The Milliner's Hat Mystery (8 page)

Verneuil had been a petty officer in the French navy. Exposure to the weather had permanently coloured his skin to mahogany. He had a strong sense of caustic humour and there was very little about the foibles of his countrymen and countrywomen that he did not know.

Goron introduced Vincent as a British colleague who had come to the French Sûreté for help.

“You are perhaps a colleague of my esteemed friend, Monsieur Richardson.”

“Monsieur Richardson has climbed high,” said Vincent. “He is now one of the chief officers of Scotland Yard.”

“I am not surprised; he was one of those marked for promotion.”

“I hear that your comrade, Monsieur Bigot, is absent. Has he also achieved his promotion?” asked Vincent.

“You have employed the exact word—achieved, monsieur. He has indeed achieved it, but if you think that it has made him happy and contented you will be mistaken. He has become a slave and a beast of burden.”

“A slave? To whom?”

“To the most merciless of slave owners—the politicians. He bemoaned to me the other day that he can no longer call his soul his own. His duties now lie in the lobbies of the Chamber, and the very atmosphere in that building is poisoned with intrigue. Perhaps it is the same in your House of Commons, monsieur?”

Vincent smiled, without committing himself to a reply.

“However that may be, in Paris even Wagner's hero Parsifal, of whom the newspapers are talking, would have succumbed to temptation, not from beauteous maidens emerging from gigantic flower petals but from the corrupting influence of money since, after all, no sane man would seek election as a deputy unless there were something solid to be made out of it.”

“Now, Monsieur Verneuil, let us talk business. We have come to ask to have the dossier of Madame Germaine, the Austrian milliner in the rue Duphot, examined.”

“Nothing easier,” replied Verneuil; “if those rascals of mine have kept their files up to date.” He stamped on the floor with his heel. A hangdog police clerk stood wilting in the doorway. “I want the dossier of an Austrian milliner in the rue Duphot, a woman named Germaine.”

“Very good, monsieur.”

When the dossier was brought, Verneuil scanned the pages, with a whimsical air of surprise. “
Tiens
,” he said, “not a word recorded against her. Madame Germaine is of course her professional name—she is Fräulein Kofler—an Austrian from Vienna.”

“We on the other side of the Channel have nothing against her unless it be that she is selling hats on an almost incredible scale—to the tune of a hundred thousand francs to a single customer.”

“You think that she was smuggling them into England? That, surely, would be a matter for your customs officers, not for us.”

“The man who had the bill which I am going to show you was not at all the type of person who would be trading in women's hats.”

“But can you say of any man that he would not trade in women's hats if he had a pretty woman friend?”

“Not to the tune of one hundred thousand francs.”

Verneuil shrugged his shoulders. “Not being married I have no first-hand evidence to go upon, but I understand that if a woman were condemned to change her hat ten times a day she would gladly forfeit her chance of eternal salvation. May I see this bill for one hundred thousand francs?”

Vincent put the bill into his hand. Verneuil scrutinized both the handwriting and the paper.

“Here is a bill my wife received from Madame Germaine this morning,” said Goron.

Verneuil spread both bills out upon the table and compared them. “They are not in the same handwriting.
Tenez
, my friend, I myself will call on Madame Germaine and ask her the meaning of this large quantity of hats sold to England. Unless I am much mistaken, she will tell me that she knows nothing about it. If you gentlemen have no objection I will go alone and report to you afterwards the result of my enquiry.”

“There is one other service that you might do for me, monsieur,” said Vincent. “It is to ascertain whether two Americans—G. Lewis and R. Blake— have taken out cards of identity at any time.”

“Nothing easier; I can give you that information from the telephone.” He picked up his receiver and called a number. “Verneuil speaking. It concerns two Americans, G. Lewis and R. Blake.” He spelt out the names. “Have they taken out cards of identity at any time? Ring me when you have the information.”

He replaced the receiver and looked triumphantly at Vincent as who should say: “You see how wonderfully things are organized on
this
side of the Channel.” While the telephone was being used Vincent had a brain wave. He knew that the road to a Frenchman's heart was down his throat. He would ask Verneuil to meet him and Goron for lunch and let him choose his pet restaurant. As he had expected, the ex-petty officer turned detective accepted with alacrity.

“This falls well, monsieur. I shall have seen Madame Germaine and can make my report to you over the
hors d'oeuvres
.”

The telephone bell began to tinkle. Verneuil took up the receiver and then turned to Vincent and said, not without pride in his tone: “Two Americans— Rupert Blake and George Lewis—took out cards of identity in the fifteenth arrondissement last January. Their address at that time was 9, rue Violet. There, my friend, our system may not be perfect but at any rate it works.”

“Thank you, monsieur; that information may be very useful to me. And now we will say ‘au revoir' until twelve-thirty, when we meet at your pet restaurant near the Quai d'Orsay.”

As the two friends left the office, Goron said: “We are in luck, my friend. That restaurant Verneuil is taking us to is kept by the ex-
maître d'hotel
of a cardinal famous for his cuisine. Now I must go and make my peace with Jacqueline and get her permission to lunch out.”

“And I must return to my hotel to make myself fit to be seen. I came straight to you this morning from the boat train.”

Vincent, looking immaculate, was the first to arrive at the restaurant, where he was received with ceremony by the proprietor who, as he remarked later, treated him as he would have treated a foreign diplomatist with a string of titles before his name. Goron, with meticulous punctuality, was close on his heels; Verneuil was ten minutes late and they sat down at their reserved table to wait for him. He came bursting in full of apologies.

“You will forgive me when I tell you the cause. I was right when I said that in my opinion that milliner knew nothing about that extravagant bill.”

“You mean that someone must have stolen one of her bill-heads?”

“So she said. She assured me that she had no export trade with England, that being a great admirer of your country she often wished that she had, though not to the extent suggested by this invoice because that would mean employing hands in a factory to cope with it.”

“Had she any suggestion to make about how one of her bill-heads could have been abstracted?”

“She said that nothing could be easier. The customer would merely ask to see a model from the window and while she had her back turned, an invoice could be taken from the desk where there are always several lying ready. She said that none of her customers spend that amount of money even in a year.”

“The question before us,” said Goron, “is what could have been the object of sending a bogus invoice to England if the hats were not to be supplied.” Vincent pondered. “Two possibilities suggest themselves to me; the first that the invoice was intended to cover a sum of money that had been used for other purposes than hats; the second that it was to conceal the true nature of merchandise of another kind.” Verneuil's eyes narrowed. “I think that the second of your explanations will prove to be the true one.” 

“But we have not yet dismissed the first possibility,” said Goron; “that the invoice was intended to cover a sum of money that had been used for other purposes. My wife has a Spanish friend, a lady with a rich husband. She told her that Spanish husbands, however well to do, dislike handing over money to their wives, but that such is their love of outward show that they like their wives to be better dressed than other women and will cheerfully pay extravagant sums to their wives' dressmakers and milliners. The wives require money to indulge their little weaknesses, so they enter into an unholy alliance with the dressmaker or milliner, who charges the husband an exorbitant price and when he settles the bill the two, that is the wife and her milliner, divide the surplus between them.”

“
Tiens!
” said Verneuil. “I did well to remain a bachelor. All the same, Madame Germaine has all her goods plainly priced and it would be difficult to deceive a French husband. What is the position in your country, Monsieur Vincent?”

“You must not ask me, for I, too, like you, am still a bachelor and know nothing about the expedients of married ladies who are kept short of cash.”

“Well,” said Goron, “as the meeting has decided against the first proposition by a majority, let us turn to the second; that this invoice covered other merchandise than hats.”

“Now,” said Verneuil, “we are upon the fringe of the truth. What merchandise can run into those figures? There is only one.”

Goron, with a quick movement of his thin, lithe body, turned upon him. “You mean drugs?” Verneuil nodded significantly without speaking. “Then, Vincent, my friend, I must warn you that you have before you the most difficult case in your career.”

Goron's excitement was infectious. Vincent, himself on wires, caught some of it. “Then all the more fun in solving it.”

“That's the spirit! We'll have the fun of solving it together.” They shook hands.

An amused smile curved Verneuil's lips. “It is easy to see that you two have preserved your youth.”

“You see,” explained Goron, “we were opposite numbers as intelligence officers on the French and British general staffs during the war, and my friend will agree with me that we worked together like brothers.”

“Ah. Then you had what you call your fun even in those tragic days?”

“Yes, if you call it fun to be obsessed with the weight of responsibility for every bit of information we supplied to our chiefs.”

For the rest of the meal Verneuil was content to remain a listener as the two younger men “swapped yarns” about their service nearly twenty years before. When they had no further excuse for lingering, Vincent said:

“I think that as Monsieur Verneuil has been good enough to find me the former address of those two Americans, I ought to go to the rue Violet this afternoon.”

“Then I'll come with you,” said Goron; “in a case like this, when American gangsters—is not that the word?—are concerned, two are better than one.” Having arranged to report the result of their expedition to Verneuil a little later, the two friends hailed a taxi.

“Tell me,” said Goron when they had given the address to the driver, “what type of man was this in whose room that invoice was found.”

“He was the cashier of an important bank in London. It is now known that for many months he had been robbing his employers, and the day came when he thought it more prudent to abscond abroad, but he was murdered on the journey.”

“
Tiens!
Then you have indeed a problem. Hats and bank securities. At first sight they seem ill-assorted. It will be a problem after my own heart.”

“And according to Verneuil, drugs must not be ruled out.”

“Ah! Verneuil has been working at the drug business a good deal and it threatens to become an obsession with him. It is well that we go together to the rue Violet, because I shall be able to extract more from the concierge and the chambermaid than you would as a foreign police officer.”

The concierge proved to be a woman who had a constitutional dislike of betraying her lodgers to the police. As a concierge she was not a moral censor. Gentlemen brought their wives to lodge there, or they lodged alone. If they changed their wives occasionally what was that to her provided that they paid their bills?

Goron had drawn conclusions from her accent, though her colloquial French was fluent.

“You are not a Frenchwoman?”

“Sir, I have lived here for the greater part of my life; my sympathies are French to the core.”

“That may be, but you have your card of permission to work in France?”

“I can show it to you, monsieur: there is not a mark on it against me.”

“That may be, but let me remind you that a foreigner who declines to give necessary information to the police runs a risk…”

The woman's manner changed; she began to cringe. “Will you gentleman give yourselves the trouble of passing into my little room?” She threw open a door at the back of her glazed box and ushered them into a tiny cubicle of a room spotlessly clean and neat. “Doubtless Monsieur has come to make inquiries on the part of some husband, or it may be of some wife.”

Vincent was about to make a disclaimer when Goron touched him on the sleeve.

“These two gentlemen did not stay here unaccompanied, I think?”

“Oh no; each of them brought his wife, or at any rate a lady companion.”

“Were the ladies known as Madame Lewis and Madame Blake? I presume they had no letters, but they may have received parcels from shops. Were these parcels addressed ‘Madame Lewis' and ‘Madame Blake', respectively?”

“Certainly, monsieur.”

Vincent had been a little impatient of his colleague's line of questioning, since the women seemed to him negligible, but now he began to see whither they were leading.

“Now,” pursued Goron. “Let me have a description of each of these ladies. Madame Lewis, was she a Frenchwoman, smart and well dressed?”

The woman became voluble and assured them that both ladies were beautiful and very smart; their husbands were generous: that one could judge; probably they were not Frenchwomen, at any rate one of them was reading a Russian newspaper one day.