The Murders at Impasse Louvain

by Richard Grindal

  It was just before one o’clock on a Friday when the jury retired. With nothing left to do but wait for the verdict, Gautier left the court and went to the Café Corneille which, as he had expected, he found crowded with lawyers and journalists who had been at the trial. Everyone was talking about the unusual way in which the advocate general had handled the case for the prosecution. Duthrey was among them and he spoke cynically about the motives of the authorities.

  ‘We forced them to put her on trial,’ he declared, ‘but the government didn’t want her found guilty. An acquittal is to be her reward for keeping silent over the late president.’

  ‘It was all a cover-up,’ a young lawyer suggested. ‘One can’t believe that the cook’s son was the Hassler woman’s accomplice. If you ask me someone much more important is being shielded.’

  ‘She’ll be found guilty,’ another lawyer put in, ‘the jury won’t be deceived by Romboufs tactics.

  On Duthrey’s suggestion they decided to hold a poll among themselves on what the verdict should be and as it happened there were twelve men sitting at the table. Duthrey tore up some paper into voting slips which he passed round the group.

  ‘Are we supposed to vote on whether we think she is guilty?’ Gautier asked.

  ‘Good God, no! We all know she’s guilty. Just write down how you think the jury will vote.’

  Everyone in the group wrote on his slip of paper, folded it and handed it to Duthrey who had appointed himself, as he said, foreman of the jury. While he was counting the votes some of the journalists began to bet on the result.

  ‘By ten votes to two,’ Duthrey announced after he had counted the slips, ‘Madame Hassler is acquitted.’

  To fill in the time until the real jury returned, the whole group went and lunched at the Cloiserie des Lilas, a restaurant which had made its name as a meeting place for poets and artists. The lunch was long and leisurely and alcoholic. Under the mellowing influence of red wine, Gautier found his irritation at the way Josephine Hassler’s trial had been conducted gradually disappearing. Although he was certain she had been involved in her husband’s murder, he was almost prepared to concede that it was less than fair that she should stand trial alone, while the person who had actually strangled Hassler remained free.

  They were all back in court when, at twenty-past-five the jury returned. Before the verdict was formally announced another inspector from the Sûreté, who had been waiting outside the jury room, slipped into the seat next to Gautier.

  ‘It’s not guilty,’ he said.

  ‘I was sure it would be,’ Gautier replied.

  ‘It was touch and go. The vote was only seven to five and it seems that when they took the first count it was eight to four for guilty. But then some of the ones who thought she should be acquitted talked the others round.’

  The announcement of the verdict, although it came as an anticlimax to Gautier, created a sensation in the court. A brief silence was quickly shattered first by a burst of cheering, then by much louder counter cheers and booing. Maître Bonnard and his assistants came forward to congratulate Josephine Hassler and then hurried her out of court. Before she left she stopped by the door of the court for a moment and turned to look at those who had tried her and those who had watched her trial. There was no relief and no pleasure in her expression, no gratitude nor emotion, only a defiant contempt.

  Outside the court Gautier met Courtrand who had managed to procure himself one of the very few seats reserved at the trial for important people. Courtrand said to him: ‘The right verdict, I think.’

  ‘Does that mean you don’t believe she was guilty?’ Gautier asked him bluntly.

  ‘My dear Inspector,’ Courtrand’s tone held no more than the merest hint of sarcasm. ‘All I believe is that we didn’t put a very good case into court.’

  XIX

  ONE MORNING DURING the week following the end of the trial, Surat came into Gautier’s office. He had the apologetic air of a man who came with news that might be unwelcome.

  ‘Is the Impasse Louvain affair still of any interest, patron?’ he enquired diffidently.

  ‘Officially we have been told that the case is closed, but that doesn’t mean it might not be re-opened. Why?’

  ‘For some weeks now I’ve been keeping an eye on the coachman from the Russian embassy. He’s very careful, that one, or he has been well paid to keep his mouth shut. But last night at last I managed to fill him up with a lot of Calvados and his tongue began to wag.’

  ‘What did you learn?’

  ‘That the Grand Duke Varaslav was at the Hasslers’ house on the night of the murders. The coachman dropped him off at the entrance to the street with another man, a detective whom the embassy had employed to accompany the ambassador everywhere.’

  ‘Yes, I know who that would be.’

  ‘But if the grand duke was implicated in the murders then one or two things will have to be explained.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘For example he evidently appears to have left the house well before the time when the murders are supposed to have been committed. The coachman swears he dropped the grand duke at Impasse Louvain not much after ten at the latest, and that he stayed only a short time, perhaps half-an-hour.’

  ‘That could be just long enough.’

  ‘To murder Hassler, tie him and the old lady up, fix the rooms so they would seem to have been ransacked by thieves?’

  ‘Yes, if it had been carefully planned in advance.’

  ‘Ah, there we have another snag.’

  Surat explained that although the grand duke had arranged to see Josephine Hassler that evening, he had called at her house much earlier than he had intended. The coachman had taken the grand duke together with his wife and daughter to a special charity performance at the Opera and he had been instructed that at the conclusion of the performance he was to take the ambassador to Impasse Louvain, while another coach would take the grand duchess and her daughter to a reception to be held by the Ministry of Fine Arts who had organized the performance at the Opera. During the interval of the performance however, the coachman had been summoned by the detective Fénelon and had taken both men to Impasse Louvain.

  ‘The coachman seems to believe that the Grand Duke Varaslav was drunk and that he had quarrelled with his wife.’

  ‘He seems a talkative philosopher, this coachman,’ Gautier remarked. ‘Did he have any ideas on why the ambassador stayed such a short time at the Hasslers’ house?’

  ‘He wasn’t surprised at that. Apparently the grand duke never wasted much time with his women. Easily aroused and quickly satisfied, so the coachman said.’

  ‘So he’s saying his master left the house soon after half-past-ten?’

  ‘Yes, that’s about it.’

  Gautier got up from his desk, crossed the room and stared thoughtfully out of the window. Rain was being slanted across the city by a cold breeze from the north-east. An old woman on the far side of the street was holding her arm bent across her forehead as protection and leaning into the wind as she walked. Two fiacres were stationed waiting for custom on the corner of the street, the drivers sheltering inside the carriages while the horses stood dumb and uncomplaining in the driving rain.

  What Surat had just told him had blocked off yet another of the paths which his mind had been exploring in an effort to arrive at the truth about the Impasse Louvain affair. Now it seemed clear that the Grand Duke Varaslav could not have been implicated in the murders. The fact that he had been packed off back to Russia and the detective Fénelon bribed to leave Paris proved nothing. Even if the ambassador was innocent the Russian government, knowing he had visited the Hassler household that night, would have wished to get him out of France to avoid any chance of his name being dragged into the scandal.

  At the same time Gautier had a very strong presentiment that he was now not far from learning the truth. There must be one factor, itself probably unimportant, which he had overlooked or misunderstood and which would pr
ovide the key to open the final door.

  As he stood by the window thinking, his stare became focused on a distant church clock on the other side of the Seine. Its hands stood at half-past-eleven. For almost a minute he looked at it, aware of an unformed idea which nagged at his conscious mind, telling him that the position of the hands, the time they showed, were in some undefined way significant.

  Then he remembered. Half-past-eleven was the time at which the alarm clock by the side of Félix Hassler’s bed had been set. Immediately from this starting point, his mind leapt forward moving from idea to idea at breathless speed. Suddenly he was left with a theory which, improbable though it might appear, provided the only logical answer to a dozen questions.

  ‘Come on,’ he called to Surat as he crossed towards the door of the office.

  Where are we going?’

  ‘To the Ritz Hotel.’

  * * *

  Their visit to the Ritz was brief. They were received in an office near the reception desk by an assistant manager whose impeccable morning coat was matched only by his impeccable manners. When Gautier explained that he wished to speak with the doorman who had been on duty at the hotel’s Rue Cambon entrance on the night of 31 May, the assistant manager went to great trouble, checking through a mass of staff records and duty sheets which had been filed away.

  We are not often required to check these records,’ he explained with an apologetic smile and then when he had found the sheets he needed he added: ‘Ah, I feared as much, Inspector. It is Vallière whom you will wish to see.’

  ‘And is that not possible?’

  ‘Vallière has left our service; more than a month ago.’

  Gautier looked at the assistant manager, sensing a hint of disapproval in the man’s tone. ‘And may I ask why?’

  ‘He was dismissed for dishonesty. The hotel decided not to lay any charges against him, of course. The scoundrel was probably counting on that.’

  The assistant manager was not able to say whether the doorman had found another post or where he was living, but that information did not take long to unearth. Surat was allowed into the hotel kitchens to speak with members of the staff and he soon returned with the answers. Vallière, it seemed, had bought a hotel of his own in Rue St Denis.

  As he and Gautier were leaving the Ritz, Surat remarked: ‘This Vallière must have swindled on a big scale to have made enough to buy a hotel.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Guests at these top-class places tip well. The doorman at Maxim’s bought himself a chateau in the Pyrenees when he retired.’

  Surat sighed. ‘Who’d be a policeman!’

  Vallière’s place in Rue St Denis, the Hotel de Soleil, proved to be an establishment very different from the Ritz. Its tiny entrance was squeezed between two shops and on the three floors above there were perhaps six to eight bedrooms. Even without the sign posted on the door ‘Chambres a Louer’ one would have instantly recognized the place for what it was—a hotel de rendez-vous to which the streetwalkers in the district took their clients. There were hundreds of similar hotels to be found in Paris, around the railway stations, near the Moulin Rouge and the big Café Concerts, in Pigalle and on the Left Bank.

  They found Vallière behind a small reception desk in the narrow lobby of the hotel. He was a tall, slim man in his late thirties who would have been good-looking but for his small, mean eyes.

  Wasting no time on preliminaries, Gautier identified himself to Vallière and then said: ‘We’re making enquiries about a matter which took place when you were working at the Ritz.’

  ‘Hey, wait a minute! The hotel isn’t pressing charges.’

  ‘You misunderstand me. We’ve not come about anything you did.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘We’re interested in a certain Colonel de Clermont who’s a regular patron of the Ritz. You know who I mean of course.’

  ‘Hundreds of colonels stay there,’ Vallière replied evasively. ‘It’s that sort of place.’

  ‘You know the man all right. He had a lady friend who visited him in his suite and always used the Rue Cambon entrance. No doubt you looked after the lady from time to time; called up a fiacre for her and so on and no doubt the colonel was suitably grateful.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  Gautier was beginning to lose patience with the man and his voice took on a much harsher tone as he said:

  ‘Then let us see whether we can revive your memory. If not I’ll arrange that from this afternoon a policeman will patrol the pavement outside your hotel 24 hours a day.’

  ‘You can’t do that. What girl is going to bring a man here if there’s a flic hanging around?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  After a short, surly silence Vallière shrugged his shoulders. ‘All right, have it your way. Yes, I remember the colonel. He was a real gentleman who knew how to behave. Once or twice I was able to do him a small favour and he always showed his appreciation.’

  ‘Right. Now I want you to cast your mind back to the night of Saturday 31 May. You were on duty that night at the Rue Cambon entrance of the hotel.’

  ‘My God, that was months ago! How can I be expected to remember that far back.’

  ‘It was a special night for the colonel. He had come to Paris to attend the dinner of the Cercle Agricole. He went to the dinner and returned to the hotel soon after eleven o’clock and took his key from the night porter. We have reason to believe that he then walked through the hotel to the Rue Cambon entrance and went out again. No doubt you fetched him a fiacre.’

  ‘Well, he went out late at night more than once, I can tell you.’

  ‘I’m sure he did, but this was also a special night for another gentleman, a Monsieur Félix Hassler. He was murdered that night.’

  ‘Mother of God! The Impasse Louvain murders! You’re surely not trying to say the colonel was involved.’

  ‘The lady whom Colonel de Clermont invited up to his suite so often was Madame Hassler.’

  Vallière stared at Gautier in dumb astonishment. Behind the stare his mind was working laboriously assembling the implications of what he had just been told. Though he was quick enough in calculating ten per cent or when it came to pocketing a tip, reasoning was not Vallière’s most conspicuous talent.

  ‘My God!’ he exclaimed again and then laughed. ‘The cunning bastard! And to think I never put two and two together! If I had, it would have cost him a lot more than a ten-franc tip, I can tell you!’

  ‘Come on, let’s have the full story.’

  Now that his memory had been stimulated, it was remarkable how clearly Vallière remembered the events of the night of 31 May. Colonel de Clermont, as Gautier guessed, had indeed gone out again after returning from his club dinner. Vallière had whistled up a fiacre for him from the corner of Rue Cambon and he even remembered the driver of the fiacre, a solid dependable fellow whom he had often arranged to hire when the job was a delicate one and the pay likely to be good, for they had an ‘arrangement’. The colonel had been well on the way to being drunk, Vallière had noticed, and he had muttered about wanting to go and see a lady on the Left Bank. He had returned to the hotel in the same fiacre at about one-thirty a good deal more sober. Vallière also remembered that his shirt front was badly stained with what looked like ink.

  ‘He gave me ten francs and said I was to be sure not to tell anyone about his little late-night adventure.’ Vallière concluded. ‘I took it for granted he’d been to some high-class whore shop.’

  ‘You may be required to make a statement on oath later,’ Gautier told the man as he and Surat prepared to leave the Hotel de Soleil. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  ‘Not willingly. Remember that! It’s a fine thing when the police stoop to blackmail.’

  XX

  A PERSISTENT DRIZZLE, almost too fine and too light to deserve the name of rain, hung over the featureless countryside as Gautier was being driven from the railway station to the Chateau d’Ivry. This was typical autumn weather, he refl
ected. He had never understood how people found romance in autumn; to him it was a season of damp and decay, of sadness for the spent virility of summer and forlorn expectation of a cheerless winter. The Chateau d’Ivry itself, shrouded in the drizzle, seemed silent and unresponsive, as though immersed in gloomy thoughts of its own.

  The manservant who opened the door to him was the same one as on his previous visit and he was kept waiting in the hall, while the man went to see whether his master would consent to see Gautier. A full-length portrait of a large woman with thick lips and a swollen bosom, presumably the colonel’s late wife, hung on the wall facing the front door. The expression on the face of the woman was a combination of greed and disappointment, as though in her life she had lusted for many things, material possessions, fine clothes, men and had found them all without ever finding satisfaction.

  In a few moments the servant returned and ushered Gautier into the study where Colonel de Clermont, dressed in riding habit, was standing looking out of the window. The setting, the colonel’s stance and posture, the position of the books and papers which lay on his desk were so similar to everything he remembered from his last visit that Gautier could not help feeling that he was looking at a photograph.

  ‘I can’t imagine what business brings you here, Inspector,’ de Clermont said without looking round. ‘I read in the papers that Madame Hassler’s trial had ended and that she had been acquitted.’

  ‘That’s true, but the case has not been closed. It cannot be closed until the person who killed Félix Hassler has been brought to trial and convicted.’

  ‘You speak almost as though you knew who killed the man.’ De Clermont turned round to look at Gautier. His mouth was smiling but his eyes were watchful.

  ‘Oh I do, Colonel. I do.’

  ‘Really? Or are you guessing once again? Just as you guessed that Josephine must have strangled her husband and gagged and bound herself to her bed?’

  ‘We were right about one thing. Madame Hassler was lying. And you were lying, Colonel, when you said you had not been at Impasse Louvain that day. You went to the Hasslers’ house after you returned from your club dinner.’