The Montmartre Investigation: 3rd Victor Legris Mystery. Claude Izner

Botanical Gardens.’

      ‘You’re curing the chimpanzees with goat’s milk?’

      ‘Don’t be silly, Monsieur Noël! No, I had to speak to someone and …’

      ‘All right, all right, I don’t need your whole life story.’

      Grégoire Mercier knelt down beside a white goat and milked it, then held out a bowl of creamy milk to the horse dealer, who sniffed it suspiciously.

      ‘It smells sour. Are you sure it’s fresh?’

      ‘Of course! As soon as she wakes up Mélie Pecfin gets a double ration of hay fortified with iodine; it’s the best thing for strengthening depleted blood.’

      ‘Depleted, depleted, my wife is not depleted! I’d like to see how you’d be if you’d just given birth to twins! I’ll take it to her while it’s still warm.’

      The man dropped a coin into the goatherd’s hand and snatched up the bowl.

      ‘Tomorrow, do you want me to deliver to your house on Rue Poliveau?’

      The horse dealer turned his back without even bothering to say thank you.

      ‘That’s right, run off to your missus. You may treat her better than you do your horses, but you don’t cherish her the way I cherish my goats when they have kids! Isn’t that right, my beauties? Papa Grégoire gives you sugar every morning and he nourishes your babies with hot wine. Come on, Berlaud, let’s go!’

      As he reached Rue Croulebarbe, Grégoire Mercier regained his good humour. Now he was back on home turf, the borders of which were the River Bièvre4 to one side and to the other the orchards where the drying racks of the leather-dressers were lined up.

      Freed from the strap holding them prisoner, the goats gambolled between the poplar trees bordering the narrow river, its brown water specked with foam. The Bièvre snaked its way along by tumbledown houses and dye-works whose chimneys belched out thick smoke. Although he was used to the sweetish steam of the cleaning tubs and the fumes from the scalding vats where the colours were mixed, Grégoire Mercier wrinkled his nose. Piled up under the hangars, hundreds of skins stained with blood lay hardening, waiting to be plunged in buckets of softening agent. After a long soaking, they would be hung out and beaten by apprentices, releasing clouds of dust that covered the countryside like snow.

      Determined not to drop his find, Berlaud guided the goats on to the riverbank where tomatoes, petits pois and green beans grew. He hurried past the wickerwork trays of the peat sellers and the coaching-shed of Madame Guédon who leased hand-carts for use on Ruelle des Reculettes, which opened out just beyond the crumbling wall behind the lilac hedge.

      Old buildings with exposed beams housed the families of the curriers. Blackened twisted vines ran over their packed earth façades. The sound of pistons, and the occasional shriek of a strident whistle, served as a reminder that this was the town and not the countryside.

      Letting his dog and beasts trot ahead, Grégoire Mercier stopped to greet Monsieur Vrétot, who combined work as a concierge with his trade as a shoemaker and cobbler to make ends meet. Then the goatherd started up the stairs, whistling on every landing. Thirty years earlier he had left his native Beauce for Paris, and settled at the heart of this unhealthy neighbourhood, ruled by the misery and stench of the tanneries. A delivery boy for the cotton factory by Pont d’Austerlitz, he had fallen in love with a laundress, and they had married and had two little boys. Three happy years were brutally cut short by the death from tuberculosis of Jeanette Mercier. Moved by the plight of the little motherless boys, public assistance had given them a goat to provide nourishment, until consumption carried the little boys off in their turn. When he had overcome his grief, Grégoire decided to keep the goat and take in others as well. He had never remarried.

      He reached the fifth floor, where his flock were massed before a door at the end of a dark corridor. As soon as he closed the door of his garret, the goats went into the boxes set up along the wall. He went into a second room, furnished with a camp bed, a table, two stools and a rickety sideboard, shrugged off his cloak and hurried to prepare the warm water and bran that his goats expected on returning from their travels. He also had to feed Mémère the doyenne a bottle of oats mixed with mint, before opening the cubby hole where Rocambole the billy goat was languishing. Finally he heated up some coffee for himself and took it to drink beside Mélie Pecfin, his favourite. It was then that he noticed Berlaud. He was sitting on his blanket, wagging his tail, his find from the Botanical Gardens still between his paws, but with his eyes fixed on the sugar bowl. Grégoire pretended not to know what his dog was after and Berlaud growled meaningfully.

      ‘Lie down!’

      Instead of obeying, the dog adopted an attitude of absolute servility, flattened his ears, raised his rump and crept stealthily forward, begging for his master’s attention. Grégoire distracted him by throwing him a sugar cube and grabbed the dog’s spoils.

      ‘What’s that? That’s not a bone, that’s … that’s a … How can anyone mislay something like that? Oh, there’s something inside …’

      Grégoire was so puzzled he forgot to drink his coffee.

      Lying back with his hands under his head, the man reflected on the enormity of what he had done. He had returned exhausted at dawn and sprawled on top of the rumpled sheet under his overcoat, going over the events of the previous night. The journey to the wine market on Rue Linné had barely taken him ten minutes. The blonde girl had slept deeply under the effect of the sleeping draught and he had carried her to the carriage without difficulty. No mistakes, no witnesses. And then? Child’s play; she had not suffered.

      He put a coffee pot on the still warm stove, went over to the window and looked down into the street. It was an autumn day like any other. He had managed everything to perfection. It would take the police a while to identify the blonde and by then he would have had his vengeance. As for the young thug he had hired, there was no risk that he would give him away or try to blackmail him – when they found his body they would imagine it had been a settling of accounts. No one would link the two murders. He let the curtain fall. A detail was troubling him. That fellow at the first floor window … had he spotted him? He would have to reassure himself, find out who the man was and perhaps …

      ‘You’re mad,’ he said out loud.

      But he let this thought go, and instead gloated over his plan, which he considered ingenious, cunning, brilliant – it had come off without a hitch, except that when he’d arrived at Killer’s Crossing5 he had noticed that the blonde was only wearing one shoe. It would have been much too risky to return to Rue Linné. At first he had panicked – that kind of error could be fatal. Then the solution had presented itself: all he had to do was remove the other shoe.

      He poured himself a cup of coffee.

      ‘The flics will easily trace the owner of the stolen carriage but so what! Where will that get them, the fools?’

      As he hunted in the pocket of his overcoat for some cigarettes, three little stains on the grey material caught his eye. Blood? It was an alpaca coat; it would be costly to get rid of it.

      ‘Just wine,’ he decided.

      He inspected his trousers and shoes: spotless. He sat down at the table and regarded the red silk shoe sitting beside a flask of sulphuric acid.

      ‘The police will think it was a crime of passion.’

      It was an amusing idea, and it soothed him.

      ‘In fact, I can make use of the shoe.’

      He opened a drawer, took out some writing paper, a pen and an inkwell and wrote out an address:

      Mademoiselle C. Bontemps

      15 Chaussée de l’Étang

      Saint-Mandé. Seine

      Victor sat on a bench outside a building on Rue des Mathurins, leafing through Paris Photographie, a review to which he had just subscribed. He looked half-heartedly