poured from the stove, sprawled the
form of a beautiful girl. In the living-
room, doubled up between an armchair
and a table, slumped the body of a
young man. There were two bullet holes
in his left temple and one in the back of
his neck.
The detectives, Inspectors Louis
Poirier and George Dubois, turned to
Marsan, who told them what he knew.
The man was his friend Felix Bailly. The
girl was Pauline Dubuisson. Felix had
gone out with Pauline when both were
in medical school in Lille.
They parted a year and a half ago.
Felix enrolled in a Paris university while
Pauline continued her studies in Lille.
A few days ago Pauline had suddenly
popped up in Paris.
Somebody, Marsan continued, had
warned Felix’s father that the girl was
armed. And his mother had urged him
not to stay alone in the apartment. So
he had asked one friend or another to
be with him. But Felix couldn’t believe,
Marsan said, that Pauline meant him
any harm.
Why should she even be after him,
let alone want to kill him, after that
18-month separation? Still, to ease
his parents’ minds, he tried to have
someone with him at the flat.
While the detectives were questioning
Marsan, firemen were administering
oxygen to Pauline. They succeeded
in restoring her faint heartbeat and a
few whimpered words crossed her lips
before she slipped into a coma.
Marsan, his voice taut with rage,
said: “She’s a wild, perverse creature.
She knows only one law – her body.
She wanted to pull Felix down into
the cesspool of her own depravity. He
resisted so she shot him in cold blood.
That suicide attempt – it’s just a fake. If
she’d wanted to die, she’d have used the
gun.’’T
he detectives disagreed. The death
weapon, which they picked up from
the living-room floor, was jammed.
Moreover, the girl had inhaled enough
gas to get her just deserts. If Marsan
had not arrived when he did, she might
have died. She still might. Her pulse had
sunk again to the merest flicker. And in
a severe case of gas poisoning, there is
always the danger of complications.
Marsan couldn’t tell them anything
more. As a recent friend, he said, he had
come in only at the tail end of Felix’s
troubles. “Talk to Jacques Godet,’’ he
suggested.
Godet, also a medical student, spent
the preceding night at Felix’s apartment,
Marsan said, as a precaution against the
girl finding him alone there.
“At 8.45 this morning Pauline
Dubuisson rang the doorbell,’’ Godet
told detectives. “‘I want to come in,’ she
said. I told her we were still in the raw
and not pretty to look at. She replied,
‘I’ve seen worse. Tell Felix to come to
the door immediately.’ But he just called
out to her, ‘Meet me at 10 a.m. at theCambronne Café.’”
Felix didn’t mean to keep the
rendezvous, Godet said. Nor,
apparently, did Pauline. That became
clear later when detectives spoke to the
owner of the tavern across the street,
where Pauline had sipped her “last’’ cup
of coffee.
Godet was upset about what followed.
He had been unable to stay with Felix
after Pauline called there. The two men
had both gone to a nearby café for
breakfast. There Felix phoned Bernard
Marsan to come over. The two finished
their breakfast then Godet caught a bus
and Felix returned to his flat alone.
“He must have opened the door to
Pauline thinking it was Marsan,’’ Godet
speculated. “He was a plucky fellow,
Felix. He didn’t like all these sissy
precautions, but his mother made him
promise not to spend a moment alone
till Pauline was out of town again. Or
maybe he let her in to settle things. She’s
a viper! He never should have trusted
her.’’
Why had this rumpus with Pauline
started up again? the police asked.
Godet suggested that the officers talk
to Fernand Wagner, who had “baby-sat’’Felix the night before and was his
closest friend.
Wagner was shattered when he heard
the news. “Somebody else is guilty of a
crime here that’s almost as bad as the
murder,’’ he declared. “And that was to
give Pauline Dubuisson Felix’s address.
When he left Lille he made a point of
keeping his Paris address a secret, even
from most of his new friends.’’
At any rate, Pauline had got it. Ten
days ago, just before midnight on
March 8th, Felix’s doorbell rang. There
stood Pauline in a friendly mood, so he
asked her in. She curled up in a chair
and spoke of old times. Felix eased her
out of the place under the pretence of
wanting to have a late snack. And he
put another damper on her passion by
telling her he was now happily engaged
to be married.
“Pauline took the train back to Lille,’’
Wagner finished. “She’s the kind of
woman who is happy only when she can
put her claws into a man. She must have
been very unhappy that night.’’
The city morgue sent the detectives
a bloodstained telegram that had been
found in one of Felix’s pockets. Signed
“Madame Gerard,’’ the four-day-old
message asked Felix to phone her at a
Lille number “regarding a matter of the
greatest urgency.’’W
ho was Madame Gerard? Felix’s
friends couldn’t help and Pauline
was still in a coma. So next morning
detectives made the three-hour trip
to Lille and dropped in on Madame
Gerard.
“I’m Pauline’s landlady,’’ the elderly
woman said. “Poor girl.’’ She was
the first person so far to express any
sympathy for the suspect.
Asked what sort of girl Pauline was,
Madame Gerard said, “I think I know
Pauline better than most people. She’s
been staying with me for over two years.
Some say she’s wild. I wouldn’t know. To
me she’s always seemed a warm-hearted,
generous girl. She loves animals and is
always helping people.’’
“She shoots them too,’’ Inspector
Poirier said. “In the past couple of
weeks something made her go off her
head. Do you know what it was?’’
The landlady shook her head. Strange
things had been happening. There was
Pauline’s first trip to Paris.
She had left suddenly on March 8th.
On returning to Lille two days later,
Pauline said she had seen Felix. He was
going to marry Monique Lombard,
she said. Obviously it was a marriage
of convenience from what she had
heard, she told her landlady, and added,
“Somebody once told me I was a tigress.
It wasn’t nice what I did to Felix when
he still wanted me.’’
It sounded involved, but the detectives
weighed every word. If Pauline
recovered she would have to answer for
the murder.
“Was she jealous of his fiancée?’’
Inspector Dubois asked. The landladyPauline Dubuisson in the
dock where she admitted the
deliberate, premeditated murder
of one of her lovers