Death Off Stage

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The Dashkova Ballet Company - a visiting Russian troupe led by Inspector Gautier's charming Soviet mistress, Princess Sophia - is about to become the toast of Paris when the famous Judge Prudhomme is found with a bullet in his heart in a squalid hotel room. And when the corpse of the beautiful prima ballerina Nicola Stepanova turns up equally cold, the company's once sparkling future pales considerably. Gautier has to solve the murders to save the troupe and salvage his great romance - all of which he undertakes with his customary élan, éclat and joie de vivre.

Release date: December 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 209

Sample

As he lay on his back, Gautier looked up at the ceiling of the bedroom. The ceiling itself was a pastel shade of blue with a gilded frieze below it and from the corners of the
room golden cherubs, each holding a golden cornucopia full of flowers and fruit, looked down benignly on the bed. Even if he had not been aware that it was Sunday, the silence when he awoke would
have told him so; the silence in the bedroom on which neither the ticking of the ormolu clock nor the breathing of the young woman lying beside him could make any impression, the silence in the
hotel corridors and in Rue du Faubourg St Honoré, the silence of a still sleepy Paris.

Glancing at Sophia, he could not restrain a smile. He remembered other Sundays which stretched back, milestones in his memory. When his wife Suzanne had been alive and they were still sharing
his modest apartment in the 7th arrondissement, they would go to Mass on Sunday morning and then lunch en famille with Suzanne’s parents, her sister and her sister’s husband, usually in
a restaurant chosen by old Monsieur Duclos. His memories of those Sundays were redolent of bourgeois impressions and simple bourgeois pleasures, the smell of incense and the intoning of priests,
the flavour of a good gigot and the bouquet of a fine red Burgundy. After Suzanne had left him to live with another man, there had been bachelor Sundays when he had found ways of filling his time
or, more rarely, which he shared with some girl of casual and usually short acquaintance.

This was a Sunday morning with a difference, for he had awoken with a sleeping princess beside him. It was true that Sophia was not a princess by birth and had acquired the title only by a brief
marriage to a Russian prince now dead, but she was even so recognised as a princess in Paris as well as in St Petersburg.

He glanced at her again. She lay there sleeping with her back towards him, covered only by a sheet which did not conceal the contours of her naked body. At the recollection of their lovemaking
in the night, desire stirred again and he was tempted to wake her gently by stroking her shoulders, her back and her hips. Then, because he knew she must be worn out after the stress and excitement
of the last few days, he withdrew his hand and climbed out of bed as noiselessly as he could.

He shaved in the bathroom, a rare luxury, for few houses or apartments in Paris had a bathroom and even in the Hôtel Cheltenham they had as yet been installed only in the suites. Guests in
the ordinary rooms would wash and shave in hot water brought up to them by maids from the kitchens in the basement. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he wondered, not for the first time, whether
he should not grow a beard. He was the only senior inspector in the Sûreté who did not have one and, while this might have been excused because he was also easily the youngest, the
excuse was scarcely tenable now that he had been promoted to Chief Inspector.

He left the hotel, using the stairs to reach the lobby rather than the cumbersome iron lift with its clanging doors. The concierge, whom he knew from the past, had not yet come on duty and a
sleepy night porter opened the doors to let him out into Rue du Faubourg St Honoré. The streets were empty except for a priest who hurried by to prepare for the first Mass of the day and a
solitary fiacre, which passed him slowly, the coachman sitting on his box asleep, the horse making its own way home as it often did at dawn. Fiacres did a good trade in the early hours of Sunday,
taking debauched gentlemen from the maisons closes or high-class brothels in Rue de Richelieu to their houses in Faubourg St Germain on the Left Bank.

As he was walking through the Jardins des Tuileries, heading for the Seine, he paused to admire the splendid view, looking across Place de la Concorde up the full length of Avenue des
Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, golden in the early morning sunshine. Halfway along the avenue an automobile was crawling like a hideous black beetle. Even at that distance he could
hear the splutter of its engine, fouling the silence. He frowned. The twentieth century was scarcely half a dozen years old and some American had already taken to the air. Automobiles were being
followed by flying machines and who knew what other mechanical contraptions would come next. Gautier was not against progress; he welcomed it, but he still had an uneasy feeling that these modern
inventions might take more away from life and leisure and tranquillity than they could give.

A church bell began to ring as he walked along Quai du Louvre. He remembered then that it had been on a Sunday too when Princess Sophia and he had first made love. Had he not been on duty today,
they might have gone out of Paris as they did then, to lunch in a guinguette on the banks of the Seine at Asnières. He smiled at the memory of how they had eaten and danced,
enjoying the gaiety of the place and the company of other couples, working people from Paris spending their Sunday in the country. In the evening they had gone boating on the river and when Sophia
had fallen into the water, he had taken her to a nearby hotel so that she could change her clothes. He did not linger now on the memory of the events that had followed, because they were pale and
distant, overshadowed by the intensity of the passion they had shared only a few hours ago. She had gone to Russia soon after that night in Asnières and now she had returned as she had
promised that she would. Gautier was uncertain of what lay ahead for the two of them, but he had already resolved that he would not think of that, not for the time being at least.

At the Sûreté the work that waited for him was the tidying up of the aftermath of a typical Saturday night’s violence; clumsy attempts at burglary, pickpockets who had
believed they were more adroit than they were, one pimp stabbing another in Pigalle. Usually it involved little more than paperwork, taking statements and preparing the dossier which the examining
magistrate would require on Monday morning. Surat, his principal assistant, had already started on the work by the time Gautier arrived in his office.

‘Anything unusual?’ Gautier asked him, looking at the small sheaf of papers on the table which served him as a desk.

‘Nothing that will tax our ability, patron.’

‘No crime of the century?’

Surat laughed, recognising the allusion to a particularly sensational headline which a Paris newspaper had printed over the story of a triple murder case which Gautier had investigated some
months previously.

‘The only affair which interests me among all those’ – Surat nodded in the direction of the sheaf of papers – ‘is one which you may well think
unimportant.’

‘What is it?’

‘A murder; infanticide to be precise. A Mongol baby of a couple living in the twentieth arrondissement was found dead. Apparently it had been thrown out of a window of their apartment on
the fifth floor.’

‘Do we know who threw it?’

‘That’s what I find strange. The father admits that he did but the mother says he is lying. She claims that it was she who killed the child.’

‘Are there no witnesses?’

Surat pointed at the pile of papers once again. ‘I’ve put it all down in my report there.’

‘At what time did this happen?’

‘Yesterday afternoon. The police from the twentieth commissariat brought the man and woman in. You had gone off duty so I dealt with it.’

‘How late were you here last evening?’

‘Not very late, patron.’

Gautier shook his head. Surat was older than he was, well into middle age and he had been passed by for promotion, so now in all probability he would never be given it. He was a good policeman,
honest, brave and unswervingly loyal especially to Gautier. His fault, if it could be called one, was that he was over-conscientious.

‘Your wife and children see too little of you,’ he told Surat. ‘The report could have waited until this morning.’

He read the report. The couple whose baby was dead were a Jacques and Marie-Louise Lebrun and the baby, their only child, had been almost eighteen months old. Shortly before midday on Saturday a
woman living in a top floor apartment nearby, glancing out of her window, had seen what she thought at first was a bundle of clothes being thrown from a window of the Lebruns’ apartment. She
had watched it fall to the ground in a courtyard below and had only then realised that it was not a bundle but a small child in baby clothes. Hurrying down to the courtyard, she had found that the
child was dead, its head crushed by the impact of the fall. The police from the local commissariat had been called and had gone to the apartment where Lebrun lived and found him asleep in bed.
Madame Lebrun had not been there but had returned soon after the police had arrived. She had evidently been out shopping for food.

‘So the neighbour cannot say who threw the child from the window?’ Gautier asked Surat.

‘No. She did not actually see it being thrown. She just saw it as it fell through the air.’

‘Are you saying that both the husband and the wife have confessed to killing the child?’

‘Yes, and each of them denies that the other was responsible.’

‘But the wife wasn’t in the building.’

‘Not when the police arrived, no. Her story is that when she realised what she had done she was distraught and rushed out of the apartment, leaving her husband asleep.’

‘I see that the concierge of the building has made a statement.’

‘Yes, she says she saw the woman leaving the building; nothing more. You’ll find her statement and the one made by the police officer from the twentieth attached to mine.’

Gautier decided that he would not read either document. In cases of this type he had found that reading the statements of other people was liable to influence one’s own judgement, clouding
it with the views and sometimes the prejudices of other people.

‘Where are this couple now?’

‘She is in the St Lazare prison for women, he in La Roquette. Expecting that you would wish to interview them I gave instructions that they should be brought to Sûreté
headquarters in police wagons,’ Surat replied and then he added, ‘separate wagons of course.’

Gautier resisted the temptation to smile. Having the accused couple brought to Sûreté headquarters separately, even though both of them were admitting killing the child and accusing
the other of lying, was typical of Surat. Everything he did was carefully planned to observe police regulations meticulously.

‘They should be here within the hour.’

‘So early? The poor creatures will get no breakfast.’

‘That might be merciful, knowing the breakfasts which are served in our prisons.’

After Surat had left his office to wait downstairs for the arrival of the prisoners, Gautier read the other reports on his desk. As always they were depressing. Some crimes he could understand
even if he could not condone them; theft by people living on the edge of starvation, a stab with a kitchen knife by a woman whose man had cynically exploited, terrorised and finally betrayed her,
even the underpaid and bullied clerk who sought a kind of justice for himself by defrauding his employers. The crimes which depressed and angered him were those committed for greed or vanity or the
pleasures of violence to which the Comte de Sade had given his name.

As he worked he found himself thinking of the contrast between what he was doing now and how he had spent the previous evening. The papers in front of him were a reminder of all that was sordid
and depressing in man’s nature, while at the Théâtre du Châtelet the previous evening he had watched the expression of what was most to be admired – imagination,
creative invention, beauty and grace.

He had gone to the Châtelet with Princess Sophia Dashkova to watch a performance of the ballet company which she had been instrumental in bringing to Paris. She had hoped when she came to
France the previous season to bring an opera company with her, but its tour had been cancelled when one of the leading singers had reneged on his contract. Now she had returned with the Dashkova
Ballet Company which had just completed the first week of its engagement.

Until then, in France at least, ballet had been little more than an appendage to opera, providing a harmless diversion between acts. Audiences watching ballet would expect to see young women,
chosen more for their charms than for any skill in their art, go through a routine of stilted classical steps wearing conventional classical costumes. Now suddenly they were dazzled by
Sophia’s Russians; athletic male dancers who leapt gracefully to incredible heights, ballerinas of astonishing virtuosity who had abandoned their tutus for bright, modern costumes, all
dancing to strange, noisy and sometimes discordant music against stage sets of extravagant splendour.

Gautier had gone to watch them expecting to be no more than mildly entertained, perhaps even bored. Instead even now the impact of the evening, of the colour and gaiety and movement and, at the
end of the performance, of the frenzied applause, still lingered in his senses. He put the memory on one side and read the sheaf of papers in front of him, initialling some to mark his approval,
writing instructions for future action on others.

He had almost finished working his way through the documents, when Surat came into the office to tell him that the Lebrun couple had arrived at the Sûreté.

‘Bring them up here,’ he said and then added, ‘together.’

A few minutes later when the couple came into the room, he recognised Lebrun at once. The man was a bouquiniste, one of those who sold second-hand books from stalls on the side of the
Seine, and his stall was no more than five minutes’ walk from Sûreté headquarters. Gautier had often passed it, stopping on occasions to glance at the titles of the books on
display and he could recall buying at least one.

Madame Lebrun was a good deal younger than her husband, not a pretty woman but with pleasant features and long, well-brushed brown hair. For someone who had spent the night in St Lazare prison,
sharing a cell no doubt with a dozen others, thieves and street-walkers and drunken old crones, she was surprisingly neat and tidy in her appearance, but she was clearly upset and badly frightened.
From time to time she glanced at her husband, looking for comfort, imploring him silently to find an escape from the nightmare they were sharing.

Moved by a sudden sympathy, Gautier got up and helped her to a chair. Lebrun inclined his head to acknowledge the courtesy. ‘Thank you, Inspector.’

Gautier could see that the man was not well; his eyes were watering, his face flushed and his shoulders had a hunched look, as though he were constantly fighting against a bout of shivering.

‘Chief Inspector,’ Surat corrected him.

‘Inspector will do,’ Gautier said smiling. ‘We’ve met before have we not, monsieur? I have purchased books from you.’

‘Only one book, Chief Inspector,’ Lebrun replied, but without any reproach. ‘A novel by Pierre Mounet. Did it help you in your investigation?’

‘How did you know that I bought it for that purpose?’

‘It was not the sort of book you would read for entertainment. Besides, soon afterwards Mounet was arrested for murder.’

‘Yes, and guillotined.’

‘Mother of God!’ Madame Lebrun could not stifle a little cry of horror.

Gautier looked at her. He had made the remark deliberately. One or both of the two people facing him was confessing falsely to murder and they had to realise what their lying could mean.

‘I need to know how your child died. Tell me in your own words,’ Gautier said and then added, ‘You first, Monsieur Lebrun.’

‘I was at home in bed,’ Lebrun began.

‘On a Saturday? That must be one of the best days in your business.’

‘He has had a grippe, Inspector,’ Marie-Louise Lebrun said, ‘for two days now.’

‘I was trying to sleep, but little Anna was crying and would not stop. It got on my nerves. I think I may have fallen asleep for a time, for I remember a horrible dream, a nightmare. When
I awoke I was in a frenzy. The baby was still crying. Suddenly I could not stand it any more. I lost control. The window was open and—’

Lebrun broke off in mid-sentence and looked at his wife. Her eyes were shut, her face twisted in anguish. Suddenly he was aware of the effect that his words were having on her.

‘What my husband says is not true.’ Regaining her self-control took an immense effort for Madame Lebrun, but she succeeded. She did not look at her husband as she continued,
‘Our baby Anna was not normal and we knew she would never be able to do anything for herself. She was sickly too, always falling ill. I kept asking myself what kind of life the poor creature
would have. What would happen to her after my husband and I were dead? Yesterday she was lying in her cot by the open window, for the day was hot and sunny. On a sudden impulse I decided to end her
life. It seemed the kindest thing to do. I thought people would think that she had somehow wriggled out of the cot and fallen through the window. It never struck me that my husband would be accused
of killing her. When I realised what I had done I was horrified and rushed out of the apartment in a panic.’

She had been speaking as her husband had, without emotion, carefully reciting the sentences in the way that a schoolchild recites a poem, indifferent to their meaning. Gautier realised that both
of them had separately rehearsed what they would say to him. He could visualise them, each in a crowded prison cell, sleeplessly through the night choosing the words that would make the confession
sound plausible to the police.

‘Pay no attention to what my wife is saying!’ Lebrun protested. ‘She loved Anna, was devoted to her and was determined with her love and her help she would one day be able to
live a normal life.’

Gautier glanced at Surat who had been listening impassively to what the couple had been saying. He wondered what Surat was thinking, what he should decide or what, for that matter, Solomon would
have decided in the same circumstances. A decision was required and he, Gautier, would have to make it.

‘You two will appreciate,’ he said to Lebrun and his wife, ‘that I cannot believe both of your stories. To be candid, I am not sure which of you I should believe.’

‘Monsieur l’Inspecteur,’ Lebrun began, but Gautier held up one hand to silence him.

‘Tomorrow an examining magistrate will be appointed to deal with this matter and you will both be required to appear before him. If you continue to give him conflicting explanations of
what happened to your child, he will question you mercilessly and give you no respite until he is satisfied that he knows the truth. My advice to you is this. Go home and talk about what happened.
Settle your differences. Come back tomorrow and be prepared to tell the truth.’

Lebrun looked at him in astonishment. ‘Are you saying that we may go home?’

‘Yes. I can see no reason for keeping you in prison – as yet.’

Lebrun went over to his wife and helped her from her chair. Unexpectedly, perhaps with relief, knowing now that she would be spared the horror of another night in prison, she began to cry,
quietly stifling her sobs. The noise she made r. . .