by Pirate Irwin
“Well you set up de Chastelain, firstly by having Marguerite warn him not to turn up in court to defend the burglar Lescarboura. By orchestrating that you denied Lescarboura the one man who could give him a proper defence, even more so because de Chastelain was also involved.
“Then not content at just making him a fugitive from justice you falsely pinpointed him as the murderer of Marguerite. That could bring a charge of wasting police time as well as a more serious one of obstructing justice,” said Lafarge.
“I take it that when you said the burglary would take care of de Chastelain that is what you meant? Ridding yourself for good of the one rival for Marguerite’s affection. Something which was apparent when you asked her and she complied to warn him of his impending arrest.
“Then you knew that she still harboured strong feelings for him and that irritated the hell out of you,” said Lafarge, warming to his task.
Von Dirlinger tried to interrupt but Lafarge waved him aside. Mathilde simply remained mute, fiddling with her necklace.
“Bousquet was the only one of the gang that you could not oust so blatantly, for his work was, how would you put it, invaluable to the SS and the Nazi ideological war.
“However, conveniently you knew very quickly that I was the perfect weapon to use because of my longstanding dislike for the man. Thus you could sit back and allow me to take care of him, or turning it on its head we would both rub each other out. Well you got your result there too.
“Mathilde also furnished me with information that makes it even harder to accuse de Chastelain of murdering Marguerite. She told me she accompanied him down the stairs and saw Bousquet leaving and saying goodbye in both German and French, which can only lead to one conclusion that you were still in the apartment.
“Now she tells me that you have always protested that when you eventually left she was still alive. I am asking you face to face whether that is true or you did indeed murder her.
“For according to Bousquet the conversation was a lively one. Even he, a man who prefers to murder people with the impersonal stroke of a pen and not pull the trigger himself, felt the compunction to strangle her as she was incapable of telling you both where the jewels were.
“So if he didn’t then there remains only one person who could have done and that is you colonel, unless of course it was Mathilde and de Chastelain,” said Lafarge staring at Mathilde.
Von Dirlinger too looked at Mathilde his expression one of surprise. She looked aghast and scowled yet again.
“That is ludicrous Inspector! I don’t know where the border between reality and fantasy end with you but this theory is outrageous!” she yelled.
“Is it Mathilde? After all we only have your testimony and that of de Chastelain, who is no longer here, to support your version. He did tell me that he had come down here on his own. You say to the contrary that you accompanied him. But is this yet again another false trail to throw me off the scent?” asked Lafarge.
“You know it’s not possible that we murdered her. You heard two versions all but similar save that perhaps to protect me de Chastelain said he came down here alone. Why on earth would I give you an account protecting a man who has disappeared, it doesn’t make any sense,” she protested.
“That is true but this case has been an interesting one for I have been dealing with criminals above the normal level of intelligence. Masters at role-playing and games and you and de Chastelain could be the best of the lot.
“What did he promise you? That he could find the jewels and if you helped him with Marguerite he would share the spoils. You saw your chance to lift yourself out of this miserable situation you had found yourself in after the death of your husband.
“One where you could be independent and live it as you wanted, be free of the constraints of the colonel and being Suzy Solidor’s pathetic down at heel lover,” Lafarge said viciously.
Those remarks hit the target, for Mathilde launched herself out of the chair, anger blazing from her eyes but also tears too. She went for Lafarge, grabbing him by the lapels, which he easily extricated himself from.
“Go to hell Lafarge! You disgust me, how dare you insult me and my life. What the hell do you know about it! I am not going to sit here and be abused and accused by you. You are the nastiest type of man, allowing your prejudices to overcome your sense of justice and judgement.
“Just because I wouldn’t sleep with you, let alone allow a drunken sot to fiddle with me. You should take a good look at yourself. You are no angel, going around with all this anger and bitterness inside you believing you are righting wrongs done by your compatriots when you are no better than they are,” she screamed before walking towards the kitchen.
Lafarge and von Dirlinger exchanged glances. The latter looked completely stunned by the latest turn of events, the former had everything under control.
“Colonel you stay here, I better go and see if I can stop her from leaving or at least calm her down. You stand by just in case I need you,” said Lafarge looking all apologetic.
Von Dirlinger held his hands up and laughed.
“Well it’s your show inspector, not only is it very entertaining but I am also intrigued. A few minutes ago I was the suspect and all of a sudden I am the innocent spectator.
“I am not altogether convinced that you have the right person but please feel free to bring her back in here as I can’t wait for the climax,” he said still laughing.
Lafarge strode across the room into the kitchen where there was no sign of Mathilde. He exited and made his way along the corridor to the main bedroom where he saw that the door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open and saw Mathilde bending over the dressing table, pulling open a drawer.
He hoped it wasn’t a gun, so he all but ran over and slammed the drawer shut catching the tips of her fingers in it. He put her hand over her mouth to stop her making any noise and put his finger to his mouth.
She nodded so he released his hand but only so he could take the capsule out of his pocket, force her mouth open and then with both hands force her jaw shut so that she bit right down on the cyanide.
Her eyes widened, Lafarge thought it was a mix of fear and surprise, but it was too late to fight back for the poison took hold and she slumped down onto the floor.
He felt for a pulse but there was none. He walked back purposefully to the drawing room where von Dirlinger was still sitting.
“Colonel, you better come I think she has taken something,” said Lafarge feigning concern.
He jumped to his feet and ran with Lafarge to the bedroom, though, the detective stopped at the door. Von Dirlinger went over to see if he could do anything for Mathilde. He looked up shaking his head and mouthed ‘cyanide’ only to stop.
“Colonel you know you were correct when you said you thought I had the wrong person for the murder of Marguerite. It wasn’t you and it wasn’t Mathilde, it was me,” and with that Lafarge shot von Dirlinger twice in the head.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Lafarge sat in his study in Nice preparing for their departure for Spain, then Portugal, and a boat to Argentina.
He had been kept in Paris for a week while Massu, and when his boss allowed it, von Dirlinger’s Abwehr colleagues asked him questions about what had happened in the apartment that night.
It had been easy for him. The Abwehr generally weren’t prone to violence in their interrogations, too ungentlemanly for them. Like the Wehrmacht they preferred to see themselves as the honourable partners in the German crusade, but they were no idiots either.
So Lafarge had stuck by his story of how he had confronted von Dirlinger and accused him of the murder of Marguerite, whereupon eventually he confessed. Unfortunately Lafarge had allowed him to go and get his coat while his accomplice Mathilde had excused herself saying she was going back to her room before going out.
That was when he heard the shots.
He had been too late to save the colonel and before he could subdue Mathilde – who had feared that
von Dirlinger would persuade Lafarge to just hold her responsible for the murder – she had bitten down on the capsule, which she must have taken from the drawer and within seconds was dead.
The gun Lafarge had used was von Dirlinger’s. He had taken it from his holster, which had been hanging up in the dressing room adjacent to the bedroom, and following the shooting he had wiped it clean and pressed it into the hand of Mathilde.
The Abwehr were appalled at the potential scandal if this news leaked out.
Thus with the willing complicity of Massu and Lafarge they released a version whereby Colonel Karl von Dirlinger had been murdered by an ungrateful woman, who had never got over the death of her husband at the hands of the Germans. Feigning friendship she had gained his confidence only to strike him down in brutal and cowardly fashion.
It was all typical German pomposity thought Lafarge, but it suited his ends whatever way they couched it in.
The important thing was that Massu believed him and his confidence seeped into the consciousness of the Abwehr officers, who were keen to put any other rumours to rest.
Besides when they learnt from Lafarge of all the links between von Dirlinger and the French Gestapo their sympathy for their former colleague ebbed away.
This was sheer hypocrisy for Lafarge knew full well some of von Dirlinger’s superiors had links to them too or had done in the past. However, again it suited his cause that they outwardly at least were appalled by their subordinate’s behaviour.
He had been congratulated on bringing the case to a close and sent on his way, Massu allowing him to keep his police ID card in case one day he felt his place belonged back with them.
That was to prove useful one last time. Other than that Lafarge was finished with the police, well a triple murderer investigating murders might be useful to the force for his insiders view but in truth he had had his fill of the job.
Thus he returned for a final time to his apartment to bid Madame Grondon farewell, give her a handsome tip, pack some things and to leave Aimee a note should she not be there.
In fact she had been and they had celebrated, for a final time, as any married couple would do his release. In the morning he had left telling her she could stay for as long as she felt it was safe to do so, that Madame Grondon would not betray any friend of his.
He didn’t try and excuse himself again for having betrayed her. In a way she understood although he equally didn’t reveal the whole truth behind his Machiavellian plan, but he felt sad as he bid her farewell for the final time.
For she unlike the others in the affair was a genuinely good person and he hoped she would see the war out. He also left content that he had erased his debt to her by offering her a safe house.
Madame Grondon assured him that she would be well looked after and they too had a tearful parting, the old lady telling him he was a good and decent man, which coming from her made him feel better than he should have done.
Thus it was that he found the police ID card useful on one last occasion. For before returning to Nice he passed by the farm belonging to Marguerite Suchet’s parents and flashing the badge told them he was the man responsible for solving their daughter’s murder.
Naturally they were extremely grateful and allowed him to search through the things in her room, which remained like a shrine to her.
Framed photographs of her, alone in studio promotional shots and at premieres surrounded by admirers and friends, were hung up or sat on the table and desk in the room. He gave them the briefest of glances because it was the chest of drawers he was most interested in.
It didn’t take long for him to find at the bottom of the drawer, containing her lingerie, a neatly wrapped package which on unwrapping it before him lay the jewels.
Mathilde it was who had alerted him to the possible whereabouts of the missing jewels when she said that Marguerite had paid a visit to her parents after the burglary. To Lafarge it had made sense, it was the safest place to hide them. They were her life insurance and her nest egg for her childhood friend Lescarboura and whichever man she decided was to be hers.
He sighed and thought well they are mine now and wrapping them back up he put them in his briefcase. He had then had to go through the excruciating experience of lunch with her parents, who had laid out a fine spread for him as he discovered when he descended the stairs.
There he sat making polite conversation with the parents of the girl he had murdered and with the jewels that had sparked the whole sequence of events, or was it sequins he joked darkly to himself, beside him in his briefcase.
Now as he sat looking out the window into the garden where the children were playing with Isabella, he remembered the look of surprise in both Marguerite and von Dirlinger’s faces as he killed them.
He of course would never reveal to his wife the truth. He would perhaps one day put it all on paper, for to him it wasn’t murder in the strictest definition of the term.
It was him acting as a lone resistant. Far easier and safer too because there was nobody one had to rely on and trust, equally to be afraid that if the others were caught you could be the next to receive a call at the door.
Being a policeman of course had helped. A maverick is always going to be regarded with suspicion, but only from a political point of view and a man as arrogant as Bousquet would never have thought Lafarge was capable of concocting such a plan.
True it had all started on impulse. The pathetic Marguerite in her ceaseless search for protection and placing her trust in anyone that held any authority, had called him and asked him to come to her apartment.
He must have arrived only minutes after von Dirlinger had left and he had found her in a terrible state.
Although they had not seen each other since before the war, she said she had always held him in high regard and knew she could trust him.
Thus she had given him the whole story from the origins of the burglary to the enrolling of both von Dirlinger and Bousquet in the ring.
Lafarge had not thought much about it until she mentioned Bousquet’s name. De Chastelain he didn’t like but he was now a figure of the past as he was on the run and von Dirlinger well at the time he meant little to the detective except he was just another German colonel.
But Bousquet now there was a man he would love to bring down.
Quite aside from their personal animosity he was disgusted at how he had enthusiastically embraced collaborating with the enemy. Worse he had accepted a position that could only lead to authorizing dishonourable acts in the name of France, not because of his ideological beliefs but because of naked ambition.
Lafarge had witnessed firsthand on the front line how the Germans behaved.
Even the better regarded Wehrmacht had acted with such savagery towards civilians and prisoners of war that he had thought if they are seen to be the good bad guys what on earth are the SS and the Gestapo like?
Thus once Marguerite said Bousquet had been there that evening Lafarge knew he had been presented with a golden opportunity to harass the secretary–general. He would try and sew enough suspicion around him that it could not only destroy him but also undermine Vichy in both the Nazis and the French people’s eyes.
Lafarge had consoled Marguerite about the invidious position she found herself in, although he didn’t really feel that way at all. In reality he regarded her with nothing but contempt, and the idea of killing her and then implicating Bousquet and the colonel, was too attractive a possibility to pass over.
Lafarge had played the role perfectly of the sympathetic listener as she recounted the quandary she found herself in, being bullied by her lover and threatened by the overbearing and glacial Bousquet over the stolen jewels and their whereabouts.
But she had said, smiling confidently, their hiding place was her security and she would never surrender that information. However, she wanted Lafarge to keep an eye out for her, to keep his ears open at work or better still to try and wean his way in to becoming a trusted lieutenant of Bousquet�
�s.
Lafarge had thought then that she really was deluded if she thought he could be won over to playing a role he had no taste for by her charm and sweet smiles.
It had been easy to procure von Dirlinger’s gun. He had excused himself to go to the bathroom and instead had walked into the dressingroom. Sure enough, just as would happen the evening he disposed of von Dirlinger and Mathilde, the colonel had left in his holster a charged pistol.
Lafarge had barely even reflected on the fact that he was about to commit murder, let alone that the victim was a woman.
The only thing he saw in front of him was the chance to destroy Bousquet and inflict a damaging wound on Vichy. People would see that Vichy for all its pompous declarations on purity and moral values had a head of police, their young turk, who was himself little better than the criminals that his police force sought to track down.
In any case he had justified the death of Marguerite as just another civilian victim. One more to lay alongside the hundreds of thousands that had already perished, mown down or blown up by a sociopathic regime intent on spreading its evil and hateful ideology all across Europe.
Armed with both the weapon and his sense of righteousness he had found it a simple task to execute his mission. He had felt nothing as he swivelled round when he reached the mantelpiece and shot her hitting her once.
Then luck had fallen his way, in avoiding de Chastelain and Mathilde when he left and even more so when Massu appointed him to the case. Bousquet had acquiesced in his nomination although he had told him later he had wanted him removed. But he knew it would be difficult to justify it as he was the best homicide detective on the force.
How he must have regretted that decision once Lafarge found his cigarette case and linked the murder with the burglary.
That had been a moment of genuine delight for Lafarge, for without any eye witness testimony Bousquet would have started to suspect that Lafarge appeared to know a lot about a crime. Even for a man of his talents.
Lafarge had been only too happy to play along with the de Chastelain angle and indeed his desire to catch him was as great as Bousquet and von Dirlinger’s, only for different reasons.