Murder in Monte Carlo Page 5

  At times, the detective learned, he carried around considerable sums of money in cash which he sometimes brought home. One night a week, Gouffé did not return home. His break from routine was in the pursuit of pleasure – wine, food and women to satisfy his vigorous sexual appetite. From an interview with the hall porter of the office building it emerged that in or around nine o’clock on the evening of Friday July 26th the porter heard someone he presumed was the bailiff going upstairs.

  A short time later he heard the footsteps descending the stairs. He left the porter’s lodge and, realising it was a stranger, was about to confront him when the man seemed to conceal his face and hurried out the door onto the street. As it was dark in the hallway he could not provide any useful description of the stranger. When the office was searched, there were no obvious signs of robbery or scattering of papers or documents. Quite the contrary. When the investigator moved aside some documents a sum of 14,000 francs was revealed.

  If the strange intruder had been looking for money, he had made a poor job of the search. The safe had not been tampered with and there was nothing else to indicate an attempted robbery. There were ten long matches, half-burnt, on the floor. Perhaps Gouffé was a smoker – that would be easily confirmed. But on the other hand he did not appear to be the type that would just drop matches on the floor.

  Strange, thought the detective. Indicative of haste, but for what? If the intruder was a robber in search of money, he was most definitely incompetent. Even the most cursory search would have provided an extremely good night’s work. Perhaps he had been seized by some form of panic.

  The reason for the visit thus was unclear and somewhat disappointed Goron, for if such a sum of money had been stolen then a solid motive and reason for the bailiff’s disappearance could justifiably have been posited – and explain the visit by a man that the porter was absolutely sure was not the missing person. That would have connected two parts of the puzzle.

  There was an additional element. Accepting that the matches had been left by the stranger, how else could access have been obtained to the office but by the bailiff’s keys? In Goron’s estimation the only way that would add up was if the keys had been taken from Gouffé by force. This, combined with his knowledge of the man’s life and occupation, was enough to persuade the Sûreté chief that wherever he went it was not of his own accord.

  The team carried out further questioning of Gouffé’s family, friends and business associates, among them a man who could have provided an early and vital lead but, for weak reasons that would eventually be ventilated, chose to remain silent. A review of the statements produced a lot of good information but nothing to indicate how or why the bailiff had melted into thin air.

  The investigation stalled. There was nothing to do but wait. There is a time all good detectives recognise when all the pushing will lead nowhere. It was time for a pull and it came without any use of energy in the Sûreté.

  On August 15th, in a thicket at the foot of a slope running down to the River Rhône, from the road that passes through the district of Millery, ten miles south of Lyons, a roadmender was overpowered by a foul odour and discovered human remains. The body had been wrapped in cloth and placed head-first inside a duck-cloth sack. It was in a fairly advanced state of decomposition, accelerated by the means of wrapping and the warm climate of the season.

  The Lyons police were informed and, in the company of a forensic team and doctor, arrived at the scene. It was confirmed the corpse was male and was completely nude inside the sack. There were no clothes, nothing to aid in establishing the identity. Detectives judged by the position of the sack that it had been rolled down the incline with the purpose of reaching the river, where it would have been taken away by the current.

  Again Goron pondered on the fact that, in such an isolated location, the person or persons responsible for the dumping of the body had not taken the time to ensure that it had, as intended, been deposited in the river. The matches on the floor of the office came to mind. A further indication of similar haste, by the same person?

  Goron was energised by the find and was sure that the body was that of Gouffé and the investigation could go into full swing. Another event raised his hopes even further. Two days after the discovery of the corpse, a broken empty trunk was spotted by some snail-gatherers in the woods and when the police examined it a transport label was still attached. It showed that the trunk had been dispatched from Paris to Lyons on July 27th 188–. The final figure of the date was obliterated. After a further search, a key was unearthed which fitted the lock of the trunk.

  Goron urged the Lyons judicial authorities to establish a link between the body and the trunk. It was beyond the realm of coincidence. He telegraphed a description of Gouffé, including facial features, hair colour and approximate height and age.

  The post-mortem findings by Dr Bernard revealed that there were two breaks in the larynx indicating that strangulation was the cause of death. He also concluded that the man was about 35 years of age, of average height with black hair.

  Gouffé was 49 years of age with chestnut-brown hair.

  Nonetheless Goron sent the brother-in-law Landry to view the corpse which had been temporarily deposited in a makeshift morgue on a nearby barge. The state of decomposition rendered the facial features unrecognisable and, probably shocked by the viewing of the corpse and influenced by the different hair-colouring, he could not make a positive identification. He said that the body was not that of Gouffé.

  This was a blow for the investigation, and the body after being photographed was buried in the pauper’s plot of a local graveyard. That seemed to be that. But Goron was not tempted by this setback to consign the case to the missing-persons file to gather dust. He was positive that his instinct in the case would prove to be correct.

  He took the label found on the trunk to the Gare de Lyon and, interviewing the clerk who handled it, established that it had been brought there on a train from Paris as confirmed by the company records.

  But that was not the main purpose of the visit. He wanted to know the weight of the trunk. The recorded weight of the trunk amounted to that which would match the container plus the weight of an adult man. Goron did not have any difficulty deducing that it had almost certainly been the receptacle of the body found in the vicinity. The detective was excited by the discovery. It fired his determination to get to the bottom of the mystery. Another part was inserted into the board of the puzzle.

  Moreover, he suspected that the trunk had carried the body of Gouffé. Nonetheless, he could not prove, as things stood, that the body in the pauper’s grave was that of the missing man. Quite to the contrary, given the pathologist’s findings and the failure of a family member to identify the body as his brother-in-law.

  He pondered the matter in his office in the Sûreté. There was no rational explanation for Gouffé’s disappearance. He had not informed any of his family or friends that he had plans to travel, and to just go away without notice was completely out of character. The more he thought about it, the argument for Gouffé being the body found was overwhelming.

  Was there something that the pathologist had missed? Landry could hardly have been blamed for not recognising his brother-in-law’s face, bloated and blackened by the process of decomposition.

  The hair was black not brown. Could that be a result of the rotting? He contacted Dr Bernard and travelled to Lyons. The doctor produced samples of the hair he had kept in a test tube. Gouffé’s hair was brown and worn short, while the hairs from the body appeared to be black and longer in length.

  He asked the doctor for distilled water and immersed the hairs. After a few minutes, cleansed of black residue, the hairs were brown and shorter. The doctor admitted to the shortcomings of his examination. The detective realised that the doctor was a young man with limited experience. He needed a pathologist with a proven track record and did not have to look far to find one.

  On this basis Goron applied to the authorities to have
the body exhumed and examined by another pathologist. Despite the protestation of the local authorities he secured permission for the exhumation and sought the involvement of Dr Lacassagne. On both counts he succeeded. While Lacassagne shared his instinct in the case, he did not hesitate to state that the only way of proof was by science.

  Identification was aided by the act of a clever lab assistant who had a hunch that the body would be needed again, and had scratched his initials on the outside of the coffin and put a hat on the corpse’s head in anticipation of such an eventuality.

  Lacassagne was faced with a huge task. Not only had the body deteriorated further in the grave but he found that the first post mortem was a botched job. The skull had been opened with a hammer and the chest while being opened with a chisel, a usual method of the time, had been damaged. But since the death had luckily not been caused by blunt-force trauma, he got on with the job.

  The breaks in the bones of the throat were still evident, supporting the idea of death by strangulation. Manual strangling.

  The next thing he looked for was the signs that would establish the age of the deceased more accurately. He examined the pelvic bones and in particular the teeth. There was only one missing so he had a lot to go on. Over the ageing process there is a loss of gum and deterioration in the bone around the sockets of the teeth. He concluded that this was the body of a man well over forty and near to fifty. That was a match: Gouffé was 49.

  Next was height. The standard practice was to stretch the body and add one and a half inches. The doctor had the benefit of a study by a student Étienne Rolet who had examined the bodies of 100 men and women, calculating the relationship between measurements of bones and the height of the deceased. From this study, Lacassagne calculated that the height of the body was 5 foot 8 inches. In Paris Goron made confirmation by reference to Gouffé’s military record and interviewing his tailor. A match.

  There was the problem of the hair colour which the pathologist did not fear as he was aware from his previous test that it had been altered by the putrefaction process. By careful washing, the black post-mortem residue was stripped away to reveal chestnut brown. He made a microscopic comparison between strands of hair on a brush that Goron had retrieved from Gouffé’s apartment and strands taken from the cadaver. The diameter was exactly the same. A match. To be absolutely certain, he asked a medical colleague to make chemical tests to establish if the hair had been dyed. The tests proved that it had not.

  He then made a close examination of the bones to see if there were any deformities or old injuries unique to the body. The heel and ankle-bone of one leg revealed an old fracture which had not fully healed. He concluded that this might have produced a slight limp. There was also an abnormality in one of the knees. He discovered a ridge on the bone that attached to the right big toe which the doctor suspected was associated with gout, a disease caused by a build-up of uric acid in the bloodstream and resulting in inflammation of the joints. When located in the big toe it is an extremely painful condition. He received a second opinion from another medical colleague whose examination of the bones confirmed Lacassagne’s findings. He contacted Goron and asked him to interview Gouffé’s family and doctor and anyone else who could corroborate his conclusions.

  Goron found out that Gouffé had a fall as a young child and sustained a fracture which resulted in his dragging his right leg slightly in a minor limp. His cobbler had compensated for the affliction by making a wider right sole and also had used particularly soft leather so as not to put pressure on the right big toe which caused him chronic pain. His physician confirmed that Gouffé suffered from gout, resulting in great discomfort in the right toe. He also suffered from swelling of the knee. Despite medical recommendation to deal with the gout, it had persisted; seemingly the pain did not act as a restraint to the patient’s fondness for good food and wine, often but not always the cause of the condition.

  After eleven days of post-mortem examination, Lacassagne was able to announce to his audience of attendants and police: “Messieurs, the body found at Millery is indeed the corpse of Monsieur Gouffé.”

  Goron was overjoyed; all his hard work and instinct had been confirmed by the work of a brilliant doctor and criminologist.

  The way was clear now to hunt down the perpetrators.

  PARIS, NOVEMBER 1889

  It was now the end of November. Four months had passed, and the police were no closer to identifying a prime suspect for the murder of Gouffé. A friend of the victim had come into the frame but after questioning was eliminated from the inquiry.

  But a solid lead was established when a man who knew Gouffé was being interviewed. “There is another man who disappeared around the same time as Gouffé,” he said. “The man’s name is Eyraud, Michel Eyraud.” He had not thought of this before, he said, he had not made the connection. Since it was a good lead the detectives did not make a fuss about the lateness about the information.

  Goron made enquiries about this Eyraud and learnt he was a married man aged 46 with a chequered career, who had left a trail of debt and was implicated in a number of financial swindles. He had a mistress Gabrielle Bompard who was half his age and who had engaged in prostitution. Sometime after Gouffé was reported missing they disappeared and had not been heard of since.

  Goron had a replica of the trunk constructed and put on show in a Paris morgue where it was viewed by no less than 25,000 visitors. A reward of 500 francs for information had been offered by the family of the victim to anyone who could identify the trunk. Later, photographs were carried in the French and foreign press. Apart from a large amount of crank mail and anonymous letters, these measures did not immediately produce anything of interest.

  Then in December, the police chief received a letter with a London postmark from a boarding-house owner, informing him that Eyraud and a woman he only knew as Gabrielle had stayed in his house and on July 14th the young woman had left for France via Newhaven and Dieppe, taking with her a large trunk with little or no contents. The boarding-house owner’s wife remembered having expressed surprise to Gabrielle at the large size of the trunk, into which she had put one dress. “That’s alright,” replied Gabrielle with a beaming smile and a laugh. “We shall have plenty to fill it with in Paris.” Having departed on the 14th, she returned on the 17th. On the 20th, she and Eyraud travelled back to Paris.

  Goron sent members of his team to London who confirmed the veracity of the story. They also found the shop on the Euston Road where the trunk was purchased. The assistant confirmed that a man answering Eyraud’s description had bought the trunk on July 12th.

  Having established the identity and descriptions of the killers the police chief began to make further investigations into their movements after the commission of the crime. His right-hand man Jaume, wearing out a lot of shoe-leather, found out that on the 27th the couple had purchased train tickets from Paris to Marseilles but had got off at the Perrache Station in Lyons. Travelling there, the detective confirmed that a couple matching their description had stayed in the Hotel Bordeaux with the trunk.

  The following morning the couple had taken the trunk away from the hotel in a horse-drawn cab. The owner of a livery stable told Jaume he had hired the cab by the day to a couple, one a middle-aged man of respectable appearance and dress and a small and slender brunette in her early twenties. Staff at the railway station said that later that day they had deposited luggage in the cloakroom. In the evening they returned to the station and took the express train to Marseilles. There the trail ran cold.

  Piecing together what he had to date, Goron concluded that this unlikely couple were indeed the killers and had committed the crime on the night of the 26th, since Gouffé was last seen around 7p.m. on that date. Concealing the body in the trunk, they had travelled to Lyons, spent a second night with the corpse and then had driven in the cab to the countryside and disposed of both trunk and corpse near Millery. Then they’d travelled to Marseilles, for what reason he did not know, and then
presumably came back to Paris and sometime later took flight.

  The police contacted French government agencies and consulates abroad with details and description of the fugitives which were also disseminated in newspapers internationally, carrying stories saying that Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard were wanted for questioning in relation to the trunk murder.

  The year 1889 faded into oblivion, the sensation of the Gouffé murder undiminished by the bells of the New Year. No one needed to guess what Goron’s resolution would be. The tentacles of information were out there in the world and he had no doubt that somehow, somewhere, someone with something relevant to say about the case would contact him. Time was no longer running out for the investigation; that situation was left for the perpetrators. Albeit, he realised, it was a big world out there.

  PARIS, JANUARY 1890

  As January moved on, nothing. The chief did not despair. He was exhausted and later in the month he contracted a nasty flu but after a few days in bed dragged himself into the office before he had fully recovered.

  On the morning of January 16th when he entered his office there was a large letter on his desk. Picking it up, he noted the postmark was New York, dated January 8th. Not even his clever mind could have anticipated the contents, never mind the author.

  He read the first paragraph with a sense of the incredible. Another astonishing twist in the strangest case of his career. He jumped briefly to the last page. There it was, the signature: the writer was none other than Michel Eyraud. He turned the letter back to the first page.

  Why had Goron, the writer complained, made him the object of a worldwide manhunt? He admitted he had fled from Paris the previous summer but he had done so due to his financial failure. Much of his misfortune was down to the Jews and Miss Bompard.

  He had, he wrote, not harmed his good friend Gouffé but he suspected that Gabrielle and one of her many lovers were guilty of the evil deed. He protested against the suspicions directed against him. It was all as a result of improbable coincidences. His misfortune was his association with that “serpent Gabrielle Bompard”. He had certainly bought a large trunk for her but she told him that she had sold it.