So, far from being startled or apprehensive, I really felt a certain pleasurable excitement when I looked up from my desk just before closing time that afternoon, and saw the three masked bandits presenting their weapons to our staff and terrified patrons. In common with the other # occupants of the banking room, I slowly raised my hands over my head at the robbers’ command. Simultaneously and unnoticed, however, I also pressed my knee against the alarm button under my desk.
I could picture clearly the exact sequence of events that would be set in train by that movement of my knee. Miss Coe’s buzzer would sound. She would perhaps sit immobile for a shocked second at her worktable. She would drop the hat she was working on, and cross speedily to her telephone. She would place her emergency call to the police with splendid calm. And then she would wait confidently for the news from me that our bank robbers had been circumvented or captured.
Unfortunately, as I found out later, Miss Coe did none of these things.
What she did do, when the alarm buzzer sounded in her shop, was merely to glance at the clock on her wall, rise impatiently from her sewing stool and cross the room, and there, (bless her methodical heart!) push the minute hand of the wall clock ahead ten minutes so that it pointed to exactly three o’clock.
70
The Secret of Fort Bayard
Georges Simenon
We missed the most terrible part of this adventure, G.7 and I. But the case remains my most vivid nightmare. The most sinister prison seems to me a delightful spot compared with Fort Bayard.
This fort is on an islet off La Rochelle. Two large islands, Re and Oleron, here lie parallel to the coast, thus enclosing a magnificent roadstead which was formerly of strategic importance. Napoleon, among others, bestrewed it with forts which still stand amid the waves. The best known of these is Fort Bayard.
In the center of the roadstead, hardly a mile from Bayard, lies the island of Aix, on which a hundred or so inhabitants live — mostly on fish and particularly on oysters.
The setting is a harsh one, even in the summer season. In November it is sinister. The ocean roars and surges, and the people of Aix are sometimes cut off from the mainland for weeks.
When we arrived, the excitement aroused by the affair had not yet died down, but the worst was over. We landed on the island of Aix one foggy noonday. The gasoline lamps were already lit in the houses. You could believe that it was twilight.
G.7 had George’s house pointed out to him. This George was the only fisherman on the island who had his own small cutter to haul his net. We found him at home, before the fireplace, surrounded by his wife and three children. He was a man of about forty, large, strong, rough-looking, but with a disconcerting calm about him.
Despite which, public opinion had accused him of the most hideous crime. The woman’s eyes seemed to me dead and lightless. Even the children seemed crushed by the atmosphere of suspicion that pressed down on the house.
The dialogue was brief:
“Will you take us to the fort?”
George didn’t stir. “Now?”
“Yes, now.” G.7 showed his badge.
The man rose, took down his oilskin from a hook, threw it around his shoulders, and changed his wooden shoes for hip boots. For a moment he looked at us in our city clothes, then shrugged as though to say, “So much the worse for you...”
A quarter of an hour later, we were on the bridge of the cutter, clinging to the rigging as we pitched unceasingly, our eyes fixed on the black walls of Fort Bayard.
It’s a dangerous spot, full of rocks. The fishermen never go there unless for some very good reason. The crumbling walls are a danger, too. Though there is a narrow opening through which you can get into what’s left of the fort, no one ever had the curiosity to do so, for fear of a blow on the head from one of the rocks that fall from time to time.
The yachting party were strangers to the district and lacked the natives prudence. That is how they came to make their monstrous discovery.
There was a being living in the fort. A human being. A woman.
You’d have to see the place to realize how much those words mean. The papers are fond of sob-stuff about the hard lot of the lighthouse-keepers, isolated out in the ocean. But lighthouses are livable. At least other men come there occasionally. At Fort Bayard, the wind whirls in through a hundred holes. The rain pours down through a roof that is now nothing but a few beams.
The woman was naked. When she saw strangers, her first movement was to flee.
And now, while we were sailing to what had been her prison, she was in a mental sanitarium in La Rochelle, surrounded by doctors.
She was eighteen. A girl.
But what a girl...! Knowing nothing of human speech, casting frightened glances about her like a hunted animal, hurling herself avidly upon her food...
As I said at first, we arrived only when the case was almost over. The photograph of the girl had appeared in all the papers. And already a man had come from Amsterdam who had recognized her, who had given a name to that enigmatic face: Clara Van Gindertael.
“Here! Grab the ladder!”
George held tight to the helm. We had reached the fort. The surf could shatter our boat against it. G.7 grasped an iron rung and passed a mooring rope over it.
So this was the examination of the scene of the crime. What should one call it? A prison? But even prisons have roofs...
Four ancient walls. Loose rocks. Seaweed. Rubble and rubbish of all kinds. I could imagine the girl crouching in some corner...
I tried to imagine the man who must have brought her food regularly. Mechanically I turned to George, who seemed calmly detached from all that lay around us.
When the yachting party had found Clara Van Gindertael, there had been a stock of provisions for her not more than a month old. Public rumor accused the fisherman. People remembered that he was the only man who ever dared the dangers of this region and dragged his net near the fort.
I examined his features. I asked myself if it were possible that this man, whom I’d just seen at home with his children, could have been coming here for thirteen years, bringing monthly provisions for a human being.
Thirteen years! Clara was five then. Much the same age as George’s children... It was horrible. I felt unhappy. I was impatient to get away from this accursed fort.
The magistrates had already questioned the fisherman.
His answers had cast no light on the problem: “I don’t know anything. I never saw the woman you’re talking about. I used to fish around the fort, but I never set foot inside...”
He ended his deposition with a question which embarrassed his examiners: “Where am I supposed to have picked up this little girl?”
The fact is that she was kidnaped in Paris, where George had never been. G.7 had showed me an old newspaper clipping:
A mysterious abduction took place yesterday in a hotel in the Avenue Friedland.
For some days a Dutchman, M. Pieter Claessens, had been occupying a suite on the first floor of this hotel, which he shared with his five-year-old niece, Clara Van Gindertael, the child heiress, whose guardian he is, since she is an orphan.
His personal valet looked after the child.
Yesterday then, while M. Claessens was out, this servant went down to the kitchens where he remained about an hour, leaving the child alone in the suite. When he returned, she had disappeared.
The description of the little girl is as follows: rather large for her age, slender, fair hair, blue eyes, wearing a white silk dress, white socks, and black patent-leather shoes.