The Saint-Florentin Murders (14 page)

‘Come closer, Nicolas,’ said Semacgus, ‘and you, too, Pierre. What do we observe? The wound in the hollow beneath the
shoulder is deep, funnel-shaped and, by its very nature, fatal. Look how lacerated the inner walls of the wound are and how crushed and compressed the skin is. What do you deduce from that?’

‘That we can rule out the use of a sharp instrument,’ said Nicolas.

‘That the object used was such a strange shape,’ said Bourdeau, ‘that it created a kind of pear-shaped hole!’

‘That’s a perfect description.’

Sanson whispered something in the doctor’s ear. ‘I agree,’ he said, ‘though I doubt that our friends will savour the experience!’

‘As the good apprentices and scholars that we are,’ proclaimed Nicolas, ‘we accept anything that leads to the truth.’

‘Of course, Bourdeau’s tobacco and the cooking salt which I suspect is in the commissioner’s pocket will help the two of you to bear it.’

Semacgus was alluding to something Fine, Nicolas’s nurse in Guérande, always used to ward off the evil spells of the devil. This remark once again set them laughing. Once that was over, Semacgus clenched his fist and resolutely plunged his hand into the neck wound. It fitted almost exactly. The two police officers watched with shock and astonishment.

Bourdeau was the first to break the silence. ‘Do you mean to say that someone killed this poor creature with their bare hands?’

Sanson shook his head. ‘It isn’t our intention to put that forward as a theory. A hand, even one of exceptional strength, would not be able to go through flesh and produce the cuts and compressions we’ve observed.’

Nicolas was thinking. ‘So, if I understand correctly, the murder
appears to have been perpetrated using an object shaped like a hand and sufficiently solid to penetrate flesh?’

‘Penetration is not essential,’ said Semacgus. ‘Let’s not forget the lacerations and compressions. Note, gentlemen, that the wound is in the right shoulder. From that I conclude either that the victim was attacked from the front, which does not tally with the description of the scene of the crime, or that she was attacked from behind, which would imply …’

He placed himself behind Sanson, pressed him against his chest with his left arm, and mimed striking a blow with his right hand.

‘… that the attacker was armed with an unknown object. But if, unusually, that was the case, a hand would not have been able to twist and still keep its shape and strength.’

‘Couldn’t the wound,’ said Bourdeau doubtfully, ‘have been caused by repeated blows with a knife?’

‘The cuts would have looked quite different.’

‘I’m reminded of the wooden pegs they use for sealing barrels where I come from.’

‘There speaks the man from Touraine!’

Semacgus let go of Sanson, who readjusted his plum-coloured coat where it had been displaced by the surgeon’s extremely firm grip.

‘I think our two practitioners should come to a conclusion,’ said Nicolas, who was becoming impatient.

‘The young woman died of a fatal blow to the base of her neck. This fatal wound opened the subclavian vessels of the large branches of the axillary artery. This was likely to cause immediate death through loss of blood.’

‘As we observed,’ said Nicolas.

‘But most of it would have been internal,’ said Sanson. ‘The loss of blood compressed the lungs and suffocation followed.’

‘In other words,’ concluded Semacgus, ‘it was quite unlikely that the victim could have survived.’

‘Anything else?’ asked Nicolas.

‘Ah, yes! The girl had been leading a life of pleasure, and quite recently, too. Some of our observations indicate that clearly.’

‘On the evening of the murder?’

‘No, the previous day or days. I shan’t go into the detail of our observations. They are similar to those noted in prostitutes of the lower class who sell themselves to one man after another.’

‘So she indulged in debauchery?’

‘Of the most dissolute kind, there’s no doubt of it. We found significant erosion, as well as traces of an astringent lotion, the kind that makes it possible to remove all traces of excessive and repeated male penetration.’

‘It’s an unguent taken from the root of a rosaceous plant, the
pied-de-lion
,’ Sanson remarked learnedly. ‘The whores use it to repair all kinds of damage.’

‘Last but not least,’ said Semacgus, handing the two police officers something small and brown at the end of a small pair of pincers, ‘this is what we discovered in the “window in the middle”. It’s an intimate preventive sponge, which proves at least one thing – that the girl was expecting to meet a suitor!’

A long silence fell over the gathering, soon broken by Nicolas’s resolute voice. ‘Pierre,’ he said, ‘when we’ve found the murder weapon, we’ll be close to finding the murderer.’

Bourdeau and Nicolas were both back in the duty office, the former filling his pipe, the latter preparing his battle plan. Nobody, Nicolas thought, was going to force him to do anything that he had not decided to do himself. Overwhelmed with requests from both the minister and the Lieutenant General of Police, he would take the path dictated by his own free will, certain that whichever he decided upon would be more innocent than any of the others, because it would be in pursuit of the truth. In the order of priorities, one choice appeared to be the
imperative
one. He would have to keep to it and discard anything superfluous in order to devote himself to what mattered most. He talked about this with the inspector after briefly relating his conversation with Lenoir. As for Sartine’s strange request, he preferred to keep silent about it, at least for the moment. However, he did not conceal the question mark hanging over the Duc de La Vrillière’s presence at Versailles on the night of the murder.

‘Whatever the tasks imposed upon us, my dear Pierre, you know how important it is to solve a crime quickly. We must at all costs find the murder weapon, although I do not harbour any
illusions on the subject. The sewer and the river were both quite close. I also need to question the family of the wounded
major-domo
. There may well be something to be gleaned there.’

‘I have the names and addresses of his in-laws, the family of his late wife,’ said Bourdeau, taking a paper from his pocket. ‘It consists of three people: first of all, his sister-in-law, a nun at the convent of the Daughters of Saint Michel at Notre-Dame de la Charité, in Rue des Postes—’

‘Of what order? There are so many in Paris.’

‘The establishment was opened by the founder of the Eudists, with female boarders who wish to repent their past sins.’

‘The nuns?’

‘No, the boarders!’

‘What is this person’s name?’

‘Hélène Duchamplan. Her religious name is Louise of the Annunciation. Then we have the first brother-in-law, Gilles Duchamplan, and his wife, Nicole. Finally, Eudes, the second brother-in-law, the younger of the two, who lives with them in Rue Christine.’

‘Try to find out more about these people, and don’t slacken with the servants in the Saint-Florentin mansion. One of them is bound to end up saying more than they intended. Let’s meet in Rue Montmartre at dinner time. I’d be most surprised if Catherine and Marion couldn’t find something for us to eat.’

‘Aren’t you afraid of disturbing Monsieur de Noblecourt?’

‘Of course not. He doesn’t have anything in the evenings except a few prunes and a herbal tea. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to drink in our company. In fact, it will be an opportunity for him to come out with a few of those finely polished maxims
which always seem to be miraculously applicable to the matter in hand.’

As he was leaving Bourdeau, Nicolas consulted his watch: it was midday. Walking out through the main entrance, he stepped aside to let a prisoner’s funeral procession pass. He thought with a shudder of that coffin of chipped black wood which, it was said, had been used at the Châtelet for a century for the funerals of dead prisoners, and to which the gaolers gave the humorous nickname ‘the pork pie’: it had a panel in it which opened to let the body slide out into the common grave. The corpses of drowned people benefited from a different procedure: after being displayed on the stone in the Basse-Geôle, they were transported on a stretcher to the Hospitallers of Sainte Catherine, nuns whose constitutions committed them to washing these mortal remains, wrapping them in shrouds, and burying them in the cemetery of Saints-Innocents.

Amid the hustle and bustle of the street stalls, he hailed a cab. He wanted to get back to Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin as soon as possible. Confined in the worn velvet of the narrow interior, he sank into a kind of dreamy somnolence which could have been more comfortable. His head half raised, he made out the tops of houses, the balconies, the barred windows, the corbels, and the pompous or grimacing figures decorating the facades of the buildings. When he walked, he mainly observed faces, but, ever since his arrival in Paris, he had realised the danger of admiring the tops of houses: anyone who indulged in this perilous distraction might find himself in trouble when, in a thunderous
din, a carriage, cab or wagon suddenly loomed up, leaving him no chance of salvation other than to flatten himself against the wall, his face turned sideways, or to leap through the doorway of a shop.

When he got to police headquarters, he went straight to the offices. Through pursed lips, the first clerk he approached explained that it was necessary to distinguish between living animals and slaughtered meat and that, in consequence, the trade and control of livestock should not be confused with the business of butchery. In short, the person he was looking for did not work with Monsieur Lenoir, due to shortage of space, and he would have to ask for him elsewhere. After much equivocation, he was informed that he would have to go and see Monsieur Poisson in Rue Saint-Marc. Nicolas decided that he would get a horse from the stables of the Lieutenant General of Police, as he had been doing regularly for fourteen years. A groom who was new to the place arrogantly refused him one, and Nicolas, patient as he was and as little inclined to play the marquis, had to restrain himself from shaking the fellow. Champing at the bit, he was forced to go to another employee and request a signed paper. This man detained him for a long time, asking him a thousand trifling questions before agreeing to his demand. Once in the saddle, he regretted that he had not kept the cab. The horse, which was not of his choice, turned out to be restive and rattled several times, either by abruptly pulling up short and then kicking in all directions, or by going as close to the wall as possible at the risk of crushing its rider’s leg.

In Rue Saint-Marc, a new discovery awaited him: Monsieur Poisson dealt with wine, fruit and vegetables, while butchery and
livestock were the province of Monsieur Imbert, who could be found in Rue Richelieu. That was not far, and he proceeded there immediately. Unfortunately, it appeared that this Monsieur Imbert was indeed involved with meat, and also cattle, but only those that had passed through the city gates and were already the property of the butchers. Therefore he would have to glean the information he sought by addressing himself to Monsieur Collart du Tilleul in Rue de la Soudière, near the market of
Saints-Innocents
. Nicolas sped to his new destination, tempting his mount with a heap of cabbage.

He had to force open the door of his new interlocutor, who had claimed not to be available. Nicolas entered angrily, regretting that he did not have a riding crop with which to lash his boots. The panic-stricken clerk took shelter behind an unstable pile of official paperwork over the top of which only his trembling black skullcap appeared. His master assured Nicolas that Monsieur Longères, on Place Popincourt, both because of his age and the esteem and trust of his colleagues, appeared to be the primary authority among the cattle farmers in the viscounty and generality of Paris, and the man best able to answer questions from the authorities. Nicolas thanked Monsieur Collart du Tilleul curtly and ordered him to have the restive horse taken back to police headquarters. Exasperated by his mount’s capriciousness, he had decided to continue his journey outside Paris by other means. He had to go all the way back to Rue Saint-Honoré before he found a cab cruising for fares. The interior was so dirty and the upholstery so repulsive, with dubious-looking stains, that he had to sit sideways on the very edge of the seat. His policeman’s eye spotted a large number of bloodstains, which someone had tried
to remove without success. What on earth had this vehicle been carrying? Some wounded person, no doubt, picked up from the gutter and carried home after a drinking session. He lowered the window to get a little air.

The cab advanced by fits and starts, steering a path through the hurrying, distracted crowd. It had to stop in front of a small gathering of laughing girls and boys dancing hand in hand in the middle of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine to the harsh, merry music of a hurdy-gurdy. The musician wore the costume of his remote province, and was turning the handle with one hand and playing the melody with the other, all the while tapping his clogs in time to the music. Nicolas contemplated this sight with a somewhat nostalgic benevolence. What remained to him of his youth? He remembered running off to the marshes with boys of his age. Then came his interminable studies, gloomy and stifling. He recalled the anguish of school, where, despite his successes, he was despised as a poor orphan by companions who came from the best families in Brittany, and his ambiguous position at the notary’s office in Rennes, where his aristocratic connections had made him both envied and despised by the other pupils. Solitude had been his companion throughout these years, illumined however by the tutelary figures of Canon Le Floch and the Marquis of Ranreuil, his father, and by the even more moving figure, now distant and almost faded, of his sister Isabelle. He prayed that his son, Louis, would be spared such vicissitudes.

As they drove through Faubourg Saint-Antoine, in the shadow of the Bastille, he was struck once again by the diversity of the
sights on offer. The various strata of the population all came together here: tranquil bourgeois strolling with their families, factory workers out for a good time, rich peasants from the
faubourg
whose costumes looked out of place, brazen women of the streets, and last but not least the armies of beggars and cripples, real or simulated, who poured into the capital of the kingdom from the provinces. Every day, poor wretches arrived by road, attracted by the prestige and illusion of Paris, and hoping to find a solution to their misfortunes and an end to their poverty. Statute labourers, pushed to the point of despair by the unimaginable drudgery of their work and the meagreness of their subsistence wages, would decide to take refuge in the cities, where they swelled the ranks of the destitute. As Nicolas had been observing for years, many of these people became petty thieves, pickpockets, and even murderers, and would end up in gaol, or in chains in the King’s galleys, or worse still as pitiful figures on the gallows.

He ordered the driver to turn off towards Popincourt. As soon as they left the main road, the hustle and bustle gave way to a more provincial atmosphere, like that of a large country village. The main open space was shared by workshops, the shops of cabinet makers and artisans, and furniture factories, separated from one another by gardens and farms. The warm, heavy odour of manure imbued the air, chasing away the foul smells of the city. Nicolas noticed a sad troop of cows, their sides covered in mud and slurry, being led towards the city gates, from where they would proceed to the slaughterhouse.

By the side of the road, furniture had been laid out to attract customers. Nicolas remembered with some bitterness having one day bought a small writing desk from one of these workshops.
Monsieur de Noblecourt had been curious enough to climb the stairs to see it. His reaction had disappointed Nicolas: what was the meaning of that stifled laugh? He had been so happy with what he had thought was a genuine bargain that he had been really surprised when, a few weeks later, the desk had simply fallen to pieces. There were many crooks and fakers operating here, and they harmed the reputation of the genuine craftsmen, who were a credit to their guild and true artists in furniture. The dregs of the trade would continue to fabricate phantom constructions which, after a mere couple of weeks, would turn out to be rickety, obsolete and worm-eaten.

In a small dead-end street planted with lime trees, he finally came to a collection of rustic buildings surrounded by cowsheds, gardens and orchards. A woman sitting on a milestone looked at him curiously and confirmed that he was indeed outside the house of old Longères. He got out of the cab and paid the driver, who obstinately kept his hat pulled down over his face. Nicolas observed that the carriage had the number 34, followed by an N and the regulation two capital Ps on a white background. He laughed at the coincidence: the initial of his Christian name, and his own age. He was unsure whether or not to notify the transport office about the filthy state of the cab. In the end, he decided to drop it, given that favourable registration number. It was a weakness of his to believe in signs: although he claimed to be a good Parisian, his Celtic soul often came to the surface.

Cautiously, he entered the farm, anxious not to provoke a nasty-looking yellow dog which was barking and pulling on a rope. A stooped elderly man emerged from a lean-to. His face was lined and weather-beaten, and a crown of sparse white hair
framed a skull covered in brown blotches. He was wearing a brown jacket with horn buttons, grey breeches, rough woollen stockings and sturdy hobnailed clogs. Leaning with both hands on a gnarled stick, he looked at the intruder without saying a word.

‘Monsieur,’ Nicolas said, feigning a detached, casual air, ‘would you be able to tell me where I could find Monsieur Longères?’

The man turned aside and spat. ‘Do you want the young one or the old one? If it’s the old one, here I am.’ He angrily kicked the beaten earth. ‘Not the same bloody story again, damn it! We’ve already told you everything’s been settled. I’d have thought the commissioner was satisfied. It’s not going to look good for us. To tell you the truth, I’m the one who has to see to all that, and it doesn’t make me popular in spite of my white hair …’ He threw a stone at the dog, which was howling. ‘Shut up, Sartine!’ He gave Nicolas a sideways glance. ‘No offence. He’s a good guard dog.’ He laughed and slapped his thigh with his hand.

Nicolas was smiling to himself. He had previously come across a parrot bearing the name of the former Lieutenant General of Police. He pretended to understand the meaning of the farmer’s speech, convinced that the truth sometimes emerged from the most incoherent statements.