The Haunted Detective

by Pirate Irwin

The colonel smiled apologetically.

  “Well yes indeed one would have to be a fool to be optimistic at this time. Anyway rather than waste any more of your time than is necessary, that is effectively my line of defence. I think there’s enough contrition within it to earn me a reprieve from the firing squad,” he said.

  Lafarge wished he could be as confident, he felt it fell way short of a contrite admission of guilt even though treason would be hard to prove without anyone having written evidence of support for a Nazi victory.

  “I’m glad you are so content. However, I think to ensure you do escape the firing squad you are going to have to denounce the others for their complicity in the round-up of the Jews, or if you can’t bring yourself to do that at least the Milice’s torture and murders of innocent French people, some of whom were only guilty of rebelling against a misguided government allied to an evil regime.

  “The others were simply executed as reprisals and had nothing to do with the actions of the maquis,” said Lafarge falling back on his final reserves of argument and patience.

  His father rolled his eyes, almost as if he too had reached the limits of his own patience at being harassed by his alcoholic son, who for some reason still retained his job and had even gained promotion but in the process lost his own son whilst his wife and daughter lay at the bottom of the ocean.

  “No, Gaston I draw the line there. Like it or not the maquis were undermining the French Government and attacking our allies the Nazis, for that there was no option but to deal with them severely,” said the colonel defiantly.

  “I think I go far enough in what I said earlier that the Marshal and I should have been more aware of the concerns of the vast majority of people. That, however, does not go so far as to extend mercy to those who resorted to violence. They knew the risks they were taking and that if caught the penalties would be severe, so excuse me if I don’t weep for them.”

  Lafarge leant back in the rickety wooden chair and breathed in deeply before puffing out his cheeks. He’d done his bit, and called on every argument he could find and been largely rebuffed. He would have liked to put it down to his father’s pride refusing to accept his son’s advice. Once the patriarch always the patriarch and his father wouldn’t let that mantle fall until his last breath.

  However, the awful realisation was dawning on him that his father wouldn’t give a yard because he still believed they had been essentially right, and defeat and their association with a truly evil regime had not made the slightest bit of difference in shaking that belief.

  “Don’t worry Gaston this is at least one member of the family you can say you fought your hardest to save,” said his father, returning to his vituperative worst.

  Lafarge once again did not rise to the bait, hoping his father’s provocative language was just a protective device to distance his son so that if it came to the firing squad he would not feel too sad.

  Lafarge rose as did his father and they shook hands, the look in the colonel’s eyes warmer than his words.

  “You know Gaston I sent people to their deaths in front of a firing squad, back in the time of the Mutiny of 1917. We saved as many as we could, poor buggers one could hardly blame them for running out of patience with some of the appalling demands made on them by some of the generals,” he said.

  “However, not all could go unpunished and we probably sacrificed a few who should have also been reprieved. But that is how it was, and if it should happen to me too, well I will have little to complain about,” he added his voice almost inaudible.

  Lafarge, who had picked up the box of cigars and handed them to his father, smiled and felt a lump rise in his throat, tears too began to well up, but he bit his lip and opened the door allowing his father to go ahead of him.

  It had been ever thus.

  ***

  “So Chief Inspector is your father coping well enough ahead of the trial?” asked Hugo Levau, Lafarge’s younger partner.

  Lafarge nodded and took a sip of the coffee that Levau had thoughtfully provided when he had arrived at the Quai early in the morning.

  He had been unable to sleep, anxiety over his father’s indifference to how his defence would sit with the court keeping him awake. Was it because he couldn’t believe he would be condemned to death, or was it some inner guilt that he refused to admit to his son but for which he wished to be punished.

  Whatever the reason Lafarge hoped he had changed his mind by the time the trial opened the next day. Otherwise Gerland would have to produce the performance of his life to save his client.

  He looked round the shabby office and regarded it with disgust. The dark brown paint that remained was peeling off the walls, the parquet floor needed a whole new covering as it was worn away and the once shiny polished surface was unrecognisable as coffee, blood and red wine among other substances had destroyed it.

  It looked even worse without any other detectives in it. Some were out on cases, others sleeping off the excesses of the night before, the fresh crop brought in after the department had been cleaned out after the Liberation had quickly learned the seamier side of the job.

  Several had regular assignations with prostitutes, great source material they said by way of explanation to which the Chief Inspector replied ‘my eye’ but allowed it to continue so long as he didn’t know too much about it. Others went further and pressurised café owners and club managers to take goods from a particular black marketeer, tobacco and alcohol being in short supply on the legal market, and made a fortune.

  This Lafarge would have liked to tackle but he was reliant on a black marketeer himself, so instead they hit the other ones who had thought they could break into the lucrative business. His colleagues were by and large, though, a decent group, and aside from their ‘business interests’ reliable and the majority had been members of the Resistance, maquis or the Free French.

  Levau, though, was the best of the lot of them. They got on well without being overly familiar, the odd drinking session but nothing more. However, Lafarge could tell something in Levau’s past had left its mark, and whilst the Chief Inspector conceded he could be a difficult and tricky partner he didn’t think that was sufficient reason for the younger man to seem so lost.

  Something had definitely taken place in his previous posting in Marseille, for whenever he probed about his time there Levau either clammed up completely, or made a light-hearted joke to change the subject.

  “How are you dealing with your father’s ordeal?” asked Levau, who had returned after briefly leaving the office.

  Lafarge looked at his partner – who cut a contrasting figure to him being clean shaven, his brown hair slicked back and well-coiffed whilst his navy suit was as always beautifully pressed – and shrugged.

  “Oh well you know, good moments and bad ones. Nothing, though, that a good meaty case wouldn’t cure,” he said smiling.

  Levau grinned and went over to his desk picked up a folder and handed it to Lafarge.

  “Well this could be the pick of a bad bunch. The Chief thought it might spark your interest and take your mind off things,” Levau said sheepishly.

  Lafarge stared at him and felt quite touched Lucien Pinault had been concerned about how he might be. He hadn’t taken to Pinault initially – hardly a surprise as he had interrogated him about his ties to Vichy and subsequently left him in the cells for nearly three days – and he certainly wasn’t the equal of his former boss Georges-Victor Massu, but he was humane which was reassuring and a rare quality these days.

  Leaning back in his chair and putting his well-worn patent leather black shoes on the desk he flicked through the file. Levau was correct it wasn’t a thriller of a case. An unidentified elderly man had been dragged out of the Canal St Martin. However, it hadn’t been because he was inebriated, which the majority of such sad cases were, he had fallen into the water.

  He had the back of his head bashed in and whoever had murdered him had gone to an awful lot of trouble to dispose of the body as his fo
ot had a chain attached to it. The murderer had messed up, though, for the victim had not gone to the bottom of the canal because the weight attached to the chain had come off.

  Normally with all due respect to the victim the dredging up of an old man’s corpse wouldn’t excite an awful lot of attention, well certainly not from a man of Lafarge’s rank, but it was, according to the file, the second such case in a week. The other victim, Pascal Neveu, who was somewhat younger aged 47 and left a widow and four grown-up children, had stirred some interest because he was a hero of the Great War. The detectives who had gone round to his apartment on Rue Faubourg Saint Antoine, near the Bastille, had ascertained he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honour, when they spoke to his widow.

  She had expressed surprise they did not already know this because he always wore the medal on the lapel of his jacket.

  The medal was nowhere to be found, the uniformed gendarme who had discovered the body floating in the canal had not handed it in and when questioned said he had not seen any evidence of it on the man’s jacket.

  Like the old man his head had been bashed in and again a chain was lashed round his foot but fortunately it appeared the gendarme had surprised the murderer, who had panicked and thrown the body into the Canal without having the time to attach the block to it.

  Lafarge rubbed his chin pensively and sucked in his cheeks before puffing them out again, and allowed himself a pouting of the lips to complete his thought process.

  “I would say Levau we do have an interesting one here. The most recent one, well until he’s identified we can’t tell if he is tied, so to speak, to the first victim Neveu. Maybe he’s his Uncle…” Lafarge said laughing heartily at his joke, questionable as it was in taste.

  Levau laughed too, heaven knows dark humour was the best antidote sometimes to the gruesome nature of the job, and so long as jokes weren’t cracked within hearing distance of the bereaved family then that was fine.

  “I’d say we should pay a visit to the morgue and see what our friend Frederic Durand has come up with to help us,” said Lafarge turning businesslike and rising from the chair flinging on his tatty tweed coat and putting on his velvet fedora, which was in far better condition than either the rest of his attire or himself.

  “Hopefully too he will have something that might identify our second victim. If we don’t crack who he is this may well drain our interest,” he laughed.

  Levau grinned and they both trotted down the stairwell of the Quai and were about to leave the building when Pinault appeared in the doorway. He looked at Lafarge and gestured for him to step outside into the courtyard even though it was raining heavily.

  Pinault waited until a group of gendarmes, their capes sodden with rain, had passed by into the welcome haven of the hallway. Lafarge could tell there was something troubling his boss because he didn’t even return their salutes, nor did he reprimand one for failing to salute him, which was the first time he had seen Pinault permit that.

  “Gaston I would have preferred to do this in my office, quite aside from the rain, it would be more proper,” said Pinault, who rarely if ever used Lafarge’s first name.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that your father has died. He was found dead in his cell this morning.”

  Chapter Eight

  “What a bloody mess!” exclaimed Levau as he surveyed Pierre Lafarge’s cell.

  Lafarge had been permitted to go to Fresnes by Pinault, who had said the corpse at the morgue would keep as he wasn’t going anywhere, a line he regretted as soon as he had said it given the Chief Inspector was going to have to send his own father there.

  Lafarge, though, had been told he was to go solely as an observer and for Levau to ascertain whether Colonel Lafarge had been a victim of foul play or had taken his own life.

  Lafarge hadn’t said very much on the journey there and Levau, never one for idle chit chat, had let him be. The Chief Inspector felt a whole range of emotions, sorrow and anger the dominant ones. Sorrow for the manner in which he and his father had parted and anger that despite taking the precautions it had not been enough to save his life.

  The cell looked as if his father had not gone willingly which was of some comfort, the thin mattress was half curled up on the floor, the books that Pierre Lafarge had been permitted to have, Antoinette’s sole contribution with regard to material goods, lay scattered around and the colonel’s corpse was sat in the far corner.

  He was still dressed in his night shirt. His head was bowed resting almost on his knees whilst his arms were outstretched. His hands open palmed touched the bare stone floor, which was stained with blood from his open wrists.

  Levau called to the guard who had been standing outside the cell when they arrived and asked him brusquely whether anything had been moved. The guard, who to Lafarge’s consternation was neither Fayette nor Vandamme, replied that it was as they had found it.

  Lafarge was relieved Levau was the lead on this one, not just that he was thorough and had a good eye for detail and things being not quite as they seemed. He was numb at seeing his father lying dead a few yards from where he stood, the proud man he had seen only the day before shorn of all dignity, a puddle of urine was just to the side of the body whilst his nightshirt bore the evidence of the ejaculation.

  He could perhaps have accepted his father’s death at the hands of a firing squad, for he would have been judged and found guilty. However, for him to die in this manner was not one a man who had devoted his life to serving his country merited even though he had tarnished his name by remaining loyal to Petain. Lafarge was certain his father had not committed suicide, his spirit the previous day had been defiant and confident he had decided on the best defence he would allow himself.

  However, he had to leave it to Levau to come to a conclusion. He was there to await the van to deliver his father to the morgue. He was permitted to ask certain questions of the personnel, but not to go over a line, that is to be accusatory or judgmental. That again was for Levau.

  He had a good slug from his hip flask. It steadied his nerves and suppressed for the moment at least the torment of his emotions. Then he turned to the guard, who had remained at his post and from time to time cast a glance into the cell to observe Levau, and offered him the hip flask. The guard, more smartly turned-out than the majority of his colleagues with his shirt ironed and his tie correctly done up to his throat, gratefully accepted it and introduced himself as Gerard Lavroux.

  “So it was you who found him?” asked Lafarge, allowing his voice to carry so Levau didn’t think he was overstepping the boundary of his remit.

  “Yes, I came to wake him and bring his breakfast. Sometimes he ate with the others in the communal dining hall but generally he preferred the company of his books and silence,” said Lavroux.

  “I found him like this. I felt for his pulse, hence why I have blood on my fingers,” he added, holding up his right hand to show Lafarge.

  Lafarge nodded and said he could relax.

  “I ran to get the doctor, but he was busy with Darnand. The brute lost his bravura. He used to strut around the exercise yard or in the corridor declaring France would never execute someone who had shed blood and given so much for his country, but when he was fetched this morning he started shaking and sobbing.

  “He refused to leave his cell. We were due to transport him to Fort Chatillon for his execution but he clung onto anything he could get his hands on to prevent the guards removing him from his cell. They’d had to summon the doctor to inject him with a sedative, for he was built like a rock.

  “It was chaotic this morning with his histrionics and your father’s death. The staff was stretched to their limits,” he said smiling sadly.

  Lafarge thought about what he had said, running it over in his mind and trying to make sense of it. Strange Darnand had lost control the very moment probably his father was dying, was it planned or was it really a man going to pieces as he realises that the State does have the balls to
execute him.

  It was a question which would perhaps remain unexplained. Certainly Darnand would not be answering it as Lavroux told him they had eventually succeeded in transporting him to Chatillon and executing him.

  “Was there anything else odd that struck you about what you discovered here?” Lafarge asked Lavroux.

  Lavroux nodded.

  “The cell door was unlocked when I arrived. It was often the case the doors were open during the day but it was usually the guard who brought the breakfast and woke the prisoner who performed that duty,” said Lavroux.

  “What was stranger was that your father’s door was the only one that was unlocked. I didn’t check them all, naturally, as I went for the doctor but those I did try were definitely locked tight.”

  Lafarge agreed that was certainly strange.

  “I imagine all the guards have keys to all the cells?” he asked.

  Lavroux nodded, but added only for the wing, there were four of them leading off a central corridor, they were assigned to.

  “How many guards are responsible for a wing?”

  Lavroux smiled sourly.

  “Not nearly enough is the answer.

  “The cells are overflowing at the moment. There are over 2000 prisoners, most of them accused of various offences during the Occupation, and usually three to a cell, with just one bed,” he said raising his eyebrows displaying some sympathy for the prisoners.

  “The only consolation for having three in a cell is that it warms it up a little.

  “Certain prisoners like your father were granted extra privileges, such as being on his own, allowed to see you and his lawyer without a grill separating you. Perhaps he would be alive if he had shared a cell,” he added ruefully.

  Lafarge concurred with Lavroux, but it was pointless thinking of what might have been different. Now they had the task of finding a murderer, and more importantly the people behind it. The murderer had wielded the weapon but he had been paid for it guessed Lafarge because those who wanted it to happen were still locked up in their cells.