The Anatomy of Murder, page 15
The details, then, would vary with the circumstances. No exact information is to be obtained, except in each case from what the concierge remembered of confidences made to her, for it is noticeable that all these women led such lonely lives, with relatives so few or so distant, that it was only to the concierge they were able to gossip about the charming gentleman who had so unexpectedly come into their lives, of his attentions and unfailing kindness, his courtesy, and the happy prospects opening out before them. In one or two cases when friends might have wondered why Madame So-and-So had cut herself off from them so entirely, Landru took pains to send a box of chocolates as a parting present, or flowers—he had always a weakness for flowers—that had come ostensibly all the way from Nice, where it was to be assumed the lady was happily and comfortably installed in her new life. Impossible to suppose that harm had come to one who took the trouble to send such lovely flowers in such profusion all the way from the South of France.
But if the details varied, the end was the same. A little trip to the country would be proposed, a pleasant excursion, such as town-dwellers love all the world over, and Parisians perhaps more than most. There was a little villa at Vernouillet, small and pleasant town in the valley of the Seine. Later it was another small villa, the Villa Tric, as it was called from the landlord’s name, in the lonely village of Gambais, on the outskirts of the forest of Rambouillet, not very far from where in that same forest every morning a fleet of lorries from Paris deposits fresh tons of the refuse of the great city in enormous pits and disused quarries that exist there, and that the authorities have adopted this method of filling in.
A careful and far-seeing man like Landru, so cautious and so calculating, may possibly have noticed this, have watched with interest in the early morning that long line of lorries issuing fully laden from Paris and returning empty, and have perceived that from this public enterprise some private profit might be drawn.
At any rate it was in Gambais that the idyll, begun when a prospective purchaser of furniture called in answer to an advertisement at a small Paris flat, would presently draw to its conclusion.
One morning Landru and Madame—there are ten names that can be filled in at choice—would set out, Landru, one is sure, as smiling and attentive and polite as ever, and Madame—take which name you prefer from the list—one can well imagine, in high spirits at the prospects of this country jaunt with the vrai monsieur who had power to depict their joint future in such glowing colours and who, for proof of his position in the world, was able to boast of the reality of the favourite dream of the Parisian—a little villa in the country.
She would be quite content to wait while he left her for a moment to buy their tickets and presently he would return still smiling and attentive as ever, with the tickets, one single and one return.
A thoughtful man, it is to be noted, and one with an eye to detail. Why go to the unnecessary expense of buying a return ticket for one who would not return?
Carefully he would enter the details in his note-book, jotting down exactly how much for the single ticket, how much for the return, while no doubt Madame looked on admiringly, and with true French love of thrift thought how fortunate she was to have found a man who knew so well how to look after his sous.
Here, for instance, are the items of the expenses for one such day copied directly from his note-book, his careful note-book, for April 4, 1918:
Fr.
Garage voiture 1.00
Figues 1.80+.45 rembourse de valise 2.25
Voiture, Invalides, 3.00, billets, 3.10 & 4.95 11.05
1 pneumatique à 7h. 0.40 .40
Diligence 2.40
The price for a single ticket from Paris to the nearest station to the village of Gambais—a diligence running between the station and the village—being at that time three francs ten, or a return ticket four francs ninety-five.
Grotesquely, and a little horribly, reminiscent, is it not, of the old legendary tag of duelling days: “Pistols for two; coffee for one”?
And there the story ends so far as any facts are known. It was a Madame Pascal to whom these special entries referred. She had been a dressmaker, earning a comfortable, if modest living. On that morning of April 4, 1918, Landru called at her small flat, and with him she left for the country trip they had planned together. At the railway station he bought, as duly entered in his note-book, one single ticket and one return. Since then, since that hour when she left her flat with Landru, the man whose ‘charming courtesy’, whose ‘perfect breeding’ she had so often praised to friends, she has never more been seen, nor has any recognizable trace of her been found. That April 4th she stepped out of the ranks of the living to be no more heard of, and the next day, April 5th, Landru, content and tranquil, returned alone to Paris, having first in his careful, precise, business-like manner jotted down in his note-book the small expenses of the previous day such items as the purchase of a cup of coffee, a roll, tobacco, and so on. Also there is noted in larger, clearer figures, at the top of the page for that day the hour of five-fifteen in the evening, though with no indication of what event it was he considered interesting enough to record in this manner.
Within a week, having entered into possession of Madame Pascal’s flat, he had sold her furniture and her personal belongings, and so was her tale done, till it began to be retold again in a court-room at Versailles.
Yet how within that brief space of time between, say, a quarter-past five in the evening and Landru’s presentation at the station for Gambais of the return ticket to Paris with which he had so thoughtfully provided himself, did he manage and contrive so successfully to dispose of Madame Pascal’s body that no trace remained, no sign of struggle, no bloodstains to be found, no cry heard, nothing?
A busy and efficient man this Henri Désiré Landru seems to have been, that much praise at least he has fairly earned.
II
THE MURDERER DOMESTIC
At this time Landru, born in 1869, and therefore in middle age, was a man to all appearance rangé, as the French say. His parents seem to have been, to quote the story books, “poor but honest”. The father is described as a mécanicien, a rather vague term that might cover any occupation from that of driving an express on one of the railways to casual stoking in the boiler-house of any factory. Probably the civil state of Landru senior was more akin to the latter occupation than to the former. Nothing is recorded to his discredit and, indeed, nothing to remark on his life save his method of quitting it, for he committed suicide in the Bois de Boulogne in 1912. It is no doubt far-fetched to suggest that the motive for this suicide may have been his realization of the kind of monster he had brought into the world. His wife in the usual thrifty French fashion helped the family income by doing needlework. So far as is known there is nothing in the family history to suggest any taint of degeneracy or disease. In his childhood, too, Landru appears to have made a good impression. He became a choir boy which certainly would not have happened had anything serious been known to his discredit, and his taste for music he retained to the end—indeed, when he was not murdering, music and flowers had always their appeal for him. He even went on to take ‘minor orders’ as a sub-deacon, so that his general conduct must certainly have been regarded as exemplary by the authorities of the church he attended. At this time he was in fact, as the presiding magistrate at his trial remarked, un peu de l’église, the suggestion being that it was to this early association with the Church that he owed the peculiar suavity of his manner, the ingratiating, confidence-creating way he undoubtedly had. But one is inclined to suspect that presiding magistrate of being something of an ‘anti-clerical’ in French politics, and of meaning to hint that it was from the Church Landru had learned how to impose upon credulous and foolish women. Rather one may suspect it was that smooth tongue of his which had enabled him to impose upon his ecclesiastical superiors and to hide from them his real disposition.
In various offices where he worked as a boy his conduct was still satisfactory, and when in due time he was called up for military service his army record remains good. He left at the expiration of his time with non-commissioned rank, and only then does he seem to have drifted in some way or another into the ranks of petty crime. Motors attracted him. He had again a certain skill as a mechanic—he claimed credit for one or two small inventions—and some offence connected with the buying or selling of a motor lorry earned him a sentence of three years. Soon after his release the police were looking for him again, but he managed to evade their attentions successfully. During his three years in prison his mother had died, and some time or another he had married. Apparently he was a good and kind husband, and no woman with whom he came in contact had ever a word of complaint to make against him—till at least in a moment of incredulous amazement they understood too late, and probably too briefly to understand in full; for surely one so efficient and painstaking as Landru, however he gave death, must have given it easily and swiftly.
To the credit of the French police, once they were convinced that Landru’s wife had never had the least suspicion of the nature of his peculiar activities, they took care that neither she nor her children should be referred to. In the long trial once only something is said of “a good and simple woman who knew nothing of these things”, and Landru himself does not omit to point out that he is admitted to have been a good husband and father. The French newspapers, too, either because they are so much less enterprising than our own or because they have more respect for the decencies of private life, make no reference to her. It is true that, owing to his unfortunate misunderstandings with the police, Landru was unable to live at home with his family, but he seems always to have kept in touch with them; and when, after one of his successful business transactions, he had to take over possession of furniture recently belonging to a woman now understood to be happily travelling in England or resident in Nice or somewhere else where furniture in a Paris apartment was no longer of value to her, then it was his son, a lad of sixteen or seventeen, whom he called upon to help convey it to the garage, where in due time so many oddities were to be poked out by interfering police officers.
There is an odd little scene recorded when at the Gambais villa this lad is seen in the garden picking flowers he explains he means to give to his mother; and Landru looks on approvingly, remarking that one cannot take too many pains to show attention to one’s mother. He failed, however, to explain to the woman who was with him at the time—the one woman who visited Gambais and lived to tell the tale—that this mother was in fact his own wife and the boy his eldest son. But one cannot go into every detail, and the boy himself seems to have preserved an equally discreet silence, never forgetting the character of ‘apprentice’ assigned to him.
It is odd to notice, though, how all through this strange, dark tale of murder, ruthless and repeated and so callously efficient, there runs perpetually this motive of flowers and of music.
About Landru’s personal appearance there does not seem to have been much to account for that success he had with the women whose complete confidence he won time and again. He is described as small, slight, insignificant; probably he owed his easy triumphs to his caressing, insinuating manner and his persuasive tongue, the tongue of the readiest liar, one imagines, that hell ever spawned.
Photographs show him as the almost comically typical representative of what the French call the petit bourgeois. It may be that the very ordinariness of his appearance helped to create that confidence he seems to have won so easily. Who could imagine that a man who looked so exactly like everyone else could be in fact so strangely, so dreadfully different? An old man could not have won such personal success, a young man might have been regarded with more suspicion, but why mistrust this plain, sober, tranquil, gentle-spoken man of middle age, whose middle-class respectability proclaimed itself aloud to all the world, who differed from the thousand like him only in being so much more polite, so extremely punctilious and well bred. Nor is there any Frenchwoman, whatever her station, but attaches importance to politeness and good breeding. No wonder Landru attracts, when in him good breeding is so ingrained that presently, on a bleak February dawn, when he has business in a Versailles square with, as the bitter Parisian jest ran at the time, the only ‘widow’ he had not known how to cheat, he refuses to recognize one of the officials whose duty it is to see that business well and truly carried out, until proper introductions have been effected!
Let the reader put the question to himself. Could he find it credible that the next typical clerk or shopman he sees hurrying to or from the city in the rush hours, bowler hat, umbrella, attaché case, season ticket, morning or evening paper under one arm, could he believe that man was a murderer not once but a dozen times, a murderer, too, so skilful and efficient that, grimmest of magicians, he could make the body of his victim vanish ‘without trace’?
Always it is a part of the peculiar horror of this tale that makes it outstanding in the record of human wickedness, that everything is so drab, so ordinary, so commonplace, so ‘everydayish’ to quote the French expression. The actors in it are all the least conspicuous of folk, types of the everyday citizen whose ordinary destiny would be to slip unnoticed from undistinguished cradle by an uneventful and laborious life to one more grave in a crowded city cemetery—the Mr. and Mrs. Zero of our civilization, the tiniest of cogs in the revolving wheels that make society go round. All through the tale runs this ‘dailiness of daily life’ till at the end, abruptly and without warning, leaps up mystery and horror unparalleled.
When the amazing record of his crimes became known, people began to talk of the hypnotic power of Landru’s eyes. They seem to have been small and bright under bushy eyebrows, and he had a way of gazing into the distance as though his immediate surroundings were unworthy of his attention. Whether this was unconscious or a deliberate pose on his part remains doubtful, but it was certainly effective in impressing all who came in contact with him with a certain quality in him of a proud and aloof tranquillity—and a proud and aloof tranquillity is not exactly what one expects in a man accused of nearly a dozen murders. The murderer ferocious, the murderer brutal, greedy, frenzied, passionate, we can understand, but not the murderer tranquil and gentle, the murderer who seems as if he might turn from the corpse of his victim to give the cat a saucer of milk or to chat over the fence with a neighbour about the garden flowers.
Talk about hypnotic power may, however, be dismissed as a discovery after the event. Possibly, too, the sketches made in court give a better idea of Landru’s personality than the exact and precise photographs that misrepresent the more because they misrepresent nothing. In the sketches one seems to get a glimpse of a certain demoniac power the man’s deeds show that he possessed, however well he kept it hidden in common life. There is one drawing, too, that shows him bending forward a little, his eloquent hands held out, his attitude full of an eager sincerity, truth almost visibly oozing from him as he stands there in the Versailles court-room before his judges, and lies and lies and lies again with such conviction he almost turns the false into the true.
The sketches, too, seem to show that the facial angle is bad; though the presence of a heavy, close-growing beard makes the point a little difficult to decide with certainty. But the backward slope of the head is clearly marked, and is suggestive. Clearly marked, too, is the breadth of the head above the ear—an indication of the intellectual powers the man certainly possessed, in spite of the efforts of a famous English journalist to write him down a fool. A fool he certainly was not, except in that high sense in which all sin is the supreme folly.
To give an instance of the clear insight that was at times in the man, however clouded by vanity and greed, it may be pointed out that the reason he gave for offering better prices for the furniture he was bargaining to acquire (thus by so unexpected a liberality earning the confidence of the gratified seller) was that after the war there was likely to be a great scarcity of manufactured goods, so that anyone with a store laid up would be able to sell at a big profit.
The reflection seems obvious to-day, commonplace indeed. To have entertained it, however, at that time—while the war still raged—is proof of exceptional insight. Some of those to whom that same insight came were led by it to fortune. One remembers, for instance, how the British Government offered for sale by public contract some enormous collection or another of textiles manufactured for war use, and how there was at first considerable hesitation to buy. When at last one speculator plucked up courage and ventured the purchase, he was able to sell again retail at a profit that made him a millionaire in a month or two.
So might it easily have been with Landru, since he was of those who had acumen enough to realize the famine of the world for those commodities of which the war had so long deprived it. Had Landru but followed the gleam thus vouchsafed him he might well, with his talent for buying and selling and his passion for method and precision, have acquired prosperity and wealth and all the honour and renown that wealth brings with it. Instead he chose another path, possibly arguing that since public slaughter had become the business of all the world, a little private slaughter might be permitted to the individual.
A very noticeable feature of his physical make-up was his baldness. It seems to have struck the imagination of the Parisian public, perhaps because there is something respectable, almost avuncular about baldness; one finds it difficult to imagine a bald Don Juan, to conceive a bald Lothario making a conquest of two hundred and eighty-three women—for that is the incredible and altogether preposterous number of the women that the careful investigation of the Paris police established as the count of his finacées. Though one may be permitted to doubt whether in all those cases actual fiançailles had been announced, for in France the fiançailles is a serious and public affair. But still, in this incredible business one may believe anything—even two hundred and eighty-three fiancees. Perhaps, like Clive, Landru stood amazed at his own moderation when he reflected that out of them all he had contented himself with murdering only ten—at least that is all the prosecution brought forward, with one boy thrown in as if for makeweight.
