The Curse of the Grand Guignol

by Anna Lord

  The butler was summoned. A second set of keys existed. He kept them in the silver safe. La marquise in the meantime felt faint. She retired to her bed and asked to be kept informed should any news reach them, no matter how dire. While the inspector and Dr Watson waited for the butler to return, the Countess slipped back into the boudoir, rolled back the cylinder desk, and rifled through the papers. One sheaf in particular brought a knowing smile to her face.

  The private study was eventually unlocked.

  “What are we searching for?” asked Dr Watson. “A suicide note?”

  “No,” said the inspector, “we are searching for re-writes of the plays.”

  “Au contraire, mes amis,” said the Countess, “we are searching for anything that links Monsieur Radzival to the first five victims.” She reeled off the names: Maurice Dupin, Louis LeBrun, Amelie Hertzinger, Eugene Mueller and Stanislaw Lodz.

  Inspector de Guise started with the secretaire which had numerous drawers and possibly one or two secret compartments. Dr Watson checked the armoires. They were bulging with boxes full of accounts received and paid; the late marquis had apparently been a stickler for keeping track of expenditure. The Countess left the men to it and went to speak to their hostess in her bedchamber.

  The Marquise de Merimont was reposing languidly on a récamier, her blush-pink, pinch-pleated, satin day dress fanning out with such perfect elegance it could have been an idealised mise en scene lifted straight from the French Romantic canvas of Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. “Do you think Crespigny murdered Casimir?” she said weakly, half afraid of the answer.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said the Countess confidently. “In fact, I’m sure he didn’t.”

  Reassured, the noble voice lifted a little then faltered quiveringly before fading. “Do you think, do you think, it possible that Casimir is the…killer?”

  “Yes,” she said bluntly, “and that is why I seek permission to search his bedroom.”

  Sighing, la marquise put her hand to her pearlescent forehead and closed her limpid sea-green eyes. She resembled a mermaid washed up on a beach or a Nereid on her deathbed. “If you must. His room is in the north wing. The butler will have a key.”

  “Did Monsieur Radzival have a valet?”

  “No, I pressed him to take one but he refused. He said his needs were simple. The under-footman did for him when necessary. You will see by his room what I mean. I offered him a larger bedchamber in the east wing but he declined.”

  By now the servants had guessed something was seriously wrong. The butler, sensing la comtesse was searching for something vital, offered to assist her. She shook her head.

  “Send up the under-footman, tout de suite.”

  Every new fact she learned pointed more and more to Casimir Radzival being the killer. He had no valet because he did not want anyone to access his bedroom in his absence. A valet would come and go, organizing things for his master. But an under-footman might confine himself to running a bath, brushing down frock coats, seeing to the laundering of handkerchiefs, shirts and undergarments, checking if boots needed to be polished by the boot boy, and so on. He would be summoned only when specifically required.

  The under-footman knocked and entered. “You sent for me?”

  “Yes, I’d like you to tell me if anything is missing from this room.”

  The word ‘missing’ was every servant’s worst nightmare. It implied theft. The under-footman got his back up at once. “Missing?”

  She needed to put him at ease or she would have no co-operation. “Monsieur Radzival has disappeared. I need you tell me if any personal items have been removed from his bedchamber.”

  The under-footman relaxed his shoulders and began to search the room, opening drawers and closing them. The room was compact and sparingly furnished. After a few minutes he stopped. “The gold and silver cigarette case he received recently is missing. He placed it here on the étagère next to this book by Zola. His diamond tie pin, a gift from la marquise is not here. Likewise, for his gold cuff links and gold fob watch, also gifts from the mistress. I believe he wore them last night when he left for the theatre.” He lifted up the satin counterpane. “The valises under his bed have gone.” He threw open the doors to the wardrobe. “All his vestments, shoes and hats are missing.”

  Well, that was self-evident! Monsieur Radzival had returned late last night, packed his belongings and fled. He had taken only those things which he actually owned. The valuable paintings, silver candle-sticks, Ming porcelain and ivory bibelots his patroness would have chosen to be placed in the room were still on display.

  The Countess locked the door, pocketed the key and returned to the private study. Her two companions had struck gold. In a hidden compartment of the secretaire the inspector had found a small, neatly folded, transcript of the six acts that related to each of the six murders.

  “Radzival must be Anonymous,” he said eagerly, tasting success at last. “He passed the plays on to Davidov but kept a copy of the six acts he was intending to mimic in real life.”

  “No,” contradicted the Countess. “I just checked the desk of la marquise, the one in her boudoir that she was terrified of allowing me to inspect. Under the roll top was a copy of all six plays written in her hand, dated, number seven for next week finished and dated, and she was working on number eight, dated for the week after next. It was almost finished. She funded the theatre because it allowed her to stage her own plays. She would have known that Davidov rejected Crespigny’s early efforts and she anonymously passed her own onto him. She was the playwright but she was a noblewoman, a marquise, unable to put her name to the lurid plays of the Grand Guignol. The theatre was more than entertainment to her, it was her creative life. She went every night to see her own plays because she was proud of her efforts.”

  “Are you saying she is the killer?” challenged the inspector.

  “Of course, not. Think, gentlemen, who would have had access to her private desk? Who could have seen in advance the plays she wrote? Who could have chosen the act most suited to be staged as murder in real life but who had no connection to the theatre whatsoever?”

  “Radzival,” said the two men simultaneously.

  “Exactly – Casimir Radzival. But he did not wish to implicate his benefactress in murder so he committed the murderous acts while she was in her private booth. If the murders were ever linked to the plays she would not be a suspect. And he must have known Crespigny was not really writing the plays, so he knew the playwright could not be charged with murder either. But think how well the staging of the Marionette Murders with the name tags suited the caricature associated with the Panama Affair. Despite the tags not matching the caricature in perfect word order, the public would have made the connection sooner or later. What other evidence do we have?”

  In the bottom of one armoire, Dr Watson had found some string, and in a hat box on top of another armoire he had located ten blank cardboard tags, identical to those found around the necks of the victims. The evidence was fairly damning.

  “Nothing about the victims?” posed the Countess.

  The two men shook their heads.

  Disappointed but not discouraged, she explained about Radzival’s bedroom. “He must have known he would have time to return to the Hotel de Merimont to pack his things last night. Crespigny, on the other hand, must have realised we were onto him. He probably expected a policeman standing by at the peniche. He was forced to flee empty-handed.”

  “You think the two of them fled together?” quizzed the inspector.

  “I am certain of it. That’s why Crespigny left the theatre in such a hurry. He wanted to warn Radzival we were narrowing down the list of suspects. He probably helped stage the corpse on the windmill to speed things along.”

  “So Crespigny was in on it the whole time?” The doctor wondered if he’d missed something important.

  She shook her head. “No, he guessed it was Radzival shortly before we did. Possibly after that time he took me
to visit the rag and bone yard in Clignancourt. We had been talking about the Panama Affair and I think he guessed then that the killer was taking revenge for the scandal. Several things he said that seemed puzzling at the time make sense now. I thought he was trying to hide the extent of his family’s losses but I think now he was hedging because his brain was ticking things over regarding Radzival.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Dr Watson, frowning. “Crespigny hardly knew Radzival. The only time he would have seen him was at the salonniere. Why risk everything for a man you hardly know?”

  “Love makes us do strange things.”

  “Love!” The inspector’s tone was incredulous.

  “Crespigny was hopelessly in love with Radzival. Delgardo must have noticed it at one of the salonnieres. He put me onto it. Crespigny admitted it when I confronted him. That’s why I’m sure they fled together.”

  “But what about Radzival?” challenged the inspector; skeptical to the last, though he knew such men existed and even had some among his coterie of friends. “Did he feel the same? He struck me as a cold fish, aloof and unemotional.”

  “Dignity is often mistaken for aloofness and aloofness for coldness. His emotions must have been in constant check. By the end of the Gobolinks party I think Radzival understood how Crespigny felt about him, and I do believe he reciprocated those feelings. I saw him blush more than once when Crespigny made physical contact. Keep looking for a link to the first five victims otherwise we have nothing tangible linking Radzival to the Marionette Murders. I’m going to the library. There may be a folio cupboard with a diary hidden inside it, or at least some notes. I doubt la marquise went there often. It was her husband’s pride and joy, not hers. Radzival would have had the place to himself.”

  Five thousand books!

  Feeling overwhelmed, she hoped she would not be forced to search inside every single one of them as she gazed despairingly at the endless shelving. First up, the rare Syrian manuscript by Mesrop of Xizan and that’s when she recalled the book the librarian had tucked under his arm when she delivered his invitation. It was the same book on the étagère in his bedroom. Emile Zola’s Germinal.

  Many said it was Zola’s best. The title meant ‘seed’ in Latin, but it was also the name of a month of the year. A month in spring. Did the month mean something special? Was it the month of his birth or the month he returned to Paris to find his family utterly ruined?

  She wondered about all the possibilities as she rushed to his bedroom. The novel was still on the étagère. She held the spine, turned the book vertical so that the pages faced downward, and gave it a vigorous shake. Out fluttered more than a dozen pages of notes covered with neat handwriting. Each page had a different name: Dupin, LeBrun, Hertzinger, Mueller, Lodz…there were ten more. It was the first five that she was most interested in.

  Monsieur Dupin, the glove manufacturer, had cheated the maternal grandfather out of tens of thousands of dollars when he bought the Bobigny factory for a pittance. Monsieur LeBrun had sold the family’s priceless art collection and then failed to pass on the full proceeds of the sale, even charging an exorbitant fee that was tantamount to theft. Madame Hertzinger had bought many of the artworks for a song in collusion with LeBrun, who then kept the best paintings for himself. Several were still hanging in his gallery. Dr Mueller, the Crusade historian, had once worked at an insane asylum in Montmartre where he regularly stole provisions which he sold on the black market while the inmates starved to death. Captain Lodz, an old family friend with ties going back to Poland, had been given the family vineyard in Alsace on the proviso the sisters would be cared for, but after raping them he turned them out and they ended up on the streets of Paris.

  The other ten names revealed more of the same. It was an indictment of the worst of human nature – to profit from misfortune. Epithets for tags had already been chosen: matka, brat, siostra, wuj, stryj, and so on. The Slavic link was just a random selection. The next five were Polish and some Jewish ones came later.

  As she prepared to return to the private study with the tangible proof they needed she realized that he wanted her to find the book. He wanted her to know. He wanted her to understand that in a world full of monsters some were to be pitied.