The Tortured Detective Read online

  THE TORTURED DETECTIVE

  Pirate Irwin

  © Pirate Irwin 2014

  Pirate Irwin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.

  This edition published by Sharpe Books in 2018.

  Dedicated to a vibrant and elegant French lady Florence, an inspiration for so many things

  “There is no such thing as white or black there is just grey;”

  Francois Mitterrand

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY–FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY–SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY–ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  EPILOGUE

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

  PROLOGUE

  I am dying. There is no point anyone coming to my aid for I feel the life ebbing out of me, the bullet is lodged inside me and I can feel the bile and blood rising to my mouth.

  I’m done for and I want to use these few moments remaining to express myself, regrets and joy at the life I have lived. Sadly though not to an age that I would have liked to have lived to. But hell, at some point or other, we all end up in the same sodding ground, just another name on a headstone and good business for all those undertakers and others who profit from death.

  However, if you are thinking that amidst these final thoughts of mine that I will reveal who shot me, then you will be disappointed.

  That, readers, is for the police, the Gestapo or others to discover, for I have other matters to deal with. Such as how did it come to this that I, one of France’s finest up and coming acting talents, should end up lying dying on a sofa and without having achieved the superstar status that was due to be met? The country – nay the world of cinema – has been robbed of my star quality and my legacy aged just 31 will be but a dozen films.

  It’s so unfair. But then there will be those who will rejoice that I, Marguerite Suchet, has been murdered, the tart that spread her legs for a German enemy and profited by immortalizing herself on screen.

  That they cannot destroy.

  For my enemies may have this small victory but it is they who are losing the war and by taking the life of an unarmed and harmless actress they do nothing to enhance their claims of righting the wrong done to them by an invader.

  They fight for some previously unknown unremarkable General, de Gaulle! A man who like many of his rank betrayed his country, his people and either deserted their troops or fled to our other accursed neighbour across the water, England.

  There he hides behind the petticoats of those fine ladies of England and every so often spouts rubbish on the radio exhorting those he left behind to their fate to rise up and return France to its former glory!

  Fine words indeed, but I believe that mine uttered on screen have had a bigger effect on raising the morale of ordinary French men and women even if they have come in films produced by Germans under the Continental Films mantle.

  So what, we are actors and actresses and our job is to entertain, to give life to words, to give people an exit from the mundane lives they live even if it is just for an hour or so. And yet here I am, having given so much pleasure to those of my compatriots who live in fear and occupied by a largely humourless nation, lying on my sofa gasping for breath, one of which will be my last, although I will not know it till it arrives, and having to explain myself for my actions.

  For behind every crime, they say, there is a reason or a motive, and the detectives will be looking for that to make it easier to solve this latest murder.

  Not the brightest of sparks detectives these days, those who were more intelligent were also too independent for the new regime and thus have been advised to seek employment elsewhere.

  A nice euphemism for your career is at an end and unless there is a remarkable turnaround in the war, you might as well kill yourselves.

  Oh well, I might as well prepare for a rather long and drawn out process of determining who my killer is but that is what they are paid for, and no doubt if they find themselves stuck for a culprit there are always plenty of Jews or other such Untermenschen – as the Germans charmingly refer to those they despise – to pin it on.

  Anyway, I digress and with so little time left to me I must hurry and relate as to why or how I came to such a violent end.

  The bullet has thankfully not touched my spine for I can turn my neck and I have feeling in my legs so I can look at the photographs displayed on my mantelpiece and on the tables beside the sofa.

  They are a mix of better times and some ultimately unhappy liaisons, but I have always been one not to hide the bad from the good and in every affair there are happy moments to be recalled and not to be discarded like an old handkerchief.

  But there is one photograph that for me reflects the unhappy circumstances I find myself in now. There is me of course, slightly off center – which is rather annoying – dining at Maxim’s after the première of my finest performance in ‘Les Femmes qui chassent les Hommes’.

  No, not a tale of nymphomaniac women but a group of responsible ladies, who have no time for the men of their village lying around doing nothing after the defeat and through a mixture of cajoling and calling on their last vestiges of pride get them to offer their services to the Nazis to go and work in Germany so that German men can be liberated to fight for their country.

  It got rave reviews as you can imagine from both inside the Reich and here in France. ‘Suchet is without doubt the Arletty of the next generation’ wrote Robert Brasillach in his outstanding publication ‘Je suis partout’.

  No less a figure than Pierre Drieu la Rochelle wrote a personal letter to me declaring his admiration for my ability to transfer the message to the slothful French male worker and also cheekily asked me out for dinner. I took him up on that offer but more of that later if I have the chance.

  So there I am, off center as I said in the photo, but then understandably so because also in the shot are Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador, and his French wife, as well as the Count and Countess de Chambrun, parents of Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval’s son–in–law, and my beau, my dearest, dearest love, Colonel Karl von Dirlinger.

  Oh so handsome, so cultured and so much the antithesis of the Nazi brute that is portrayed outside of France and the Reich!

  Indeed I look more Aryan than he does, me with my blonde hair, in braids that evening, my green blue eyes and my firm jaw and he with his rather louche look, dark hair, brown eyes and slightly feminine mouth. But so capable and able to turn his hand to anything. A former actor and Grand Prix driver turned spy for the Abwehr, the least indoctrinated of all of Hitler’s military services and run by the sphinx–like Admiral Canaris.

 
“Quite some performance Marguerite, one that will be revered and talked about for generations to come,” I recall Abetz saying.

  “Why thank you Ambassador, it was a most exhausting but rewarding experience and I certainly hope notwithstanding personal rewards that it will have the desired impact on my compatriots to get off their bums and do the right thing,” I replied.

  “Quite, quite,” interjected Countess de Chambrun, an imposing lady with a deep voice and not easy to understand with her American accent. But she was well worth getting along with, not only because of her link to Laval but also because she was related to Theodore Roosevelt and the present American president Franklin.

  “You must call on us at the American Hospital too and visit with the wounded French soldiers. It would give them a huge fillip to see someone of your stature caring for their welfare,” piped up the Count, who was descended from one of the great French heroes the Marquis de La Fayette, who had helped the Americans free themselves from British tyranny.

  “Thank you Count, I would be honoured to perform such a service for you and for those Frenchmen who, through no fault of their own, were conned into defending their country against Germany and whilst their officers fled, they suffered appallingly.”

  All nodded at my wise words, Karl patting my knee tenderly.

  I remember Karl being uncommonly silent that night at dinner, preoccupied by something that he obviously felt better about keeping to himself, or at least in front of the others, and not spoiling my moment of glory.

  However, it was when he took me home and we had a nightcap in my drawing room, my last resting place as it turns out, that he unburdened himself to me.

  “Margot,” he said addressing me by the affectionate first name he preferred using when alone with me, “there is something terrible I have learnt which directly affects you and which I feel compelled to tell you.”

  I was rather taken aback, my life seemed so uncomplicated and my career such a roaring success that I couldn’t think of anything that could possibly impinge on the happiness I was feeling.

  “It’s regarding a piece of intelligence I received a day ago about Pierre,” he said in rather a severe tone.

  Christ Pierre or rather Pierre–Yves de Chastelain, known as Pierre to his intimates, my former lover – or rather fiancé, one of Paris’s most flamboyant and successful young lawyers. He had been generously allowed to continue his career despite becoming progressively more and more radical in his views on the Nazis and the Vichy Government in the two years since they came to power.

  He had certainly become too radical for my comfort and realizing what damage this could do to my career and not being one for lost causes, I abruptly broke off our engagement and discarded him.

  Hence my enthusiasm for acting in such films as ‘Les Femmes qui chassent les Hommes’, such projects served to enhance my fervent belief in the powers that be. Pierre had let it be known in no uncertain terms his disgust and disdain for my behaviour, but then what could he do about it? He was powerless.

  I wasn’t one of his clients in the dock, I was protected from up high and with Karl as my lover doubly so.

  “Pierre? What about him? I have no contact with him, indeed not for a long time now,” I said, though I was lying as I had had a discreet lunch with him in his apartment only two days before, after he implored me to.

  Needless to say it hadn’t gone very well, he had tried to persuade me to boycott the premiere and to return to him. As you can tell, I rejected him on both fronts, but now I was nervous that Karl had been apprised of this by a spy covertly observing Pierre’s apartment which was in Rue Monsieur Le Prince in the 6th arrondissement, near the Sorbonne, on the left bank.

  “Listen Margot, I know you had lunch with him, he told me himself and told me what it was about, so the fact you have lied to me I will let slide,” Karl said smiling.

  “He told you? How on earth did you manage to persuade him to talk to you, the enemy?” I asked in a steady tone.

  “Let’s just say we share some common ground, and it isn’t just with regard to you!” he replied laughing – rather nervously I thought.

  “Anyway, it’s not what he said that is of interest but what I have since learnt with regard to his own safety. Karl Oberg, the brutish head of the SS in Paris and its equally thuggish affiliates, wants him badly, and up to now he has been thwarted by me and by several influential French people, who shall remain nameless, as well as to a certain degree by Abetz, for reasons I do not know.

  “However, Oberg believes he has enough information – true or not it won’t matter if he gets hold of him – to arrest him. A sympathetic soul at the French police headquarters supplied me with this nugget because Oberg doesn’t trust me.

  “Anyway, that goon and his buffoons have instructed René Bousquet to entrust his arrest to his most trusted lieutenants as it has to look like he has been plotting against Vichy. Keep it all nicely in house if you will. Bousquet, being the parvenu and puffed up peacock that he is, is only too willing to acquiesce.

  “So Pierre is due to be picked up tomorrow when he arrives to defend Arnaud Lescarboura, your friend the jewel thief, at the Palais de Justice. Of course, all those noble members of the ‘independent’ press corps will be there to catch on camera his moment of humiliation.”

  Oh my God! I gasp, not then but now, my breathing is getting shorter and I can hear the rattle in my chest, it is heaving and I can all but feel myself suffocating.

  No, God, please! not quite yet, let me have my say, for if there is to be a prosecution, I will not be present to give my version of events, for they are pertinent to this story. Good, thank you, the pain has eased ever so slightly and I can still, though my memory too appears to be shutting down, just remember enough.

  “Christ Karl! This is awful. I mean I don’t have any romantic attachment for him anymore, I love you, the person, not because you wear the uniform of the victor, but I still don’t want any harm to come to him. Can’t you intercede?” I pleaded.

  He shook his head and replied: “No darling Margot, I have no power in the matter, I cannot let Oberg and Bousquet become aware I have a mole inside the French police department, for he is a card I need to hold back for the future. It is pointless phoning him because it will be tapped so there is only one solution and that is for you to warn him.”

  It was my turn to shake my head, it was impossible for me also and I didn’t want to endanger myself just when everything had come right for me. The simple girl from the Lot region, who had fought for everything she had achieved. Well alright, a one night stand with Marcel Carné had helped get my foot on the ladder, but hell, everything else was my doing.

  “How the hell do you expect me to warn him when there is a curfew in place and I have no transport or any way of getting to him? Besides how do you know he would even let me in as I have rejected him?”

  He sighed and gave me a knowing look.

  “Margot, you may lack sound political judgement and not be the brightest of girls but you are blessed with resourcefulness.

  “Besides, thanks to Abetz, you have an Ausweis which allows you to travel even after the curfew. That is that out of the way. Now how you get there, well, taxi is the only option, and I am sure by chance you will find one when you exit your door,” he smiled and winked at me conspiratorially.

  I nodded and thought, well, there is enough on my conscience, and still having some feeling for Pierre, at least for his safety, I acquiesced. I was a little surprised at this turn of events but not being the most reflective of types, I didn’t dwell on why Karl was so eager for Pierre to be forewarned, although I had a pretty good idea.

  Thus it was that yes, there was a taxi miraculously waiting outside with a gruff looking driver, who turned out to be monosyllabic as I gabbled on in my nervous state.

  He did manage one sentence lasting longer than two words to reassure me that he would wait for me, but I should not dally.

  In that I was in full agreement,
so I ran up the three flights of stairs to Pierre’s beautiful apartment that he would have to leave behind him, come what may. He answered after the first ring of the bell, was genuinely surprised at me being there, looked furtively around and ushered me in.

  His drawing room was tidy for him, though there were some dossiers flung over his sofa, so he directed me to one of the leather armchairs that were placed either side of his fireplace.

  “I can’t stay Pierre, I have just come to warn you that you need to go somewhere else, you are in danger,” I said my voice trembling.

  He stared at me, his blue eyes searching my face for any hint of betrayal, and then scratched his brow. I proceeded at great speed to relay to him the information I had gleaned from a conversation with a French admirer, preferring to keep Karl’s name out of the story in case Pierre was to be picked up.

  He smiled but his eyes did not.

  “Thank you for this Marguerite. Now you can go,” he said.

  I was rather offended by his lack of gratitude, but not wishing to overstay my welcome and keen to return home to the comfort of Karl’s embrace in my well–appointed apartment on Avenue Foch, I pecked him on the cheek, wished him well and left.

  That was five days ago and the very least that can be said is that he took my warning seriously and went to ground. It wasn’t just me who was relieved, Karl was as well, whilst poor old Lescarboura, my old friend the jewel thief, was left in abject despair as his great advocate failed to turn up and he received 10 years hard labour for his latest misdemeanor.

  It was nothing compared to the fury of the Vichy authorities, who wanted to further ingratiate themselves with the Nazis. Their bird had flown, leaving Bousquet seething with arriviste rage and his German paymaster Oberg having to explain himself to his boss, the former chicken farmer and now head of the SS Heinrich Himmler – a man with little humour at the best of times. Well, I didn’t cry for them.

  Ah… so melodramatic I am, my parents always said that of me. They said me milking a cow was a theatrical performance in itself. Though they exaggerated somewhat in saying the geese and the ducks and the pigs wandered into the barn to watch me do it. Funny that, I wonder what would have befallen me had I just stayed on the farm in the dreary but safe environs of the Lot... Too late now old girl.