Dazed with shock, he had brought the mare back to her stall, fed her and brushed her down before collapsing here, a few yards away from the house, whose shutters were all closed.
He was obsessed with one thought: he had got the wrong one! How could he have known that the blonde had died her hair black?
He paid the bill and crossed the street, still lit by the red glow from the bakery, went up the three floors to his room and lay down. He was tired, but sleep eluded him. What had happened at the La Villette tollgate seemed not to belong to any chronological sequence of time. He remembered having followed Sophie Clairsange for several days. How long, exactly? He could not remember. First, she had gone to a street near the church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. She had stopped the carriage in front of an elegant house, but had simply looked at the building without getting out. Then she had done the same thing opposite a large town house in Rue de Varenne, and then again in Rue des Martyrs, outside a residential building.
Corentin Jourdan had carefully taken note of all three addresses, hoping to identify the residents and match their names to the information he had found in the blue notebook.
A train whistling broke the silence, and all of a sudden he felt unbearably lonely. He missed his home, Gilliatt, Flip, even old Madame Guénéqué. He had neither friends nor confidants in his quest, only the certainty that he must do everything in his power to achieve his end. Eventually, he fell asleep. His dreams were filled with the image of Clélia.
At daybreak a series of violent blows threatened to break down the door of the wooden shed. Martin Lorson, yawning and scratching his aching head, opened the door to Alfred Gamache, who was fuming with rage.
‘Is that the way you thank me, eh? And to think that, if I hadn’t helped you, you’d be sleeping under a bridge by now! D’you think I’m stupid? The police found a stiff by the canal, so they came looking for me and what did they find? My hat and bayonet abandoned in the dust! Good thing I turned up sharpish just after. I told them I’d responded to an urgent call of nature, leaving the symbols of my authority to keep guard in my place. I said that whoever had throttled the poor woman must have perpetrated the dreadful crime while I was otherwise distracted.’
‘Did they believe you?’
‘I should hope so, because thanks to you I’m in a fix! Apparently, they’re going to summon me to the police station for questioning some time soon!’
‘You … you’ll keep me out of it, won’t you?’
The knot in Martin Lorson’s stomach seemed to rise up to his throat, and he began to stammer, terrified to admit that what he had persuaded himself was a hallucination brought on by the rum had actually happened, and that he had witnessed a murder.
‘Yes, you imbecile, but it’s not as a favour to you. If they find out about my escapade, I’ll lose my job. Now, spit it out.’
‘What?’
‘Tell me what happened, by God! They didn’t just invent it, did they?’
‘The truth is … I’d dropped off for a moment. I’d had a bit to drink, and then I just fell asleep. When I woke up, I saw a man standing next to a woman, all stiff and stretched out, and I was so afraid that I—’
‘Blind drunk, I’ll bet!’
‘No, I swear, I was just tired. I promise it won’t happen again, Alfred!’
‘Well, there’s no point fretting about it now. One of the flics is an old army pal. And, in any case, stiffs turn up all the time around here, so one more now and again doesn’t cause a stir … Go on, you old scoundrel, go back to sleep, and, word of honour, it’ll be our secret. We’ve been mates for so long, we won’t fall out over a crime of passion.’
When Gamache was gone, Martin Lorson stayed wide awake. A crime of passion? He kept seeing the villain in the felt hat rifling through the bag, indifferent to the fate of the woman spread-eagled on the pavement.
Something didn’t fit.
Martin Lorson struggled to order his thoughts. It was a laborious process, but eventually he managed to piece the jigsaw together.
A masked woman plays hopscotch in front of the rotunda.
An unseen carriage stops behind the toll barrier. Someone jumps out and, after a brief exchange of words, strangles the woman and disappears. The carriage drives off, clip-clop clip-clop clip-clop.
‘That much I’m sure of. So why did the bloke come back again straight away?’
Martin Lorson finished off the last dregs of the rum and all of a sudden it hit him like a slap in the face: the killer couldn’t be in two places at once, so there must have been a second criminal lying in wait. Yes, that was it! And it was this second man who had come back to peer at the dead woman’s face.
‘Unless … unless the strangler never got back into that blasted carriage. What if he saw me? If he did see me …’
Martin Lorson thrust his trembling hands into his pockets. His fingers closed round the medallion. He stifled a curse.
Wednesday 14 February
A man was loitering outside 18, Rue des Saints-Pères. Dressed in a tightly fitting overcoat and a black velvet beret, rather like a latter-day Van Dyck, he was feigning an interest in the window of the Elzévir bookshop. On the left-hand side, several books about famous criminal cases and how they were solved were on display, with the complete works of Émile Gaboriau taking pride of place. The right-hand side was filled with old books illustrated with engravings, and other more recent ones, many of them English, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.6
It was a dank, gloomy morning, and a persistent drizzle was making the paving stones damp and treacherous. The streets were deserted. The same could not be said of the bookshop, though, which had been invaded by a quartet of society ladies all decked out in their winter finery. There was an old man with them who had the look of a poet about him: his forehead was marked by fine lines and the corners of his mouth were curled into a sardonic expression, only partly masked by his luxuriant beard.
Maurice Laumier peered in through the window. Kenji Mori, one of the owners, was making a discreet exit up the stairs leading to the flat above the shop, whilst Joseph Pignot, his assistant, was leaning against a fireplace adorned with a bust of Molière, reading a newspaper. There was no sign of the other owner, Victor Legris.
Making his way over to the porch of the adjoining building, Maurice Laumier deliberated for a moment before resigning himself and knocking on the door of the concierge’s room.
‘Be brave,’ he adjured himself. ‘Mustn’t fall at the first hurdle!’
Micheline Ballu abandoned her pile of carrots and turnips. The scandalous corruption of these final years of the century had spawned more than its fair share of eccentrics, and since she and her late husband had begun working as concierges in this neighbourhood full of bookish types and students, nothing surprised her any more. She hardly batted an eyelid at the sight of the damp and dishevelled dandy. By the look of him, he was probably trying to sell her something.
‘O keeper of the gate, goddess of this vestibule, please be so good as to tell me where the venerable Monsieur Legris is currently residing.’
The concierge had been about to rebuff her unwelcome visitor, but to