The Case of the Climbing Rat: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “The difficulty was that nobody was ever very closely acquainted with Bariche—”

  “Except his victims.”

  “Precisely,” said Gallois imperturbably. “And the dead unhappily leave little evidence. But in that fire a man and a woman died, and the man wore the clothes which Bariche had been seen wearing, and Bariche’s ring was on his finger. Both had been shot and it was impossible to say who had died first. If the man was not Bariche, then who was he?”

  “But, if you will pardon the liberty, why repeat the conclusions of those who disagreed with us?” Charles asked dryly.

  “Because after all they may be right,” Gallois told him.

  “But there was always the fire. I admit again that there were those who disagreed with you, but—you will pardon the impertinence?—I myself believed your theories implicitly. ‘Bariche,’ I said to myself, ‘pretends to be dead and gets rid of another victim at the same time. Sooner or later he will reappear, and the trouble is that till perhaps many more women are dead we shall not be aware that we were right.’”

  Gallois was nodding to himself as he resumed his walk around the room. It was the fire at the Auteuil villa of which they had been talking, with its revelations, through the supposed discovery of the man’s identity, of the trail of victims that Bariche had left through France. The career of Landru had been far less horrifying than that of Bariche, and even then the police were of the opinion that many of his victims were still unknown. And another tragedy of the Auteuil fire had been that Bariche—dead or alive—had left behind him never a fingerprint. His methods, too, had been far more subtle than those of Landru. The women he had married were never young and callow, but of an age and kind to manage their own affairs, and he had always succeeded in avoiding personal contact with relatives. Later there would be a letter from the wife announcing a sudden business trip abroad, after which—nothing. And since the various disappearances were not focused about the one man, Bariche, till after the Auteuil fire, it had been extremely difficult for the police to hark back and compile a description of Bariche from the recollections of tradesmen and such others as had seen him or come into some brief impersonal contacts.

  Gallois halted again, nodded to himself, and then came back to his seat at the desk.

  “Let us leave all that,” he said. “This conversation which you have written down—what were your impressions?”

  “You assume that Bariche is alive?”

  Gallois made a gesture of impatience.

  “But certainly.”

  Charles nodded in satisfied acceptance.

  “Then I would say that Toulon is an admirable place for him to make a reappearance. The Riviera is one of the districts from which we had no information about him at all. Also he was not of the crude type who inveigled servants and typists. His women had money and were superior—the kind he would find at this moment, for instance, on the Riviera, during the spring.”

  The face of Gallois lighted for a moment.

  “Admirable,” he said. “As you say, this Bariche is the plausible, handsome type, and he has made money.”

  “It is also well over six months since the fire,” Charles said, “and he knows the public has accepted for a fact that he is dead. He would have waited that long to make sure.”

  “Yes,” said Gallois reflectively. “But the informer. What is his relationship with Bariche?”

  “There was a mention of secrecy,” Charles reminded him, if somewhat tentatively. “He said he had scruples and he wished the vital information to come through a third party.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, there is the possibility, for instance, that this informer may be a priest.”

  Gallois looked as if the idea had not occurred to him.

  “A priest,” he said, and frowned. “Then he obtained the information at the confessional, through some new victim whom Bariche has in mind. But how could that woman possibly suspect that her lover or fiancé was Bariche? The papers announced that Bariche was dead, and only you and I thought otherwise.”

  Charles shrugged his shoulders again.

  “A description was circulated, when we were hunting for information. Every paper published it.”

  “But a description is not a photograph. Besides this Bariche was a chameleon. The only thing of which we are certain is his height and build, and possibly the colour of his eyes.”

  “All the same, it is something,” Charles insisted. “But if you will pardon me, what good is it to speculate?” He smiled. “I remember an argument with M. Travers, who is what you called the grand théoriste—”

  Gallois had smiled at the first mention of Travers’s name, and at once he was seeing him in his mind’s eye. Travers, like himself tall and lean, and in other innumerable ways an affinity. Yet of a type that was essentially English: reticent and with easy optimisms; the perfect listener and the most loyal of colleagues; gravely courteous but with a mind so agile that to propound a problem was indeed to hear some theory of his arrive like an echo.

  “In our profession there are all types,” he said reprovingly. “When one indulges in theories like our good friend M. Travers, naturally one makes mistakes. But it is the genius of M. Travers that he himself sifts and discards the theories that are wrong, and sooner or later he arrives at the only one that is right. There was a certain mot of his—”

  “’It is only the fools who are never wrong.’” quoted Charles.

  “Precisely. And you yourself, my dear Charles, while remembering the argument, have forgotten the fact that on that same occasion it was M. Travers who again was right and whom I recommended to you as a model.”

  He smiled dryly as the face of Charles fell.

  “You would now tell me perhaps that this Bariche talks in his sleep, or that the woman is suspicious because he is already making preparations to secure her money.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But there are a hundred theories, as you say. Let us return then to the informer. If he is a priest, why should he be so anxious about the amount of the reward?”

  “You still desire me to theorize?” Charles asked, not without a certain pique.

  “But why not?”

  “Then if he is a priest, he will consider he is not breaking the seal of the confessional provided he can induce the third party to give information. As for the money, did you ever know a priest who had no use for money? Not for himself, necessarily. For some charity, perhaps, or a religious foundation.”

  Gallois nodded.

  “And his voice? It was that of a priest?”

  Charles gave a sly look. Gallois smiled sadly.

  “You think you discern a trap. You say to yourself that if he disguises his voice then he will speak unlike a priest. But was the voice disguised?”

  “In my opinion—not. And I still think it may have been the conversational voice of a priest.”

  The only comment of Gallois was to press the buzzer and lift the receiver.

  “It is you, Lucien? Then take this down as urgent, and particularly confidential. Ask Toulon to discover for us, if possible, the name of any father concerned with confessionals who has a voice that is high pitched and inclined to break. A tendency to being asthmatical, if they prefer. If there is time they should inquire in the neighbourhood as well as in the town itself. The information to be sent to me personally, at Nîmes, before Sunday next. Repeat, if you please.”

  He nodded as if satisfied as he hung up the receiver.

  “If this priest exists and there is any information,” he said to Charles, “it is you I shall send from Nîmes to obtain further information in advance. As apparently he knows me, I must not be seen in Toulon myself before the interview, or he may be alarmed. But one question that occurs to me. You are acquainted with Toulon even better than myself. Why the choice of the Syndicat d’Initiative for the rendezvous? Isn’t it near the Place de la Liberté where every one promenades at six o’clock? It is among crowds that one can always be unobserved.”

  �
�But the Syndicat building faces the Place,” Charles said. “Also it is not central. It is on one side, and you can have every one beneath your eye without being observed yourself.” His face lighted. “There is a lounge with a large expanse of glass that faces the Place and I seem to remember maps hung on it and notices of information. Any one could pretend to be looking at those and at the same time be really looking out at the promenaders in the Place de la Liberté. What I imply is that the priest could be out of sight himself and nevertheless be watching for you to approach.”

  “Excellent,” Gallois said. “Make arrangements, please, for us to have a meal here in this room, then bring all the papers relating to the affaire Bariche.”

  The papers came, but before he re-examined them he read again and again that description which had been carefully put together of Bariche as he had been known at Auteuil.

  ARMAND BARICHE, alias Bernard Aiglon, alias Hippolyte Defrère, alias Guillaume Tréfort, etc., etc, Height 1.57 metres approx., clean-shaven but may now be wearing a moustache and/or beard; colour of hair flaxen, but may have been dyed. Eyes blue-grey. Well built and carriage upright. Voice baritone and slight tendency to lisp. Lips full. Complexion pale. Chin pointed, and with dimple.

  As Gallois laid that description aside, he was clicking his tongue with a justifiable exasperation. There on the table before him was the only Bariche he had ever known—a Bariche of shreds and patches and mere words. And then suddenly he was nodding to himself with something of a grim resolve. If the informer were right—and in his heart and soul he believed that he was right—then in another week there should be another Bariche, and already his long fingers were crooking themselves and lifting as if to close tenaciously upon the shoulder of a real and living man.

  The following evening Gallois left for Nîmes where he was due at a conference. Charles accompanied him—though, when the conference was over, he was hoping to take a short holiday.

  It was on the Thursday—eight days before Good Friday, which fell late that year—that the two reached Nîmes. There Gallois learned that the person who had made the long-distance call from Toulon to the Sûreté could not be traced.

  The conference itself ended on the Saturday night, but there were various points to clear up and one rather boring function still to attend. Gallois dexterously pleaded urgency of work, and delegated the boredoms to Charles. As a set-off, Charles was definitely given his holiday. On the Wednesday, however, he was to be in Toulon at six o’clock, and on one of the seats of the Place de la Liberté nearest to the Syndicat building. What he did with himself in the meantime was his own affair.

  Gallois decided to have something of a holiday while awaiting the Wednesday’s meeting. Toulon had been wholly unsuccessful in its search for the supposed priest, and he took the autobus to Marseilles, and from there another that went to Toulon and along the coast. At Toulon, during a ten-minute halt, he squinted through the window at the place of the Wednesday’s meeting, and was gratified to see that Charles’s theory had had a considerable basis of fact.

  Early on the Monday the autobus that was taking him along the coast arrived at Carliens. Gallois had never been there before, and he found the place irresistibly attractive. Little over an hour in a fast car would bring him back to Toulon, as he told himself, and he made up his mind that he would go no farther. Till the Wednesday afternoon he would bask in the Carliens sun, and at the same time get together some ideas about Shakespeare and the French dramatists of the seventeenth century. From the Hôtel de France, where he booked a room, he once more rang the police at Toulon in case something should have happened since his departure from Nîmes. But nothing had happened. The Toulon authorities had made inquiries throughout the district and there was never a priest with a voice like that which Gallois had described.

  CHAPTER II

  THE CLIMBING RAT

  THERE may be a skeleton in every cupboard, but one would have thought that the Travers’s cupboard would have been the last in which to look. With them everything was going well: a delightful home, comfort without ostentation, a wide circle of friends and no possible fear of financial worries. Bernice and her sister were about to leave on a Mediterranean cruise that would last till well over Easter. Travers was to join them later at Marseilles on the return and the three were to travel by road through Paris and so home.

  Then almost on the eve of the cruise Travers discovered the skeleton. In some curious way he knew that Bernice was worried about something, but he made no comment and left the moment of revelation to her. He did imagine that the worry was due to a certain letter she had received, and it was when the second letter arrived some days later that she approached him.

  “Darling, I’m frightfully worried.”

  “About what?”

  She hesitated. “You’re going to be very angry with me.”

  “Am I?” said Travers. “That will be an event.”

  “Oh but you will. You see—well, I’ve kept something from you.”

  Travers was still smiling. “Really? And what’s his name?”

  She stared. “How on earth did you know?”

  The wind was taken clean out of Travers’s complacent sails. He fumbled at his glasses, which was a trick of his when suddenly surprised or on the edge of some discovery. Then Bernice understood.

  “It’s not a he of that kind. It’s Uncle Gustave.”

  Travers smiled feebly and let out a breath. “And who on earth is Uncle Gustave?”

  “Well, you knew Aunt Emily?”

  “Your Aunt Emily who died two years ago? Well, I’ve heard you mention her, but I don’t think I ever actually met her.” He thought of something.

  “She was a widow, wasn’t she?”

  “No,” said Bernice, still somewhat hesitatingly. “She was supposed to be a widow and her name wasn’t really Haire. The name was Rionne. She had been married to a doctor called Gustave Rionne.”

  Travels raised his eyebrows. “French, was he? Or naturalized?”

  Bernice frowned for a moment or two in thought. “It’s really very difficult for me to tell you all about it. It must have happened when I was quite a girl. He was French. I don’t think he was naturalized. In fact I am sure he wasn’t. I should have told you Aunt Emily confided all this to me two years ago, just before she died.”

  Travers was giving his glasses a polish. “Well, what’s all the worry?”

  “You mustn’t hurry me,” she said. “You’re getting me all muddled up. What was I saying? Oh, yes, that he wasn’t naturalized. He was frightfully clever, even Aunt Emily admitted that, and he was Harley Street, if that is anything to go by.” She frowned. “I don’t think I’ve got it wrong, but I believe Aunt Emily said he was one of the very first plastic surgeons who really did anything worth while, and then there was a scandal; something perfectly dreadful it must have been, and he was struck off the list, or whatever you call it. He went to France, or escaped to France, and Aunt Emily divorced him, and took her maiden name. About a year before she died she had a letter from him, From Switzerland I think it was, saying he was ill and very hard up, and begging for help, so she allowed him a small pension—about a hundred and fifty a year, I think—”

  “Pounds, of course, not francs?”

  “Yes, pounds. I think it was one hundred and fifty, because that is what she left in her will. A hundred and fifty pounds a year to be paid by some trustee or other. If he dies it goes to various charities, but Aunt Emily warned me he might pester me for money.”

  “And why should he know of your existence?”

  “I think he was sent a copy of the will. Aunt Emily would have insisted on that.”

  Travers nodded. “He wrote to you through the trustees and the letter was sent on. He asked you for the money?”

  “Yes. Only just recently though.”

  Travers held out his hand. “Do you mind if I see the letters?”

  “But you can’t,” she said. “They’re horrible. I mean the second one was horribl
e.”

  Travers shook his head. “I’m going to ask you a question. Forgive me if I’m being stupid, but has he any actual hold over you yourself?”

  She smiled. “Of course not! He was just raking up things against Aunt Emily, and hinting at making trouble.”

  Travers hooked off his horn-rims again and began giving them another polish.

  “Let me get this thing perfectly clear. His letter merely asked for money, and you sent him some—but not as much as he expected.”

  Her eyes opened. “But, darling, how on earth did you guess that?”

  “Because he wouldn’t have applied again so quickly,” Travers said, “and he wouldn’t have begun to put the screw on.” He looked up. “You don’t consider yourself bound in any way to send him money?”

  “I hate him,” she said. “I’ve hated him ever since poor Aunt Emily told me what she did.”

  “Know anything else about him—his personal appearance and so on?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know a thing except what I’ve told you.”

  “You’ve got the address where the money was to be sent?”

  She looked through her bag. “Here it is. Hótel de Sud, Carliens.”

  “Carliens,” said Travers reflectively. “Well past Hyères on the way to Cannes.” His fingers went to his glasses again, then fell. “My experience of this sort of thing, and I have had considerable experience in one way or another through the Yard, is that you’ve got to stop it straight away. May I tell you what I would like to do?”

  “But, darling, I want you to tell me.”

  “Well then. What I think I ought to do is this. I’ll leave for my holiday rather earlier and I’ll go down to the South, just as I intended, but I’ll make it my duty to drop in at the Hótel du Sud and run, my eye over Uncle Gustave. At my own particular moment I’ll have a word or two with him. After that—?” He smiled with a certain grimness and shrugged his shoulders for the rest.