CHAPTER 20
VERSAILLES POLICE STATION
Charlie met Detective Allard in the foyer of the Versailles Police Station with two croissants wrapped in baking paper. The corner of his mouth twitched.
‘Did you bring me morning tea?’
‘Oui.’ She handed him the croissants.
‘You know I cannot be bribed into handing over police evidence?’
‘I do. But I haven’t eaten and I’m hungry. Thought it might be rude to eat in front of you.’
If Versailles was known for its oversized chateaux and villas, manicured parks and elegant boulevards, the police station was equally grand.
The foyer stretched out, featuring black and white marble tiles and huge archways that presumably led to different departments.
Unlike the Cité Metro Police Station in Paris, which appeared to have offices and corridors peeling off in all directions much like a rabbit warren, Versailles Police Station was spacious, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the town square.
They walked up a central set of marble stairs until they reached Allard’s office.
It was set up like a bank manager’s with a large wooden table floating in the middle of the room, flanked by velvet chairs either side.
There was an overstuffed armchair by the window with a matching footstool and side table covered in notes, a pair of spectacles and a pen sitting on top.
It looked a bit like a gentlemen’s club and Charlie immediately thought how her boss, George, would love a large-scale office like this.
Unfortunately, nothing in Paris was large scale.
The detective caught Charlie surveying his chair and looked sheepish. Then he shrugged. ‘I work long days and sometimes I prefer to sit in a comfortable chair to read my notes.’
‘This is lovely. I wish I had an office with two chairs,’ Charlie said. ‘Or even an office. My desk is squeezed into a cubicle in a row of six in the middle of the newsroom. The sun doesn’t even reach that far in from the windows.’
Allard held up the croissants. ‘Would you like to eat? Should I get some plates? I can make coffee?’
‘Perhaps after our meeting,’ replied Charlie, wanting to sound professional even as her stomach growled.
‘Since you brought me croissants, I’d like to show you something.’ He put the treats on a shelf for later and took a pile of photos out, laying them on the desk in a neat row. On the board behind him was a map of France with red thumb tacks stuck in multiple towns.
‘We found Pierre Jouet in a forest just outside Tours. We know he was a Paris Opéra Limousines chauffeur. He was shot in the back of the neck at close range with a suspected nine-millimetre weapon and his body dumped in the forest within twenty-four hours of his death.
‘The limousine company estimates twenty-five hundred francs was stolen from his kitty. They have no record of the client—he called the office, or someone with a German accent did, and then the client was picked up off the street outside L’Opéra.
‘Thanks to your quick thinking with the witness in the park, Mael, we have a description of the man accompanying Jouet: a tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed man with a moustache and an accent. Germanic, most likely. Perfect English. And a strong whistle. He is a suspect.’
Charlie frowned, concerned.
‘Anyway’—he tapped the next photo—‘not one week later, we find a dead body, which closely matched your description of the traveller you spoke to, in some woodlands opposite a cemetery near Neuilly.’
He took more photographs out and placed them on his desk.
Charlie’s breath caught in her throat. For there, in the photos, still and lifeless, was the complete image of the charming man she had met on the park bench in Tours.
The same dark curls and eyes; dressed in the tell-tale velvet suit. His head was crusted with blood.
‘Oh,’ Charlie sighed. ‘That’s Mael.’ She took in his swarthy skin, remembering his smile and the way he had studied her hand.
‘We can now confirm he had identity papers in his vest. His name is indeed Mael, Mael Albu. It’s an old Romani last name.’
Charlie wrote the name Mael Albu in her notebook. A wanderer whose travels had come to a tragic end. ‘I trust he did not put that bullet hole in the back of his own head?’ she said.
‘No. There was no weapon at the site.’ He put the postmortem shots labelled ALBU on the table, as well as an image of his body wrapped in a shroud covered with blood.
‘This’—he indicated the material—‘is a curtain. Albu was shot in the back of the neck at close range—suspected nine-millimetre weapon. Then dumped in the forest opposite the graveyard.
‘No one has stepped forward to claim the body and there have been no reports of Romani camps in the Neuilly area—or Tours—of late.’
‘A lone traveller,’ said Charlie sadly as she remembered his kindness. A velvet-clad philosopher on a park bench. ‘Who would do this?’
‘The two incidents may be related. Albu may have been blackmailing the killer in Tours. Certainly, both are shots in the back of the head with a nine-millimetre weapon. But it’s all circumstantial evidence.
Romani people, travellers, sometimes have the unfortunate reputation of being hustlers.
Maybe it was a robbery or a bribery gone wrong. ’
‘Albu—Mael—didn’t strike me as a hustler. He read my palm …’
Detective Allard’s face creased with scepticism for a second before he composed it into a polite smile. ‘I understand this is a shock. A witness is dead—’
‘Are you confirming these two murders are related?’
‘Not yet. But I’m working both cases and I can’t help but compare them.
I’m looking for possible links. I would be remiss not to.
We have two dead bodies that have turned up in forests with gunshot wounds to the back of the neck.
One victim had cash stolen. We have not been able to find anyone who knows Mael to confirm what he may have carried on his person. ’
Charlie remembered the elm leaf in her notebook from the Tours forest. ‘Did Jouet have any leaves stuck to the soles of his shoes?’
‘He did,’ Allard replied. ‘But he was found on a forest floor. That’s hardly surprising.’
‘Yes, but he never did set foot in that forest, did he? His body was carried in.’
‘Ah.’
‘So, both Jouet and Mael had leaves on the bottom of their shoes. Were they leaves from the same forest?’
‘Unconfirmed. But good point, I can ask our technicians to check that.
‘This brings us to a new homicide yesterday. Monsieur Jean Auclair.’ He spread the photographs of the victim across his table. ‘Auclair was also shot in the back of the neck. See?’ He tapped the dark entry hole with his pen.
Charlie winced and nodded. ‘Why didn’t I hear of this?’
‘It came in late yesterday evening, too late for the press to get wind of it. And I knew you were coming down this morning, so I thought best to discuss it directly. We don’t want people jumping to wild conclusions.
’ Detective Allard gave Charlie a pointed look.
‘Do you know where we found Auclair’s body, Mademoiselle James? ’
‘Charlie, please.’
‘Okay. Charlie?’
She shook her head.
‘Saint-Cloud. At the edge of the woods.’ Allard waited a beat for her to take this in.
‘Our victim was an estate agent. According to his secretary, who I spoke with this morning on the telephone, he was showing a new client a pretty three-bedroom villa on the outskirts of Saint-Cloud the day before yesterday. His secretary became concerned when Auclair did not return the villa’s keys to the office—apparently, Monsieur Auclair was a stickler for office procedures.
‘There is also the matter of five thousand francs that Auclair did not put in the office deposit box. He had collected this rent money from a tenant earlier that day on a routine inspection. Again, most unusual, and so we consider the possibility that this third victim of a gunshot wound was robbed of the cash.’
‘In Saint-Cloud!’ said Charlie with emphasis. ‘Surely there could be a link with Maisy Bell.’ Charlie hastily filled Allard in on the broad facts of the case. She pulled Gigi Rockefeller’s letter from her notebook and passed it to him.
He took his time reading it with pursed lips. When he was finished, his brow furrowed and he said gently, ‘I’m certainly not ruling anything out. But this particular case of a missing young woman was closed by the Metro Police.’ He paused.
‘I know that this Maisy Bell case feels personal for you. I can sense this. I recognise it, Charlie. But let me warn you, this is a deep, dark hole you are digging for yourself. It will stop you from pursuing other cases. It will hamper your reporting of these cases, Jouet, Mael Albu, now Auclair. These are real deaths and they deserve real justice.’
‘The Maisy Bell case was closed by the Metro Police, not by me,’ she replied vehemently, remembering her promise to Clementine Bell. If Charlie James was being instructed to report on men who were already dead, surely she could keep room in her mind for a woman who just might be alive?
Allard and Charlie stood on opposite sides of the desk staring at each other, an abyss of hurt and confusion swimming between them. Also, an understanding that sometimes cases are not solved. That gaps in evidence can be insurmountable.
Charlie looked at the photos of Jouet, Albu and now Auclair on Allard’s desk, and the red pins in the map of provincial France. Charlie would report on the deaths at hand. The mystery deaths of three unrelated men.
Allard came and stood beside her, picking up the photographs and placing them in neat rows. The first row was an eerie line of bullet wounds to three different necks. Same place at the back of the skull.
‘See,’ he said, ‘scorching on the skin, which indicates close range. The killer was close to the victims, behind them. This indicates the victims trusted him.
‘The second row is to your point about the leaves. Look at the shoes of all three deceased.’
Charlie leaned in. ‘You mean the dirt and leaves.’