The Curse of the Grand Guignol

by Anna Lord

  Crespigny may have come to the Trocadero for several reasons: to help the murderer hoist the body up to the sail, to help with the mutilation and the demented decoration, to act as a lookout, or to help the murderer flee the scene.

  Or perhaps he was entirely innocent and like them knew the sixth murder would involve a windmill and had guessed, as they eventually had, that the windmill in question would be the one at the Trocadero. He may even have been trying to avert the murder. There was every chance he would be found dead tomorrow.

  “Yes, yes, very well,” blasted the Director General, “but the Trocadero is vast, enormous, and a building site covered in rubble. What prompted you to look up at the windmill?”

  “The inspector was working on a theory –”

  Surprised to hear a woman’s voice, the Director General looked at the Countess for the first time. He had noticed her out of the corner of his eye, standing slightly behind the inspector, keeping out of the wind, but he had dismissed her as a painted trollop, the inspector’s fancy-piece, or possibly his strumpet of a sister.

  He knew about Didier de Guise’s ignoble background; everyone at the Sûreté was privy to it within weeks of joining the force. The name Grosseteste was infamous. Half the historical misdeeds of France were committed by the Grossetestes or a distant relative. Even to this day their cunning was somewhere behind most of the crimes in the city though they kept a less sensational profile after cheating their way to the honourable de Guise name.

  Two brothers - one a horse-trader and a thief, the other a gambler and card-sharp; one uncle, a master embezzler, fraudster and forger; the mother, a mistress of dangerous liaisons and a brothel madame who was not above blackmail; the little sister, an aristocratic prostitute who traded in state secrets and missing jewels.

  If it was up to him the whole family would be locked up without trial. The guillotine was too good for them. The Director General was not in the mood for politesse. He had been called away from a lavish twelve course banquet inside the Louvre and was standing in a puddle of mud waiting for yet another mutilated human puppet to spur sales of satirical rags at the expense of the dignity of the Sûreté.

  “Is this your fancy-woman or your scandalous sister?” he delivered phlegmatically, cutting the Countess off mid-stream.

  Inspector de Guise had been hunkering down inside himself in an effort to keep warm, but now straightened his back and shoulders. “May I present Countess Volodymyrovna. She was with me at the theatre tonight. In fact, it was her deductive reasoning which prompted the connection to the windmill.”

  The Director General was not old enough to have remembered the wealthy adventuress known as Zoya Volodymyrovna. The name meant nothing to him. “Explain yourself, de Guise.”

  “It was Countess Volodymyrovna who noticed a link between the first five murders and the theatre on rue Ballu.”

  “Are you referring to le Cirque du Grand Guignol?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I see, proceed, and try to express yourself clearly.”

  Inspector de Guise was a man of infinite patience, sympathetic sensibility, and an ego that was not over-inflated, but he had borne the brunt of the Sûreté’s failings and had been scapegoated by the Director General in a futile effort to buy off the anarchists who wanted to dance on the ashes of law and order. He thought he might just lose his temper and say something he would eternally regret.

  “The Countess might explain it better,” he said in a level tone, indicating with his eyes for her to step up. “She was instrumental in solving the Clairvoyant murder in Biarritz last month. She was travelling at the time with Dr Watson, the partner of Mr Sherlock Holmes.”

  The Director General was au courant with the Biarritz affair and had heard several complimentary things about the aristocrat in question; though her actual name had been relegated to the list of foreign cognomens that possessed far too many syllables than was good for the tongue and sounded like a Slavic disease. In fact, news had already reached him concerning the successful part she had played in the strange affair at Chanteloup in the Cathar hinterland. Her reputation preceded her but not in the way he first imagined.

  “We are fortunate to have you in Paris,” he said with heavy-handed irony, though not ungraciously, to let her know he would bow to her sleuthing skills for now, but to not get ahead of herself. “Please, take up the story, la comtesse.”

  She managed a grateful smile that had nothing to do with gratitude. “Each of the Marionette Murders occurred on the exact same night that the theatre on rue Ballu was presenting a new act – November third, tenth, seventeenth, twenty-fourth, the premier day of December and now again on the eighth of the month. It could not have been a coincidence. Moreover, each murder mimicked what was happening on stage. If a body was strung up from a lamp-post and the hands chopped off on stage, so it was that it happened somewhere in Paris at the same time.”

  “Did you know about this, de Guise?”

  “I did not become aware of it until after I was suspended from duty, sir.”

  “And still you said nothing?”

  “It was only last night that I fully realized it, sir”

  “And when were you planning to share your realization?”

  “As soon as I had some proof, sir, as soon as I thought I would be believed. My reputation was in tatters. My word did not hold much weight. I did not wish to provide further ammunition to the satirists and caricaturists.”

  The Director General appeared to wince. “Please go on, la comtesse.”

  “The playwright appeared to be the likely culprit. But he claimed not to have written the plays. He said they were passed to him anonymously. Of course, he could have been lying. However, there is no disputing there are many people connected to the theatre who could have known what was about to be enacted before the actual act, namely, the actors and actresses, the director, and the men who build the scenery and the props.”

  “I presume you have narrowed it down to a small handful of suspects?”

  “Not yet,” she replied candidly to avoid giving birth to false hope.

  Like the inspector, she was not yet certain who the killer was, and now the corpse of Père Denys added a baffling new dimension. He was not elderly and affluent. His murder broke the pattern. And yet, she hoped it might prove to be a catalyst.

  Unlike the inspector, she could not easily dismiss Crespigny. They could definitely place him at the Trocadero. If he was not the killer, per se, he had to be intimately acquainted.

  How reliable was Pascal Leveret? The man seen smoking a cigarette at the top of the stairs may have been trying to sneak into a private booth. She and Mahmoud had done the same. Or he may have been embarrassed at being spotted at the horreur by someone who appeared to know him. He might have fled to avoid an awkward social encounter. Or it may simply have been a spy from the rival rue Chaptal gang, sent to check out the new plays, who did not wish to be caught out. There was any number of reasons as to why he bolted.

  “You knew in advance the murder would take place at the Trocadero?” pressed the Director General, still trying to get to the bottom of how much these two knew and didn’t share.

  She shook her head. “We strongly suspected the sixth murder would involve a windmill, but we did not know which windmill the murderer would choose. According to Inspector de Guise there are numerous windmills in Montmartre. We did not consider the Trocadero until we heard that someone had bolted out of the theatre and hailed a cab.”

  “The man Pascal Leveret spotted?”

  “No, a different man,” she said.

  “You think there may be two murderers?”

  “Anything is possible,” she said vaguely, mainly because she didn’t want to see Crespigny banged up in a police cell, protesting his innocence all the way to the gallows. The Marionette Murders were horrific and horrific murders tended to encourage people to let their emotions run away with them. A lesson she had taken on board during her first case. Besides, she ha
d picked up on Inspector de Guise’s reluctance to name names when recounting who they had pursued to the Trocadero. She took her cue from him.

  But the Director General was a not a man who regarded subtlety and discretion as necessary virtues for catching a killer. “As soon as we are done here,” he barked, “we arrest everyone associated with le Cirque du Grand Guignol.”

  The Countess could see the inspector’s nostrils flare as he pressed his lips together and clamped his tongue. Such high-handed action would set them back, not push them forward, the innocent would suffer by association, the theatre would go bankrupt and lives would be ruined, and after all that they might not even have their killer. She was in accord with the inspector but she was not in fear of losing her livelihood and had no qualms about voicing her opinion.

  “May I suggest you hold off; the killer may not even be a member of the troupe. There are several other theories to consider.”

  Tired of being lampooned, the Director General was anxious to take action. He was accustomed to being respected not ridiculed. He was becoming the butt of jokes at his club and his wife had stopped holding her regular decoupage circle with her four closest friends.

  “What theories?”

  “The Panama Affair.”

  “The Panama Affair!” His voice, sarcastic and strident, echoed across the night despite the smothering fog. “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds, la comtesse? That business finished more than six years ago! France does not live in the past!”

  “And so did the Dreyfus business finish until they brought him back from Devil’s Island,” she reminded with hauteur. “The men who orchestrated and condoned that miscarriage of justice will go down in history as the rogues and scoundrels they are. Their names will ring down the centuries. If you wish to arrest the troupe at the theatre so be it on your head. Your name will ring down the centuries. It will be a byword for incompetence. Whenever the name Vidocq is celebrated, your tenure will be remembered for the clumsy mishandling of the Marionette Murders.”

  That soubriquet always brought on a cringe. Alliteration made it worse. It served to align something obscene with something poetic. Children would be inventing skipping rhymes next, like ring-a-ring-of-roses, a song about the Bubonic Plague. They might even name a disease after him. Or worse! Perhaps they would name a clumsy police marionette with a hare’s tail on his cap after him. His name would carry down the centuries worse than Grosseteste.

  “You think there may be a link to the Panama Affair?” he said hoarsely, a lump in his throat so big he wondered if he’d just swallowed his own Adam’s apple.

  “It is just a thought,” she admitted. “I have no proof. But when justice is not done, when it is not even seen to be done, when it becomes tokenistic, it festers, it gnaws; it eats away at the human spirit like a chancre. When evil-doers get away with murder, it forces otherwise good people to take the law into their own hands or to become sick at the thought of it.

  Philosophers discuss punishment in terms of retribution. We have grown beyond an eye for an eye, they say philosophically. We are better men than our ancestors were. But the true purpose of punishment is restoration. The punishment must fit the crime because the human spirit demands it. Justice is a tonic for our souls. It is good for our health. Punishment is the restorative. Without it we grow sick.”

  The Director General had never heard a woman speak like that. He felt lost for words. He ceded to her entreaty.

  “I will give you six more days,” he mandated didactically, “but not seven. I cannot wait for another murder to take place. The people are sick of it already. Paris grows wretched. The very air is poisoned with supposition and suspicion, fear and dread. My men are run off their feet chasing shadows. A young girl placed a puppet in her window and the family home was smeared in dog excrement. A marionette shop was torched last night. A streetwalker was beaten to death because she was wearing red lipstick. A man who purchased some sturdy string was set upon by a mob which then chased him to his death – he leapt into the river to escape them and drowned. People are afraid. They are, as you say – taking the law into their own hands.” He turned abruptly to the inspector. “Consider yourself back on duty. We need all the help we can get. Solve this crime before the chancre spreads to the whole of France.”

  The mutilated body of Père Denys was laid out on a workbench inside the windmill. The six night-watchmen who had carried it in made sure to cross themselves afterwards. This was the work of the devil, they muttered, watching as the inspector removed a tag from around the neck and showed it to the painted lady standing in the shadows.

  Dozens of hurricane lanterns, flickering quietly in the discouraging gloom, were suspended from oak beams or set out on nearby tables and chairs to provide sufficient light for viewing the corpse. There was no time to waste. Any clue would be welcome. The police surgeon had been sent for and had arrived grumbling into his beard about the lateness of the hour until he saw the mutilated corpse and realized the hideousness of the crime.

  “Rigor mortis is quite pronounced. This man has been dead at least one day, possibly two days,” he said grimly. “He was killed by a metal spike which pierced his heart and lungs, same as the previous victims. The bloodstain on the undergarment tells us that. I thought all along the murder weapon might be a thick hat pin but I now think it more likely to have been a large iron nail. The mutilation was done post mortem, no blood around the groin, thank goodness. It is a small mercy but at least the poor soul was not forced to suffer the indignity of dismemberment while still alive. This cannot go on much longer. I am growing heartily sick of these mutilated corpses.” Shaking his head and sighing heavily, he picked up his medical bag. “I will examine the body further tomorrow in the surgery where the light will be better. Do you know his name?”

  “Yes,” said the inspector, “it is Père Denys from Saint Pierre de Montmartre.”

  “A priest?”

  The inspector nodded.

  “Madness, madness,” muttered the police surgeon as he shuffled to the door, paused and crossed himself. “This is a crime against God.”

  The Director General did not have the stomach to return to his twelve course banquet and took himself off home, feeling slightly ill, wondering if the oysters had been off or the lobster undercooked or the wine soured by a rotten cork. But he knew it was none of those things. This was not only a crime against God; it was a crime against France.

  The Eiffel Tower loomed out of the fog like a grotesque, half-built, giant gallows as Inspector de Guise and the Countess made their way wearily back to their waiting hackney cab, the driver having been paid in advance for his patience. It had just gone midnight and the streets of Paris were eerily quiet. The clip-clop of horse’s hoofs penetrated the blanketed silence of the sleeping city, reassuring them they had not yet passed through some dark veil into the Hell.

  “The murderer killed Père Denys in advance because he knew he would not have enough time to do it tonight,” said the inspector, extracting the tag from his pocket. “Do you agree?”

  Just one word, same yet different: nana.

  “Yes,” she said. “He could not have killed him at the church in Montmartre, transported him across to the Trocadero, hoisted him up, mutilated him, and escaped unseen. Nor could he have lured him to the building site as easily as he lured the others to their places of death. The others must have gone willingly to meet him, by willingly I mean of their own volition, albeit unwillingly in their hearts, knowing they were being coerced, probably blackmailed, and yet still going regardless of the danger.”

  “In hindsight, it was a mistake not to disclose the full details of the first couple of murders. The others would have thought twice about going to their deaths.”

  “Hindsight is a wonderful cudgel to beat ourselves up with.”

  “Have you had a chance to think about how the priest fits into the pattern of victims?”

  “He doesn’t fit in. That is the interesting thing. The killer has kill
ed someone he did not originally intend to kill. He has killed from necessity.”

  “Necessity?”

  “When Dr Watson and I visited the church in Montmartre to speak to Père Denys he revealed that he was having a recurring dream about a rag and bone man. In fact, a rag-grubber’s hand-cart woke him the night of the murder. He often took a stroll in the cemetery at night to calm himself from his nightmares. It’s possible our killer observed the priest doing this and later pondered the possibility of having been seen whilst arranging the corpse.”

  “He killed the priest to silence him?”

  She nodded. “It confirms the link to the rag and bone man too.”

  “He was killed with the same sharp spike as the others and the body hidden, perhaps under the rags on the hand-cart, and then transported by wagonette to the construction site and left there until tonight. No one would have checked the wagonette, and if they did, well, they would have found the body earlier, that’s all.”

  “Yes, I think that makes sense.”

  “How does Crespigny fit in?”

  “You were right in that regard, inspector, he is not the murderer. He didn’t have time to stage the corpse.”

  “But he must have known in advance about the windmill?”

  “He guessed it would be act three, the dismemberment, the same as we did, but he correctly guessed the Trocadero before us. Nevertheless, his behaviour tonight indicates something very significant.”

  “It does?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it tells me he knows who the murderer is.”

  “You don’t think he is working in tandem with the killer?”

  “No, I think he is trying to protect the killer.”

  “In that case, I had better go and arrest him tonight. If he knows the name of the killer it is time to put a stop to this madness. Did you say he lived on a peniche on Canal Saint-Martin near the Hospital Saint-Louis?”