The Tortured Detective

by Pirate Irwin

  For de Chastelain could provide first hand testimony implicating the good colonel and Bousquet. However, Lafarge was never going to allow those two to get their hands on the lawyer. It would have totally screwed up his plan for a scapegoat to take the blame.

  De Chastelain too would never be around to seek vengeance on him, were he to commit pen to paper. This was the greatest irony. The man who he had entrusted the lawyer’s safety and eventual escape from France, Dr Petiot, the caring and effective general practitioner, had just been exposed as a serial killer.

  The address where Lafarge had left de Chastelain had been revealed as a charnel house, with bones and fragments of people’s bodies lying in a pit, their belongings or some of them strewn round the uninhabited house. Massu had taken charge of the case, for this was of such magnitude only his calm assurance and powers of detection could be counted on to solve it.

  Massu had called Lafarge in the early morning after the gruesome discovery to ask him if he would return for one last time, but he had declined. He thought it too much of a risk for if Petiot was arrested he could if he so wished identify him as having delivered de Chastelain to him.

  Questions would be asked as to why he had aided a wanted man to escape justice which would have set Massu off thinking over the Suchet murder. Lafarge didn’t think he would be capable to outwit the master detective, he would have slipped up somewhere.

  Thus he rejected Massu’s request in the politest of terms saying that he was finished with police work and he wanted to look towards the future with his family.

  That was what he stared out on now. His beautiful wife ordering their young children to come inside for bath time, and asking them for the umpteenth time that day had they packed everything they wanted to keep for they were leaving for a new life...

  Lafarge knew it wouldn’t be easy to leave behind the memories of the past two years but he could live with that, there were many like Bousquet who he prayed would find it not so simple.

  EPILOGUE

  Lafarge stood by the rail of the liner, Isabella and the children beside him, as they looked out on the Atlantic Ocean, which they had now been cutting through for the past three days.

  They and hundreds of others had been fortunate enough to gain passage in Lisbon on an Argentinian registered vessel, the Simon Bolivar, bound for the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo. From there a ferry would transport them across to Buenos Aires and their new life.

  It had taken them three weeks to make the journey from Nice to Lisbon. A hard trek across the Pyrenees had been the worst of it, but the children had borne it well and Lafarge had been justifiably proud of them for their resilience and lack of moaning and whining.

  Once over the border into Spain their lives had been far more comfortable.

  His father–in–law had organized with the Argentine embassy in Madrid for a car to come and pick them up. After a stopover for several days in the Spanish capital, where they were able to recuperate and relax, they set off in high spirits for Lisbon.

  With Isabella’s father, being held in high regard by the Peron regime in Argentina, they were allocated a large and comfortable cabin on the ship, with a bathroom to boot.

  They were the fortunate ones. The passengers for the most part were either crammed into cabins which were only used to at the most four people, the sanitary facilities were negligible, and many preferred to sleep up on deck.

  The food too, apart from for people like Lafarge and his family, was of poor quality, but the majority of the ship’s human cargo put up with the privations. They were just happy to be leaving a continent devastated by war and setting out for a new life in a country, which while run by a dictator, at least offered peace and new opportunities.

  Lafarge spent most of the time reading or walking with the children on deck. They tried to catch sight of the dolphins or other species of fish which rose to the surface and swam alongside the boat, hoping the remains from what meals were served would be thrown their way.

  The children, especially, found this amusing and diverted them from other moments when squalls hit the ship and they would have to retire inside and lounge around while the boat rocked from the stormy weather.

  They were now out on the deck, after one of those squalls had passed over, after emerging to see if there were new breeds of fish swimming alongside, when Pierre nudged Lafarge.

  Lafarge turned to him slightly annoyed at his elbow having connected with his ribs.

  “What do you do that for Pierre?” he asked tetchily.

  Pierre smiled and pointed with his little hand.

  “Look papa. Those two fish are swimming straight at the boat, normally they swim alongside it,” he said.

  Lafarge looked down and saw the two ‘fish’ that Pierre had pointed out and they were indeed going very fast below the surface. Lafarge put his hand protectively over his son’s eyes, and with his other arm he held Isabella and his daughter tight, and then as the ‘fish’ hit the ship with two great bangs the sky went dark.

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  HISTORICAL NOTE

  While the majority of the characters are fictional several are real and below is a short account of what happened to some of them:

  René Bousquet

  Following his resignation he and his family were taken to Bavaria by the Nazis and kept there till the end of the war. Brought back to France he remained in prison – he stayed faithful to Laval and passed the time with him in his cell throughout the night prior to the former Prime Minister’s execution. He was put on trial in 1949, the last of the main protagonists of the Vichy Government, who hadn’t escaped justice, to be tried. Extraordinary as it may seem at the time he was not charged over the deportation of the Jews, some say that the then French government preferred such unsavoury matters were not brought up four years after the end of the war, and thus received a light sentence. Shameless as ever he became an advisor to the bank of Indochina and supported Francois Mitterrand financially in his presidential election campaigns against General de Gaulle, all of them unsuccessful. Eventually most people including the judicial authorities came to disagree with Mitterrand, whose own role under Vichy was subject to debate though of far less importance than Bousquet’s, and he was charged in 1991 with crimes against humanity. However, one of those lone gunmen, a French version of Jack Ruby, gained access to Bousquet’s apartment block and shot him dead when he answered the door in 1993 – he was 84. A lot of people breathed a sigh of relief that Bousquet had been silenced before perhaps he exposed them in court. For others, though, it erased any chance of seeing one of the coldest, most callous and able characters of the Vichy regime finally answer for his true crimes.

  Jean Leguay

  He was made Prefect of the Orne department of France following his resignation from his post as deputy to Bousquet in December 1943. Persona non grata post the Liberation he managed to escape to the United States where he worked for a cosmetics company, they probably being unaware of his unsavoury war record which had seen him organise the trains to deport the Jews and other undesirables and execute Bousquet’s orders on the ground. He eventually returned to France and worked for a research laboratory near Paris. His past finally and belatedly caught up with him when the former Vichy appointed Commissioner for the Jewish Question Louis Darquier de Pellepoix – who had escaped certain execution by making his way to Spain after the Liberation – revealed in an interview both Leguay’s and Bousquet’s integral role in the deportation of the Jews. Leguay was charged in 1978 with crimes against humanity but incredibly 11 years later on his death aged 80 he had yet to face trial. Many believe that like Bousquet, powerful political figures were nervous what Leguay might say were he to have his day in court.

  Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

  He was a much admired writer and remained close to several – including Andre Malraux – who disagreed with his virulent anti–Semitic views and blind devotion to the Nazis. However, this veteran of the Great War did not forget his friends either as he inte
rvened to have the writer Jean Paulhan released in May 1941. He came to doubt his belief in Fascism being the future and that the Nazis would win the war. He went into hiding on the liberation of Paris but increasingly desperate as the authorities searched for him he succeeded in committing suicide, after two failed attempts, on March 15 1945. His phrase published posthumously sums up his rather cynical attitude by the time of his death: ‘We played, I lost. I ask for death.’

  Otto Abetz

  The German ambassador was a cultivated man, who made much of his francophilia. However, that did not extend to those who were considered to be members of the countless organizations that the Nazis despised and outlawed and certainly not the Jews. He supported Laval through thick and thin – earning a reprimand from the Nazis in Berlin at one juncture – but remained at his post, a brief interlude apart, until the eve of the liberation of Paris. Arrested in October 1945 he was sentenced to 20 years hard labour in 1949, but was released in 1953. He died aged 55 as a result of injuries sustained in a car crash in 1958.

  Doctor Marcel Petiot

  On the exterior a well regarded general practitioner. However, in reality he was a highly intelligent but most probably certifiably mad ingenious moneymaking serial killer. Doubts had already arisen about several patients disappearing prior to the war but had been dismissed for want of concrete evidence. However, in the chaos of war he flourished inventing the story that he provided an escape route for the many people who wished to get away either from the Nazis or from the Bonny and Lafont French Gestapo. Some have alluded to the possibility that he received aid from the Germans, who were attracted by the riches he accrued from his victims, and also the French Gestapo. Whatever the truth he took it with him to the guillotine, after a farce of a trial helped no end by his mischief making. He was found guilty of 27 cases of murder, although he claimed he had only murdered collaborators. The morning of his execution, May 25 1946, he joked to one of the delegation that came to his cell that he looked deathly pale and if he wished he could give him an injection. His final words as he was strapped to the guillotine were: ‘Look away. This will not be pretty to see.’

  Pierre Bonny and Henri Lafont

  Bonny and Lafont were arrested in the summer of 1944 while hiding out in a farm having declined to take flight with their German friends. At their trial Bonny divested himself of all blame laying it at Lafont’s door. Lafont was defended by Petiot’s lawyer René Floriot, but the latter like with Petiot later was unable to save his client. Bonny’s pathetic efforts at trying to avoid all responsibility failed and he was executed by firing squad alongside his partner on December 26, 1944. Several of their gang were also executed but others succeeded in escaping to South America while others flourished in France thanks to powerful political godfathers, whose campaigns were no doubt funded from the French Gestapo’s loot from the war.

  George–Victor Massu

  Despite his herculean efforts in tracking down Petiot and other criminals in Paris during the Occupation, after the Liberation, he was arrested and tried for collaborating with the enemy. He was so desperate that he tried to commit suicide while in prison but was saved and it was fortunate for him as he was to be cleared of all charges. He returned to the police force and he was the inspiration, though not 100 percent of it, of his friend Georges Simenon’s legendary character Inspector Maigret.

  SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

  Several historical books about this darkest of periods in French history proved educational in terms of background. They were primarily:

  Death in the City of Light by David King

  And The Show Went On – Cultural life in Nazi–Occupied Paris by Alan Riding

  Americans in Paris by Charles Glass