CHAPTER FIFTY
Foulerot, 3
GENEVIÈVE FOULEROT’S bedroom, or rather her bedroom-to-be.
The room has just been repainted. The ceiling has been decorated in matt white, the walls in ivory-white gloss, the quartered woodblock floor in black gloss. A bare bulb on a wire has been partly covered by a makeshift shade consisting of a big piece of red blotting paper rolled into a cone.
The room is entirely devoid of furniture. A picture of large dimensions has not yet been hung up and stands against the right-hand wall, where it is partly reflected in the dark mirror of the floor.
The picture itself represents a moon. On the windowsill there is a bowl of goldfish next to a pot of mignonette. Through the open window a rural landscape can be seen: the soft-blue sky, rounded like a dome, rests along the horizon on the jagged outline of the woods; in the foreground, at the roadside, a little girl, barefoot in the dust, lets a cow graze. Further in the distance, a painter in a blue smock is working at the foot of an oak, with his paintbox on his knee. In the background there shimmers a lake on the shores of which a misty city rises, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water.
This side of the window, a little to the left, a man in a fancy-dress uniform – white trousers, chintz jacket overloaded with epaulettes, stripes, sabretaches, and frogging, a big black cape, boots with spurs – sits at a rustic writing desk – an old junior school desk with a hole for an inkwell and a slightly raked top – on which stands a jug of water, a stem glass of the sort known as flûtes, and a candlestick whose pedestal is an admirable iron egg set in silver. The man has just received a letter and reads it with an expression of utter dismay on his face.
Just to the left of the window there is a telephone fixed to the wall and, still further left, a picture: it represents a seashore landscape with, in the foreground, a partridge perched on a branch of a wizened tree whose twisted, knobbly trunk springs out of a pile of boulders which open out onto a foaming inlet. In the far distance, out to sea, a boat with a three-cornered sail.
To the right of the window there is a large gilt mirror which is supposed to reflect a scene allegedly taking place behind the back of the seated character. Three people, all also in disguise, a woman and two men, are standing. The woman wears an austere long dress in grey wool and a Quaker’s headgear and holds a jar of pickles under her arm; one of the men, an anxious-looking forty-year-old, is dressed in a medieval fool’s costume with a doublet divided into narrow-pointed triangles of alternating red and yellow, a bauble, and a cap with bells; the other man, an insipid youngster with thinning yellow hair and a baby face, is disguised, precisely, as a fat infant, with rubberised pants bulging over a nappy, short white socks, patent-leather bootees, and a bib; he is sucking a celluloid coral of the kind babies are for ever sticking in their mouths, and in his hand he holds a giant feeding bottle with marked levels alluding in colloquial or vulgar terms to the sexual exploits and fiascos which are supposed to correspond to the amount of alcohol absorbed: C’mon baby, Get right on and you’ll see the sights, The Bridge over the River Kwai, Money back if not satisfied, Come again, Rock-a-bye baby, Lights out, etc.
The painter of this picture was Geneviève’s agnate grandfather, Louis Foulerot, better known as an interior designer than as an artist. He was the only member of the Foulerot family not to disown the girl when she decided to keep and raise her child and ran away from home. Louis Foulerot agreed to meet the costs of doing up his granddaughter’s flat, and it seems he has done her proud; the structural work is finished, the kitchen and bathroom are ready, painting and finishing are in progress.
His painting was inspired by a detective story – The Murder of the Goldfish – the reading of which gave him such pleasure as to make him think of using it as the subject of a picture which would bring almost all the elements of the mystery together into a single scene.
The action is set in an area quite reminiscent of the Italian lakes, not far from an imaginary city which the author named Valdrada. The narrator is a painter. Whilst he is working in the countryside, a young shepherdess comes up to him. She has heard a loud scream coming from the luxurious villa recently rented to a hugely rich Swiss diamond-trader called Oswald Zeitgeber. In the company of the girl, the painter lets himself into the house and finds the victim: the jeweller, wearing a fancy-dress uniform, lies struck down, blasted to death by an electric shock, next to the telephone. A footstool has been placed in the centre of the room, and a rope tied into a slipknot hangs from the chandelier. The goldfish in the bowl are dead.
Detective Inspector Waldemar, who conveniently takes the painter-narrator as his confidant, is in charge of the investigation. He searches every room in the villa thoroughly, and has many forensic tests done in the lab. The most revealing clues are all inside the school desk: found in it are, item a, a live tarantula; item b, the classified advertisement about the rental of the villa; item c, the programme of a fancy-dress ball held on the evening of the crime, with the singer Mickey Malleville in person as a special attraction; and item d, an envelope containing a blank sheet on which the following cutting from an African daily has been simply glued:
BAMAKO (APA). 16 June. A Mass grave containing the bones of at least 49 human corpses has been discovered near Fouïdra. First reports suggest that the bodies were buried 30 years ago. An enquiry is taking place.
Three people had called on Oswald Zeitgeber that day. They had all arrived more or less at the same time – the painter saw them drop in one after the other at intervals of a few minutes – and left together. All three were in fancy dress for the ball. They were quickly identified and questioned separately.
The first person to have come was the Quaker lady. She is called Madame Quaston. She claims she came to offer her services as charlady, but nobody can prove it. Moreover, the investigation soon discovers that her daughter had been Madame Zeitgeber’s maid and had drowned in circumstances that remained obscure.
The second caller was the man wearing the fool’s suit. His name is Jarrier; he owns the villa. He came, he says, to see if his tenant had settled in and to get his signature on the inventory of furniture and fittings. Madame Quaston had been present at the interview and can confirm his statement; she adds that scarcely had he arrived than Jarrier nearly came a cropper on the newly polished parquet floor, but had caught himself on the windowsill, spilling half the contents of the goldfish bowl onto a rug placed near the wall-mounted telephone.
The third visitor was the big baby: he is the singer Mickey Malleville. He confesses straightaway that he is none other than Oswald Zeitgeber’s son-in-law, and that he had come to borrow money from him. Jarrier and Madame Quaston both confirm that, when the singer came in, the jeweller almost immediately asked them to leave the two of them alone. A little later he called them back in, apologised for not accompanying them to the ball, but promised to come along later when he had dealt with some urgent telephone calls. The painter saw the three disguises pass by again and even when, he says, he saw them from the front walking side by side across the whole width of the little lane, he could not avoid having an unpleasant impression. About an hour later the shepherdess heard the scream.
The cause of death is easily established: there was a long metal plate beneath the rug: when he used the telephone, Zeitgeber caused a short circuit, which was what killed him. Only Jarrier could have fitted the plate, and it becomes immediately obvious that it was so as to cause an electrocution that he had arranged to soak the rug with water on entering the room; then two more details of even greater significance are discovered: first, that it was Jarrier who had given Zeitgeber his fancy dress for the ball, and the steel tips and spurs on the boots and all the metallic decorations of the jacket were also intended to facilitate the conduction of an electric current; second, and most important, that Jarrier had adapted the telephone fixture so that the fatal short could only occur if the victim, identified by his very disguise – Zeitgeber in his superconductive suit – dialled a particular number: that of the surgery where Jarrier’s wife worked!
Confronted with these damning pieces of evidence, Jarrier confesses almost straight away: a pathologically jealous man, he had noticed that Oswald Zeitgeber – whose philandering was notorious throughout the area – was chasing after his wife. Wanting to resolve his suspicions, he designed a homicidal device which would not be triggered unless the jeweller was truly guilty, that is to say unless he telephoned the surgery.
Even if the motive was manifestly imaginary – Madame Jarrier weighs twenty stone, and anyone “chasing after” her would catch up with her without much effort – the murder was nonetheless premeditated by Jarrier: he is charged, arrested, and held in custody. But that clearly doesn’t satisfy the detective or the reader: the death of the goldfish, the hangman’s noose, the tarantula, the envelope with its African cutting remain unexplained, as does Waldemar’s latest discovery: a long pin, like a hatpin but without a head, found buried in the pot of mignonette. As for the forensic tests, they produce two results: first, the fish were poisoned by a fast-acting substance called fibrotoxin; second, on the tip of the pin there are traces of a much slower poison, hydantergotine.
After various subplots have been worked out, and after various false trails have been followed and abandoned – suspicions being entertained respectively as to the possible guilt of Madame Jarrier, Madame Zeitgeber, the painter, the shepherd girl, and one of the organisers of the fancy-dress ball – the perverse and polymorphous solution of this indulgent brainteaser is finally found, and it allows Detective Inspector Waldemar, at one of those gatherings at the scene of the crime, with all the surviving actors present, and without which a detective novel would not be a detective novel, to reconstruct the whole affair with brilliance: obviously all three are guilty, and each was acting on a different motive.
Madame Quaston – whose daughter, pursued by the old lecher, had to jump into a lake to save her honour – had introduced herself to the diamond-trader claiming she was a clairvoyant, and set about reading the lines in his hand: she took advantage of this to prick him with her pin, smeared with a poison which she knew would take some time to have an effect. Then she hid the pin in the mignonette and put the tarantula, concealed so far in the lid of her pickle jar, in the desk: she knew that a tarantula sting provokes reactions similar to the effects of her poison, and though she was aware that the subterfuge would be unmasked eventually she thought, rather naïvely, that it would mislead the investigators for long enough to allow her to escape scot-free.
Mickey Malleville, for his part, the victim’s son-in-law, a failed singer riddled with debt, unable to foot the extravagant bills run up by the jeweller’s daughter – a scatterbrain accustomed to yachts, breitschwanzes and caviar – knew that his father-in-law’s death alone could save him from his ever more inextricable plight: he had nonchalantly poured into the water jug the contents of a small phial of fibrotoxin hidden in the teat of his giant bottle.
But the real bottom of this business, the story’s ultimate twist, its terminal turn, its final revelation and closing fall, was something entirely different: the letter Oswald Zeitgeber was reading sealed his own death warrant: the mass grave recently unearthed in Africa was all that was left of an insurgent village whose entire population he had had killed and which he had razed to the ground before pillaging a fabulous elephant graveyard. From this crime committed in cold blood came his colossal fortune. The man who sent him the letter had been on his trail for twenty years, restlessly seeking evidence of Zeitgeber’s guilt: now he had the evidence, and the news would be out next day in all the Swiss papers. Zeitgeber had that confirmed to him on the telephone by his associates who had been accomplices in the old business and who, like him, had received the letter: none saw any way out of the scandal except death.
So Zeitgeber went to get a stool and a rope to hang himself. But first, maybe with a superstitious feeling that he had to do one good deed before dying, he saw that the goldfish did not have enough water and emptied the jug of water into the bowl which Jarrier had spilt on purpose when he came. Then he set up his rope. But the first symptoms of hydantergotine poisoning (nausea, cold sweat, stomach cramp, palpitations) were already upon him and, bent double by the pain, he called the lady doctor – not because he was remotely in love with her (in fact he had his eye rather more on the barefoot shepherdess) but to ask for help.
Does a man about to commit suicide worry that much about stomach pains? The novelist was aware of the question and added a postscript where he specified that hydantergotine produces alongside its toxic effects a pseudohallucinatory psychic state, in which the jeweller’s reactions would not be unimaginable.