Dream Killer of Paris E-Book

Fabrice Bourland

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 290

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Enter the world of supernatural crime investigation - In the autumn of 1934 a channel crossing to France takes a paranormal turn for private detective, Andrew Singleton, when he sees an extraordinary mirage and has an encounter with a lady in white. On arrival in Paris he is quickly drawn into a very unusual murder investigation in which the victim appears to have died of fright in his sleep. Who caused this death and how? And could there be some connection to Singleton's experience on the channel? In a city alive with surrealism and metaphysical research, Singleton and his partner James Trelawney set off on the trail of a criminal mastermind, whose evil methods and motives will prove bizarre beyond their wildest imaginings.

Leseprobe

THE DREAM KILLER OF PARIS

FABRICE BOURLAND

Translated by Morag Young

Pushkin Vertigo

My thanks to Geneviève and Jean who gave me such a warm welcome at their inn

‘Two gates of Sleep there are, whereof the one, they say, is horn and offers a ready exit to true shades, the other shining with the sheen of polished ivory, but delusive dreams issue upward through it from the world below.’

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI, translated by H. R. Fairclough

‘Never have I been able to pass without a shudder through those gates of ivory or horn which divide us from the invisible world.’

Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia, Part I, chapter 1

‘It may appear extraordinary but sleep is not only the most powerful state but also the most lucid one for thought.’

Charles Nodier, Some Phenomena of Sleep, 1831

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by the Publisher

I Fata Morgana

II Tour Saint-Jacques

III Deadly Sleep

IV At Château B—

V An Unexpected Entrance

VI Jacques Lacroix Plays Sherlock to our Watson

VII I Win Two Cases of Vouvray

VIII Too Much Reading Can Damage Your Sleep

IX An Ominous Increase in the Number of Cases

X A Visit to the Institut Métapsychique

XI At the Café de la Place Blanche

XII Long Live Surrealism

XIII Objective: Chance

XIV Good Night Vienna!

XV All Aboard The Orient Express

XVI The Need for Sleep

XVII At W— Castle

XVIII The Master Race is Battery-Farmed

Epilogue

Notes

About the Author

Copyright

FOREWORD BY THE PUBLISHER

As readers may remember, we were sent the manuscript of The Baker Street Phantom1, Andrew Fowler Singleton’s previous adventure, in the post and were so impressed that we decided to publish it as quickly as possible. Readers may also recall that William H. Barnett, son of John W. Barnett, the detective writer’s executor, told us in his accompanying letter that there were several folders in his father’s attic that might contain more unpublished stories.

We immediately contacted him and he confirmed that twelve files had been found in a trunk and that these files did indeed contain unpublished manuscripts written by the celebrated detective. He had not yet had time to read them all but said he would be happy to send us the second adventure soon, a tale which, in his view, was just as disconcerting as the first.

A few days later we duly received a large envelope from Northampton containing 235 typed pages, carefully protected in a blue folder. On the first page was the title The Dream Killer of Paris in capital letters.

Naturally, we read the manuscript straight away. This time the adventure had taken Singleton, in October 1934, to Paris and its literary and spiritualist circles, as well as to Vienna. We must warn readers that, as in his previous tale, the facts appear to be highly implausible. And yet, as a result of a number of checks carried out over the past few weeks, in particular at the archives of the French police force and the Institut Métapsychique International, we can confirm that this account is an accurate reflection of events.

Unlike The Baker Street Phantom, where it was difficult to determine when it had been written, in this instance a sentence in the epilogue (the reference to the ‘young man’) seems to indicate that the manuscript was written between 1947 and 1950. As for the young man in question, our attempts to find him have been unsuccessful. We don’t know therefore whether Auguste was eventually admitted to the Academy or not.

All things considered, this second document sheds a little more light on why the writer, and later his legal executor, wanted to keep some of his cases out of the public eye. In the stories we were already familiar with, bodies might disappear without explanation, castles be filled with ghosts, and evil creatures float in the air but, in the end, the real guilty parties always proved to be made of flesh and blood. It is probable that Andrew Fowler Singleton, mindful of his reputation, was reluctant to publish those cases which had led him to enter a realm outside conventional understanding. He knew that the excessive scepticism which poisons our age would make it impossible for these tales to be taken seriously.

And perhaps he was right – the incredulity already expressed by many readers of Phantom is the best proof of that.

Stanley Cartwright, 3 May 2007

Notes

1The Baker Street Phantom - Gallic Books

I

FATA MORGANA

It had been an exceptionally warm year across most of Europe, and even in London, in Montague Street, temperatures were still high at the beginning of autumn. I recall that when my business partner James Trelawney and I, Andrew Fowler Singleton, brought the shameful activities of the ‘gang of bell thieves’ to an end in the last days of September, we were in shirtsleeves, our foreheads beaded with sweat. It had been a truly incredible case which had taken us the length and breadth of Great Britain for a number of weeks, from Swansea to Ipswich; from Edinburgh to the tip of Cornwall.

Consequently, on the morning of Tuesday, 16 October 1934, with no new cases in the offing in London, I decided to go to Paris. I wanted to spend a few days trying to solve a particular mystery that I had put off for far too long.

As I was packing my travelling bag with a few essentials, James’s athletic form appeared in the sitting-room doorway – he had just dragged himself out of bed. I’d put my plan to him on numerous occasions but each time he’d merely looked doubtful. At that moment he was pondering the reason for my haste.

‘Still obsessed by the death of Gérard de Nerval?’ he asked, smoothing a recalcitrant lock of blond hair on top of his head. ‘For goodness’ sake, the man killed himself seventy years ago, Andrew! What on earth are you hoping to find out?’

‘I came across some disturbing information in this book,’ I replied, as I tried to push a biography of the poet2 acquired a few days earlier in a French bookshop in Kensington into my bag, alongside six volumes of his complete works published by Honoré Champion. ‘There are too many different versions of the discovery of his body in Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. And the number of medical checks carried out in the morgue afterwards seems very high for a simple case of suicide by hanging.’

‘You told me yourself that his friends were famous writers. It’s hardly surprising that they discussed the circumstances of his death, with each one having his own theory. And even if Nerval didn’t commit suicide, it just means that he was killed for a few pennies by a local villain. Does it really make any difference? Do you think you’ll find one of the murderer’s family and force a confession out of him?’

‘I don’t claim to be rewriting history. I just want to find answers to some questions that fascinate me. Now, James, are you going to tell me if you’re coming or not?’

‘It’s just such a waste of time,’ my partner replied, yawning so widely that I thought he’d break his jaw. ‘My programme’s all mapped out: swimming, cricket and the pictures. It’s so nice not having anything to do! Afterwards, well, I’ll keep my strength up with that wonderful calf’s sweetbread they serve at McInnes’s, washed down with a pint, and then I’ll go and forget my sorrows in the arms of a pretty girl. In a week or so, if you still want to fritter your time away on the other side of the Channel and if no damsel has decided to cross the threshold of this flat to ask for my assistance, then maybe I’ll join you.’

‘Bah! You’ll show up within a week – I’m willing to bet on it!’

‘Very well, I bet you a case of Vouvray. But I beg you, Andrew: if an interesting case does turn up, don’t let it slip through your fingers because you had your head buried in a book. You will let me know, won’t you?’

‘I promise,’ I replied, putting on my jacket. ‘But let’s make it two cases of wine. I’ll wire you the address of my hotel as soon as I get there.’

We embraced, laughing like children, and I left the home of Miss Sigwarth, our wonderful landlady. We had been renting rooms on the first floor for two years and, although our means had improved substantially, allowing us to take a more spacious flat, we were reluctant to leave the old lady.

Seeing no taxis in Montague Street, I walked to the rank in Great Russell Street, a hundred yards away, where I found a cab which dropped me outside Victoria station in no time.

At the Southern Railway ticket studyI paid the twenty-pound fare for the journey (a tidy sum but it’s not every day that you travel on one of the world’s most luxurious trains) and on the stroke of eleven, in keeping with its reputation for punctuality, the Golden Arrow moved off.

At half past twelve I was in Dover. Ah, the miracle of human ingenuity! Had I had the choice, I would willingly have swapped my easy existence in this crowded century for the life of a young knight in the time of the houses of York and Lancaster, or that of a trapper on the prairies of the Wild West, or an explorer in the South Seas, or a romantic young blade under the July monarchy in France. Nonetheless, I admit that travelling from the hustle and bustle of Soho to the excitement of the Latin Quarter in just a few hours was a privilege for which I was grateful to the modern world.

This was not the first time I had made the journey from London to Paris since James and I had set ourselves up in the English capital. Thanks to the success of our first cases, our reputation had spread to the Continent and on three occasions we had helped the Paris police: firstly, to solve the case of the Phantom Violin at the end of August 1932; then during the unlikely affair of the Curse of the Fresnoys, as the press referred to it in their excessive coverage, which had the public on tenterhooks for many weeks; and finally, in the case of the Cut-throat with the Broken Watch, which lingered in the memories of all at the Eclipse studios in Billancourt. But on those trips I had never had time to stroll through the streets of Paris, the city I had dreamt about for as long as I can remember.

I was sixteen when I first read Gérard de Nerval and, as a sensitive and tormented young man, I had immediately recognised the writer as a kindred spirit. It was while I was at boarding school in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia (the province where I was born), during a French lesson. I was reading his poems ‘El Desdichado’ and ‘Fantaisie’. Accompanying them was a short biography which briefly recounted the time the author had spent in a mental asylum and, above all, his tragic end. On the night of 25 January 1855, Nerval, then aged forty-six, had hanged himself from a grating in Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne in one of the most sordid areas of the city. Some had suspected foul play but that theory had quickly been discounted. The police investigation concluded that it was suicide.

Since my time at boarding school, I had often returned to Nerval’s work, always with the same fervour. I’d found out about his life and read most of the articles written about him, although, after leaving my father’s house, these had proved very difficult to get hold of in America and England. I’d always promised myself that one day I would investigate the mystery surrounding his death. Had he hanged himself one night in despair or had it been a cowardly murder?

At quarter to one I boarded the Canterbury, an imposing steamer chartered by the Southern Railway and the Compagnie du Nord, enabling passengers to cross the Channel in record time. In less than five hours, after being whisked to my destination on board the Flèche d’Or, the Golden Arrow’s French alter ego, I would be walking upon the cobblestones of the City of Light!

In the meantime, I intended to make the most of the crossing.

Stretched out on a deckchair, with my body facing east and my face caressed by spray and soft sunlight, I reread some pages from Sylvie. The English coastline had already disappeared over the horizon and the French coast, from Calais to several miles beyond the lighthouse at Cap Gris-Nez, was only just becoming visible. Suddenly, as I was about to nod off, I stared wide-eyed at a staggering vision. Fairly high above the horizon, to the right of the Boulogne coastline, and therefore directly above the glittering water of the Channel, was an immense dream-like landscape that went on for about a mile and created the illusion of a long valley in green and orange tones, covered in vines and densely wooded. I could see, scattered here and there on steep hillsides, the roofs and steeples of mythical towns peeping through the foliage of conifers and chestnut trees. Snaking through the middle of this panorama that had sprung from nowhere was a blue river as wide as the Thames, with what appeared to be paddle steamers plying its fast-flowing waters. Near the banks, solemn rocky peaks were shrouded in mist and, at the top, I could see the shadowy forms of medieval castles or small ruined forts. One of the castles in particular, which overlooked the river opposite a small island, commanded my attention: it was an eyrie composed of a tall square tower and another lower one with a pointed roof.

What was this vision? Had I fallen into a rapturous sleep without realising it? Or was I fully aware of what was going on around me and witnessing one of those incredible mirages which are sometimes depicted in tales of expeditions to distant lands?

‘Fata Morgana!’ said a soft female voice nearby.

‘Fata Morgana!’ I repeated, astounded. I turned to the person who had spoken.

In the deckchair to my right (which I could have sworn had been empty a few moments before) was a young woman with a grace as miraculous as the vision I had just witnessed. She was about twenty and impeccably dressed in a long white silk tunic. Barefoot, with a mane of soft blond hair falling over her shoulders, she continued to study the distant phenomenon. I, for my part, had almost forgotten its existence, so difficult was it for me to turn away from a profile worthy of the statues of Antiquity.

‘Do you believe in mirages?’ she asked, leaning towards me, her expression candid, her dark eyes sparkling like two uncut gems.

‘Well …’

Deep down, I had the indefinable impression that I was experiencing something unique, almost supernatural. The fantastic spectacle in the sky, this mysterious stranger next to me, the intoxicating heat running through my veins, the distant buzzing in my ears …

‘Well, we’re seeing the same thing,’ I continued. ‘So the mirage must exist, there’s no doubt about it.’

Just then I discovered that I could tear my eyes away from the young woman’s face, as if she had suddenly released me from her spell. On the horizon, the suspended valley was already beginning to disintegrate and gradually metamorphose into a trail of iridescent clouds. In a few moments there would be no trace of it.

We observed this slow transformation in respectful silence until it was complete. Then, fearing above all that the female vision at my side would disappear as quickly as the celestial one, I tried to hold on to her by steering the conversation towards a more down-to-earth subject.

‘My name is Singleton, Andrew Fowler Singleton. It’s a—’

‘You misunderstood me, Mr Singleton. I asked you if you believed in fata Morgana, in the possibility that what we have seen has some kind of meaning.’

‘All I know is that it was an atmospheric phenomenon,’ I replied, both amused by and surprised at her insistence. ‘I know it’s traditionally linked to Morgan le Fay, hence the name, and that the fairy created mirages from Etna, which captivated the people of the Bay of Naples and the residents of Reggio Calabria in the Straits of Messina. They were eager to see portents in these mirages. But I’ve never seen one before and, what’s more, I didn’t know that such an illusion could be produced in the northern waters of the Channel.’

‘I think the people you mention are absolutely right. I’m certain it contains a hidden meaning.’

‘And what might that be?’

‘Do you dream, Mr Singleton?’

‘Yes, very often.’

‘Wonderful! Apparently, there are people who never dream.’

‘They don’t remember, that’s all. Everyone dreams; you can’t help it.’

‘I don’t mean that kind of dream. Do you have real dreams that you can still smell when you wake up, which follow you around throughout the day and which, sometimes, go on for several nights? Dreams which transform you, shape you, improve you?’

‘Ah! If you mean that kind of dream, then no, I must say that I’ve never had one like that.’

‘You will, you will. But let me give you a piece of advice. When it happens, don’t forget to write it down so that it may influence your waking hours.’

‘I will. But, about the mirage we’ve just seen together – and sorry to press the point – what is the hidden meaning you mentioned earlier?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t tell you! All I can say is that it was a message.’

‘A message? Sent by whom?’

‘Elemental spirits! Sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, salamanders …’

Her answer left me deeply perplexed. What did she mean? Was she making fun of me?

The steamer’s foghorn suddenly brought me back to reality. My gaze was irresistibly drawn to the area of the sky where, not so long ago, I had thought I’d seen a majestic landscape. A flight of cormorants now took its place.

I turned to my companion but the ochre and blue chair was empty.

Where had she gone? I scoured the deck in every direction but couldn’t see her golden mane anywhere.

In Calais at the harbour station and later in the Pullman carriages of the Flèche d’Or I looked for her again among the passengers – in vain. It was as if she had disappeared into thin air and I thought it unlikely I would ever see her again.

As the train sped through the French countryside at more than seventy miles an hour, I considered the strange meeting again. By the time the train had stopped at Platform 1 of the Gare du Nord, my memory of the scene had become so uncertain that I wondered if I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Indeed, what if, after all, the young woman herself was a mirage. Fata Morgana!

Notes

2Gérard de Nerval, le poète et l’homme by Aristide Marie, published by Hachette in 1914. Singleton devoured this biography, the first truly complete account of the French writer’s life. (Publisher’s note)

II

TOUR SAINT-JACQUES

I walked from the Gare du Nord to the capital’s historical centre. As well as Nerval’s books, I had taken care to slip into my bag a guide to modern and ancient Paris written in the 1920s which I had bought from a second-hand dealer in Boston. In the middle of the book was a very colourful map and every time I consulted it I circled in pen the names of the main roads, bridges, squares and monuments which captured my imagination.

Whistling, I headed down Boulevard de Magenta and then Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis before turning down Rue Réaumur on to Boulevard de Sébastopol. At the top of Rue de Turbigo, I made my way through narrow streets with delightfully evocative names: Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, Rue Brisemiche, and so on.

At the bend in Rue Saint-Bon, I reached Tour Saint-Jacques, so dear to Nerval. The monument was all that remained of the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie whose refurbishment had been paid for by Nicolas Flamel, the famous alchemist.

The tower took pride of place in the middle of a small square filled with trees and flowers. Somewhere in this garden was the spot where the poet had come to hang himself that night in January 1855. Unless it was fifty yards further along where the solemn Théâtre des Nations had since been built3. In Nerval’s time, the area didn’t have the respectable feel it has today. It had been a jumble of dark alleyways and sordid passageways where scoundrels and down-and-outs loitered. That was before Baron Haussmann’s engineers ‘civilised’ Old Paris for ever.

The day after Nerval’s death, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, Roger de Beauvoir and, to a lesser extent, Arsène Houssaye expressed serious doubts about the suicide theory. They thought that their friend had been the victim of one of the local ruffians.

I remember talking one evening, in a pub in Aldgate, to a music hall lighting engineer who had worked in Paris a few years earlier at the Théâtre des Nations. According to him, when work had been carried out in the building’s basement at the beginning of the 1910s, engineers, comparing the city maps with those of sixty years before, had noticed that the bars of the cellar window where Nerval had been found hanged at the end of a thin rope corresponded exactly to the current position of the prompter’s box. What’s more, if the usherettes were to be believed, on some evenings the poet’s ghost wandered between the rows of stalls after the performance. There was even a story that Sarah Bernhardt’s prompter was the ghost in person. However, I suspect that my companion, who was partial to whisky, was trying to pull the wool over my eyes to some extent.

I rested for a few minutes on a bench in Square Saint-Jacques, opposite the tower, and then, as evening began to fall, started looking for a hotel.

Having briefly studied the neighbourhood, I decided on an establishment in Rue de la Verrerie next to the church of Saint-Merri where the writer of the future had been christened, and a stone’s throw from the building in Rue Saint-Martin where he’d been born on 22 May 1808.

I went up to my room to drop off my luggage. The walls and ceiling were crisscrossed with beams and the rustic furniture didn’t seem to have been replaced since the days of Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.

It was the perfect place for me. Here I could easily immerse myself in the writer’s work, wander where he had wandered at night, try to understand what had been going through his mind and perhaps even establish the exact circumstances of his death.

‘I am the other,’ he had written in the margin of a book4.

I wanted to be him for a few days.

The next day, Wednesday 17 October, after a disturbed night of fraught and chaotic dreams which I was unable to remember upon waking, and a quick morning stroll on the banks of the Seine, I spent much of the day in my room, reading Nerval’s biography. It was long past midday when I eventually decided to go out for lunch at the Café des Innocents. A hundred and fifty years earlier it had been the site of a cemetery of the same name. At the end of the fourteenth century, on a panel there Nicolas Flamel (him again) had had a ‘man in black’ drawn on one of its pillars, directly facing the alchemic figures supposedly taken from the book of Abraham the Jew.

In Paris, more than anywhere else, history had left its mark on the present. For those who were able to see, reality consisted of more than just the fieeting con tours of beings and things. Wherever the eyes of those who could see fell, on the corner of every street, on nearly every wall, between every join in the cobblestones, they could perceive another layer beneath the superficial layer of reality. It looked similar but was very different and slightly out of step, a little like the anaglyphs whose technique Louis Lumière was refining in his workshops in order to screen three-dimensional films. Perhaps one day, simply wearing a pair of stereoscopic glasses in the street would make a new view of life possible – richer, more profound, more real, carved out of the depths of time, where past and present would be visible simultaneously.

After lunch I pushed the remains of my meal away and opened Aristide Marie’s book, which I always had with me. On one of the last pages, an extract from the register of the morgue (then located north-east of Pont Saint-Michel on Rue du Marché-Neuf ) was reproduced with the observations made by the state pathologist, Dr Devergie, on 26 January. Also reproduced was the complete text of the death certificate drawn up on 29 January at the town hall in the ninth arrondissement. These were about the only facts available. Thirty pages earlier, in a very obscure sentence, Aristide Marie intimated that documents from the investigation had been destroyed. What had happened? Was there any hope of ever finding them again?

For now, I intended to visit the archives of the new Forensic Institute at Place Mazas near Quai de la Rapée.

As the weather remained fine, I decided to walk along the Seine. Emerging on to Rue de Rivoli, I had just reached Tour Saint-Jacques, in front of Cavelier’s statue of Pascal, when I heard someone behind me calling my name.

‘Singleton! Singleton! Is that you?’

‘Inspector Fourier!’ I exclaimed, delighted to see the familiar face of the detective from the Sûreté, who was striding towards me.

‘Ah, my friend!’ he cried breathlessly, warmly shaking my outstretched hand. ‘But it’s Superintendent now, you know. I’ve been promoted!’

‘Of course, how could I have forgotten! This summer the Daily Mail reported at length on the exploits of Superintendent Fourier. That great figure of the Paris police force who managed to put behind bars the famous Bosco, big-time thief and the kind of colourful, elusive character only to be found in France!’

‘Well, well!’ he exclaimed, smoothing the long, solitary lock of hair which ran from one side of his head to the other. ‘I’m delighted to see that the reputation of our men is starting to cross the Channel. Give it a little time and Scotland Yard will be visiting our offices in Rue des Saussaies to study our methods. In any case, my dear friend, without you and your faithful partner I don’t think we would ever have got the better of the infamous Billancourt studios killer.’

I won’t dwell on the case of the Cut-throat with the Broken Watch which I referred to earlier. One of these days I intend to gather together all the documents and notes made at the time and write the whole story down. In the meantime, all the reader needs to know is that in the winter of 1933 James and I made the acquaintance of the kind and scrupulous Edmond Fourier from the Sûreté Générale. Although the investigation had been particularly sensitive (the idea of working with two amateur detectives was nothing less than sacrilege for some members of his organisation), Fourier, who had initiated the collaboration, always demonstrated full confidence in us. In the end, it served him well.

With his customary tweed suit, tweed overcoat, thin moustache, bowler hat and swordstick, Superintendent Fourier was the archetypal French policeman. He was a mixture of Juve, Tirauclair and Chantecoq!5 When I was with him I felt as though the shadow of Fantômas was about to appear on a rooftop or that the agile dandy overtaking us on the pavement was none other than Arsène Lupin returning from another burglary at a prince’s residence or the Crédit Lyonnais on Boulevard des Italiens.

Edmond Fourier was about fifty-four or fifty-five and the son of ironmongers from the Franche-Comté region but he had lived in Paris, in Rue Cadet, for a long time. His humble origins had taught him common sense and realism, which often paid off. He had joined the Sûreté Générale at the age of twenty-seven, a few years after Prime Minister Clemenceau had set up his brigades mobiles, the famous Tiger Brigades, to counterbalance the all-powerful Préfecture de Police. Fourier was one of the stars of the Sûreté which, since its creation in 1820, had always suffered from comparisons with its rival. The large-scale reorganisation of the State’s police force the previous April had also seen the resources and remit of the Sûreté increase considerably so that it now had national powers. The staff of the Sûreté and the Préfecture were not quite ready to bury the hatchet but the new set-up did at least give each institution precise boundaries.6

‘But I see no sign of that wag Trelawney,’ remarked Fourier, pretending to look left and right over his shoulder in case my six-foot-three friend was hiding in the policeman’s short shadow.

‘James stayed in London but he’ll be joining me soon. At the moment, I imagine he’s finding it very difficult to resist the siren call of your city.’

‘Do I take it then that you are … uh … what one might call “on holiday”?’

All of a sudden his deceptively disinterested tone made me realise that meeting Superintendent Fourier like this wasn’t simply a coincidence. Although he undoubtedly had all the qualities required of a detective, his acting skills left much to be desired. I remembered that the evening before, as I had left a brasserie on Rue Saint-Martin near my hotel, and then again that morning during a short stroll among the booksellers on Quai de Montebello, I had noticed a thickset individual with a broken nose like a boxer and short black crew cut hair whom I vaguely recognised but couldn’t place at the time. Now, the detective’s mischievous expression instantly provided me with the fellow’s name: Raymond Dupuytren who worked for Superintendent Fourier at the Sûreté Nationale and whom I’d met on several occasions in January 1933.

The French police had certainly not improved in the field of domestic espionage. When the press wanted to mock it, didn’t they refer to it as the national secret?

‘Come, Superintendent,’ I said. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense any longer. Tell me why you wanted to see me – I know you’ve been following me. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to ask me to come to Rue des Saussaies?’

‘Ha ha! I see I still can’t get anything past you! As for making you come to the Sûreté, there was no point. I got wind that you’d left the Hôtel Saint-Merri and since I happened to be near Île de la Cité this afternoon, it seemed natural to pay you a little courtesy visit.’

‘Only this time you almost missed me. I was about to go to Bercy.’

‘You’re right, my dear friend! Anyway, enough of this banter! I imagine you’re still fond of cases which baffle even the most intelligent of men?’

‘Well …’

‘I’m investigating a rather strange case that would appeal to you! The death of the Marquis de Brindillac. Have you heard about it?’

‘No.’

‘How come? Haven’t you read the papers?’

‘Since I arrived I haven’t opened a single one. Strange as it may sound, you see me before you but it’s just an illusion. In reality, I’m in 1855. Busy solving an incredible mystery.’

‘How frustrating!’ said the detective, who knew my liking for long literary excursions. ‘I don’t know what kind of case you’re dealing with but you should know that events every bit as extraordinary are happening in 1934.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘It’ll be worth it, I promise. You’ve never heard anything like it, even in a novel.’

‘Don’t get carried away!’

‘Give me half an hour, Singleton. Just enough time to bring you up to date.’

‘You’re making my mouth water, Superintendent! Go on then, tell me what’s happened.’

Notes

3 Built in 1862, the Théâtre des Nations changed its name to Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in 1949 before being renamed Théâtre de la Ville in 1967. (Publisher’s note)

4 This is reported in Chapter XIV of Aristide Marie’s book. Nerval was the subject of a book by Eugène de Mirecourt which had been dedicated to him in cabbalistic letters and, under a sketch, had written ‘I am the other’. (Publisher’s note)

5 Juve was the ingenious policeman who hunted Fantômas in the series of the same name written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain between 1911 and 1913. Tirauclair was the hero of L’Affaire Lerouge (1866) by Émile Geboriau. Chantecoq was one of the characters in Belphégor by Arthur Bernède, published in 1927. (Publisher’s note)

6 In fact, different police forces coexisted in France, created according to need and without any coordination between them. In particular, a war was raging between the Sûreté Générale (which became the Sûreté Nationale in 1934), which had been autonomous since 1877 and was directly attached to the Ministry of the Interior, and the Préfecture de Police in Paris. (Publisher’s note)

III

DEADLY SLEEP

We sat in a café on Rue de Rivoli. Through the window I could see the vast form of the Hôtel de Ville and, in front, the old Place de Grève where so many villains had been quartered in the Middle Ages and much of the nobility had been decapitated during the Revolution.