J. Janes - Carousel

‘You weren’t to touch a thing,’ warned St-Cyr.

‘The stomach doesn’t touch. Its juices dissolve.’

‘A scientist, eh?’ snorted Kohler. ‘A smart-ass.’

‘You may start the machine,’ said Louis. ‘Give us the privilege of your expertise. Set your snack on the ground. No one will step on it.’

‘Music, maestro?’

A real card. Talbotte must have given him all the rope he needed. ‘Of course, why not the music? It will help us think.’

‘Stand back then.’

Threading his way among the menagerie, Cueillard disappeared through a gap in the panelled mirrors that surrounded and hid the boiler and its workings. ‘All set?’ he cried from in there.

‘Proceed,’ shouted St-Cyr, feeling the fool.

And the thing began to turn – slowly at first, the stallions rising and falling, the body also. All in slow motion but as if straining to throw off the shackles that had bound them. The glitter, the vivid colours, the wicked eyes of the animals now intent, now in flames enraged, came at them. Faster … faster …

The lights above, and from the many mirrors, swirled to the music of a stupendous band organ, a grandiose thing of brass pipes and Louis XIV gilded carvings under the name of GAVIOLI, PARIS, 1889. A calliope superb!

Boom, boom.

‘What’s the march?’ shouted St-Cyr.

‘That of the Bulgarians,’ came the reply. ‘Punched cards that are fed by a belt of themselves into the machine.’

The man was obviously something of a mechanic and lost on the police force.

The band organ passed by them. Eventually the body came up again. The corpse no longer threatened Madame Minou but intrigued her. ‘A chicken?’ she asked with all the incredulity of her years. ‘Why a chicken, Inspector? One of the gondolas would have been far better for a murder such as this.’

Hermann had gone off some place. ‘Why indeed?’ shouted St-Cyr. ‘It’s magnificent, isn’t it?’

The carousel.

‘Very fashionable in the old days. Perfectly restored by a lover of such things, monsieur, and until quite recently kept in excellent repair.’

Good for her. She’d noticed it too.

The march past was completed in four and a half minutes. Now it was the ‘Sidewalks of New York’, and then ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.’

Hermann was hanging on to one of the brass poles, going round and round. ‘He’s overtired, madame,’ acknowledged St-Cyr. ‘Things like this tend to make him forget the real world.’

‘For detectives, the two of you are a puzzle.’

‘We work in mysterious ways. Now please, allow me to experience the turning as it must have been seen by the grandmother who found this one and reported the murder.’

The woman hunched her shoulders. ‘It turns. It goes up and down in time to the music. It is loud, brassy and bright, and for children.’

‘And whores,’ snorted Hermann, leaping off the thing. ‘Louis, I’m going to have to invite the girls from the Lupanar des Oiseaux Blancs. *Madame Chabot will be intrigued by its possibilities.’

‘The chicken, Hermann. He’s tied to the chicken, remember?’

‘Two men?’ asked Kohler.

‘Perhaps, but then the girl was killed by one, isn’t that so?’

‘Almost certainly, and almost a day later.’

Kohler offered a cigarette. St-Cyr struck the match and held it out for him. ‘The girl this evening, Hermann, the killer quite possibly knowing we were heading home to have a look at this one.’

‘Two killings, Louis, separated by at least twenty-four hours. Us to take care of things because Pharand had spoken to Boemelburg and the Sturmbannfuhrer had said we should.’

St-Cyr nodded grimly. ‘Talbotte accepting the arrangement, a thing he would never do unless he knew there’d be egg in his trousers if he meddled.’

‘Egg in his trousers … I like that, Louis.’

‘Then tell me, please, are we supposed to think the girl was this one’s chicken?’

The man a pimp, a mackerel. ‘It’s not possible, Louis. She was too …’

‘She was what , Hermann?’

‘Too much the lady; too much the … well, the innocent.’

‘Precisely! It’s what I have felt myself.’

‘Perhaps, then, the two murders are totally unrelated, or are bound only by the third party?’

The ‘client’ of the girl.

‘Then why the fake gold coins?’

‘They’d been tested with nitric acid, Louis.’

‘Not brown? Not a trace of that discolouration?’ Gold would turn brownish under the acid.

‘As green as a gardener’s thumb.’

Bronze – the copper.

‘So why the canary?’ asked Kohler.

St-Cyr took the thing out of a pocket. The music had changed to the ‘Gypsy Fortune-teller’. There was now no sign of Madame Minou.

Lost in thought, Louis fingered the bird. The galloping menagerie came at them, going round and round as the music blared and the lights played their magic on the mind.

‘Was it a talisman, Hermann, or merely a reminder of a lost friend?’

‘Let’s take a look at the corpse.’

Madame Minou had gone to sleep in one of the gondola cars. There was no need to disturb her. Indeed, it would be best not to stop the music.

‘So, the jockey rides a chicken and has two chicken-catchers from the slaughterhouse to puzzle over him.’

Pacquet, the city’s Chief Coroner, had come to do the job himself. Yawning at 2.30 a.m. and inclined to be touchy.

‘You’re looking well,’ enthused St-Cyr.

‘Sarcasm I don’t need. Did you stick a thermometer up his rectum?’

‘He’s been dead for well over twenty-four hours. Rigor’s set in like concrete.’

‘An expert, eh? What about the girl? Did you shove one up hers?’

‘We are not permitted to do such things. Besides, Hermann broke the thermometer on a prostitute and Stores have not been willing to release another to us. This war … the shortages …’ St-Cyr gave a futile shrug. In truth, Pacquet had always made him feel out of place.

‘Can’t you stop this bloody thing?’

Hermann gave a shout and the music began to unwind as the carousel beat its wings to tired submission.

Cruising to the last. Up and down.

‘Want the lights left on?’ shouted Clement Cueillard.

‘Idiot! Of course,’ screamed Pacquet, his narrow cheeks jerking.

Fastidiously, the Chief Coroner took the small, round, wire-rimmed spectacles from their pocket case and carefully worked them on to the bridge of his angular nose and over his pinched ears. A frizzy mop of greying dark-black hair protruded behind and from under the speckled tweed cap Pacquet wore both when at the races and when not. In all the years St-Cyr had known him, he had never worn anything else up there.

That he was bald over the crown of his head was understood. That the rest of the hair, the tangled bush of a moustache in particular, had been grown long and thick in defiance of that baldness was silently understood.

One didn’t dare cross Pacquet on that subject, or on anything else.

Gesturing, the coroner threw the agonized police photographer into battle, held the boys in blue with their canvas stretcher in reserve, and set upon the corpse, flinging his battered black bag down as if fed up.

‘Twenty-six years of age.’

An eyelid was pried up. The shirt collar was teased away to better expose the wound. ‘This one, having successfully avoided the patriotic defence of his country, has succeeded equally in avoiding the forced-labour requests of the glorious Third Reich. He’s reaped his just reward, eh, Kohler?’

Hermann didn’t get a chance to reply. ‘Who’s the old dear? His mother?’ shouted the Chief Coroner.