Over and Out

by Michael Gilbert

  ‘I agree. But before any proceedings could be contemplated we need more definite information. You mentioned that Braham had been attending to this. I don’t know what progress he has made, but I can tell you that in the past we have found these women united in a determination to say either nothing at all or as little as possible.’

  ‘A difficult crowd to tackle,’ agreed Luke. ‘I’ll have a word with Braham this evening. But is there any reason why we shouldn’t deal with Marianne? The evidence against her seems to me to be strong.’

  ‘I plan to pick her up at an early hour tomorrow. And I’d like to have you there when we do.’

  From what Braham told Luke that evening it seemed that he had done his best, with very little result.

  He said, ‘Yes. I did speak to the stall-keeper, Madame Jolliet, but her memory of the jacket seems to have undergone a number of changes since she first spoke of it. And—a further complication—before answering any questions she whistled up her fan club, whose function is to support every statement she makes. You would have enjoyed listening to this unequal contest. Madame Jolliet was in great form. I was no match for her.’

  He imitated madame’s high-pitched voice – ‘Did I not say, at the time, that anything coming from the hands of Tante Marie or equally from any of her associates, should be regarded with suspicion and referred to the police?’

  ‘Your very words’, her chorus agreed.

  ‘Then, do I understand’, I said, ‘that it was not Tante Marie herself who offered you the jacket?’

  ‘Heaven forbid. Had that woman approached me, be sure that I should have given her a piece of my mind. No. It was one of her creatures. She had no doubt observed that I was, for the moment, absent, and that my stall was being looked after by my son. A boy of twelve’.

  ‘Imagine it, said the leader of the chorus. ‘A boy of twelve to be approached by a creature of that sort’.

  ‘I then said, though without a great deal of hope, “Could you possibly give me the name of this—creature, as you call her?”’

  At this point, Madame swivelled round to look at the audience, whose numbers had been steadily increasing as the dialogue continued. Everyone, it seemed to me, avoided her eye. The murmurs which broke out, though no words were clearly audible, indicated that if any of the ladies present had known the name of the creature they were not prepared to admit it, since to know her name might suggest a degree of intimacy.

  ‘How then!’ I said, in desperation, ‘since you did not know her name, did you know that the creature was a hanger-on of Tante Marie?’

  ‘By the smell’, said Madame Jolliet.

  ‘The laughter that this provoked was still ringing in my ears as I took my departure, with my tail between my legs.’

  ‘They’re as bad as an Irish jury’ said Luke. ‘I only hope we have better luck with Marianne when we pull her in.’

  It was still dark when the posse that Bernardin had collected approached the rue Ste-Cécile. Luke, shivering in his overcoat, observed that the police were making their dispositions with some care.

  It was not an easy place to guard.

  One man was stationed in the rue Ste-Cécile itself, and a second one in the rue des Archives. But the dangerous side was on the east. Here, anyone leaving No. 15 through its back garden, had only to cross the main road and a small stream, and skirt the lake, and he would be in open country. To deal with this possibility, Bernardin had posted two men with motor cycles on the boulevard.

  Having checked that his men were in position, he advanced up the garden path and rapped smartly on the door. It was opened so promptly that someone must have been waiting inside with one hand on the latch.

  It was Madame Klotz, the mother of Marianne. When she saw the men, she started to scream steadily. The commissaire, who was closest to her and got the full benefit of the noise, stood perfectly still, blocking her exit, but making no further move.

  The scream died away at last, degenerating into something between a moan and a whimper. Gradually, words and phrases became audible. Bernardin translated them as they emerged.

  ‘My daughter—my only daughter. A respectable girl. What has she done to deserve such treatment? Attacked and bullied by men she would scorn to lay a finger on.’

  Here there was an interval whilst madame choked. Then, ‘The first one a policeman, so he said. He produced no proof that he was a policeman.’ The words were coming consecutively and more intelligibly now. She was speaking in the local patois, but her audience followed her without difficulty. He showed us a scrap of cardboard. He could have picked it up in the gutter for all we knew. I am not frightened of policemen. I told him he could take himself off and leave two respectable citizens to the privacy of their home.

  Managing to stem the tide of words for a moment, Bernardin said, ‘You spoke of two men. Who was the second?’

  ‘The second was worse. A brute beast. A criminal.’

  Luke said, ‘You had seen him before, Mother? Yes?’

  Madame Klotz seemed taken aback by this interruption from an unexpected source. She said, ‘So what if I had? What if I had seen him a dozen times before? Does that make him an acceptable man to go off with my daughter?’

  At this point, Routley, who had slipped past when the front door was opened, reappeared and said softly to Bernardin, ‘She’s gone. Only the old cow here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure, sir. Not many places to hide in.’

  Bernardin turned on Madame Klotz, backed her up against the wall, and hit her, hard and deliberately, with his open hand, first on one side of the face, then on the other. Luke thought that such brutality would be self-defeating, but it seemed that Bernardin knew what he was doing. As the old woman went down on her knees, he bent over her, grabbed her hair and jerked her head upright.

  He said, ‘Now we will have the truth. The second man, the one who you say had visited your daughter many times before; you tell us that your daughter went away with him. Willingly?’

  ‘Most unwillingly.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  Madame Klotz was speaking now with no trace of her previous hysteria.

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘The first man, early. By the time the second man came, it was getting dark.’

  ‘And you say that she went with the second man, unwillingly? If that is true, why did she go at all?’

  ‘She could not help herself. He was brutal to her. She did what she was told.’

  ‘His name, please.’

  ‘When she spoke of him she called him Manny.’

  ‘A Belgian?’ said Luke.

  ‘Exactly so. A Belgian and a brute.’

  ‘To put it in plain words,’ said the commissaire, ‘your daughter was a whore, and he was one of her protectors.’

  ‘You call him a protector? Say, rather a bully. A murderer—’

  Madame’s voice was rising again. Bernardin smacked her face, so hard this time that Luke wondered whether he might have smashed her cheekbone. He said, ‘No nonsense, Mother, or I will really hurt you. So listen carefully. When this man came, was he alone?’

  ‘No. Another man with him.’

  ‘And when they left, which way did they go?’

  ‘Up the road. Then they dragged her through the hedge. After that I could see no more.’

  Bernardin, who had called in his men, now redeployed them. Disregarding the old woman, who crouched on the ground, silent, but shaking, he said, ‘Two of you search the hedge on the other side of the road. If you can find where it was broken through, follow up any traces you can find, go carefully, so as not to obscure them. Right?’ To a third man, ‘Oh, and take that old bag to her bedroom and lock the door.’ To the remaining man, he said, ‘Come with me.’

  Once through the hedge, they found themselves on the bank of a stream. It was easily fordable. As they splashed their way across, Routley, who was with the two men searching the hedge, shouted. Th
ey closed up carefully on him. He was pointing to a line of footprints in the mud.

  ‘Clear enough, sir,’ he said. ‘Here’s where they broke through the hedge, and here’s where they forded the stream. Two sets of prints.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘No prints from her. One of them must have had her over his shoulder. Not struggling, I’d say. And they hadn’t far to carry her.’

  Bernardin stood for a moment, his hands clasped behind his back. Luke wondered what he was thinking about. The answers to the questions he was afraid to ask surely lay ahead of them, where the waters of the Étang de Saint-Pierre stretched, black and silent, under the morning sun. At last, he shook his head, angrily, as though he was shaking off a wasp. ‘Nothing else for it. We shall have to drag the lake. Have the apparatus here by first light tomorrow. We must see if we can get through with the job before we have half the population of Béthune round our necks.’

  By nine o’clock on the following day, the fruits of four hours’ work had been piled on the edge of the lake, a dank and unpromising heap. Most of it was vegetable matter and slime, topped by a few rusty tins and specimens of bird and animal life in different stages of putrefaction.

  Bernardin was on the point of saving, to his dispirited assistants, ‘We could do it once more, I suppose,’ when he was interrupted.

  The spectators, so far, had been content to stay at a respectful distance. The newcomers were two boys. Any age between twelve and fifteen, thought Luke. Difficult to tell with tough kids. Having wriggled past the attendant policemen, they marched up to Bernardin and one of them said, ‘You look for Marianne, yes?’

  Unable to think of any appropriate answer Bernardin simply nodded his head.

  ‘Come with us, we will show you where she is.’

  Concentrating on the taller boy, who seemed to be the spokesman of the two, Bernardin said, ‘Who are you, for God’s sake?’

  ‘He is Bo. I am Emil.’

  Routely said, ‘Their father’s one of the fishing crowd round Bray-Dunes. Cellier or Cellarer. Some name like that.’

  ‘You say you know where Marianne is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you find her?’

  ‘We tread on her,’ said Emil, grinning through a row of battered teeth.

  Bernardin took a deep breath, then decided that the boys could hardly be lying.

  ‘You better come with us in the car and show us.’

  ‘The car for the first part,’ said Emil. ‘After that, not easy for motor cars, we shall run.’

  After ditching their car three times, and after being rescued three times by the entire strength of the company, they gave the boys best, and followed for the last 400 yards on foot. They were heading for a bleak stretch of the coast, which comprised, at that point, a series of linked rock pools. They stopped beside one that was wider and deeper than the others.

  ‘Here we come for shrimps’ explained Emil.

  Without removing his trousers, which could hardly have got any wetter, he sat down on the edge of the pool and slid forward into the water. He had taken his shoes off.

  ‘Here we felt her,’ he said, wriggling his bare feet. ‘Yes. She is there. I stand on her now.’

  It took half an hour to raise Marianne and lay her out beside the pool. The disgust with which Bernardin looked down at her bleached and swollen body was not connected with her appearance, though that was unpleasant enough. It was the thought of the information which would have been available to them if they had moved fast enough to reach her living and which was now lost to them forever.

  His feelings were made no easier by the suspicion that the loss was, in part, his fault.

  ‘If we got the pathologist busy,’ suggested Braham, who had attached himself to the party, ‘he might be able to tell us something useful.’

  This suggestion produced a sour grunt. It was not medical opinions Bernardin wanted. Doctors always wasted hours of valuable time and rarely produced anything useful.

  On this occasion he misjudged them. The District Pathologist, Dr Sedgewick, understood the importance of speed. His report was in front of them early that evening. Luke and Tom Braham were with the commissaire as he examined it.

  After dealing with some formal points, the report got straight down to business.

  The cause of death was manual strangulation. This is clear from the imprint of fingers on the neck and the fracture of the hyoid bone. It is not possible to give an entirely accurate estimate of the time of death, but it would be safe to say that it took place not less than forty-two and not more than forty-eight hours before I made my examination.

  Everyone started to make calculations.

  Bernardin said, ‘Her mother saw her being dragged off at dusk on Tuesday.’

  ‘Dusk is a bit vague,’ said Luke, ‘but we wouldn’t be far out if we called it five o’clock. In which case, since I see the pathologist dated his report as three p.m. on Thursday afternoon, death must have taken place very soon after those goons got their hands on the girl.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bernardin. ‘They finished her off as soon as they’d dragged her through the hedge. That would have given them enough cover to do it’

  The report concluded:

  There are a number of bruises and lacerations on the body, most of them post-mortem. This suggests that the body was moved for some distance, and roughly handled, after death.

  ‘The picture,’ said Bernardin, ‘is becoming a little clearer. It seems that these men intended, at first, to deposit the girl’s body in the lake. Then for some reason they changed their minds. No doubt they would have had some form of transport available to them—’

  ‘A cart and a pair of stout horses,’ suggested Luke. ‘Better than a motor car in that swampy district—’

  ‘Certainly. And if it was a cart we can probably trace it.’ And to Routley, ‘Have your men examine all possible routes between the lake and this area. That shouldn’t be too difficult.’

  Routley made a careful note in the book that he carried. He offered no opinion as to whether the tracing of the cart would be difficult or not.

  ‘And even if he can trace it right back to where it came from,’ said Luke to Tom that evening, ‘it doesn’t answer the real question. Why did they change their minds?’ He added, ‘Here’s another point, too. The finding of the body, and the consequent matters we had to attend to drove it from my mind. I quite forgot to ask Bernardin about that other policeman. The earlier one who called on Madame Klotz.’

  ‘Just as well that you didn’t raise the matter,’ said Tom.

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have increased the entente cordiale. The first policeman was a mistake. A fatal mistake, as it turned out. It seems that a directive had been received from police headquarters at Arras by the four subdivisions—Béthune, Hazebrouchk, Bailleul and Cassel—to check up on all foreigners, Belgian and Dutch in particular—who might have made their way into the area via the no man’s land north of Cassel. In itself a sensible and routine matter. In fact, since it resulted in a policeman visiting the rue Ste-Cécile, it was quite deadly. The operators of Der Zirkel were already extremely nervous about the extent of the information that Marianne could give to the authorities if she decided to speak. The sight of that policeman was the match that fired the train. They took immediate action to prevent her saving anything at all.’

  Luke said, ‘And you’re suggesting that as soon as that directive reached Bernardin he should have spotted the possible danger and ensured that his men steered clear of the rue Ste-Cécile?’

  ‘Wisdom after the event,’ said Tom, ‘but yes.’

  That same evening, Inspector Routley paid them a visit. Clearly he knew all about the unhappy result of the police inspection at the rue Ste-Cécile and the topic was avoided. Instead, he produced an interesting report from two of his men who had made a further inspection of the supposed scene of Marianne’s killing.

  ‘The odd point a
bout it,’ said Routley, ‘is that when they were able to examine the footprints more carefully, it became clear that the men carrying Marianne’s body had never gone close to the edge of the lake at all. About a hundred yards short of it, they swung off to the left, round the north end of the lake, and out onto the Estaires-Cassel road. There were signs at the roadside that a horse and cart had drawn in there. It’s quite a reasonable road, but anyone who is aiming for the Bray-Dunes area must, sooner or later, leave it and set off across the broad strip of no man’s land which lies to the north. From that point they had a choice of twenty paths.’

  ‘Fifty,’ said Luke, looking glumly at the map.

  ‘It’s cleared up one point,’ said Tom. ‘We thought they were misleading us by pretending to dump the body in the lake. Not true. They were simply making the shortest way back to where they had left their cart.’

  ‘All right,’ said Luke. ‘It clears up that particular point. But it doesn’t explain something that has puzzled me a great deal more.’

  He had the map open on the table, and had marked on it two lines, the first definite, following the road from Béthune to Caestre, a hamlet on the Cassel-Armentières road; the second, a more tentative line which straggled northward, with a dozen alternatives, towards the Channel coast.

  ‘What it fails to explain is why they first took the trouble, and attendant risk, of driving their cart for fifteen miles along the high road, with every chance of being spotted and then for another fifteen miles or more across no man’s land, with every chance of getting bogged. Why didn’t they dump the body in the first convenient ditch?’

  ‘It was indeed a very odd thing to do,’ agreed Tom. But Luke thought, from the way he said it, that he had got the beginnings of an idea that might explain it.

  Chapter Ten

  For nearly a week after that conversation, Tom Braham hardly opened his mouth. He disappeared every morning after breakfast, and rumour had it that he had been seen in the Bray-Dunes area at a number of different points between Zuydroote and Koksijde Bad, coming back late, and fagged out, to the quarters in Montreuil that he shared with Luke.