Léon carried the strawberry tartlets up to the third floor. The stairs were freshly polished, the bright red stair carpet was free from dust, and the brass stair rods gleamed. He breathed in the scent of wax polish, which gave him a homely feeling of peace and permanency, and listened to the little sounds from the neighbouring flats, which seemed to convey a sense of belonging and security.
He paused outside his door. He could hear his wife singing a ballad in her girlishly high but slightly husky voice. ‘Si j’étais à ta place, si tu prenais la mienne...’ He waited until the song had died away, then opened the door. Yvonne was standing in the hallway in a pale summer frock far too light for the time of year, arranging a bunch of asters in a vase. She turned to him with a smile.
‘There you are at last! Supper’s on the table. The boy’s asleep already. I waited supper for you and opened a bottle of wine.’
She took the plate of strawberry tartlets from him, laughing at their sorry state, sent him off to wash his hands with feigned severity and, after a quick sidelong glance at herself in the mirror, tweaked her hair into shape. Léon was surprised; this wasn’t the despairing, tormented, captive creature he had left at home that morning, but the singing, laughing young girl he had once fallen in love with.
‘You’re looking odd,’ she said when supper was over and they’d retired to the living room for coffee and the maltreated strawberry tartlets. ‘Has something happened?’
‘I went to Saint-Sulpice and bought the tartes aux fraises.’
‘I know, it was very nice of you. You took your time, though, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Over two hours. Were you held up?’
‘I saw this girl.’
‘What girl?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You’re not sure? You see some girl, but you aren’t sure and you’re two hours late?’
‘Yes.’
‘My dear, it sounds as if we need to talk.’
‘I think it was Louise.’
‘Which Louise?’
‘Little Louise from Saint-Luc-sur-Marne. You know who I mean.’
‘The girl who died?’
Léon nodded, then gave his wife a detailed description of his encounter in the Métro, his toings and froings along the selfsame tunnel, his doubts on the way home, and the further doubts that had arisen since then. He ended by telling her about his visit to the concierge and his subsequent ascent of the stairs, during which tears had come to his eyes – tears of pity not only for Madame Rossetos but for himself and the world in general.
When he was through, Yvonne got up and went over to the window, where she drew the curtain aside and looked down at the nocturnally silent street.
‘We always knew something like this would happen one day, didn’t we?’ Her tone was cheerful and there was a faint smile on her lips. Her figure was silhouetted against the lamplight and the falling rain. ‘You’ll go looking for this dead girl. You have to make sure.’
‘She doesn’t exist any more, Yvonne. Besides, a lot of time has gone by.’
‘You’ll go looking for her all the same.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘You’ll go looking for her sooner or later. You won’t be able to live with the uncertainty.’
‘The certainties I do have are enough for me,’ he replied. ‘I don’t need any others. I don’t chase after other women, you ought to know that.’
‘Because you married me?’
‘Because I’m your husband and you’re my wife.’
‘You don’t want to do anything wrong, Léon, and that’s to your credit. All the same, this business will prey on your mind if you don’t get to the bottom of it. I don’t want to see you suffer, for my own sake above all. You must look for the girl, I insist.’
Next morning Léon struggled with an urge to ride the Métro back and forth a couple of times, just on the off-chance. In the Place Saint-Michel he abandoned the struggle. Passing beneath the cast-iron art nouveau lamp at the head of the steps, he made his way down into the Métro station. In the hour that followed he encountered a large number of people of both sexes and every age, size and skin colour, as well as a few dogs, a cat in a wickerwork cage, and even a farmer with dull yellow canine eyes and two live sheep, who must have parked his cart at Porte de Châtillon and was taking them by Métro to market at Les Halles. But he never saw a girl with green eyes.
Nobody noticed that he was late for work. The Police Judiciaire’s forensic laboratory was situated on the fourth floor of the Quai des Orfèvres building, high above the offices of the commissariat, the criminal police headquarters itself, which rang with shouts, lamentations and oaths at all hours of the day and night. In Léon’s department, by contrast, peace reigned. There was no smell of rain-sodden police overcoats, or of the sweat of apprehensive suspects under interrogation, or of beer and choucroute, or of the sandwiches and cigarettes of crime reporters hanging around in the passages hoping for a scoop. Here it smelt of chlorine and Javel water, ether and acetone. The laboratory abounded in brass and glass and mahogany, and the staff worked with silent concentration to the hiss of Bunsen burners.
They padded around quietly and talked in low voices, and if some clumsy junior should happen to clatter two Erlenmeyer flasks or test tubes together, his colleagues merely raised their eyebrows in annoyance. Here superiors addressed their subordinates formally as ‘vous’ and politely couched their orders in the interrogative form. Everyone made his own coffee at break time, and no one would have dreamed of even noticing a colleague’s belated arrival.
It was ten years since Léon had presented himself at the Police Judiciaire’s communications centre, which was situated two floors below the laboratory and one floor above the commissariat. In the early weeks he had found it hard to do justice to his function as a Morse expert, because all that counted there was efficiency and he couldn’t disguise his incompetence by falling back on a railwayman’s smart uniform and a red flag. It had clearly emerged after only one hour’s work that Léon hadn’t a clue about Morse telegraphy. This he had with difficulty justified to his superiors by vaguely alluding to years off work owing to war service and convalescence after being wounded in action; once he had even pulled his shirt out of his trousers to show off his cicatrized bullet wounds.
But because he proved to be extremely hard-working and pored over the official manuals of the French and international telegraph companies until long after midnight in his attic room in the Batignolles, he quickly overcame his handicap and was accounted a fully qualified telegraphist after only a few months.
However, it was soon borne in on him that Morse telegraphy, once you got the hang of it, was an extremely monotonous occupation with little prospect of variety. As luck would have it, he was rescued from the telegraph office after three years by the deputy director of the Scientific Service, with whom he occasionally had lunch and who offered him an assistant’s post in the newly established forensic laboratory.
Léon’s change of job did, admittedly, mean a return to a state of utter incompetence, because his total lack of interest in chemistry had consigned him to the bottom of the class at school, and he had completely forgotten the little rudimentary knowledge that had, despite himself, lodged in his brain.
By employing his tried and tested method of imposture, however, he again succeeded in remedying his ignorance in a short space of time. His colleagues forgave his initial clumsiness partly because he was friendly to them all and did not contest anyone’s position in the hierarchy. By the autumn of 1928, when his second child was on the way, Léon was among the most senior members of the laboratory staff and accountable to no one. There was a good chance that he would be appointed deputy departmental director in a few years’ time.
That morning he had to check a potato gratin sample for traces of arsenic, a procedure he must have carried out a hundred times before. He took the dish containing the supposedly poisoned gratin from the refrigerator, dissolved a knife point of it in hydrogen and poured the solution over a piece of filter paper to which he had previously applied a solution of auric sodium chloride. Although constant repetition had rendered every move he made second nature to him, he exercised due care when handling the samples, every second or third of which actually proved to contain enough poison to be hazardous to health. This time the result was negative. Instead of turning violet under the influence of the potato solution, the auric sodium chloride retained its brown coloration. Léon went to the sink and washed his utensils, then sat down at the black and gold Remington on his desk and typed out a report plus three copies for the investigating magistrate.
In the early years he had taken an interest in the broken vows of fidelity and cooling passions that gave rise to the poisoned potato gratins and pork chops, likewise the stories of avarice, betrayal and revenge. He had tried to imagine the desperation of the poisoners – it was nearly always women who resorted to rat poison, men having other weapons at their disposal in the fight for survival. He had also tried to empathize with the feelings of relief and disappointment entertained by those husbands who had misinterpreted their stomach-aches, giddy spells and fits of sweating as symptoms of poisoning. He used to seek out the detective inspectors on the ground floor and chat with them in order to learn something of the fate of those persons whom he, Léon Le Gall, with his pipettes and stirrers, had either set at liberty or consigned to prison or the scaffold. He had sometimes – unofficially and against his colleagues’ advice – visited crime scenes or viewed the homes of female poisoners, paid his respects to their victims in the morgue, and looked into the murderesses’ eyes when they were convicted and sentenced.
As time went by, however, he discovered that most of these dramas bore a terribly banal resemblance to each other, and that the same stories of rapacity, brutality and stupidity recurred again and again with only minor variations. After three years in the department at latest, therefore, he confined himself to looking for arsenic, rat poison or cyanide on behalf of the law and left any questions of guilt, motive and fate, as well as punishment, atonement and forgiveness, to others: to the judges in their august robes, or Almighty God in heaven, or the man in the street, or the beer drinkers around their favourite table. This was the attitude of professional detachment which his more experienced colleagues had advised him to adopt from the outset.
For all that, he could nearly always arrive at a clear-cut, definitive and exhaustive answer to the simple questions – Arsenic, yes or no? Cyanide, yes or no? – he had to deal with in the laboratory. This he found extremely pleasant, and after years of handling countless cases he could still subscribe without reservation to the moral principle underlying his work: that it wasn’t a good thing to dispatch people from life to death by means of poison.
From that point of view, Léon still found the purpose of his job – demonstrating to potential poisoners that they might not get away with it – moral and important and right. As for the repetitive nature of his daily work, which didn’t often get him down, he consoled himself with the generous salary that had enabled him to afford the move from the Batignolles to the Rue des Écoles when he married, and with the hope that if all went reasonably well he would sometime be promoted to a more interesting position.
After the potato gratin he tested a glass of white Bordeaux for cyanide, got another negative result, and took the Roquefort he was to test for rat poison from the refrigerator. A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was already eleven. He decided to save the Roquefort for the afternoon and have lunch at home for once. Being so early, he would take advantage of the spare time and make two or three Métro trips back and forth between Saint-Michel and Saint-Sulpice.
When Léon left the Boulevard Saint-Michel and turned off down the Rue des Écoles, the clouds parted. Ahead of him, the Sorbonne emitted a pale radiance such as only exists in the streets of Paris and the sky suddenly gleamed as if impregnated with gold dust. From one moment to the next the blackbirds in the trees began to sing, the hum of the traffic sounded more cheerful, the tap-tap of ladies’ heels crisper, the gendarmes’ whistles less peremptory.
After a few steps Léon seemed to hear, above the noises of the street, the delighted squeals of his son Michel. As he drew nearer, he saw he hadn’t been mistaken: the little boy really was on the little stretch of turf beside the Collège de France which municipal gardeners had laid right below his living-room windows a few weeks ago. Cheeks flushed and eyes shining with all the joie de vivre of which a four-year-old is capable, Michel was riding round and round the centrepiece of the miniature park, a stone bust of the deaf poet Pierre de Ronsard, in a bright red pedal car in the form of a fire engine complete with turntable ladder, bell and spotlight.
Seated on a stone park bench, in a pose of utter relaxation, was Léon’s wife. Yvonne’s left arm was draped over the back of the seat, her right forearm rested horizontally against her forehead. She had stretched out her legs and was as engrossed in the sight of her blissful child as a mother cat that has just given her litter an ample feed. She was wearing a long white linen dress that was new to Léon – her self-confidently swelling little tummy could be glimpsed beneath it – together with a pretty little straw hat and some pink-lensed sunglasses that lent her summery get-up a rather jaunty appearance.
Léon was taken aback. This wasn’t the blithely singing girl he’d left at home that morning, nor the tormented domestic prisoner who had kept him company in recent months, but a woman he’d never seen before. She might have been one of those Russian aristos who strolled for hours in the Luxembourg Gardens, or an American film star on her third highball.
When Yvonne spotted him, she waved each of the fingers on her right hand in turn. He waved back, then crouched down beside his little son and got him to show off his fire engine’s bell and ladder.
‘Léon, how nice that you’re home for lunch for once!’ Yvonne said as he sat down beside her. When he kissed her, he felt her nestle against him in a way she hadn’t for a long time.
‘Forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but did you go mad this morning?’
She laughed. ‘Because of these new acquisitions, you mean? Little Michel and I went on a shopping spree at Galeries Lafayette.’
‘You bought all this stuff brand-new?’
‘As you can see. Look how happy the boy is. The bell’s solid brass, you know. Michel, sweetheart, ring the bell again for your Papa.’
The little boy tugged at the bell rope so hard, passers-by on the other side of the street glanced across in surprise. Léon did his best to smile at this display of childish happiness, then readdressed himself to his wife. ‘Care to tell me how much that fire engine – ’
‘Do you like it?’
‘How much did that fire engine cost?’
‘No idea. It’s down on the bill. Probably a bit more than you earn in a month. How much do you earn, actually?’
‘Yvonne...’
‘It’s made by Renault, you know.’
‘You’re out of your mind!’
‘A genuine little Renault, manufactured in their workshops at Boulogne-Billancourt. The salesman explained it to me. The power is transmitted from the pedals to the rear axle by a Cardan drive, just like a real Renault. You must take a look.’
‘Yvonne...’
‘Do you know what a Cardan drive is?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘A drive shaft with a universal joint.’
‘Correct. How do you like my dress?’
‘Listen to me.’
‘The sunglasses look a bit silly, I admit.’
‘Kindly listen!’
‘No, you listen to me now, Léon. Will you?’
‘Of course.’
‘What are you trying to tell me – that I’ve done something silly?’
‘You can say that again!’
‘You see? We’re in agreement there. I have done something silly, but so have you.’
‘You’ll bankrupt us, you and your Cardan drive.’
‘And you did a fair bit of travelling on the Métro today, didn’t you?’
Léon didn’t answer.
‘I know you too well – I knew you would before you knew it yourself. I watched you from behind when you left the building this morning. I could tell you’d go on the Métro today from the guilty way your neat little boyish buttocks waggled to and fro.’
‘And that’s why you took our son to Galeries Lafayette?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Forgive me if I fail to see the connection.’
‘Léon, your Métro rides are a disgrace and an insult – an insult to you and me and us both. I don’t want you committing such pathetic little stupidities. You’re making a fool of yourself, and you’re making me look a laughing stock to myself. It’s got to stop. Either you go looking for that dead girl, or you don’t.’
‘You’re right.’
‘But if you go looking for her, you must do it properly. Otherwise, I’ll show you how to commit some really big stupidities, not pathetic little ones. If you continue to go on your pathetic little Métro rides, I’ll commit some stupidities that’ll make your hair stand on end.’ She took his right hand and clamped it between her knees, then rested her head on his shoulder.
‘Am I going to lose you, Léon?’ Her voice had gone suddenly reedy and her expression was as pained as if she were plucking her eyebrows or ripping a depilatory off her leg. ‘Are you going to leave me? Am I losing you?’
‘How can you even ask such a thing? I certainly won’t leave you, it’s out of the question.’
‘Nice of you to say so, but we know better, don’t we? You probably won’t leave me, that’s true, but either I’ve already lost you or I never had you. That’s the way it is. From now on, things can get either worse or a little bit better. It’s entirely up to us.’
‘I’m sitting here beside you, Yvonne, surely you can see that? I’m here because I want to be. I won’t leave you, I promise.’
‘And you always keep your promises, I know.’ She sighed and patted his flank like a dog. ‘For all that, Léon, you mustn’t waste any time. Go looking while the trail is fresh.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘I order you to. Think of some way of finding the woman. After all, you’re with the police.’
They sat there in silence for a while, watching little Michel circling the gravel path in his fire engine. When the pressure of her knees relaxed he took her right hand and pressed it firmly to his lips. Having released her, he nodded as if in confirmation of some decision he’d come to. Then, without another word, he rose and walked swiftly, resolutely off. It felt as if the Rue des Écoles were leaving him behind, not the other way round.