Cynthia Manson (ed) by Merry Murder Page A

it.
    Yet, outside, Paris
was celebrating Christmas. Thousands of people had been to Midnight Mass,
thousands more had spent the night roistering, and those who hadn’t known where
to draw the line had sobered down in the police station and were now being
called upon to explain things they couldn’t remember doing.
    What had his
brother Olivier been doing all through the night? An old woman had been found
dead. A boy had started before dawn on a breathless race through the streets,
breaking the glass of the telephone pillars as he passed them, having wrapped
his handkerchief round his fist.
    And what was
Olivier waiting for at the Gare d’Austerlitz. sometimes in the overheated
waiting rooms, sometimes on the windswept platforms, too nervous to settle down
in any one place for long?
    Less than ten
minutes elapsed, just time enough for Godin, whose nose really was running, to
make himself another glass of hot grog.
    “Can I offer you
one, Monsieur le Commissaire?”
    “No, thanks.”
    Looking more
embarrassed than ever, Saillard leaned over towards Lecœur to say in an
undertone, “Would you like us to question him in another room?”
    No. Lecœur wasn’t
going to leave his post for anything. He wanted to stay there, with his little
lamps and his switchboard. Was it that he was thinking more of the boy than of
his brother?
    Olivier came in
with a detective on either side, but they had spared him the handcuffs. He
looked dreadful, like a bad photograph faded with age. At once he turned to
Andre. “Where’s Francois?”
    “We don’t know.
We’re hunting for him.”
    “Where?”
    Andre Lecœur
pointed to his plan of Paris and his switchboard of a thousand lines.
“Everywhere.”
    The two detectives
had already been sent away.
    “Sit down,” said
the Inspector. “I believe you’ve been told of Madame Fayet’s death.”
    Olivier didn’t wear
spectacles, but he had the same pale and rather fugitive eyes as his brother
had when he took his glasses off. He glanced at the Inspector, by whom he
didn’t seem the least overawed, then turned back to Andre. “He left a note for
me,” he said, delving into one of the pockets of his grubby mackintosh. “Here.
See if you can understand.”
    He held out a bit
of paper torn out of a schoolboy’s exercise book. The writing wasn’t any too
good. It didn’t look as though Francois was the best of pupils. He had used an
indelible pencil, wetting the end in his mouth, so that his lips were very
likely stained with it.
    “Uncle Gedeon
arrives this morning Gare d’Austerlitz. Come as soon as you can and meet us
there. Love. Bib.”
    Without a word,
Andre Lecœur passed it on to the Inspector, who turned it over and over with
his thick fingers. “What’s Bib stand for?”
    “It’s his nickname.
A baby name. I never use it when other people are about. It comes from biberon .
When I used to give him his bottle—” He spoke in a toneless voice. He seemed to
be in a fog and was probably only dimly conscious of where he was.
    “Who’s Uncle
Gedeon?”
    “There isn’t any
such person.”
    Did he realize he
was talking to the head of the Brigade des Homicides, who was at the moment
investigating a murder?
    It was his brother
who came to the rescue, explaining. “As a matter of fact, we had an Uncle
Gedeon but he’s been dead for some years. He was one of my mother’s brothers
who emigrated to America as a young man.”
    Olivier looked at
his brother as much as to say: What’s the point of going into that?
    “We got into the
habit, in the family, of speaking—jocularly, of course— of our rich American
uncle and of the fortune he’d leave us one day.”
    “Was he rich?”
    “We didn’t know. We
never heard from him except for a postcard once a year, signed Gedeon. Wishing
us a happy New Year.”
    “He died?”
    “When Francois was
four.”
    “Really. Andre, do
you think it’s any use—”
    “Let me go on. The
Inspector wants to know everything. My brother