The Strangers in the House, page 11
‘The man who lives on Place d’Armes, who has a private income?’
‘Yes. He’s a customer. He buys lots of books, particularly expensive books we order specially for him from Paris. He came into the shop one day when Monsieur Georges had gone upstairs to have his tea – he always has tea at four o’clock. Monsieur Testut paid his bill. One thousand three hundred and thirty-two francs. I kept it. I was planning to give it back by the end of the month.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. I’d have found a way. Things couldn’t have gone on like that. I swear to you I’m not a thief! Besides, I’d let Edmond know.’
‘About what?’
‘I told him I didn’t want to keep being the scapegoat. The others had to help me. If they hadn’t got me drunk on the day of the accident …’
A distant car horn pierced the layer of silence, reminding them that all around there was a little town, every inhabitant of which thought they knew everything about it.
Why, at that precise moment, did Loursat think of the Courthouse Club? It had no connection with anything! A few years earlier – it was the time when contract bridge was starting to be played throughout the provinces – magistrates and lawyers had decided to start a social club, which was lacking in the town.
For weeks, all the leading figures in Moulins had been sent circulars and invitations. A provisional committee had been established, with Ducup as the secretary.
Then a permanent committee had been elected, presided over by Rogissart and a general – why a general? – and the club had bought a corner building on Avenue Victor-Hugo.
Loursat had discovered his name on the list of members – not because he had agreed to anything at all, but because all the leading figures were automatically put on it. He had received sumptuously produced reports.
Despite his isolation, he had heard rumours of the arguments that had arisen whenever it came to admitting new members. Some wanted a very exclusive club, comprising only the cream of Moulins. Others, thinking of swelling the budget, suggested they should be more democratic in whom they allowed in.
The magistrates had fought with the board for the important posts, and three meetings had been devoted to the case of a doctor who practised plastic surgery, whom some wanted to admit, others to reject.
Ducup, still the secretary, had followed Rogissart when the latter, along with a good half of the club, had resigned in the course of a stormy meeting.
Nothing more had been heard for weeks, until the day suppliers asked for payment and it had emerged that the manager had signed some strange purchase orders …
The case had come close to ending up in court, and it had even been necessary to ask each member to donate money – not everyone had agreed to that.
‘Tell me, Manu …’
He had been on the verge of saying ‘Émile’.
‘I need to know all the members of your gang, as you call it … By the way, did Big Louis ever mention that a friend or associate of his was planning to pay him a visit?’
‘No.’
‘Or that his mistress might come to Moulins to see him?’
‘No.’
‘Between all of you, was there ever any discussion about trying to get rid of him?’
‘Yes.’
The guard knocked at the door and half opened it.
‘A note for you, maître. A messenger just brought it from the prosecutor’s department.’
Loursat tore open the envelope and read the typewritten note:
The public prosecutor has the honour to inform Maître Loursat that Jean Destrivaux has been missing from his parents’ house since yesterday evening.
There were still so many scattered fragments! And, on top of that, for eighteen years Loursat had unlearned what people’s lives were like!
He had a sense of it, though. It seemed to him that one more effort and he would pull together all these … all these …
‘Destrivaux,’ he said out loud.
‘What?’
‘What do you think of Destrivaux?’
‘He’s a neighbour. His parents built a house in our street.’
‘How did he get on with the gang?’
‘It’s hard to explain. He wore glasses. He was always trying to be cleverer than the others, more objective, as he put it. He was pale, quiet …’
‘I’ve just heard from the prosecutor’s department that he’s gone missing.’
Manu thought this over, and it was curious to see this big child knitting his brows like a man.
‘No!’ he said at last.
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘I don’t think it was him … He stole cigarette lighters.’
Loursat was getting tired from the constant effort he was having to make: it was indispensable to translate every sentence into plain language, as if it was a text in shorthand or a message in code.
‘I don’t understand,’ he admitted.
‘He was the most comfortably off. He’d buy cigarettes in a tobacconist’s where there were lighters on the counter. Then he’d arrange it so that he dropped some of the lighters on the floor. He’d apologize and pick them up, and as he did he’d put one in his pocket.’
‘Tell me, Manu …’
Once again, he had almost said ‘Émile’ and almost asked a question it was better not to ask. He had wanted to say:
‘What was your motivation in stealing like that?’
But no, that was stupid! He understood without understanding, struggling amid his intuitions and his contradictions.
‘All the same, one of you …’
‘Yes!’
‘Who?’
Silence. Manu was still looking at the floor.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Dossin?’
‘I don’t think so. Or else …’
‘Else what?’
‘Or else he might have been scared.’
For the first time that day, Loursat was feeling the effects of not having had any wine. He was tired. He was limp.
‘You’ll probably be taken to the courthouse at nine tomorrow morning. I’ll try to see you before the interrogation. If not, I’ll be present anyway. Don’t answer too quickly. If need be, don’t hesitate to ask me for advice. I think it’s indispensable to tell the truth about the thefts.’
He realized that Manu was disappointed, and so was he, without knowing exactly why. He had probably been trying to go too fast, thinking he could gain immediate entrance to this world he was only just starting to discover.
As for Émile, he hadn’t been told anything specific. Once the door closed, he found himself as adrift as before.
But then the door opened again immediately. It was Loursat.
‘I was forgetting! I’ll see to it right away that your cell mate is changed. He’s a stool pigeon. But don’t trust whoever they put in his place either.’
Was it because there was an age difference of nearly thirty years between them? The connection hadn’t been established. Going out through the main gate into the rain, his briefcase against his left side, Loursat looked at the street lamps, the reflections, the busier street beyond the next crossroads.
On the right, there was a small bistro from where some prisoners had their meals brought in. He went in.
‘Red wine.’
It was about time. He was out of his depth, almost missing his study and his deep solitude.
The owner, who was wearing a pullover, watched him drink his wine and finally asked:
‘Do you think there’ll be lots of them caught up in it? Is it right that most of these rich young people were part of it?’
So the whole town knew!
‘Same again!’
The purplish-blue wine was thick and rough.
Loursat paid. For a first time in contact with people, he had been out for too long. Do convalescents on their first day out walk from morning to night?
Once outside, though, he hesitated to go back to the courthouse. No particular reason: he just wanted to breathe the air of the other side.
Part Two
1
Loursat raised his head, gave his daughter a furtive glance, left his armchair and went and poked the stove, which had been roaring whenever there was a sudden gust of wind. He sensed that Nicole, calmly bent over her files, was watching him without needing to move her eyes – it was as if she held him at the end of a thread – but he nevertheless headed over to a cupboard, opened it and took out a bottle of rum.
‘Aren’t you cold, my dear?’ he asked awkwardly.
She answered no, her tone a mixture of reproach and indulgence. Several times, he had put the bottle back without drinking. This time, he merely let out a genuinely weary sigh.
‘It’s the last night! Tomorrow …’
It was after midnight. The town was deserted, the sky clear, with a brutal clarity, the streets swept by a wind that raised a fine dust of ice from the cobbles.
The shutters in the study hadn’t been closed. In the whole street, the whole neighbourhood, the Loursats’ window was the only small patch of life.
They were nearing the end of the tunnel, a tunnel they’d been in for three months. Already by the morning of 1 January, the heavy layer of dampness that had crushed the town had disappeared, and they had stopped living in stickiness, furtively hugging the dripping buildings, in a world of black on white, as faded as an etching.
The nights were so long that you forgot the days, once again saw nothing but dimly lit shops, steamed-up windows and streets shrouded in darkness, where every passer-by became a mystery.
‘How many have you done so far?’ Loursat asked, sitting down again and looking for a cigarette.
‘Sixty-three!’ she said.
‘Aren’t you tired?’
She shook her head. Sixty-three files out of ninety-seven! Ninety-seven folders of thick paper arranged in piles on the desk, some full to bursting, others flat, sometimes containing nothing but a single sheet of paper.
Above the fireplace, a big, black figure 12 on the pale sheet of the calendar: Sunday 12 January. And as it was after midnight, it was already Monday 13, in other words, the day.
To other people, it might mean nothing. For Loursat, for Nicole, for the Dwarf, for the maid, for some people in the town and elsewhere, Monday 13 was the end of the tunnel. At eight o’clock in the morning, an unaccustomed group of volunteer stewards would take up position on the steps of the courthouse and demand to see tickets, which had been distributed only sparingly. The police van would bring Émile Manu, who had grown thinner but taller and would be wearing the new suit his mother had had made for him the previous week. And in the cloakroom, Loursat would put on his robe, which Nicole had persuaded him to let her send for a thorough cleaning.
‘Wasn’t Pijollet interrogated twice?’ she said, frowning in surprise.
Who even knew who Pijollet was? They did! They and a few others who, after spending so much time on the case, could have been using a hermetic language among themselves.
‘There was one interrogation on the 12th of December,’ Loursat said without hesitation.
‘For some reason, I thought there’d been a second one.’
Pijollet was a neighbour of the Destrivaux family, a man of independent means who had been second or third violin at the Paris Opera and had returned to his native town. Being a neighbour of the Destrivauxs, it followed that he lived in the same street as the Manus.
‘I didn’t know them. All I knew was that there was someone a few doors down from me who gave piano lessons. As for the Destrivauxs, I’d see them in their garden from my window. In summer, of course! And also, when they were in their dining room, I could hear a murmur of voices from mine. Not clearly enough to understand. A word here or there. What I did hear was when they opened and closed the door … I never get to sleep before two in the morning – a habit from working in the theatre. I read in bed. I’d noticed that someone in the Destrivaux household was coming home very late, even sometimes waking me with a start.’
All that to get to this question asked by Ducup:
‘Do you recall the night of the 7th of October?’
‘Yes, very well!’
‘How can you be so categorical?’
‘Because, in the afternoon, I ran into a friend I’d thought was still in Madagascar.’
‘But how do you know it was the 7th?’
‘We went to a café together, which is something I don’t often do, and there was a big calendar right in front of me. I can still see the number 7. Anyway, I’m certain that someone at the Destrivauxs’ came in at two in the morning, just as I was about to switch off the light.’
Ninety-seven files! Ninety-seven people, some of them quite unexpected, who ceased to be particular individuals – a policeman, a waitress, a sales assistant from Prisunic, a customer of the Georges bookshop – and became a fragment of the huge dossier that Nicole was checking through one last time.
At eight o’clock, Émile Manu – charged with the murder of Louis Cagalin, otherwise known as Big Louis, committed soon after midnight on 8 October in the building belonging to Hector Loursat de Saint-Marc, lawyer at the court – would step into the dock and his trial would begin.
During the three months that the investigation had lasted, rain had continued to fall from the sky, and the town had continued to be grey and dirty, with people coming and going like ants moving towards mysterious goals.
Now, all that was left were ninety-seven folders of thick yellow paper with names written on them in purple ink.
But day by day, night by night, hour by hour, each file, each sheet, had come to life, had become a man or a woman, with a job, a house, faults, vices, habits, a particular way of speaking or standing.
At first, there were only a handful of them: Edmond Dossin, whom his parents had sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland, the young pork butcher Daillat, Destrivaux, who had been tracked down in Les Halles in Paris, without a sou in his pocket, prowling around the barrows of vegetables waiting to be unloaded … Then Luska, who could be seen every day on the pavement outside Prisunic selling big hunting boots at a discount …
Then there was Grouin, who hadn’t spent much time with the gang, but was a part of it, and whose father was a departmental councillor!
For three months – except for the last few weeks – Émile Manu had left the prison every morning, accompanied by two gendarmes, and the days had been as monotonous, as meticulously regular as in the Georges bookshop.
Ducup, who knew that he wouldn’t need him before ten or eleven, demanded that the prisoner be at his disposal by eight. At that hour, the corridors of the courthouse were still lit and women were washing the flagstones.
Manu would enter a small room that had been found for him: dirty walls, a bench, brooms and galvanized buckets in a corner. One of the gendarmes would go off to drink his coffee and come back with his newspaper, his moustache smelling slightly of rum. Then it was his colleague’s turn.
The light bulb would grow paler. Footsteps would be heard over their heads: Ducup arriving, settling in for the day, sorting his papers, asking for the first witness to be brought in …
There might have been people in the town who were still living with other ideas, other concerns, other plans, but for some, the world had frozen, as it were, a few minutes after midnight on 8 October.
‘Are you Sophie Stüff, owner of an inn at Les Coqueteaux?’
‘Yes, monsieur.’
‘You were born in Strasbourg and were married to a Monsieur Stüff, a road sweeper. Having been widowed with two daughters, Eva and Clara, you lived first in Bettignies, where you worked as a cleaner. You were the mistress of a certain Troulet, who beat you, which led you to file a complaint against him.’
She was the manageress of the Auberge aux Noyés. Five pages in all, including the interrogation of her two daughters. But Loursat had gone back there himself, three times, four times, and had seen a photograph of Stüff, looking like a halfwit, along with photographs of her daughters when they were little, and one of this fellow Troulet, who had been a gendarme and had beaten his mistress.
‘Which one was the most resourceful of the gang? In short, was it always the same one who paid?’
‘Monsieur Edmond, yes!’
Only Loursat knew, through Nicole, that each of them, before setting off for a good time, would hand over money to Dossin!
‘When he danced, he’d put his cap on at a tilted angle and have a cigarette dangling from his lips. He’d brought records of dance music, because we didn’t have any. He’d hold himself very stiffly and claim that was what people did in dance halls.’
‘Did he flirt with you?’
‘He pretended to despise us.’ (This was Eva, the younger daughter, speaking.) ‘He called us minxes. He pretended to believe that we …’
‘Say it!’
‘Don’t you get it? He thought there were bedrooms upstairs, and that we’d go up there with just anyone. He wouldn’t let go of it.’
‘And he didn’t ask to go up himself?’
‘No, but the pork butcher …’
‘What did the pork butcher do?’
‘He was always sticking his hands on us. We’d try to push him off, but he’d start right in again. If it wasn’t me, it was my sister, and he would have done the same with my mother. Just so long as it was a woman! He’d laugh and tell disgusting stories.’
Ducup and Loursat had stopped shaking hands. Whenever Loursat entered the judge’s office, for an interrogation of Manu or a confrontation, they would say to each other coldly:
‘Please … After you … If counsel for the defence …’
And Loursat seemed to bring to the courthouse, in his beard, in the folds of his clothes, in his grimaces, his glowering eyes, lingering odours of this strange world into which he would plunge, all alone, for hours on end, only to return with a new prey, a name unknown the previous day, a new yellow folder to be opened.
