The Case of the Climbing Rat: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

  Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Climbing Rat

  An attendant had come in with the cage. He stooped and held the rope taut. The cage door was opened, Jules called from high in the roof and at once the rat began to climb. Then something went wrong. All at once Auguste scampered down and shot back into his cage.

  When Ludovic Travers arrives in the South of France to say a few well-chosen words to his wife’s shady relative, Gustave Rionne, he finds them unnecessary: a knife-thrust a few minutes before had put an end to Rionne’s career.

  Also down on the Riviera, on business connected with the notorious murderer Bariche, is Inspector Gallois of the Sûreté. Joining forces, they are soon confronted with a second even more baffling murder. What is the connection, if any, between the two crimes? Who are the masked trapezists in the circus, and what is the significance of their performing rat? The car smash—was it deliberate? Had Madame Perthus been Letoque’s lover? Ludovic Travers has been involved in some curious cases but none so strange and absorbing as that of the Climbing Rat.

  The Case of the Climbing Rat was originally published in 1940. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Map

  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

  About the Author

  Titles by Christopher Bush

  The Case of the Murdered Major – Title Page

  The Case of the Murdered Major – Chapter One

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Before the Blitzkrieg: Christopher Bush’s Little Murder Tour in France, 1939-1940

  In June 1939 and January 1940 respectively, Christopher Bush published The Case of the Flying Donkey and The Case of the Climbing Rat, both of them detective novels set in France before the outbreak of the Second World War. Bush, who was fluent in the French language and had visited France many times, held the country and its people in great affection; and it is hard not to see these two crime novels—both of which reunite Bush’s series amateur sleuth, Ludovic “Ludo” Travers, with Inspector Laurin Gallois of the Sûreté Générale (the two men had worked well together before in The Case of the Three Strange Faces, published in 1933)--as a heartfelt tribute to a nation that soon was to be mercilessly scourged by German invasion and occupation. A little over two months after the publication of The Case of the Flying Donkey, Germany would infamously invade Poland, precipitating much of Europe into a state of war. Less than four months after the publication of The Case of the Climbing Rat, France herself would be overrun by a seemingly unstoppable Nazi war machine, leading to the fall of Paris on June 14 and the surrender of the country less than two weeks later. Some 600,000 French people would be killed in the Second World War, nearly two-thirds of them civilians.

  For his part Christopher Bush, a veteran of the First World War, at the dire advent of the second one went back into military service on behalf of his nation. While France was collapsing under the unbearable weight of the German blitzkrieg and the British Expeditionary Force was desperately attempting to extricate itself from seemingly certain doom at Dunkirk, Bush was administering a prisoner-of-war and enemy alien internment camp across the Channel in a Southampton suburb, an experience the author would partially incorporate into his next Ludo Travers detective novel, The Case of the Murdered Major, which was published in 1941. Neither Christopher Bush nor his series sleuth would see France again for the duration of the war. Doubtlessly for Francophile detective fiction fans like Bush, the charming Gallic glimpses of a peacetime world provided in The Case of the Flying Donkey and The Case of the Climbing Rat brought back better and far less jaded days, when death could still be treated as a game.

  The Case of the Climbing Rat (1940)

  Christopher Bush’s series sleuth Ludovic “Ludo” Travers returns for a final pre-war detection engagement in France in The Case of the Climbing Rat, a strange affair involving--in addition to a rambling Gallic rodent--a notorious physician relation of his wife Bernice, a celebrated troupe of trapeze artists and, last but most definitely not least, an infamous serial killer by the name of Armand Bariche, compared with whose criminal career that of the notorious Henri Desire Landru (aka Bluebeard) “had been far less horrifying.” This is quite a statement, as Landru had been tried and convicted in France in 1921 for the murder of eleven people, ten of them women whom he had cruelly seduced and slain around the time of the Frist World War, after first having gained access to their material assets. Landru is believed to have removed the physical evidence of his terrible crimes by dismembering his victim’s bodies and burning the pieces to ashes in his kitchen stove. Naturally the ghastly and grisly Landru case attracted the attention of writers and filmmakers, including Bush’s Detection Club colleagues E.R. Punshon (who wrote an analysis of the case in the true crime Detection Club anthology The Anatomy of Murder, 1936) and John Dickson Carr (who depicted a Bluebeard-like killer in his Carter Dickson detective novel My Late Wives, 1946), horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, who included Landru among the eerie wax effigies in his short story “The Horror in the Museum” (1932, a revision of the work of Hazel Heald) and cinema directors Charlie Chaplin (Monsieur Verdoux, 1947) and Claude Chabrol (Landru, 1962). The real life Landru was guillotined in France in 1922 and today what is purportedly the slayer’s severed head is displayed, in rather dubious taste, at the Museum of Death in Hollywood, California.

  The grim spirit of Landru quickly rises, like a spectre from the grave, in The Case of the Climbing Rat. In France an anonymous informant contends to the startled Inspector Laurin Gallois of the Sureté that the serial killer Armand Bariche is not dead as is widely believed, but rather roaming free and unfettered, doubtlessly planning something wicked whichever way he comes. Meanwhile in England Ludo Travers is disturbed to learn from his wife Bernice that her shady relation Gustave Rionne is importuning her for financial assistance in correspondence from France, his native country. It seems that Rionne was a Harley Street doctor married to Bernice’s Aunt Emily and “one of the very first plastic surgeons who really did anything worthwhile.” However, “there was a scandal,” explains Bernice vaguely (“something perfectly dreadful it must have been”), and Rionne was struck off the medical register and effectively exiled abroad. To deal with Bernice’s regrettable relative (this will not be the last of Bernice’s problematic kinsfolk with whom Ludo will reluctantly parley), Travers travels to Carliens in the south of France. There he soon finds himself embroiled yet again in another murder mystery, when a man is found mortally stabbed in the back at a public lavatory outside the circus where the Troupe Helmont--the famous incognito trapeze artists Jules, Berthe and Jeanne Helmont (not to mention Auguste, their climbing white rat)--have been performing. The dead man, it seems, is no other than Gustave Rionne!

  Travers learns from his friend Inspector Gallois that Rionne had continued his highly chequered career after departing England, having been convicted and imprisoned for performing an abortion in 1920, served as the defendant in an act
ion brought by a patient in 1933 for causing injuries by his carelessness in a skin-grafting operation and more latterly been expelled for suspicion of drug trafficking. Preoccupied as he is with the Bariche affair, Gallois dismisses Rionne’s sordid life and dismal death as a matter of no importance, but the veteran mystery reader may well suspect that there is some link between the doctor’s unnatural demise and both the mysterious Troupe Helmont and the murderer Bariche, who seemingly has come back from the dead. Then there is the matter of the suspicious accident which befalls Charles Ribaud, the winning young protégé of Inspector Gallois who was to meet with the Bariche informant—for Ribaud’s “accident” appears to have been, rather, attempted murder. When another murder—the shooting of Swiss national Georges Letoque at the Villa Sablons—takes place at a locale “hitherto so free from serious crime as Carliens,” the death of Rionne and the attempt upon Ribaud take on a new and sinister significance. What ties it all together? Bariche!

  Unbeknownst to each other, Travers and Gallois by different routes simultaneously reach the solution to a rather tragic mystery, prompting the inspector feelingly to tell his friend Ludo: “We are affinities, you and I, and what one thinks the other thinks also.” Like Ludo Travers, Christopher Bush clearly had an affinity for France and its people, a feeling which found moving expression in the year 1940 in The Case of the Climbing Rat.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  GALLOIS ANTICIPATES

  LAURIN GALLOIS was not working that evening, even if he was in his room at the Sûreté. Charles Rabaud, the young secretary and right-hand man, was working busily enough, but the Inspector was leaning back in his chair at the handsome desk, a pencil in his long, sensitive fingers, and a smile, more than ever gently melancholy, on his sensitive lips.

  To his intimates, and to Ludovic Travers in particular, Gallois was always claiming that in him were found two wholly different men. Travers was ready enough to agree; indeed, he would have gone further and admitted that he was three. There was Gallois the man of action, brilliant in deduction, tenacious of purpose, and quivering with the sensibility that a case worth his while would invoke. But there was also the Gallois who was bored by the drab routine of ordinary work, whose keen brain felt stifled and hampered by the merely everyday, and who found official forms and documents nothing but a series of emetics.

  So much for Gallois of the Sûreté: but there was another Gallois—the artist and poet. Travers always thought that the perfect portrait of him would have been as a virtuoso, painted by John as a pair to that great portrait of Suggia. A violin should be tucked beneath his chin, the bow superbly drawn, the long, lean fingers caught in some dexterity of double-stopping, and on his face that sad brooding smile that had in it a sympathy for all the sorrows of a world.

  That evening it was Gallois the poet who was ruminatively at work. There was an intellectual circle to which he belonged, and his turn would be coming in a month or two to contribute a paper. And as Gallois was so much of an Anglophile as to be almost an Anglomaniac, he had gone at once for a theme to some point of literary contact, and at that very moment was deciding on Molière and his debt to Shakespeare. Then the buzzer went. Gallois frowned as he picked up the receiver.

  “An anonymous caller on the line, Monsieur l’Inspecteur, who says he has information about Bariche.”

  “Bariche!” The eyes of Gallois goggled. “Put him through.”

  Charles, from the side-table, had also pricked his ears at that mention of France’s latest and most spectacular Bluebeard, and so that the sound of the keys should not disturb his own listening, was temporarily abandoning his typing.

  “The headphones—quick!” Gallois hissed agitatedly across at him. “Paper and pencil. And record in your mind, if you please, your own impressions.”

  Charles was just in time for the first sound of the voice, and an unusual voice it was—high pitched, querulous and slightly asthmatic.

  “You are Inspector Gallois who was in charge of the Bariche affair?”

  “Yes. Who is it speaking?”

  “That I am unable at present to tell you, but I am genuine—I assure you of that.”

  “Continue, I beg of you,” said Gallois suavely. “What is this information you wish to give me?”

  There was a slight clearing of the throat before the voice went on.

  “First of all, is there a reward for the capture of this Bariche?”

  “But Bariche is dead!”

  “M’sieu, I am assuring you that he is not dead.”

  Gallois grunted as if enormously surprised.

  “There will be a reward then for his arrest?” the voice was going on.

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “It will be a considerable sum?”

  Gallois smiled sadly.

  “That depends not only on the amount but on the need of monsieur, if he will allow me to say so. There are those to whom a thousand francs would be a considerable sum.”

  The listener discerned the subtle question behind the remark and he took a moment or two’s thought.

  “I would not embroil myself with the affair for a thousand francs. What is the final sum which the authorities would be prepared to pay?”

  The shoulders of Gallois drooped and a world of regret was in his voice.

  “That, monsieur, I do not know, but if you ring again in the morning I guarantee to inform you.”

  “There is no hurry,” the voice said. “There are certain inquiries which it will be necessary for me to complete.”

  “Precisely,” said Gallois, with the same suavity. “You therefore know the whereabouts of Bariche?”

  “I think so, but I am not sure. As I said, there are inquiries which I still have to make.”

  “The inquiries will take—how long?”

  “That I cannot say. A week perhaps. Also it is possible—” He broke off as if to think once more. “It is very difficult to explain, but I ask you to believe me a man of honour. I wish the revelations to be made by a third party, because there are certain confidences which I am bound not to reveal. I am obtaining the assistance of this third party.”

  “Precisely,” said Gallois again. “MayI also assure you that I desire to respect these confidences. If monsieur cares at this moment, for instance, to give me merely his name, I give my sacred word that it shall not be known outside this room.”

  “That is impossible,” the voice said with a curt finality.

  “Perhaps I could arrange a personal and private interview at any place monsieur would care to suggest. There could also be every possible safe-guard.”

  “That unfortunately is impossible,” the voice said, and with a definite regret. “You are in Paris and I am—a thousand kilometres away.”

  Gallois smiled sadly.

  “M’sieu, if you are twenty thousand kilometres away, it wouldn’t matter. Where Bariche is concerned, I should consider it no more than a step across the road.” He smiled even more sadly. “But if you wish me to come to Indo-China or Siberia, might you not at least describe this supposed Bariche to me as a proof that your information is genuine?”

  A pause. “That, monsieur, I am afraid I prefer not to do. As I told you, there are certain things to verify. Nevertheless I swear my offer is genuine.”

  “As you wish,” Gallois said. “And where and when do you want me to meet you?”

  There was a longer pause, then: “You would be prepared to come to Toulon?”

  “But certainly.”

  “I see. If you will allow me a moment then, to make arrangements in my mind, and write them down?”

  One minute and he was ready.

  “You could be in Toulon this day week? At eighteen hours, at the door of the Bureau of the Syndicat d’Initiative?”

  “I shall be there,” Gallois told him. “On Wednesday next at eighteen hours. And I shall recognize you—how?”

  “I have a photograph of yourself, and it will be I who approaches you. You can absolutely rely o
n me. Au revoir, monsieur.”

  “One moment,” said Gallois quickly. “This matter of the reward?”

  “We can discuss that then. But I should not be interested in a sum of less than fifty thousand francs. If my information is complete, I may desire much more.”

  “As you will,” said Gallois calmly. “That, as you say, is a something which also can be discussed later. Until Wednesday then.”

  “Until Wednesday,” repeated the voice, and at once the line was dead.

  Gallois frowned for a moment, then was pressing the buzzer.

  “You have traced that call?”

  “Yes, It was from Toulon.”

  “Then take these instructions. Request Toulon to discover the place of origin of the call, and request also that the greatest circumspection should be employed. I’d like the information before my departure to-morrow afternoon.”

  He sat frowning for a minute before he turned to Charles.

  “You think he is genuine, this informer?”

  Charles smiled, and one saw at once an extraordinary likeness to Gallois himself, though the snub nose gave the face a difference as well as a curious attractiveness. The scandalous would hint that Charles was more than the great man’s protégé and that his adoption by Gallois had had in it more than benevolence, but few could deny the young agent’s merits or maintain a jealousy in the face of his personal charm.

  “Is it not the rule,” Charles said, “that an anonymous communication should never be disregarded? Besides, you yourself never believed that it was Bariche who died in that fire.”

  “And you?” countered Gallois.

  Charles shrugged his shoulders.

  “Your own conclusions were overwhelming. If our superiors thought differently . . .”

  He shrugged his shoulders again. Gallois was walking slowly round the room, his lean fingers feeling, as it were, the air, as if to pluck from it the confirmation he needed. Then at last he halted, and faced Charles again.