The Curse of the Grand Guignol Read Online Free PDF Page B

Klaus in a mocking tone,
fresh cigarette hanging off the side of a thick lip.
    Karl emerged into the dirty
light and dropped the trapdoor behind him. It banged into place and
several of the patrons reacted as if a gun had been fired.
    “What blood?”
    “You cleaned some blood off the
alleyway this morning?” reminded the inspector, wondering why he
was bothering with this line of enquiry. The Humboldts had a
reputation as anarchists, not melodramatic killers. If they had
wanted to kill someone they would have done it fearlessly. They
would not have left behind a puppet-like corpse and an artistic
trail of blood. They would have made a bomb and thrown it through a
window.
    Karl had the same mannerisms as
his brother – he gave a surly shrug. “So what?”
    “Do you know how the blood got
there?”
    “This isn’t the Café des
Flore,” he amplified with a sneer, earning an accolade from his
appreciative audience. “Fights break out all the time.”
    “You live above the café, how
come you didn’t hear anything?”
    “We were in the cellar.”
    “We?”
    “Klaus and Kasper and me.”
    “In the cellar?”
    “Sorting out a delivery of
wine,” he said a little too quickly. “We were checking the crates
to make sure we hadn’t been short-changed. Can’t trust anyone these
days.”
    Another appreciative snigger
rumbled around the squalid café.
    “Can I take a look in the
cellar?” The inspector went to step around the German when the
third brother appeared suddenly from a back room. He was holding a
meat cleaver, or rather wielding it, and had probably been
listening to the entire exchange.
    “What for?” The third lookalike
had even more attitude than the first two.
    “It will corroborate that you
were busy uncrating bottles of wine.”
    “Since the wine has been
uncrated there is nothing to corroborate,” he declared with surly
emphasis, forming a solid wall with the other two
chips-off-the-block.
    Relying on brains rather than
brawn, Inspector de Guise was not built like a Minotaur and he
didn’t really believe he would find anything in the cellar apart
from an illegal still for vodka and pamphlets denouncing rich Jews,
and he had a chilling premonition that checking the cellar might
end in a nasty accident, perhaps even a fatal fall down a ladder.
Not having any back-up made him reluctant to go it alone into the
underground. Jules was busy scouting for possible witnesses and
Marcel was busy speaking to the dead man’s widow, trying to
establish a link with the other murder victims – five in all
now.
    He bid the Brotherhood of the
Boldt an ironic bonne journee and headed toward rue
Bonaparte.
     
    “The staging of the murder
scenes to make the victims look like marionettes has to be
an allusion to the theatre, moreover,” asserted the Countess
confidently, eyes alarmingly bright as myriad theories germinated
inside her head one after another until she settled on her
favourite, “the theatre of naturalistic horror known as le
theatre du Grand Guignol .”
    Dr Watson recognized the
passionate and breathless tone. Like father, like daughter.
Sherlock was always unnaturally aroused by the prospect of a new
case, a fresh adventure, an element of danger. “What makes you so
sure it has something to do with the Grand Guignol?”
    “Grand Guignol means Big
Puppet. It is named after a giant puppet from Lyonnaise similar to
Punch.”
    “As in Punch and Judy?”
clarified the doctor.
    “Yes, that Punch - there
simply must be a connection.” Another frisson of excitement caused
her neck hairs to stand on end.
    “The five murder victims,” said
the incorruptible inspector, drawing an unsentimental breath and
wondering if he had done the right thing after all in dispatching
that telegram, “had no connection to any theatre whatsoever. They
had no family members or close friends who worked in the theatre
and no dealings with the theatre in a professional capacity. As far
as we know they had never even