by Adrian Speed
“All of you?”
“Us two,” he indicated the woman he had been sitting next to who declined to stand. “Are you the detective?”
“Hannah Delaronde,” I nodded. “And you are?”
“Etienne Deshaies, junior lecturer, and this is Adélie, one of my PhD students.” With a glare from Etienne Adélie reluctantly stood up. She was a year or two older than I was, with jet black hair that had been attacked by shears into a rough bob. She wore black too, dark black trousers and a thin black and white striped jumper that must have been extremely fashionable. She glared at the room like a rebellious child. She rested her elbow in her hand, her fingers by her lips. They twitched with irritation. A smoker? Or a guilty conscience perhaps?
“And how did you find out the treaty was missing?”
“We’re taking high detail photographs of all the documents in that room,” Etienne explained. “For conversion to microfilm, and for our research.”
“And the treaty was due to be photographed?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know it was stolen? How did you know it wasn’t just misplaced by an incorrect archive index?”
“Our first job when we arrived was to check the inventory, the treaty was definitely in the room at the start of the month,” Etienne assured me.
“So the treaty could have been stolen any time in the last month?” My heart fell.
“We’re fairly sure it happened yesterday,” Etienne said with a grin.
“Why?”
“None of us remember the lock being broken before that.”
I knelt down to look at the lock. It was a drum lock, probably twelve pins. It would have been hard to pick, so instead someone had dumped a load of acid into it until the mechanism would have opened for a screwdriver. Not the most elegant solution.
“Could you show me the exact location of where the treaty should be?” I asked the director. The director looked blank and turned to Etienne. The lecturer stepped inside the archive room and beckoned I should follow and Sir Reginald slid along behind us.
“It should be here,” Etienne reached a point in the racks about four feet from the door. “As far as I can tell no-one but Adélie and I had touched it since the day it arrived in the archives.”
I ran my finger along the rack mountings carefully. The index numbers of the archive were listed in small type. It would have been impossible to know what was where unless you knew the index code.
“Nothing else is disturbed?” I asked
“Not that we can tell, but we don’t really want to take everything out if we can help it. Adélie and I did a quick ‘flip-through’ check and everything else seems to still be there.”
“You two are the only ones who know the archive well?”
“This part of it, we’ve been in here every day, and photographed well... everything from that wall to here.”
With a jolt I stopped running my finger just above where the Treaty of Fontainebleau should have been. There was dust, just a little bit, nestled on the rack.
“I thought this place had to be kept spotless,” I said, lifting the dust up with my finger.
“It does,” Etienne’ eyes swelled at the sight. “It is. The air is filtered. When there isn’t an archivist in the room they’re shut away from dust and humans for years at a time.”
“That’s not dust,” Sir Reginald said, hovering just behind me.
“What? What else could it be?”
“Custard powder.”
Chapter V
Etienne looked blank in the face of the English phrase. Sir Reginald had slipped into English for just those two words.
I tried to make things clearer. “It’s not going to be crème anglaise.” It only seemed to make Etienne more perplexed. Nevertheless, as the powder slipped between my finger tips it did have the right consistency. It was fine, much finer than regular dust, almost a liquid. The only way to be sure would be to check under a microscope but... I brought my finger to my lips.
“Definitely not custard powder,” I cringed. “That’s corn starch. Pure corn starch.”
“Why would there be corn starch down here?” Etienne looked from me to the remaining scattering of dust in horror, no doubt imagining all the document-eating creepy crawlies that might be attracted to the smell of corn starch.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you have a sample bag, Sir Reginald?” He fished one out of a pocket and I scraped a little of the powder into the bag. My taste test might need more scientific methods to back it up later.
So far it wasn’t a lot to go on. A hole in the archive where the treaty should have been, a melted lock, and a sprinkling of corn starch, it hardly pointed the finger at anyone. I was going to have to do this the long-winded, old fashioned way.
“Back into the... the...” I stumbled over my words. “What do you call that room with all the desks?”
“Examination room,” Etienne said.
“Let’s get back to the examination room.”
I took another look around the assembled ‘suspects’ as the director had labelled them. Etienne sat back down with Adélie. I felt I could trust them, at least somewhat. They had complete access to the archive room and if they hadn’t reported the treaty stolen it might have gone unnoticed for decades. If they had stolen the treaty it would be one of the dumbest double bluffs in history.
Beside Adélie sat another woman. She was older, perhaps in her forties, and wore large round glasses. Curly red hair was held back by a clasp that seemed about to be overwhelmed at any moment. She almost seemed to be trying to fade into the background, curled up on herself and staring at the ground.
Lounged across several chairs, with his feet up on another, sprawled a man in his twenties. My brain instantly said ‘American’ when I looked at him, but I couldn’t say precisely why. Something in the body language. He had chestnut brown hair as long as the 1960s would allow it, with sideburns that ran down to his chin. Despite the rebellious hair he wore a cream suit and even had a hat. In keeping with the hair he left the cuffs and collar unbuttoned.
One man stood in the far corner like a preening bird. He wore a suit that could rival Sir Reginald’s, complete with silk waistcoat and shoes that shone even in the shadows. Of them all he seemed the most irritated to be stuck here, fiddling at the ring on his finger and glaring at the room.
Finally there was a man in his fifties leaning over the desk, chewing on an unlit pipe and staring into the middle distance. What was going on in the examination room was of no interest to him; his mind was dancing with the wonders and mysteries of the universe.
“Is this everyone who was in the building during the theft?” I asked the director.
“Everyone except one of the cleaners,” Director Michel said. “She’s the only one doing the cleaning now the rest of the staff are on strike and she lives in the building so there was no reason to hold her here.”
“I’ll want to talk to her as well.”
“I’ll take you to her whenever you ask.”
“Very well.” I put my hands on my hips and addressed the room. “Allow me to properly introduce myself. I am Hannah Delaronde, associate of Sir Reginald Derby, and I’m here to find the treaty and its thief. I do not have legal authority but I hope you cooperate with my investigation. By the time the police can spare time to look for the treaty it might have already disappeared in some private collection on the other side of the world.”
“It may already be there,” the American muttered in English.
“What I want from you now, one by one, is your name, your occupation, and why you were here in the archives.” I ignored the interruption. “I already know Etienne and Adélie’s reason, so let’s start with you.” I pointed to the man chewing his pipe. He blinked a few times, as if waking from a dream, and spoke with a Provençal accent.
“Leopold Chéron, I am a linguist from Marseilles. I have been building a corpus to research how the minority languages of France have impacted Frenc
h spoken at court,” the man said. “I rarely left the archives in any case, but my rooms are out in the suburbs. I don’t have a car, so with everyone on strike I’m... stuck.”
“And you?” I pointed to the preening man in the shadows.
“Sylvain Thibodeux, I am a mathematician. My research is too complex for you to understand, but much like my rotund friend here I am stuck without transport.” He barely looked up while he talked.
“And you?” I asked the woman in the glasses.
“Oh. Um. Er,” she adjusted her glasses and tried to shrink behind them. “I’m an archivist. I’m one of the only ones left looking after the collection, beside the director. So um... that’s why I was here.”
“And your name?”
“Oh! Madeleine,” she flushed with embarrassment.
“And you?” I asked the American.
“Walter Beauregard,” he said. “And I’m a draft dodger.”
“That doesn’t explain why you were here in the archives.”
“Doesn’t it?” He cocked an eye. Eventually he shrugged. “I’m here to study the French and Indian War, according to all my paperwork. Maybe once I’ve got my PhD the draft board will think I’m too much of an egg-head for Vietnam and I can go back to the States. Of course, while I’m here I don’t fancy getting mixed up in a pinko revolution.” He shot a glare at Adélie. “So the moment Condy-bendy set himself up as a miniature Mao I just moved into the archives.”
“That’s very forthcoming, Mr Beauregard.”
“I ain’t got anything to be afraid of. I’ve got my 2-S student deferment. But whenever I meet another American I think it’s best to make the situation plain before they start getting ideas,” Beauregard narrowed his eyes slightly. “You are an American, ain’t you?”
“Canadian. Can’t you hear the Québécoise?”
“Never been one for accents, even in English,” Beauregard shrugged and turned away, as if I’d instantly become boring.
“I’ll be interviewing you all individually soon,” I said to the room at large. “But if anyone saw anyone or anything suspicious it would be good to get it out in the open now before I have to grill it out of you.”
The group was silent, save for Leopold chewing his pipe.
“Do you really expect any of us to have seen anything?” Sylvain asked. “There’s just the six of us in this palace, seven if we include the director, and we each have different areas of expertise. Other than in passing, I am not sure I had ever even met these people until the director herded us together.”
“It’s always worth asking,” I shrugged. Because the earlier I get you to start lying to me, I thought, the faster I can catch your lies out. “Director Michel, could you please give us a tour of the building, and take us to the cleaner.” I ran my eyes over the ‘suspects’. I could trust them not to tamper with things, they’d guard each other. Unless they were all in on it.
“You want to see the whole building?” Director Michel looked surprised.
“At least an overview, yes. At the very least I need to see every single point of entrance.”
“Ah, well, ah. Follow me, please.” The director waved us along the corridor and Sir Reginald fell into step behind me.
Sir Reginald waited until there were two closed doors behind us before he spoke.
“Did you notice the alarm mechanism on the archive room door?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “I was going to do a more thorough look around the room after we’d talked to the suspects.”
“It was very carefully tricked,” Sir Reginald said. “It required someone with a very good understanding of electronics to bypass the original mechanism and create a sufficiently accurate bypass to fool the alarm system. You will see for yourself when we return but it was... perfectly done.”
“And that level of perfection requires patience,” I said, catching onto Sir Reginald’s train of thought. “Patience not shown when it came to picking the lock.”
“Exactly so,” Sir Reginald agreed. “Almost as if it was done by two different people.”
The pair of us followed the director around the building. The archive was formed of three quadrangle buildings surrounding three courtyards like an old fashioned university building. Unsurprising, as it had once been a medieval palace, I supposed. There were few exits to the outside world. There was the museum entrance we came through, all locked up tightly. There was a workers entrance, which was a steel door protected by a combination lock. It was undamaged. There were few fire exits, and all of them were alarmed. I inspected the systems carefully and none of them seem to have been bypassed.
“How many of the academics know the combination for the lock?” I asked.
“Etienne and Adélie were given the combination, and Madeleine would know it, but none of the others,” the director said. “The other three would use the archive entrance.”
“Could you show us please?”
The archive entrance was a pair of double doors that led out into the street. They were bolted, barred and locked from the inside. Between the archive and the doors sat a reception lobby and another pair of double doors.
“Normally we would have staff here allowing members of the public into the building,” the director explained. “Making sure they stay in the public galleries, or directing them to the archivists who would open up the archives if they had permission to see an old document. This is where the academics come in. Of course, all our staff are either home or on strike...” the director fell into grumbling about the revolutionaries.
I looked around the lobby carefully; looking for any sign things had been disturbed. It was not easy. Thousands of people passed through every week, everything was disturbed on a regular basis. The bolts and bars meant that certainly no-one was getting in from outside without help. Could someone have unbarred this door to let someone in? Or let the treaty out?
“There!” I let the word escape as I crowded around a smudge on the metal cross bar. It was at head height, and almost impossible to spot even from an inch away.
“What is it?” The director crowded in to see.
“A very... very small amount...” I pulled a pair of tweezers from my pocket to lift it up. “Of make-up.”
“Make-up?” Director Michel stepped back from it. I could feel disappointment radiating from him. “What good is that?”
“It means that since these doors were barred someone caked in the stuff rested their head here, director,” I said and took a sample bag offered by Sir Reginald to scrape the make-up into. “And I’d be very interested to know why.”
*****
But first I had the director take me to the cleaner. She was more like a barrel than a woman, with arms made of rope and tar. She had black hair, fading to iron grey, a bun wound so tight you could set your watch by it. She did not seem pleased to see us.
“Don’t need no disturbances, my time of life, never did nothing to no-one,” she had a low-level grumbling similar to an idling diesel engine while she bustled around her small flat trying to make space for us.
“We only need to know if you have seen anyone suspicious going into the archives recently,” I asked.
“Nantes is completely overrun.” The cleaner didn’t seem to take any notice of me. She flung herself into an aging gingham chair. “They’ve blocked up the roads, can’t get in or out.” She rapped on a box radio to explain how she knew. Then she picked up a glass of port, generously large, and took a swig from it. “And where’s de Gaulle in all this? Where’s the army? The communists are taking over the country and we’re sat here doing nothing.”
“I’m sorry, I am not sure if you heard me.” I cleared my throat. “I’m trying to solve the theft of the treaty. I need to know if you saw or heard anything suspicious yesterday, or in the last few weeks, to suggest a thief might be preparing for a theft.”
“Should be out there restoring order. An old woman isn’t safe walking to the shops by herself in this.” The cleaner’s grumbling
slowly ground to a halt and she fixed her hard eyes on me, as if seeing me for the first time. “Wotcha want?”
“To ask you if you’ve seen anything suspicious–”
“The students in the Sorbonne aren’t suspicious enough for you? It was probably one of them.”
“While it may prove to be, I require evidence to–”
“Evidence? They’re occupying the city! That’s all the evidence you should need!”
“But–”
“I’ve lost my entire staff to the general strike. What do they want? I see ’em paid well, they’ve got good government pensions, but when the students get the thrashing they deserve suddenly everyone throws up their hands in horror,” the cleaner took another large swig of port. I was beginning to wonder if the cleaner was actually capable of a coherent thought unrelated to the strikes. “But that’s Algerians for you.” The cleaner spat. “They’re not even in a union. They’re just lazy.” The cleaner fixed me with another hard look. “That black haired girl always looked a shifty one.”
“Adélie?”
“If that’s the name of the girl with the chimneysweep haircut,” the cleaner shrugged. “Pompidou always seemed a little too smug about it all you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was his plan all along.” She went back to the politics and I despaired.
“Please, Madame, is there anything you actually saw which might be suspicious?”
“Not that the other side is much better of course,” the cleaner continued thinking about politics. Something went thwack at the window. All eyes turned to a black cat that was hanging from the guttering and bashing its head against the window. The windows overlooked one of the courtyards.
A tiny motion in the cleaner’s hands caught my eye. They raised up as if to get out of the chair and head towards the window, but then fell still in an instant.
“Is that your cat?” I asked.