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A Kind of Madness 437
The rope sprang to the ceiling, the girdle followed it, and the professor’s
thin neck snapped. The scalpel fell from his dead hand.
The rehearsal had been a complete success.
Just as they planned to do with the bailiff Gouffé, they stripped the body
and plundered the wallet. “Not bad,” said Eyraud. “Do actresses get paid for
rehearsing?”
“This one does,” said Gaby. And they dumped the body in the trunk.
Later the clothes would be disposed of in dustbins, the body carried by
trunk to some quiet countryside where it might decompose in naked namelessness.
Gaby swore when she stepped on the scalpel. “What the hell is this?” She
picked it up. “It’s sharp. Do you suppose he was one of those types who like
a little blood to heighten their pleasures? I’ve heard of them but never met
one.”
Gaby stood pondering, her dressing-gown open …
The first night, to the misfortune of the bailiff Gouffé, went off as smoothly as
the rehearsal. But the performers reckoned without the patience and determination
and génie policier of Marie-François Goron, Chief of the Paris Sûreté.
The upshot was, as all aficionados of true crime know, that Eyraud was guillotined,
nineteen months after the rehearsal, and Gaby, who kept grinning at
the jury, was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor.
When Goron was in London before the trial, he paid his usual courtesy call at
Scotland Yard and chatted at length with Inspector Frederick G. Abberline.
“Had one rather like yours recently ourselves,” said Abberline. “Naked man,
broken neck, left to rot in the countryside. Haven’t succeeded in identifying
him yet. You were luckier there.”
“It is notorious,” Goron observed, “that the laboratories of the French police
are the best in the world.”
“We do very well, thank you,” said Abberline distantly.
“Of course.” The French visitor was all politeness: “As you did last year in that
series of Whitechapel murders.”
“I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic, Mr. Goron, but no police force in the
world could have done more than we did in the Ripper case. It was a nightmare with
no possible resolution. And unless he strikes again, it’s going to go down as one of
the greatest unsolved cases in history. Jack the Ripper will never hang.”
“Not,” said M. Goron, “so long as he confines his attention to the women of
London.” He hurried to catch the boat train, thinking of Gabrielle Bompart and
feeling a certain regret that such a woman was also such a devil.