretched himself out again, sometimes studying his notebook,
sometimes lying with his eyes shut. Now and again he stole a glance at his
brother, who sat hunched in his chair with drooping shoulders, the twitching of
his long white fingers being the only sign of the torture he was enduring.

There were hundreds
of men now, not only in Paris but in the suburbs, keeping their eyes skinned
for the boy whose description had been circulated. Sometimes false hopes were raised,
only to be dashed when the exact particulars were given.

Lecœur shut his
eyes again, but opened them suddenly next moment, as though he had actually
dozed off. He glanced at the clock, then looked round for the Inspector.

“Hasn’t Saillard
got back yet?” he asked, getting to his feet.

“I expect he’s
looked in at the Quai des Orfèvres.”

Olivier stared at
his brother, surprised to see him pacing up and down the room. The latter was
so absorbed in his thoughts that he hardly noticed that the sun had broken
through the clouds, bathing Paris on that Christmas afternoon in a glow of
light more like that of spring.

While thinking, he
listened, and it wasn’t long before he heard Inspector Saillard’s heavy tread
outside.

“You’d better go
and get some sandwiches,” he said to his brother. “Get some for me, too.”