Page 2 of The Midnight Carousel

With a twist and a flip, Detective Laurent Bisset folds the corners of a single-page report on the theft of several bottles of eau de cologne from the Galeries Lafayette department store.

After another six creases and the fanning out of the flaps, the work is completed.

He props the folded paper, now shaped as a dove with wings and a beak, between a pair of origami parakeets.

Although he is tempted to fashion a peacock next, this is not the day for dallying.

Soon he and the Chief Inspector will be speaking to the press.

There will be photographs taken on the steps of the Préfecture de Police, Inspector Barbet promised, so you’d better look your best .

With dark circles under his eyes, Laurent looks nothing close to his best. It cannot be helped, however.

Teething is natural, and Amélie is not to blame for keeping him up for the third night in a row.

He moves to the mirror affixed to the wall behind his desk and straightens his tie, his face staring back.

Despite his worn-out appearance, he knows he is a handsome man.

‘The child will break hearts,’ Tante Brigitte once announced to assembled family members, peering with such sternness through her monocle that Laurent took fright and ran to hide behind the grand piano.

That was then. At thirty-five years of age, he has grown quite accustomed to women, and sometimes men, noticing his grey eyes fringed by dark lashes, and the athletic gait of his long-limbed frame.

‘Do you need anything else, sir?’

Laurent turns as the pretty receptionist Suzette enters the room. She hurries to the desk, and he catches a glimpse of her legs as she leans over to position the newspaper next to the paper knife, four inches below the ink holder, parallel with the blotter. Just as he likes.

‘No, thank you, Suzette. I’m just preparing for the Big Event.’ He stands with his arms out and rotates on the spot, the corners of his mouth twitching with amusement. ‘How do I look?’

Since adolescence, Laurent has never been able to help himself when it comes to having the attention of a pretty young woman.

Suzette’s eyes narrow and she grips her skirt. ‘You look fine, sir.’

Intriguing. This is new. Evidently, the tiredness is taking an even greater toll on his looks than he had thought.

‘Most kind, Suzette.’

He watches her leave, then peers at the newspaper.

They say the Germans are rumbling, spoiling for war.

But it is conjecture. No one has the appetite for military antagonism, not in the twentieth century, when advances in technology have made us all civilized.

Tomorrow’s headlines will be different. Unless there is a grand calamity such as an explosion at the Eiffel Tower, the newspapers will talk of Laurent.

He checks his silver watch, tucked in the pocket of his best waistcoat. Four minutes to noon. He leaves to saunter along the rambling corridor, past the rooms where the constables jostle cheek by jowl, and out of the main door, arriving on the steps of the building at ten seconds to noon.

‘ How did you catch him, Detective? ’

Pop! The flash is so bright that Laurent winces.

More practised at these occasions, the Chief Inspector speaks up first.

‘It was a simple matter of deduction, gentlemen.’

Not so simple for Laurent, who did the legwork.

After supper each evening, while Odette took to her darning then retired to bed alone, he would pull the file from his briefcase, which grew thicker every day, and hunt for clues until the early hours of the morning.

From the moment the case of a missing child first crossed his desk, Laurent had the feeling that it could be the one he would make his name with.

Besides, Chloé Fourtou was just eleven years old when she disappeared from Bastille Market late morning on a blustery, October day in 1913, and Laurent was determined to see justice done for the girl.

What he had not anticipated was discovering other victims.

‘ What took you so long to find him? ’

Another pop ! This time Laurent forces his eyelids to remain open.

‘Here in Paris, we have the best detectives in the world.’ Quick off the mark again, the Chief Inspector throws out an answer as if he has prepared for every question. ‘And we have proved today that we will never give up.’

In truth, no one even suspected the guilty party when he came to the attention of the police fourteen years ago.

Back then, Laurent was a junior constable, sent to acquire background information from Victor Cloutier as the sole living relative of a missing factory owner.

Lost to grief-stricken madness over his dead family, poor soul, the uncle, Gilbert, had disappeared from his workshop one night in April 1900.

At the time, it was assumed by Laurent’s superiors that the man had drowned himself in the Seine, given his obvious suffering.

That his acquaintances all agreed he had become too feeble to wander very far, as well as there being no trace of his body anywhere else in the near vicinity, bolstered their theory.

This explanation bothered Laurent, since those same acquaintances knew Gilbert as a God-fearing man, a person who would naturally shy away from a self-inflicted death.

He had hoped Victor would be able to shed some light on his uncle’s state of mind, but Laurent received a surly ‘How would I know?’ in response.

Soon his concerns were dismissed by the officer in charge, and the file closed, giving him no choice but to push the case from his mind, however much it nagged at him. That is, until many years later.

It took Laurent several hours to recall why he recognized the Cloutier name in the notes on Chloé Fourtou’s disappearance.

There was a small carnival at Bastille Market that week, and the girl was last seen talking to the owner of the carousel.

When Gilbert was declared dead by court order a decade after he vanished, Victor inherited his uncle’s workshop, personal possessions and the carousel.

It was a suspicious windfall for an individual with a string of convictions for theft.

On a hunch, Laurent began piecing together the route Victor took when the carnival toured, scouring the archives and digging for unsolved disappearances in other districts.

It was painstaking work over many weeks.

But, lo and behold, he unearthed two cases similar to that of the missing little girl: Nathalie Moulland, described by her Aunt Mathilde as a sensible child, suddenly vanished from the annual Nantes Fair in the middle of a particularly warm day in the summer of 1911; and Gérard le Blanc the following March.

Gone in a poof, his fiancée said, from a fairground they had strolled through on their way to lunch in Montpeyroux.

So out of character to leave his widowed mother alone, struggling to make ends meet, according to the family.

Like Chloé, the last sighting of Nathalie and Gérard was with Victor, who was collecting centimes for the ride.

Through perseverance or luck, call it what you will, Laurent had established the man’s connection to four strange disappearances.

He probed Victor’s history next: there were domestic disputes, reports of bad blood between him and Gilbert.

And then another break in the case– a nightwatchman recalled seeing Victor skulking near the carousel workshop the night his uncle vanished.

Laurent dreads to think how many other disappearances there would have been, if not for these discoveries.

‘ What did he do with the bodies? ’

Laurent fiddles with his pocket watch. From the corner of his eye, he can see the Inspector staring at the ground. This question is impossible to answer because, search as they have, there is still no sign of the victims. No one saw how or where Victor took them, it seems.

It would be a different story if the man had cooperated.

But he has never cracked. Not on the day he was taken to the empty cell with constables Pouliot and Mallet, the burliest gendarmes in the arrondissement, only returning when his face was properly bloodied.

Nor the day Inspector Cantin organized a group of constables to help him dunk Victor’s face in the horse trough, until the spluttering drew complaints from the tavern next door.

Not even the day several weeks ago when Laurent attempted bribery with a small square of opium gum.

But, in the end, it made no odds to the judge that there were no bodies, since Victor was, by way of common-sense deduction, the missing link that connected each case to the next.

‘Victor Gabriel Cloutier,’ he rasped. ‘You have been found guilty of the most heinous of crimes known to humanity. And, for that, you are sentenced to the ultimate penalty. Death by beheading.’

Bang!

Victor screamed as he lunged towards a small boy, his miniature double, sitting in the public gallery. ‘I love you, Henri!’

No more than five years old, Henri– wide-eyed and sucking his thumb– shrank behind a weeping young woman. Dragged back by three constables, Victor fell silent as swift jabs with many pairs of elbows winded his lungs.

At last, the case was closed. All those hours, days, months, spent attempting to make sense of senseless acts was finally rewarded. Laurent was toasted with beer by the constables, with Bordeaux by the Inspectors, and promised his new office and promotion.

‘ What did he do with the bodies? ’ the reporter repeats.

The Chief Inspector is now bobbing on the balls of his feet. ‘Gentlemen–’

‘May I, Chief Inspector?’ Laurent interrupts.

‘Please be my guest.’

Pop!

Laurent exhales slowly to steady his nerves.