The Curse of the Grand Guignol (31 page)

It was Dr Watson. Seated beside
him was the wily Sikh.

There was nothing for it but to
speak up. “The theatre - the Countess needs help.”

“She sent us here. Xenia is in
danger. Kiki is insane.”

“What! I just left Xenia with
Kiki!”

“Jump in. There’s no time to
lose.”

The landau delivered them to rue
Bonaparte in what seemed a mere heartbeat. Mahmoud raced ahead to
unlock the door. Driven by panic, the three men sprinted up the
stairs. Spurred on by the fear that he might arrive too late to
save his sister, Fedir overtook the Sikh at the first turning. Dr
Watson, panting heavily, followed closely in their wake.

Xenia was lying on the bed,
seemingly asleep. The candle on the window sill had been moved to
the bedside table. It had almost burnt itself out. On the floor was
an empty vial. The dormer window was wide open and a cold draught
was blowing through the room. There was no sign of Kiki.

Fedir took one look at his
sister and castigated himself in the fiercest tones. “I should not
have left her! My fault! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

Mahmoud poked his head out the
window. Darkness made it impossible to see very far. “She must have
escaped this way. She probably heard us coming.” He closed the
window.

Dr Watson, wheezing
asthmatically, checked for vital signs. The lids were droopy and
the eyes glassy. The pulse was weak. “Get my medical bag,” he
directed at the Sikh. It’s in my room.” He picked up the vial and
smelled it. “No trace of almonds. It’s not arsenic. Thank heaven
for that.” He ran his finger around the lip of the vial and licked
it. “Absinthe mostly, maybe a trace of laudanum, I don’t think it’s
life-threatening. I can give her an emetic to make her vomit.” He
ran to get the chamber pot.

Fedir came to his senses and
remembered the French doors on the landing. He noticed they were
wide open, yet he remembered securing the latch. He crashed into
Mahmoud as he flew down the stairs.

Fedir stepped onto the small
wrought iron balcony. He could see a petite shadow-dancer in the
bruising moonlight. The insane little acrobat was balancing on top
of the garden wall like a tight-rope walker in a circus. Despite
the darkness she was moving with surprising speed toward the house
that backed onto them. If she shimmied up the drainpipe and climbed
over the roof she could escape into the street that ran parallel to
rue Bonaparte. He would never see her again. He would never have
the pleasure of wringing her pretty little neck.

Without further ado, he leapt
from the balcony, grabbed hold of an overhanging branch from the
linden tree and worked his way monkey-like swiftly down to the
ground. There was a ladder leaning against the wall where Mahmoud
had been pruning back some braches that were starting to tap on the
windows. He snatched up the ladder and dragged it over to the other
wall to head her off.

Kiki spotted him and changed
direction. She whirled on her toes like a ballerina and headed back
to the pied-a-terre. It was cat and mouse game. He shifted the
ladder to an adjacent wall but she was several paces ahead of him
and had already caught hold of some trailing ivy. She was using it
to scramble up to the roof. She was a featherweight and the ivy
supported her light frame. He was too heavy. If he went the same
way the ivy would give way and he would fall to his death on the
stones below.

Mahmoud appeared on the balcony,
glowering darkly. “This way,” he beckoned, watching as the lithe
little trapeze artist caught hold of a pediment and somersaulted
onto an upper ledge. “There are some attic stairs that lead to the
roof.”

Fedir hesitated a moment. He
didn’t trust the Sikh. But then he looked back at the acrobat and
knew he couldn’t let her get away. He positioned the ladder up to
the balcony and climbed back up to where he had started. Mahmoud
led him to what he thought was a cupboard. It turned out to be a
tight set of stairs that corkscrewed steeply upwards.

“She stole Zoya’s jewellery.
That’s why she was still here when we got back. She could have been
on the other side of Paris by now.”

Fedir realized that was why the
Sikh was glowering. He was the appointed guardian of the house. He
had guarded those jewels for what must have been a lifetime. The
way he said ‘Zoya’s jewellery’ made it sound as if he believed his
mistress was still alive, as if she actually cared her jewels had
been stolen, and then he understood with a sharp jolt that he would
say the same thing. He would care about his mistress’s jewels being
stolen whether she was alive or dead. He had more in common with
the Sikh than he realized.

Kiki reached the top of the roof
and paused to catch her breath. She thought her pursuer had given
up and was startled to see not one but two men emerge from a little
door that opened onto a flat section of roof near a stack of
chimneys. The Ukrainian and the Sikh were both after her now. But
she was agile and they were not. The airy roof of the world was her
world. She could cartwheel the length of the grey zinc rooftop of
Paris as surely as could cartwheel the greasy zinc countertop of
Café Bistro.

She took flight as lightly as a
bird on the wing, laughing carelessly when the two men followed in
hot pursuit. Her feet hardly touched the ground as she flew from
one roof to another, swooping past dormer windows that jutted out
here and there, flying fearlessly over the gaps that made them
pause and take measure. Her dream was within reach, she could see
it clearly now. It had shape and form and substance. Glittering.
Dazzling. Lux. Her pockets were bulging and she would be rich in
America. The land of dreams. Her dream!

Blithely, she did a cartwheel
and something fell out of her pocket. It clunked onto the grey zinc
and slid slowly into the guttering. Twisting awkwardly mid-air, she
fell sideways and rolled down, down, down…

Fedir leapt and caught her
sleeve. He tried to hang on but the flimsy fabric was tearing. He
could feel it giving way. He reached with his other arm to grab
hold of her arm but he went too far and went over the edge.
Desperately, he caught hold of the guttering with his free arm
while the fabric in his other hand continued to give way, bit by
bit, stitch by stitch, the two of them dangling over the side,
flailing helplessly in the inky darkness, the soot and the smoke,
and the swirling fog.

The stitching gave way and she
fell silently to the ground the same way Coco did. She didn’t
scream. She saw Coco as she fell. Coco knew who had loosened the
string. Coco didn’t scream either.

The guttering was giving way
now. Fedir could hear it heaving under the weight of him,
straining, bit by bit.

Mahmoud loosened his sacred
headdress and tossed one end of it over the side. The material was
strong, taut, it was made from one long strip of fabric and had no
stitching “Hang onto this,” he said. “I’ll pull you up.”

And he did. Afterwards, he
quietly retrieved Zoya’s jewels from the guttering while Fedir
gazed up at his lucky stars. The two men looked at each other; they
didn’t speak.

Some deeds transcended
words.

“What are you doing here, de
Guise?” The voice of the Director General was sharp, gruff and
imperious. “You were relieved of your duties. You were told to keep
your head down and not cause any more embarrassment to the Sûreté.
That ridiculous disguise will not fool anyone!”

Inspector de Guise flushed
crimson and gave thanks for the darkness; he forgot he was still
wearing the Sherlock Holmes costume.

Thick fog drifting off the Seine
added to the unreality of the Trocadero scene. He felt as if he had
entered a smoke-stained mezzotint that had been hanging for
centuries above a fireplace in a north facing room that was never
aired. The biting cold was another matter. It made him aware he was
very much alive and pitifully mortal.

The Countess was cold too. He
could see her trembling as she hugged her arms around herself to
ward off the nithering wind off the river. He had tried to convince
her to take the hackney cab and go home to bed, but she wouldn’t
hear of it. She wanted to inspect the body of Père Denys the moment
it was lifted down. The fact it was the cleric connected to Sainte
Pierre de Montmartre seemed to excite her and he was keen to
discover the reason but events had taken on a life of their own
after the night-watchman blew his whistle. His curiosity would have
to remain unsettled for the time being.

The Director General was warmly
dressed. He had rushed away from a formal dinner at the Louvre in
honour of the Russian ambassador, but at least he had had the time
to put on his winter coat, scarf, gloves and hat. He had issued a
diktat to all in his department: to be informed the moment a fresh
Marionette Murder was discovered. He did not wish to wake up one
morning and read about it in
Le Libre Parole
.

“Who found the body?” he barked
at no one in particular, avidly watching the men combing the
construction site in the dark, lanterns piercing the fog, searching
in vain for clues that the murderer would not have left behind.

Everything they needed to know
would be attached to the body. That was what the Countess was
excitedly waiting for.

“I did,” said Inspector de
Guise.

“You again!” The Director
General wheeled round. “Are you still here, de Guise?”

“Yes, sir”

“How did you know?”

“How did I know the body would
be here, sir?”

“Yes, yes, of course. How did
you know? Here! Of all places!” He gestured wildly, dramatically.
“The windmill!”

The inspector tried to stop his
teeth from chattering by tightening his jaw. He was worried about
sounding cowardly instead of just cold. “I was at the theatre on
rue Ballu when one of my men, I mean one of
your
men, sir,
spotted what he thought was the murderer in the crowd. Pascal
Leveret believes he accidentally bumped into the murderer in
Montmartre during the fifth murder. Tonight, he happened to be at
the theatre and alerted me at once. The suspect took a cab to the
Trocadero. I gave chase and discovered the body.”

Inspector de Guise had been
deliberately vague. He did not really believe the suspect he had
pursued to the Trocadero and the killer was one and the same. They
were linked, of course, but he did not believe Crespigny was the
man Pascal had spotted in the foyer.

Witnesses had said they’d seen
him coming out of the alley and though witnesses tended to be
notoriously unreliable, they couldn’t all be blind.

Crespigny may have come to the
Trocadero for several reasons: to help the murderer hoist the body
up to the sail, to help with the mutilation and the demented
decoration, to act as a lookout, or to help the murderer flee the
scene.

Or perhaps he was entirely
innocent and like them knew the sixth murder would involve a
windmill and had guessed, as they eventually had, that the windmill
in question would be the one at the Trocadero. He may even have
been trying to avert the murder. There was every chance he would be
found dead tomorrow.

“Yes, yes, very well,” blasted
the Director General, “but the Trocadero is vast, enormous, and a
building site covered in rubble. What prompted you to look up at
the windmill?”

“The inspector was working on a
theory –”

Surprised to hear a woman’s
voice, the Director General looked at the Countess for the first
time. He had noticed her out of the corner of his eye, standing
slightly behind the inspector, keeping out of the wind, but he had
dismissed her as a painted trollop, the inspector’s fancy-piece, or
possibly his strumpet of a sister.

He knew about Didier de Guise’s
ignoble background; everyone at the Sûreté was privy to it within
weeks of joining the force. The name Grosseteste was infamous. Half
the historical misdeeds of France were committed by the
Grossetestes or a distant relative. Even to this day their cunning
was somewhere behind most of the crimes in the city though they
kept a less sensational profile after cheating their way to the
honourable de Guise name.

Two brothers - one a
horse-trader and a thief, the other a gambler and card-sharp; one
uncle, a master embezzler, fraudster and forger; the mother, a
mistress of dangerous liaisons and a brothel madame who was not
above blackmail; the little sister, an aristocratic prostitute who
traded in state secrets and missing jewels.

If it was up to him the whole
family would be locked up without trial. The guillotine was too
good for them. The Director General was not in the mood for
politesse. He had been called away from a lavish twelve course
banquet inside the Louvre and was standing in a puddle of mud
waiting for yet another mutilated human puppet to spur sales of
satirical rags at the expense of the dignity of the Sûreté.

“Is this your fancy-woman or
your scandalous sister?” he delivered phlegmatically, cutting the
Countess off mid-stream.

Inspector de Guise had been
hunkering down inside himself in an effort to keep warm, but now
straightened his back and shoulders. “May I present Countess
Volodymyrovna. She was with me at the theatre tonight. In fact, it
was her deductive reasoning which prompted the connection to the
windmill.”

The Director General was not old
enough to have remembered the wealthy adventuress known as Zoya
Volodymyrovna. The name meant nothing to him. “Explain yourself, de
Guise.”

“It was Countess Volodymyrovna
who noticed a link between the first five murders and the theatre
on rue Ballu.”

“Are you referring to
le
Cirque du Grand Guignol
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see, proceed, and try to
express yourself clearly.”