The Saint-Florentin Murders (33 page)

‘Lord Ashbury may try to find refuge there, so we need to tighten the surveillance. What have we found out so far about the growing of pineapples?’

‘Rabouine is going through the list at the Châtelet and has flooded Paris and the suburbs with spies. He may have found what you’re looking for by now.’

‘I fear for your Sunday, Pierre. Your family will curse me.’

‘They’re used to it after a quarter of a century!’

They closed up the secret passage, barricaded it to prevent anyone coming in from outside, and placed seals on the front door. It did not take them long to get back to the Grand Châtelet, where Rabouine was waiting for them, looking very excited.

‘I would guess your search went well,’ said Nicolas, ‘judging by that air of smugness.’ He placed the bloodstained shirt on the table.

‘Judge for yourself,’ said Rabouine, waving a paper. ‘Of all the residences on the list, only one attracted my attention, for two reasons.’

‘Tell us what they were.’

‘The first is that the person who lives there is in our records. He appears in Marin’s daily reports, once intended for Monsieur de Sartine and now for Monsieur Lenoir, on the information gathered by our inspectors and spies. He comes into the category dealing with prostitution and licentious behaviour, and inhabits the borderline between vice and crime.’

‘He’s got us hooked!’ said Bourdeau, sitting with his elbows on the table and his head on his folded hands.

‘Anyway, to cut a long story short, it appears that the man in question is very well known in the world of vice. Why?’

‘Yes, why?’ said Nicolas impatiently. ‘Come on, Rabouine, get to the point! We don’t have much time, and you’re keeping us waiting.’

‘All right. He’s the grand master of a libertine society known as the Order of Happiness. His followers vow to make each other happy. They’re an androgynous group, who like men to become women, women to become men, and all points in between …’

‘And where do they meet?’

‘Sometimes at the grand master’s mansion in Montparnasse, which is where he has his greenhouse of exotic plants. Sometimes in the quarries at Vaugirard, sometimes in other places we have yet to discover.’

‘This is indeed most strange! And the second of your reasons?’

‘This lover of young flesh, whose influence within the society seems to increase with every passing day, is none other than the Marquis de Chambonas, who married Mademoiselle de Lespinasse-Langeac, the illegitimate daughter of the Duc de La Vrillière and the Beautiful Aglaé.’

‘Good Lord!’ said Bourdeau.

‘And that’s not all,’ Rabouine went on. ‘The only motivation for the marriage was to shore up Chambonas’s failing fortune. But when things didn’t live up to his expectations, he unearthed a nasty secret he’s been using to blackmail the minister: the Beautiful Aglaé is said to have once married a certain Comte Sabatini, who was wrongfully deported to the West Indies on the minister’s orders.’

‘Let’s not waste any time,’ said Nicolas. ‘I want the Marquis de Chambonas’s mansion to be put under surveillance immediately. What Rabouine has just told us matches the information we had
from Restif, the things La Paulet hinted at to me, and what we found in Rue Christine. Bourdeau, take this shirt and go straight to the Saint-Florentin mansion. Find the minister’s valet and spare no effort to discover if the shirt belongs to his master. Last but not least, and I don’t care how we get it, I must have, as soon as possible, a detailed report on the Duc de La Vrillière’s movements over the past week so that we can check his alibis.’

‘There’s no need, Monsieur Nicolas,’ said Rabouine. ‘I’m already on drinking terms with the minister’s coachman, who likes a tipple whenever he has a moment to spare. With a little bit extra thrown in, solid this time rather than liquid – I’ll put in my expenses claim as usual – I’ve managed to get the necessary information from him.’

‘Rabouine, you will have your reward, plus a bonus.’

‘There are always bonuses for immorality,’ said Bourdeau wryly.

‘It sometimes happens, Inspector,’ said Nicolas, ‘that men whom we believe to be without principles are strongly imbued with the religion of efficiency. We’re listening, Rabouine.’

‘Well, his magnificence the Duc de La Vrillière has not been sleeping at home for several months …’

‘There’s nothing new about that. There was the Beautiful Aglaé, and plenty of other loose women before her.’

‘That’s as may be,’ continued Rabouine, ‘but at night, he asks to be driven to different places, then dismisses his coachman and disappears. His servants are very intrigued and have tried to follow him without success. Anyway, what that means is that the minister has no alibi for any of the three murders we’ve been investigating.’

‘My God!’ cried Bourdeau in alarm. ‘We know that these crimes are linked. Who knows the horrors that may have been committed before our attention was called to the Saint-Florentin mansion?’

‘Which makes your mission all the more important, my dear Pierre,’ said Nicolas. ‘We must find out if this shirt is indeed the minister’s.’

Nicolas remained alone in the duty office. He needed this interlude to see how things stood with the investigation. He took out his little black notebook. As he read through it, he noted particular points on a separate sheet, making a list which, he hoped, would lead him to discern a clear, logical path to the truth. He had reached a point where any advance in his understanding of the case could only be brought about by a stark, deliberate demonstration of authority. The more he reread his notes, the more he realised that the testimonies he had gathered at the time of Marguerite Pindron’s murder had clouded his vision, confused his mind, and sent him off on false trails. Yes, he would have to go back to the beginning and drive the dubious witnesses into a corner. But he did not have time for persuasion. However distasteful he found the means of coercion available to the law, means that Sanson and his assistants could apply, he believed that the threat of torture should be enough in itself to convince the most stubborn. Only one thing held him back from resorting to it: being inclined to think that torture had the effect of making people confess even when they were innocent, he feared that its threat would do the same. Eventually, though, he made up his
mind to play that trick, and he began reflecting on the best and most convincing way to put it into effect. He would have to choose the witnesses to be subjected to this test. It was useless to try it on all of them. After all, he could hardly put the Duchesse de La Vrillière in a torture chamber. He just had to pick the right targets. If a false picture had been built up about what had happened and when it happened, all it needed was one element to yield, and the whole thing would come crashing down. It seemed to him that Eugénie Gouet, the duchesse’s head chambermaid, was the ideal element in this strategy. She would be more than a match for him. Next, a proper interrogation of Jacques Blain, the caretaker who had been in love with Marguerite, was sure to be of interest. He recalled something Bourdeau had said: why make a stew of three rabbits without adding blood to the sauce? Finally, a friendly conversation with young Jeannette Le Bas might well shed some light on the life of Marguerite Pindron. What Nicolas was hoping for from all this was to speed things up, to find the one thread which, pulled out of the warp and weft of the crime, would cause the whole thing to unravel.

He resolved to give himself a brief respite, unable for the moment to make a crucial decision. Wisdom dictated that he should wait for the results of the missions he had given his men. It was late afternoon by now, and he was starting to feel hungry. Leaving the old prison, he was caught up in the feverish activity of the surroundings. The smell emanating from an open-air pot of capons cooked in coarse salt tempted him, and he greedily devoured a bowlful of this stew. The grains of salt cracked beneath his teeth, and he closed his eyes and saw again the dazzling salt marsh at Guérande and himself as a little boy, licking
his fingers as he collected marine crystals … He crossed the Seine on foot, the physical effort helping him to clear his mind of the clutter of contradictory thoughts and establish a clean slate on which he would then be able to map out a logical argument.

A longer walk took him beyond the boulevard, towards the Observatory. He knew there was an entrance here to the quarries which abounded in that area. It was late, and the porter was reluctant to guide another visitor, but Nicolas’s position and the promise of a substantial reward soon overcame his reluctance. They plunged into a complex, shadowy labyrinth. It was easy to lose your way here, and the porter had to warn him frequently. The thing that Nicolas, who hated confinement, most dreaded was that their torches would go out, plunging them into darkness. He discovered to his astonishment a vast underground city, filled with weirdly shaped streets and crossroads and squares. Most of the galleries were of uneven height, and they were sometimes forced to stoop. There were stalactites in places, and the porter claimed, boastfully, that the river was just above their heads. Nicolas, who was well aware of the distance they had come, strongly doubted this.

For years, he had heard people talking about the danger these quarries posed for the city up above; it had been supported by them for many centuries, retrieving in the light of day what it borrowed from the earth. He noticed pillars half crushed beneath the weight bearing down on them and apparently on the verge of collapse,
4
and quarries on two levels where the pillars of the upper level were precariously balanced.

Engaging his guide in conversation, he learnt that some of the poorest families in the city took refuge in this place, especially in
the dead of winter. Others used it as a hiding place, only coming out at night to gather provisions or commit crimes. These people included escaped convicts, deserters, and a whole collection of rogues and vagabonds, a true court of miracles. Lowering his voice, the porter said that there were also rumours of strange meetings held here, of groups indulging in reprobate practices. Nicolas tried to get him to say more, but to no avail.

This visit gave him an opportunity both to assess the dangers of this maze of galleries piled one on top of the other, and to get some idea of the uses that were made of it. The safety of Paris depended on the dimensions of this underground complex being duly noted by the King’s engineers, a detailed plan being drawn up, structural weaknesses being identified, and stricter controls being put in place concerning the disquieting collection of individuals who haunted it. As far as his present investigation was concerned, the visit confirmed the plausibility of the rumours reported by Bourdeau about the very special use that some people made of the seclusion and intricacy of these hidden depths.

He found Monsieur de Noblecourt reading Montluc. Mouchette climbed on him and settled in her favourite place on his shoulders.

‘I’ve just returned from the underworld,’ he said simply.

‘Monsieur de Sartine is right,’ Noblecourt said with a smile, ‘you create havoc. The whole of Rue Montmartre is talking about the High Mass this morning and the untimely appearance of the devil in the appetising form of a dazed and angry fatted ox. I think it deserves an inscription in marble, in gold letters, a fine lapidary formula we can ask Louis to translate for us, something
like,
Here Nicolas Le Floch slew the minotaur
, adding this exploit to his many others
!’

‘You may well mock, I saw you leaping onto your pew like a young man! As for me, having already confronted the minotaur, I’ve now had to suffer the torments of the labyrinth and the terrors of confinement!’

He told Noblecourt of his descent into the quarries.

‘They were always places,’ said Noblecourt, ‘conducive to strange practices, even satanic meetings. The Regent, the Duc d’Orléans, once tried to summon the devil there. It’s beyond me how, in the century in which we live, people can still believe in such nonsense! It’s been too long that people have been tearing each other to pieces, with the tongue and the pen, over the contents of a papal bull or a
billet de confession
, and that the
parlement
has been defying the authority of the monarch to the renewed cries of agitators foaming at the mouth over the tomb of an obscurantist deacon. Is this really the triumph of reason and philosophy? There is a balance to be struck. Look at the regent, a rational man apparently, a chemist, an engineer, a fine musician and a statesman. How could he become involved in such things? Now everyone’s trying to go beyond the bounds of knowledge, striving to explore the treacherous regions of the garden of evil. I tell you this: we will see far worse things before the end of this century!’

He had raised his voice so much that Cyrus began howling lugubriously.

‘You see, you’ve awakened the dog Cerberus!’

The evening continued with a light supper and a long discussion of the practice of tremolo in playing music, while from the servants’ pantry there rose the delicious smell of quince jelly.

Sanson was operating while Nicolas watched attentively, sickened by this morning autopsy. Was it the sight of the executioner’s clothes brushing against that mutilated face, or the feeling that he was getting close to the end of his investigation? He was restless with exhaustion and impatience.

‘A man of about twenty-five,’ announced Sanson. ‘Well built. The face has been torn to pieces by a discharge of small shot. In my opinion, it’s quite impossible for such a terrible wound to have been caused by the pistol you found beside the corpse.’

‘As it happens,’ said Nicolas, ‘my examination of the inside of the cab did puzzle me: the shot had been scattered far too widely, and the windows had been broken. From which I conclude—’

‘That it can’t have been a suicide.’

‘In which case, what weapon could have been used?’

‘A hunting rifle seems a likely hypothesis, but I’m not happy with it. It would have had to be fired from quite a distance in order to produce such scattering.’

‘So the mystery remains impenetrable.’

‘Oh, no! There are weapons that could produce such a result, such as a blunderbuss.’

Nicolas began thinking aloud, while Sanson, who had broken off his work, looked on curiously. ‘Now that’s strange. When I was faced with that scene of carnage, two things struck me. I couldn’t help thinking that someone had tried to arrange things in such a way as to deceive a superficial examination. It seemed to me that all the elements were too neatly in place, and all led to the same observation: the body was that of a man who had killed himself, and the weapon he had used lay at his feet. And yet … several details had already attracted my attention: the shot scattered around the interior, but also the body itself. My friend …’

The word moved Sanson, whose amiable face lit up.

‘… could you examine the hands and feet of this corpse and tell me the results of your observations?’

Sanson proceeded with a meticulous investigation of the parts concerned, then looked up with a puzzled expression. ‘I’m not sure what I’m looking for. The only thing I can say for certain is that, despite the rich garments he’s wearing, this was a young man of lower class. A worker rather than a bourgeois. I would even say a peasant. The hands are callous, the nails black and soiled with earth, and scratched by thorns. The feet are wide and also possess particular characteristics. Frequently walking barefoot hardens the heels. Not very well cared for generally. Does that satisfy you?’

‘It confirms my suspicions. And when we know what this corpse was supposed to represent, or rather what it had the task of making people believe, there is, I think you’ll agree, good reason to wonder about the fairy tale they were trying to dish up! Added
to which, apart from a letter obligingly telling us the identity of the corpse, we discovered nothing in the pockets of his coat, none of those trinkets that everyone carries with them. Nothing!’

‘Not even a little black notebook?’ said Sanson with a smile.

‘Nothing at all. All of which means that this was an attempt to lead us astray. However, it appears to me so obvious – so obvious in its very falsity – that I’ve even started to wonder if we were meant to notice the attempt.’

There was a thought lurking at the back of his mind, a thought he did not want to formulate too hastily. He had not yet seen everything, and other elements might emerge to confirm the possibility. Perhaps … No, it was too soon. There was not much more to be learnt from this corpse. Everything pointed to the fact that it could not possibly be the younger Duchamplan, but was actually Vitry, the young gardener rescued from Bicêtre to become a coachman, engaged for God knows what dubious errands. It was he who, by pure coincidence, had driven Nicolas to Popincourt: the number of the cab proved that.

He thanked Sanson and prepared with him the interrogation he was planning of some of the servants from the Saint-Florentin mansion. The instructions he gave were specific: what they had to do was inspire fear merely by displaying the instruments of torture. He hoped that the terror this display would instil in witnesses who were little accustomed to the ways of the law would dissuade them from lying. His method consisted of paralysing the will to resist, but without, however, going as far as to exert direct pressure, which would take away any likelihood of honest answers.

At that moment, Bourdeau appeared, with a package in his hand. He greeted Sanson in a friendly manner.

‘So, Pierre, anything to report?’

‘I put all the servants at the minister’s house through hell, and finally, having wooed the linen maid in the wash house, I obtained what we were looking for.’

He untied the package and took out two shirts, one bloodstained, both freshly ironed, both identical in style and size.

‘That’s very good,’ said Nicolas. ‘I hope the linen maid was comely.’

The three friends laughed, then Nicolas summarised the results of the autopsy for Bourdeau.

‘You’re losing me,’ said the inspector.

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Nicolas. ‘But let’s look at it logically. Either we’re wrong in our observations, and this body is that of Eudes Duchamplan. In that case, which is highly unlikely, for the reasons that I’ve stated, in whose interest was it to kill him? Or else the body we see here is that of the cab driver, Anselme Vitry, the gardener from Popincourt and Marguerite Pindron’s former fiancé, and if we take into account a few doubtless deliberate blunders, it seems as though someone wanted us to assume, thanks to that bloodstained shirt, that the Duc de La Vrillière had been involved in another murder. Having been implicated in this latest one, that would confirm him as a suspect for the others.’

‘How could anyone have foreseen that we would search the apartment in Rue Christine?’ asked Bourdeau.

‘It was an easy assumption to make! Whether we took the body at the pleasure gardens for Duchamplan or someone else, the note found on the body was bound to take us to Rue Christine. What they hadn’t counted on was how quick we’d be. We arrived so early that we surprised Lord Ashbury.’

‘And what if all this was the work of the minister? What a brilliant idea, to implicate himself in such a way as to give us good reasons to exonerate him! He may be in league with Eudes Duchamplan, having probably frequented the same places of ill repute, with his major-domo as the go-between. That would tally with what the elder brother told us.’

‘Let’s not go too far,’ said Nicolas, ‘but stick as closely as possible to the facts. We have a corpse which someone tried to pass off as that of a suicide. We find a bloodstained shirt in the lodgings of the supposed victim. Whom does it implicate? The Duc de La Vrillière.’

Nicolas was pacing up and down.

‘It may be that we came in on the first part of something that had not been completely thought through,’ he resumed. ‘The linstock hasn’t yet reached the fuse. Imagine this shirt linked with the corpse at the pleasure gardens; the staging increased the horror of the crime and pointed to the supposed perpetrator.’

‘What are you planning to do now?’

‘I’ve given instructions to our friend Sanson here.’

‘I’m going to prepare everything in total earnest,’ said Sanson, ‘just as you asked.’

‘Are you going down that route, Nicolas?’ said Bourdeau, with a disapproving look on his face.

‘I have to, but it’ll only be a piece of play-acting.’

‘You do realise that, in such cases, a confession is merely a way of avoiding pain.’

‘I’m not necessarily after confessions, but information which has been concealed from the eyes of the law. I know I’m disregarding all the rules, since those I am summoning have not been accused.
It’s just a question of flushing each one out from his position, using the elements of surprise and threat. Some of them, I fear, are concealing a great many secrets.’

‘We need to arrest them, then,’ said Bourdeau.

‘You will summon them to follow you to the Châtelet without further ado for an interview with Commissioner Le Floch.’

Nicolas tore a sheet of paper from his black notebook, scribbled a few lines on it, and handed it to Bourdeau, who nodded and left without a word. Sanson remained in his lair, lighting his fires like Vulcan in his forge. Nicolas went back up to the duty office and again went through his notes, his lead pencil in his hand.

An hour later, Bourdeau reappeared, his face quite flushed.

‘You seem upset,’ said Nicolas.

‘I’ve had to confront a female dragon, whom the social graces demand I call the Duchesse de La Vrillière. She fought tooth and nail to stop me from proceeding with the arrests. Like all women, the last card she played was a fit of the vapours. I took advantage of that to leave her in helping hands.’

‘Good,’ said Nicolas. ‘She’ll get over it. We’re going to play several acts one after the other. Have these people taken into the corridor. We’ll leave the door open, and talk about it so that they think they’re in for a little interview designed to soften them up.’

Everything went as planned. Bourdeau returned and asked, ‘What are your intentions, Commissioner?’

‘Keep the witnesses ready to appear – I say witnesses, I ought
to say suspects – in the torture chamber. I believe the torturer and his assistants are ready to get down to the job?’

‘Indeed they are.’

‘Then let’s proceed with the preliminary session.’

‘An extraordinary one?’

‘Oh, no. Ordinary. I think that’ll suffice.’

‘Yes, of course. Five or six tin cauldrons. Tying the suspect to a plank and drowning him usually loosens his tongue.’

They both laughed.

‘Anything else?’

‘The boot, of course. We need to make sure the legs are held tight in the frames. Separate the kneecaps and ankles with two thick planks and put wedges between them. Wood for the women and iron for the man. And don’t forget to hit hard with the mallet. I think we should take the number of wedges all the way up to the authorised figure of twelve. That’s all. Take them down, I’ll join you in a moment.’

Nicolas soon followed Bourdeau and joined the group of witnesses, who were sitting, surrounded by members of the watch, on a stone bench in the dark gallery leading to the torture chamber. Strange noises were coming from the chamber, a particularly frightening din for anyone who had just heard Nicolas’s words. He decided to begin with Madame de La Vrillière’s head chambermaid, Eugénie Gouet, hoping to confound her with this atmosphere of menace. But she entered with her head held high and no apparent emotion. She was no longer as fresh and white as she had been before; her complexion now was grey, with red blotches. She gave him a look of defiance. In the gothic chamber, the assistants bustled about to the orders of a man in a green coat.
Bourdeau was standing behind a lectern, pen in hand, ready to take down a verbatim record of the interrogation.

‘You are here,’ said Nicolas in a monotonous voice, ‘as a witness and suspect of the murder committed at the Saint-Florentin mansion on 2 October 1774. The apparatus of justice you see around you should encourage you to answer my questions with complete honesty, the only response that will satisfy me as a magistrate and save you from the worst consequences.’

This speech did not seem to have any effect on the woman, but she was convulsively clenching her left fist, something Nicolas had already observed during her first interrogation and noted in his little black notebook.

‘Master Sanson, ask your assistants to be silent.’

The assistants froze. Only the crackle of the coals in the brazier continued to awaken echoes in the depths of the chamber.

‘Let’s begin,’ said Nicolas. ‘Were you the mistress of Jean Missery, at least until he developed a passion for the victim?’

She did not reply, her eyes fixed on the floor.

‘Am I to take your silence as assent?’

She raised her head. ‘I prefer to tell you the truth. Yes, Jean had been my lover. He’d even promised to marry me.’

‘That, in fact, is what the Duchesse de La Vrillière told a friend of hers, who passed the information on to me,’ said Nicolas, lying with an impassiveness that astonished Bourdeau.

The chambermaid’s reaction was one of despair, and she looked from right to left like an animal caught in a trap.

‘You agree, then. We know also that this domestic Don Juan had some difficulty in satisfying his new young friend, and wasn’t always in a state to—’

‘He wasn’t like that with me!’ she said angrily.

‘I believe you unreservedly. He wasn’t like that with you. But let’s imagine that someone gives the poor man some relaxing potion, something that would – not to mince words – make him impotent? Couldn’t the sleeping draught used and abused by Madame de La Vrillière have the ability, much appreciated by a neglected and jealous lover, to calm and even extinguish the ardour this man feels for another?’

She said nothing.

‘And if we imagine that the poor man, to overcome this new infirmity, starts using other more efficient additives, wouldn’t it then be advisable to double the dose of the potion in order to stop him joining his young mistress in ecstasy? I order you to speak, or I shall immediately hand you over to the torturer, who will extract the truth as he sees fit, I promise you that. I accuse you of having known that Marguerite Pindron would be in the kitchen that evening. Who was she meeting?’

Again she moved her head from side to side. Suddenly there came the sound of hurried footsteps. The door of the torture chamber was flung open and Monsieur Lenoir appeared,
red-faced
and out of breath, his double chin held tightly in his cravat.

‘Monsieur, I order you to cease this unjustified interrogation. It is contrary to all the rules established under my authority, which cannot be contravened. Free this unfortunate woman immediately, as well as the other witnesses currently awaiting your pleasure.’

Nicolas made a sign to Bourdeau, who conducted the Gouet woman, Sanson and the assistants out of the room.