The Montmartre Murders

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

A painter has vanished: normally an event of no importance, but Théo is the heir to a fortune, and so Inspector Gautier of the Sûreté is put on the case. Then a shady art dealer is murdered. A dealer who had acquired three paintings under dubious circumstances, from a minor artist who died in similarly dubious circumstances. But why is it that so many people want to gain possession of the paintings now - a princess, a Greek millionaire and even, in a roundabout way, Théo?

Release date: December 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 193

Sample

HAD IT NOT been for the hearse drawn by four black horses at its head, the bizarre funeral cortège which wound slowly down Rue Lepic might have
been mistaken for a carnival procession. In a coffin piled high with disorderly sprays and bunches of flowers, lay the body of Van Duren, a painter from Antwerp who had hanged himself two days
previously in his studio on the Butte. The Dutchman had been an enthusiast for startlingly bright colours and, as a mark of sympathy, his friends among the artists of Montmartre had dressed
themselves for his funeral in gaudy clothes, some salvaged out of old trunks where they had lain forgotten, others bought for the occasion from second-hand shops, itinerant pedlars and even from
rag merchants.

Joined by other bohemians, some in the capes, velvet suits and cravats that were traditional among ‘rapins’ or art students, some in the workman’s overalls that more
unconventional artists were then choosing to wear, they formed an untidy throng, ten or twelve deep, that followed the hearse on its journey to the Cimetière de Montmartre. In a fiacre at
the tail of the procession rode a girl in a bright green dress and yellow mantilla. In a fantasy induced by alcohol and ether, she imagined she was the Queen of Spain and believing that the crowds
watching the funeral cortège pass were there to pay her homage, she threw kisses at them as she went by.

When the last stragglers had rounded the bend going down towards Rue des Abbesses, Gautier continued walking up towards the top of the Butte. His duties seldom took him to that part of Paris,
because although the quartier had more than its share of crime, it was not usually of a kind that required the intervention of the Sûreté.

Fifty years previously Montmartre had been a sleepy village outside Paris, inhabited mainly by millers and vine-growers. Then Haussmann, commissioned by Napoleon III to reconstruct
France’s capital, had pulled down the city walls. In a short time Montmartre had suffered two invasions, the first by pickpockets and apaches and cut-throats eager to put themselves a little
further out of reach of the city’s police, the second a few years later by artists and poets, attracted by the peace and freedom from bourgeois convention to be found in Montmartre, but even
more by its cheapness. A dingy room capable of serving as a studio could be rented there for as little as 15 francs a month and there were cafés where a meal cost less than 1 franc,
inclusive of wine.

The local inhabitants had not taken kindly to either of these groups of intruders and enmity between tradespeople, artists and ruffians erupted into petty crime. Montmartre, as one writer
commented, had become the home of brawling and burglary, drunkenness and depravity, seduction and suicide.

Gautier was not on his way up the Butte that morning, however, to investigate a crime but to make enquiries about a man who was reported to have disappeared. Searching for a missing person was
not a duty to which a senior inspector of the Sûreté would normally be assigned, but the missing man, Théophile Delange, was not an ordinary person. The eldest son of a good,
bourgeois family, he had achieved notoriety a dozen or so years previously when a wave of anarchy was sweeping France, by being arrested and charged with exploding a bomb outside the home of a
judge. He had been acquitted for lack of evidence, as he was a year or two later when accused of conspiring to organize a violent demonstration of unemployed workmen outside the National
Assembly.

As anarchism died, Delange had abandoned politics and decided to express his social protest in art. He had moved up to Montmartre where he could share the life led by the avant-garde and
revolutionary painters and sculptors who were flocking to live on the Butte. As far as anyone knew he had lived there quietly ever since, making no sort of mark with either art critics or art
dealers.

Delange’s radical past was not the reason why the Sûreté were looking for him. His family was wealthy and influential for his father, now dead, had built up a substantial
business with interests in Africa, while an uncle had been deputy for Seine-et-Marne. Courtrand, the Director-General of the Sûreté, knowing that his own appointment had been a piece
of political patronage, had made it a principle ever since to look after the interests not only of those who had helped him in the past, but of those who might help him in the future. Politicians,
aristocrats, bankers, wealthy businessmen could all rely on a solicitous service from the Sûreté if ever they needed it. And so, when Delange’s family had told Courtrand of their
concern for Théophile, Gautier had been sent to Montmartre to enquire after him.

As he walked up the hill, Gautier wondered where he should begin these enquiries. Courtrand had told him expressly not to make himself known at the local police commissariat, which eliminated
one starting point. There was another possibility which Gautier himself had ruled out. Some months previously, while investigating a murder in another part of Paris, he had met and enjoyed a brief
attachment with Claudine Verdurin, a part-time artist’s model and herself a painter, who lived in Montmartre. Their liaison, if it could be called that, had consisted of no more than a couple
of meals and one night together and it had come to an abrupt end when Gautier’s wife, Suzanne, had left him for another man. Although Suzanne’s departure had not in any way been
connected with his affair, Gautier, now free to take Claudine as his mistress, had decided, for reasons which many would think perverse, not to see her again. For a moment that morning he had been
tempted to exploit the excuse he had been given to go and knock on her door but, not wishing to explain to her even if he could his reasons for breaking off their affair, he had decided against
it.

As he approached the summit of the Butte, he came to a bistro in one of the streets leading off the Place de Tertre which had a sign above the door that read ‘Chez Monique’. A
bistro, he decided, was as good a place as any to ask questions, talk and listen to gossip.

Inside, when his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he could see that the place, unpretentious as it was with its bare wooden floor and plain, unpainted tables and chairs, was frequented in the
normal way by artists. Hanging on the walls were paintings in an assortment of styles; landscapes in broad sweeps of unnatural colours, red grass, blue trees, white rivers; simply drawn views of
Montmartre with its old houses, their plaster chipped and flaking; a portrait of a blousy girl with ostrich feathers in her hat and a glass of absinthe in her hand; a study of a classical theme
featuring a chorus of women with enormous feet and bodies like misshapen cubes. The bistro itself, however, was empty.

A tall woman, Monique herself one assumed, came through from the kitchen at the back of the place to serve him. He ordered a bottle of wine and she brought it out to him at once.

‘One can see that you are not from the quartier, Monsieur,’ she said gloomily.

‘How is that?’

‘Everyone here is at the funeral. Every bistro, café and shop on the Butte is empty this morning. And this is the second funeral in less than a month.’

‘Was the other victim a suicide as well?’

‘No. The poor fellow died of consumption. Manoto was my favourite; only twenty-eight, a Spaniard and as handsome as God. He was so kind and considerate and gentle, when he wasn’t
drunk, that’s to say.’

‘Perhaps the mourners will come back here after they have buried him,’ Gautier suggested. In his experience people who went to funerals tried to forget their sombre reminder of
mortality by eating and drinking copiously with friends as soon as possible afterwards.

‘They won’t come to my place,’ Monique said, shaking her head with pessimism. ‘Not after last night. My customers stay away whenever the place has been visited by the
flics.’

‘You have had the police here?’

‘Last night. A mad artist and an out-of-work lamplighter began to break the place up.’ She pointed towards a corner at the back of the room where there was a pile of debris
recognizable as the shattered remnants of a table and some broken glass. ‘When they went for each other with knives, the artist’s woman ran screaming down the street and called the
flics. Stupid whore!’

Gautier had intended to ask her whether she knew where he could find Théophile Delange, but now he changed his mind. Café owners, like petty criminals and prostitutes and pimps,
had an uncanny flair for detecting a policeman and he sensed that in her present mood of disenchantment with the police, Monique, if she realized who he was, would tell him nothing. So he changed
his tactics.

‘I used to know a girl who lived not far from here,’ he remarked.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘She was an artist’s model and painted herself as well. I really came here today to see whether I could get in touch with her again.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Claudine. Claudine Verdurin.’

Monique shook her head. ‘I can’t remember ever meeting anyone of that name, but then often these models don’t go by their real names. They choose colourful ones which they
think will help to establish them and attract the artists – Kiki, Aicha, Patti.’

As she talked to Gautier, she was standing at the back of the room beside a counter which served as a cashier’s desk and where she did her accounting and made out bills. From that vantage
point she could see through the open doorway of the bistro into the street and watch for the arrival of customers. At that moment one arrived.

‘Here comes someone who will know your girl,’ she said. ‘Frédé knows everyone in Montmartre.’

The man who had come into the bistro was tiny, no larger than a small woman and fastidiously dressed in a style that was an uneasy compromise between the conventional and the bohemian. His
morning coat and trousers could not have been faulted for cut or quality, but they were offset with a pale blue waistcoat, an eccentricity affected by only a handful of poets and aesthetes, a gold
cravat and bright yellow spats. As he came through the door, he looked around the empty bistro in astonishment.

‘Monique! Where is everyone?’

‘At the funeral, of course.’

The little man clapped his hand to his head. ‘Holy Mother of God! I had forgotten all about poor Van Duren. I shall never live this down!’

‘I daresay he will forgive you in time,’ Monique remarked unfeelingly.

‘It’s all the fault of that ruffian Dillon. I was posing for him yesterday and he insisted that we should begin drinking at lunchtime. I remember nothing more until I woke this
morning.’ His glance fell on the broken furniture and glass in the corner of the room and he added uneasily: ‘We weren’t here, were we, Monique?’

‘If you had done that you would be in jail.’

Frédé shook his head and pulled a face. ‘My God! My stomach feels like an empty dustbin and my mouth like a cesspit. Give me wine and something to eat, Monique.’

‘Have you money?’

‘No, but I can pay you later. Dillon still owes me for yesterday.’

‘Dillon? Since when has he ever been able to pay his debts? You owe me 20 francs as it is and you’ll get nothing in this bistro until I have my money.’

‘Monique! For pity’s sake! I’m starving!’

Monique began to curse him. She told Frédé he was good for nothing, an idler, a drunkard and a sponger, that he would never earn any money because the only artists who ever used
him were those who could not afford a respectable model. Then she cursed herself, for becoming involved with a bistro in Montmartre, where the customers were lazy and impecunious and deceitful.
Pointing at the paintings on the walls of the room, all of which she had accepted from artists in lieu of payment, she demanded how she was ever going to sell such trash and get back the money she
had spent on their food and wine.

Frédé made no attempt to interrupt her but waited for her storm of indignation to blow itself out. Evidently he knew Monique and he did not have long to wait. Finally, after
hurling one last obscenity at him, she disappeared into her kitchen and returned shortly carrying a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread.

‘This is more than you deserve,’ she said, putting the food down on a table in front of Frédé, ‘and you’ll get no drink from me.’

Frédé sat down and began tearing the bread into pieces which he dropped into the steaming soup. Gautier noticed him glancing from time to time at the bottle of wine on his own
table.

‘It would give me great pleasure to offer you a glass of wine, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘That is if Madame has no objection.’

‘You may waste your money in whatever way pleases you,’ Monique said, but without ill-humour.

‘Monsieur, you are a gentleman and a Christian,’ Frédé said gravely.

Monique produced a wine glass which Gautier filled from his bottle and took over to the table where Frédé was sitting. The artist’s model swallowed half of it in a single
gulp. The relief on his face as the wine coursed down his throat, quenching the debilitating effects of a long night’s drinking, was almost comical.

‘Do I understand that you pose for artists, Monsieur?’ Gautier asked.

‘I have done for more than thirty years.’

‘Yours must be a fascinating profession.’

‘Scores of artists have painted me,’ Frédé boasted. ‘Some of them already famous, not only the struggling painters of Montmartre but the great classical artists.
I suppose I have appeared on canvas more often than any other man in Paris.’

‘For what kind of paintings?’ It did not seem to Gautier that Frédé, a dandy though he might be, had a physique imposing enough or masculine enough to satisfy many
painters.

‘All kinds. Classical, allegorical, impressionist,’ Frédé replied and then, as though he had divined the reason for Gautier’s question he added: ‘It is my
head they mostly wish to paint.’

His head, Gautier had to admit, although disproportionately large for his tiny body, had a certain dignity and a powerful, rugged profile. It was not unlike the head of Rodin’s statue of
Balzac which, when it had been shown at the Salon a few years previously, had stirred up bitter controversy and drawn fierce, even libellous attacks from the critics.

‘I wonder if by any chance you might know a model named Claudine?’ Gautier asked Frédé, seeing at last a way of raising the subject of his enquiries without provoking
suspicion. ‘When I knew her she lived in Rue d’Orchampt.’

‘Claudine? I think not.’

‘Someone told me she might now be living with a painter named Théophile Delange.’

Frédé laughed. ‘Whoever she is, she certainly isn’t living with Théo.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Until a few days ago, Théo had another woman sharing his studio, a Polynesian named Suji. She used to be Manoto’s mistress and when he died Théo took her in out of
pity. Personally I don’t believe he was even interested in the girl, but like many of us he was outraged by what happened after Manoto’s death.’

Taking his bottle of wine over to Frédé, Gautier refilled the model’s glass. ‘What did happen?’

Frédé told him the story, the villain of which was an unscrupulous art dealer named Victor Lerner. Lerner had come to the conclusion that the work of avant-garde painters
represented a worthwhile speculation for the future, provided it could be purchased cheaply enough. Taking advantage of the perpetual poverty in which most of the artists of Montmartre existed, he
had been paying derisory sums for their paintings, some of which he had soon been able to sell to amateur collectors for ten times what he had paid. Although the dealer was a hard businessman, the
Spaniard Manoto had somehow managed to persuade Lerner to make him an advance of 200 francs, pleading that he needed the money to buy canvas and colours.

For people living in Montmartre, 200 francs was an unheard-of sum to be actually holding in one’s hand and Manoto did not hold on to it for long. He had given a kind of running party which
continued for twenty-four hours in a number of bistros and cafés on the Butte and at which anyone and everyone had been welcome. This orgy of drinking, together with the drugs which had
accompanied it, had proved too much for Manoto’s precarious health and it was this rather than consumption that had killed him. Less than two days after the party he had been dead. Acting
quickly to recover the money that was owed to him, Lerner had managed to establish a legal right to the possessions Manoto had left in his studio. The place had been stripped bare and the
Polynesian girl evicted.

‘Everyone on the Butte was enraged,’ Frédé concluded. ‘Particularly Théo. He cursed Lerner for a scoundrel, saying that it was this kind of exploitation he
had been fighting all his life. One night when we were all a little drunk, he suggested that we should go to Lerner’s place the next morning and take Manoto’s paintings by force and
make Lerner give us money for the Spaniard’s woman.’

‘And did you?’

Frédé grinned. ‘No. It was just wine in our bellies, not fire. By the following morning we had all cooled down.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘About two weeks. Artists have short memories and Manoto is almost forgotten. Even Théo lost interest in the injustice that was done to his friend and has left Paris for the south
of France.’

‘Do you know why?’ Gautier kept the question as casual as possible.

‘Who knows?’ Frédé shrugged his shoulders at the impossibility of understanding an artist’s motives. ‘It may have been that he was tired of having Suji in
his studio. On the other hand, he had been talking about a new idea he had conceived, a new way of painting light. So he may have gone south just to find some sunshine to paint.’

‘Do you know where he went?’

‘To a little fishing village which no one has ever heard of. It’s called St Tropez.’

MADAME DELANGE LIVED with her younger son Marcel in Rue de Courc. . .