The Dream Killer of Paris Read online

  In Calais at the harbour station and later in the Pullman carriages of the Flèche d’Or I looked for her again among the passengers – in vain. It was as if she had disappeared into thin air and I thought it unlikely I would ever see her again.

  As the train sped through the French countryside at more than seventy miles an hour, I considered the strange meeting again. By the time the train had stopped at Platform 1 of the Gare du Nord, my memory of the scene had become so uncertain that I wondered if I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Indeed, what if, after all, the young woman herself was a mirage. Fata Morgana!

  Notes

  2 Gérard de Nerval, le poète et l’homme by Aristide Marie, published by Hachette in 1914. Singleton devoured this biography, the first truly complete account of the French writer’s life. (Publisher’s note)

  II

  TOUR SAINT-JACQUES

  I walked from the Gare du Nord to the capital’s historical centre. As well as Nerval’s books, I had taken care to slip into my bag a guide to modern and ancient Paris written in the 1920s which I had bought from a second-hand dealer in Boston. In the middle of the book was a very colourful map and every time I consulted it I circled in pen the names of the main roads, bridges, squares and monuments which captured my imagination.

  Whistling, I headed down Boulevard de Magenta and then Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis before turning down Rue Réaumur on to Boulevard de Sébastopol. At the top of Rue de Turbigo, I made my way through narrow streets with delightfully evocative names: Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, Rue Brisemiche, and so on.

  At the bend in Rue Saint-Bon, I reached Tour Saint-Jacques, so dear to Nerval. The monument was all that remained of the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie whose refurbishment had been paid for by Nicolas Flamel, the famous alchemist.

  The tower took pride of place in the middle of a small square filled with trees and flowers. Somewhere in this garden was the spot where the poet had come to hang himself that night in January 1855. Unless it was fifty yards further along where the solemn Théâtre des Nations had since been built3. In Nerval’s time, the area didn’t have the respectable feel it has today. It had been a jumble of dark alleyways and sordid passageways where scoundrels and down-and-outs loitered. That was before Baron Haussmann’s engineers ‘civilised’ Old Paris for ever.

  The day after Nerval’s death, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Roger de Beauvoir and, to a lesser extent, Arsène Houssaye expressed serious doubts about the suicide theory. They thought that their friend had been the victim of one of the local ruffians.

  I remember talking one evening, in a pub in Aldgate, to a music hall lighting engineer who had worked in Paris a few years earlier at the Théâtre des Nations. According to him, when work had been carried out in the building’s basement at the beginning of the 1910s, engineers, comparing the city maps with those of sixty years before, had noticed that the bars of the cellar window where Nerval had been found hanged at the end of a thin rope corresponded exactly to the current position of the prompter’s box. What’s more, if the usherettes were to be believed, on some evenings the poet’s ghost wandered between the rows of stalls after the performance. There was even a story that Sarah Bernhardt’s prompter was the ghost in person. However, I suspect that my companion, who was partial to whisky, was trying to pull the wool over my eyes to some extent.

  I rested for a few minutes on a bench in Square Saint-Jacques, opposite the tower, and then, as evening began to fall, started looking for a hotel.

  Having briefly studied the neighbourhood, I decided on an establishment in Rue de la Verrerie next to the church of Saint-Merri where the writer of the future had been christened, and a stone’s throw from the building in Rue Saint-Martin where he’d been born on 22 May 1808.

  I went up to my room to drop off my luggage. The walls and ceiling were crisscrossed with beams and the rustic furniture didn’t seem to have been replaced since the days of Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.

  It was the perfect place for me. Here I could easily immerse myself in the writer’s work, wander where he had wandered at night, try to understand what had been going through his mind and perhaps even establish the exact circumstances of his death.

  ‘I am the other,’ he had written in the margin of a book4.

  I wanted to be him for a few days.

  The next day, Wednesday 17 October, after a disturbed night of fraught and chaotic dreams which I was unable to remember upon waking, and a quick morning stroll on the banks of the Seine, I spent much of the day in my room, reading Nerval’s biography. It was long past midday when I eventually decided to go out for lunch at the Café des Innocents. A hundred and fifty years earlier it had been the site of a cemetery of the same name. At the end of the fourteenth century, on a panel there Nicolas Flamel (him again) had had a ‘man in black’ drawn on one of its pillars, directly facing the alchemic figures supposedly taken from the book of Abraham the Jew.

  In Paris, more than anywhere else, history had left its mark on the present. For those who were able to see, reality consisted of more than just the fieeting con tours of beings and things. Wherever the eyes of those who could see fell, on the corner of every street, on nearly every wall, between every join in the cobblestones, they could perceive another layer beneath the superficial layer of reality. It looked similar but was very different and slightly out of step, a little like the anaglyphs whose technique Louis Lumière was refining in his workshops in order to screen three-dimensional films. Perhaps one day, simply wearing a pair of stereoscopic glasses in the street would make a new view of life possible – richer, more profound, more real, carved out of the depths of time, where past and present would be visible simultaneously.

  After lunch I pushed the remains of my meal away and opened Aristide Marie’s book, which I always had with me. On one of the last pages, an extract from the register of the morgue (then located north-east of Pont Saint-Michel on Rue du Marché-Neuf ) was reproduced with the observations made by the state pathologist, Dr Devergie, on 26 January. Also reproduced was the complete text of the death certificate drawn up on 29 January at the town hall in the ninth arrondissement. These were about the only facts available. Thirty pages earlier, in a very obscure sentence, Aristide Marie intimated that documents from the investigation had been destroyed. What had happened? Was there any hope of ever finding them again?

  For now, I intended to visit the archives of the new Forensic Institute at Place Mazas near Quai de la Rapée.

  As the weather remained fine, I decided to walk along the Seine. Emerging on to Rue de Rivoli, I had just reached Tour Saint-Jacques, in front of Cavelier’s statue of Pascal, when I heard someone behind me calling my name.

  ‘Singleton! Singleton! Is that you?’

  ‘Inspector Fourier!’ I exclaimed, delighted to see the familiar face of the detective from the Sûreté, who was striding towards me.

  ‘Ah, my friend!’ he cried breathlessly, warmly shaking my outstretched hand. ‘But it’s Superintendent now, you know. I’ve been promoted!’

  ‘Of course, how could I have forgotten! This summer the Daily Mail reported at length on the exploits of Superintendent Fourier. That great figure of the Paris police force who managed to put behind bars the famous Bosco, big-time thief and the kind of colourful, elusive character only to be found in France!’

  ‘Well, well!’ he exclaimed, smoothing the long, solitary lock of hair which ran from one side of his head to the other. ‘I’m delighted to see that the reputation of our men is starting to cross the Channel. Give it a little time and Scotland Yard will be visiting our offices in Rue des Saussaies to study our methods. In any case, my dear friend, without you and your faithful partner I don’t think we would ever have got the better of the infamous Billancourt studios killer.’

  I won’t dwell on the case of the Cut-throat with the Broken Watch which I referred to earlier. One of these days I intend to gather together all the documents and notes made at th
e time and write the whole story down. In the meantime, all the reader needs to know is that in the winter of 1933 James and I made the acquaintance of the kind and scrupulous Edmond Fourier from the Sûreté Générale. Although the investigation had been particularly sensitive (the idea of working with two amateur detectives was nothing less than sacrilege for some members of his organisation), Fourier, who had initiated the collaboration, always demonstrated full confidence in us. In the end, it served him well.

  With his customary tweed suit, tweed overcoat, thin moustache, bowler hat and swordstick, Superintendent Fourier was the archetypal French policeman. He was a mixture of Juve, Tirauclair and Chantecoq!5 When I was with him I felt as though the shadow of Fantômas was about to appear on a rooftop or that the agile dandy overtaking us on the pavement was none other than Arsène Lupin returning from another burglary at a prince’s residence or the Crédit Lyonnais on Boulevard des Italiens.

  Edmond Fourier was about fifty-four or fifty-five and the son of ironmongers from the Franche-Comté region but he had lived in Paris, in Rue Cadet, for a long time. His humble origins had taught him common sense and realism, which often paid off. He had joined the Sûreté Générale at the age of twenty-seven, a few years after Prime Minister Clemenceau had set up his brigades mobiles, the famous Tiger Brigades, to counterbalance the all-powerful Préfecture de Police. Fourier was one of the stars of the Sûreté which, since its creation in 1820, had always suffered from comparisons with its rival. The large-scale reorganisation of the State’s police force the previous April had also seen the resources and remit of the Sûreté increase considerably so that it now had national powers. The staff of the Sûreté and the Préfecture were not quite ready to bury the hatchet but the new set-up did at least give each institution precise boundaries.6

  ‘But I see no sign of that wag Trelawney,’ remarked Fourier, pretending to look left and right over his shoulder in case my six-foot-three friend was hiding in the policeman’s short shadow.

  ‘James stayed in London but he’ll be joining me soon. At the moment, I imagine he’s finding it very difficult to resist the siren call of your city.’

  ‘Do I take it then that you are … uh … what one might call “on holiday”?’

  All of a sudden his deceptively disinterested tone made me realise that meeting Superintendent Fourier like this wasn’t simply a coincidence. Although he undoubtedly had all the qualities required of a detective, his acting skills left much to be desired. I remembered that the evening before, as I had left a brasserie on Rue Saint-Martin near my hotel, and then again that morning during a short stroll among the booksellers on Quai de Montebello, I had noticed a thickset individual with a broken nose like a boxer and short black crew cut hair whom I vaguely recognised but couldn’t place at the time. Now, the detective’s mischievous expression instantly provided me with the fellow’s name: Raymond Dupuytren who worked for Superintendent Fourier at the Sûreté Nationale and whom I’d met on several occasions in January 1933.

  The French police had certainly not improved in the field of domestic espionage. When the press wanted to mock it, didn’t they refer to it as the national secret?

  ‘Come, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense any longer. Tell me why you wanted to see me – I know you’ve been following me. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to ask me to come to Rue des Saussaies?’

  ‘Ha ha! I see I still can’t get anything past you! As for making you come to the Sûreté, there was no point. I got wind that you’d left the Hôtel Saint-Merri and since I happened to be near Île de la Cité this afternoon, it seemed natural to pay you a little courtesy visit.’

  ‘Only this time you almost missed me. I was about to go to Bercy.’

  ‘You’re right, my dear friend! Anyway, enough of this banter! I imagine you’re still fond of cases which baffle even the most intelligent of men?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I’m investigating a rather strange case that would appeal to you! The death of the Marquis de Brindillac. Have you heard about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How come? Haven’t you read the papers?’

  ‘Since I arrived I haven’t opened a single one. Strange as it may sound, you see me before you but it’s just an illusion. In reality, I’m in 1855. Busy solving an incredible mystery.’

  ‘How frustrating!’ said the detective, who knew my liking for long literary excursions. ‘I don’t know what kind of case you’re dealing with but you should know that events every bit as extraordinary are happening in 1934.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘It’ll be worth it, I promise. You’ve never heard anything like it, even in a novel.’

  ‘Don’t get carried away!’

  ‘Give me half an hour, Singleton. Just enough time to bring you up to date.’

  ‘You’re making my mouth water, Superintendent! Go on then, tell me what’s happened.’

  Notes

  3 Built in 1862, the Théâtre des Nations changed its name to Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in 1949 before being renamed Théâtre de la Ville in 1967. (Publisher’s note)

  4 This is reported in Chapter XIV of Aristide Marie’s book. Nerval was the subject of a book by Eugène de Mirecourt which had been dedicated to him in cabbalistic letters and, under a sketch, had written ‘I am the other’. (Publisher’s note)

  5 Juve was the ingenious policeman who hunted Fantômas in the series of the same name written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain between 1911 and 1913. Tirauclair was the hero of L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) by Émile Geboriau. Chantecoq was one of the characters in Belphégor by Arthur Bernède, published in 1927. (Publisher’s note)

  6 In fact, different police forces coexisted in France, created according to need and without any coordination between them. In particular, a war was raging between the Sûreté Générale (which became the Sûreté Nationale in 1934), which had been autonomous since 1877 and was directly attached to the Ministry of the Interior, and the Préfecture de Police in Paris. (Publisher’s note)

  III

  DEADLY SLEEP

  We sat in a café on Rue de Rivoli. Through the window I could see the vast form of the Hôtel de Ville and, in front, the old Place de Grève where so many villains had been quartered in the Middle Ages and much of the nobility had been decapitated during the Revolution.

  ‘Four days ago,’ began Fourier, savouring his first sip of an excellent red wine from Burgundy, ‘the old Marquis de Brindillac was found dead in his bedroom at his home, Château B—, between Dourdan and Étampes in the Paris region. He was a renowned physiologist, highly thought of by his peers, who spent his life studying the human brain and particularly the mysteries of sleep. A jovial and passionate man, he was also rather eccentric. He had always been interested in analysing and understanding dreams, something which had led him to a fairly unorthodox kind of research over the past few years. As luck would have it, the fellow died in his sleep!

  ‘At quarter past ten in the morning on Saturday 13 October, last Saturday that is, the Marquise de Brindillac, whose bedroom is just opposite her husband’s, was worried when he didn’t answer after she knocked on his door. Usually, at that time he had been up for a while and was already hard at work. As the doors to the Marquis’s bedroom, study and library were all locked from the inside (the three rooms lead into each other through connecting doors), she alerted a servant who, with the help of the gardener, forced open the bedroom door. They found the poor man dead in bed in his nightclothes, the sheets kicked down around his legs. The most incredible thing was the look on his face: it was frozen in an expression of intense fear, a fear very difficult to explain because his eyes were closed, as if the terror had come not from something external, brutally waking him, but, on the contrary, had gripped him from inside sleep itself.

  ‘A doctor was called, followed a few minutes later by a gendarme. For the doctor there was no doubt that the Marquis had died from heart failure, after a violent panic at
tack which had weakened him. However, he thought it unlikely that one could die of fright and, given the unusual nature of the tragedy (in all his career he had never seen such an expression of terror on anyone’s face!), he declared that he couldn’t issue a death certificate stating that the Marquis had died of natural causes. Consequently, the gendarme arranged for the body to be removed and the Versailles public prosecutor, who was hurriedly contacted, decided to carry out an autopsy as is required in such a situation.

  ‘The body was transported to the morgue in Étampes. On Monday morning the pathologist delivered his report and he, too, concluded that the Marquis had died of heart failure caused by a night terror. However, he emphasised that the Marquis de Brindillac was in excellent health when he went to bed, if it can be put that way. No heart or respiratory problems, no sign of bleeding to the brain. The report confirmed that the victim had died of fright but nothing more was known about what had frightened him.

  ‘But did that really matter? After three days of fruitless investigation, that was what everyone was beginning to wonder. The Marquis was seventy-two; at that age anyone can be unlucky, even if they’re fit and well. A sudden shock and that’s it! And anyway, perhaps we were mistaken in thinking we saw terror on his face? Maybe we should just have seen it as a sign of suffering, the torment of a body until then lucky in life and which, suddenly, feels abandoned by it. Good heavens, when you die you rarely look happy about it! Between you and me, that opinion was hardly outrageous and those closest to him went along with it: the Marquis’s widow, his colleagues at the Académie des Sciences, who know a thing or two about reports and diagnosis. Why, even his friends at the Meta-what-sit Institute, who have made a speciality out of splitting hairs, didn’t call for a more comprehensive investigation.’