Let Slip the Dogs of War

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Returning to Paris, Inspector Gautier is devastated to learn that his Dutch mistress Ingrid has been brutally murdered. Before he can begin to investigate, the British Ambassador informs Gautier that his daughter has been abducted in England. With the help of Sylvie, a secretary at the French Embassy, the inspector follows the trail to Edinburgh to track down the ambassador's daughter. Back in Paris, influential people are being murdered, and the wife of the Minister for War is abducted. Out of these shocking events a political motive begins to emerge, and Gautier, with Sylvie's help, starts to unravel the conspiracies under the looming threat of war.

Release date: January 14, 2016

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 182

Sample

That evening there were relatively few travellers passing through the Gare de Montparnasse and for the most part they were leaving Paris, heading for their homes at the end of
the day’s work. So Gautier found a fiacre without difficulty. He was not an impatient man, but for once he had reasons for wishing to hurry. For the past two days he had been attending a
meeting of European police chiefs that had been held in a 17th-century château just outside Paris. In the normal way the Sûreté would have been represented at the meeting by
Gustave Courtrand, its Director General, but Courtrand was indisposed and had deputed Gautier to take his place. Gautier had not enjoyed the meeting nor had he expected to.

In his experience meetings of that type, the ostensible purpose of which was to allow an exchange of information on police methods, achieved very little. Those who attended came ready to talk,
but reluctant to listen. They were eager to present their country’s achievements in policing and crime prevention in as favourable a light as possible and, in Europe at least, though the
names of police institutions varied, their methods of working were very similar. As a result the meetings often consisted of no more than a series of lectures, usually vainglorious and tiresomely
similar, most of which had to be translated, sentence by sentence by interpreters. There were few opportunities for questions, but many for compliments and for grateful tributes to the hosts, in
this case the French, for their hospitality which, in Gautier’s view, was typically excessive.

So after the meeting had finally ended, Gautier had been glad to hurry back to Paris and the prospect of an evening with his mistress Ingrid Van de Velde. He supposed one might describe Ingrid
as his mistress, even though their relationship was not one of which most Frenchmen would approve. She was Dutch, fair-haired and attractive, clever, once married but now divorced, a journalist who
had been successful in what was a man’s world. Because of her success she was busy and since they had met a few months ago, their opportunities for making love had been limited to less than a
dozen nights. But what they had lacked in frequency had been more than requited in passion, which was why after two days of boring, masculine company, he was looking forward to the intimate supper
in her apartment which she had promised him. He also had a feeling that the lovemaking they enjoyed was gradually being strengthened with an affection, which might in due course become something of
permanence.

She lived in the Marais, a part of Paris which had been fashionable two centuries ago and was now undergoing a revival. Her apartment was in a new building which had been cleverly designed to
fit in with the traditions of the old 17th-century houses and cloistered walks in and around the Place des Vosges. That she could afford such an apartment showed that she must be earning far more
than he did, a fact which did not disturb him as it might many Frenchmen. So eminently practical, when they had slept together it had always been in her home rather than in his much more modest
apartment or at an hotel.

Another reason which sharpened his anticipation was that while he was at the meeting of police chiefs, Ingrid had returned to Paris after spending a month in Rio de Janeiro on an assignment for
the Washington Post. From there she had more than once telegraphed him in affectionate terms and told him how eagerly she looked forward to the evening they would spend together on her
return. She used the word ‘evening’, but in a way that showed she meant night.

He told the driver of the fiacre to go directly to the Marais. They could easily have stopped at Sûreté headquarters on Quai des Orfèvres to leave his valise in his office
for it was on the way, but he knew from experience that if he did he would find something there to detain him – a minor crisis or news of a crime that required his urgent attention. So the
driver crossed the Seine further up river and headed for Place de la Bastille.

Ingrid’s apartment was on the third floor of the building, but after he had paid the driver of the fiacre and was heading for the stairs, the concierge came out and held out an arm to stop
him. Her eyes were swollen and red and he could see that she had been weeping.

‘Madame Van de Velde is not there, Monsieur.’ Gautier knew she had more to say, but could not find the words. He waited until she blurted them out. ‘She is dead. She has been
murdered.’

A policeman from the 4th arrondissement, who had been left on duty outside the entrance to Ingrid’s apartment, gave him the facts. The concierge had found Ingrid’s
body soon after midday when she had taken up a packet which had been delivered for her. She had found Ingrid naked on her bed, apparently strangled. The police had been called as well as a doctor
who had pronounced her dead. By that time it was considered too late to take the body to the mortuary, which would be done next morning when the inspector in charge of the case began his
investigation. That was all the policeman was able to tell him.

Inside the apartment Gautier was aware that his brain was functioning in two separate ways. One part was trying incredulously to absorb the news he had been given; the other part was wrestling
with the enormity of his loss, of grief and feelings of guilt. Had he not been at the meeting of police chiefs, he would have been in Paris the previous day when Ingrid had returned from abroad, he
would have spent the evening with her that evening, slept with her that night and she would still be alive.

Ingrid’s body lay on her bed where it had been found, but now covered with a sheet. Gautier had seen many dead bodies, perhaps too many he supposed, but as he pulled the sheet back he knew
that he must be clinical, divorcing himself from all emotion. The first sight of a body could often give one an impression which might later prove to be invaluable in helping to solve the crime. He
needed no medical knowledge to see that Ingrid had been strangled as well as stabbed, but there was surprisingly little blood on the sheets. In spite of that he concluded that she had first been
stabbed. Strangling her may have been no more than an attempt to confuse, to disguise the identity of the killer. On the other hand it might equally have been done in an uncontrollable paroxysm of
rage.

That posed the question of who could have murdered her. There was nothing to suggest that she might have been killed by an intruder. If she had had an enemy Gautier would have known about it. He
was not ready to believe that she might have brought another lover home who might have killed her in a frenzy of lust.

The timing of her murder was also puzzling. Fluent in a number of languages, Ingrid was the Paris correspondent of the Leipziger Volkszeitung and also contributed columns to other
newspapers, but she had had an ambition to work for the Washington Post. On the strength of some articles she had written for the paper, she had been invited to meetings in Washington,
following which she had been given a trial assignment for a month as a replacement for the paper’s correspondent in Rio de Janeiro. If the trial was satisfactory, she had been told that she
might expect to be given a correspondent’s post somewhere in Europe, if not in Paris itself.

Now Gautier wondered whether she had been taken on by the Washington Post and if so, whether that might have led to her murder, though he could not see how. He went to the writing
bureau which she had kept in the living room of the apartment and found it unlocked. That did not surprise him, for she had not been a secretive person, only a tidy one. In it he found only bills,
receipts, letters from an aunt who lived in Rotterdam and other personal items. There were no letters from him, for he had never written her any, but he was touched to see that she had kept the one
petit bleu, or message over Paris’s pneumatic telegraph, which he had once sent her some weeks ago to confirm a meeting. Like most journalists she had rapidly become dependent on the
telephone, using it and the telegraph as a means of daily, even hourly, communication.

In a waste-paper basket beside the writing bureau he found the torn-up remains of the steamer and train tickets for her journey back to France from Brazil. Beneath them were two leaflets, one
announcing a sale of home furnishings and the other advertising a patent remedy for neuralgia, which must have been pushed through the letter-box of her apartment. As she had been away for a month,
he was surprised there had not been many more. Beneath the tickets and leaflets lay an envelope which he picked up and examined. The way in which a woman opened an envelope could tell one much
about her character and about what she may have expected it to contain. Ingrid had slit this one open carefully, no doubt with the paper-knife he had seen in the bureau, and had let it fall without
its contents into the waste-paper basket. Gautier saw that it had been posted in Washington to her home address and would have arrived a few days before she reached Paris. He searched the bureau
again, but could not find the letter it must have brought.

He had not expected to find much in the apartment connected with her work as a journalist, for although she wrote her longer articles and some of her columns at home, she had the use of an
office in Rue Réaumur, which she shared with other journalists who wrote for foreign papers and which provided the facilities she needed. It was there that he might discover from her files
and papers on what she had been working since her return to Paris and the names of anyone she might have contacted.

He pulled the sheet back over her and knew he would have to shut his mind to his last picture of her, and replace it with other pictures from the past; of her face, her infectious smile, her
caresses and her naked body when they had made love. The bedroom was still as the concierge and the police must have found it. The following morning officers from the government scientific
laboratories would come and examine the whole apartment, looking for anything which might tell them more about her death. Police forces had begun to use science as an aid to the detection of crime
and the punishment of offenders, but little progress had yet been achieved and he felt it was unlikely that the scientists would find anything significant.

Two journalists were still at work in the office which Ingrid had shared with three others. That did not surprise him, for he knew that the publication of newspapers had become
in many ways a nocturnal business. Even so, although he understood why those who produced daily newspapers in France might in the evenings wish to be looking for late news to print in the next
morning’s editions, he would not have thought that journalists working for foreign papers need be under the same constraint. On occasions when Ingrid had declined his invitation to dine with
him, pleading work as an excuse, he had sometimes teased her for what he described as an affectation. She had laughed but had never taken him seriously.

Before going to Rue Réaumur, he had called in at the police commissariat in the 4th arrondissement and had been fortunate enough to catch the inspector who had been called to
Ingrid’s apartment when her body had been found, before he went off duty for the day. Inspector Mounier was a decent man and probably competent enough, but one could see that he had so far
made little real effort in his investigations. Gautier realized that this was probably because he knew he would not be handling the case for long. This was no ordinary killing; not violence spilled
over from the rough streets not far away, not the result of a quick knife thrust between voyous or pimps. The victim was a person of consequence and a foreigner and so the investigation
would inevitably be taken over by the Sûreté. Mounier had clearly been impressed that an officer of Gautier’s importance should be involved, but even so he had not been able to
tell him more than he already knew, except that there had been no signs that whoever had murdered the lady had broken into her apartment.

Gautier’s instructions to him were precise. The apartment should be guarded night and day and no one admitted until the official investigating team arrived. Ingrid’s body should be
reexamined by one of the doctors attached to the Sûreté and he should be told to look for evidence that she had been killed by stabbing. Attempts to make it appear as though she had
been strangled might have been simply a device to conceal the truth. He would expect the doctor’s report to be on his desk by noon the next day.

He had previously met both of the two journalists whom he found at Ingrid’s office. Luca Marinetti was a tall good-looking Italian and was listed as representing an Italian news agency as
well as two other provincial newspapers. Pierre Bertrand was a Frenchman, quiet and polite, who acted as correspondent for some small English-language magazines and a medical journal. Neither man
seemed surprised when Gautier arrived at the office, for he had called in there more than once in the evenings to meet Ingrid before they went out for dinner together. This evening one could tell
from the way they welcomed him that they had not heard of Ingrid’s death.

‘Madame Van de Velde is not here,’ Bertrand told him.

Gautier felt that there was no point in softening the news which he had to give them. ‘I know Monsieur. I regret to tell you that she is dead.’

After a moment of shocked silence their questions flew at him. He gave them only the facts, for he had no wish to be drawn into speculation. Both men were clearly incredulous and Gautier found
himself wondering how, if two seasoned journalists could not come to terms with Ingrid’s death, he would ever be able to reconcile himself to it. He could not give them the luxury of time to
recover their composure, for he had questions of his own to ask.

‘Did Madame Van de Velde tell you that she might be leaving Paris?’

‘You mean the assignment she was expecting from the Washington paper? Yes. She often talked of it.’

‘Do you know if she had received any news of it when she returned from Brazil?’

‘Yes. She told us a letter was waiting for her when she returned,’ Bertrand said, ‘but it was not the news which she had been expecting.’

‘She was not offered a post?’

‘Not an offer of a permanent position. Not yet. They wanted her to work in Berlin for three months on a temporary assignment, after which she would return and take over the Paris
desk.’

‘Paris? If that was definite it must have pleased her.’

‘She was delighted. On the day when she had read the letter she could talk of very little else.’

Gautier could imagine how pleased and excited Ingrid must have been. Had she been offered a permanent post elsewhere in Europe she would have taken it, but reluctantly, for she loved working in
Paris, which she often said was the cultural and intellectual centre of Europe. She had also made it clear that she had no wish to be separated from him.

‘When was this?’ he asked the two journalists.

‘The day before yesterday which was the day she returned from Brazil.’

‘Did she also come into your office yesterday?’

‘She did and early, just as she would on a normal day.’

‘Do you know if she had any appointments?’

‘In the afternoon she went to a meeting arranged by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs,’ Marinetti replied and then he added, ‘Many of us in the foreign press corps went. I was
there with her and our colleague Neuhoff, although in the event what they had to say did not amount to much; some minor diplomatic trouble with Germany. No doubt Madame Van de Velde had other
meetings during the day, but she did not talk about them.’

‘Do you know if she kept an appointments diary?’

‘I am sure she did. When she was on the telephone I often heard her saying that she must consult her diary and then she would take it out of her desk.’

There were four desks in the office, one for each of the journalists who used the place. Each desk had a telephone on it and two drawers in which the journalists kept their notebooks, paper and
personal belongings. Typewriters stood on some but not all of the desks, and Gautier remembered Ingrid often saying that she did not need one and could not be bothered to learn to type.

He knew which desk had been hers and went over to it. On it he saw a tray with pens in it, an inkwell, a blotter and nothing else. Ingrid had been a neat and careful person and she would have
kept her diary in one of the drawers of the desk. Both drawers were open and there was no diary in either of them. He could see that the locks had not been forced and remembered then something
which had escaped his attention when he had searched her apartment. The keys to the office and to her desk drawers had been missing.

‘Did Ingrid keep her desk locked, do you know?’ he asked the two men.

‘Of course. We all do.’ Bertrand shrugged his shoulders. ‘You know how protective we journalists are of what we are writing and our sources.’

Next morning Gautier arrived at his office even earlier than he usually did, for he knew that work would have accumulated on his desk while he had been away at the meeting of
police chiefs; not necessarily criminal cases but complaints, reports of missing persons, requests for investigations. Most of it woul. . .