It was a real thrill when he came into the court-room.
He was brought in between two warders for the press photographers to have a go at him before the judges came in.
I never saw anyone so cool.
He was quite nicely dressed and he knew how to wear his clothes.
He was freshly shaved and his hair was very neat.
He had a fine head of dark brown hair.
He smiled at the photographers and turned this way and that, as they asked him to, so that they could all get a good view of him.
He looked like any young chap with plenty of money that you might see at the Ritz Bar having a drink with a girl.
It tickled me to think that he was such a rogue.
He was a born criminal.
Of course his people weren’t rich, but they weren’t starving, and I don’t suppose he ever really wanted for a hundred francs.
I wrote a rather pretty article about him for one of the weekly papers, and the French press printed extracts from it.
It did me a bit of good over here.
I took the line that he engaged in crime as a form of sport.
See the idea?
It worked up quite amusingly.
He’d been almost a first-class tennis-player and there was some talk of training him for championship play, but oddly enough, though he played a grand game in ordinary matches, he had a good serve and was quick at the net, when it came to tournaments he always fell down.
Something went wrong then.
He hadn’t got power of resistance, determination or whatever it is, that the great tennis-player has got to have.
An interesting psychological point, I thought.
Anyhow his career as a tennis-player came to an end because money began to be missed from the changing-room when he was about, and though it was never actually proved that he’d taken it everyone concerned was pretty well convinced that he was the culprit.”
Simon relit his pipe.
“One thing that peculiarly struck me in Robert Berger was his combination of nerve, self-possession and charm.
Of course charm is an invaluable quality, but it doesn’t often go with nerve and self-possession.
Charming people are generally weak and irresolute, charm is the weapon nature gives them to cope with their disadvantages; I would never set much trust in anyone who had it.”
Charley gave his friend a slightly amused glance; he knew that Simon was belittling a quality he did not think he possessed in order to assure himself that it was of no great consequence beside those he was convinced he had.
But he did not interrupt.
“Robert Berger was neither weak nor irresolute.
He very nearly got away with his murder.
It was a damned smart bit of work on the part of the police that they got him.
There was nothing sensational or spectacular in the way they went about the job; they were just thorough and patient.
Perhaps accident helped them a little, but they were clever enough to take advantage of it.
People must always be prepared to do that, you know, and they seldom are.”
An absent look came into Simon’s eyes, and once more Charley was aware that he was thinking of himself.
“What Lydia didn’t tell me was how the police first came to suspect him,” said Charley.
“When first they questioned him they hadn’t the ghost of an idea that he had anything to do with the murder.
They were looking for a much bigger man.”
“What sort of a chap was Jordan?”
“I never ran across him.
He was a bad hat, but he was all right in his way.
Everybody liked him.
He was always ready to stand you a drink, and if you were down and out he never minded putting his hand in his pocket.
He was a little fellow, he’d been a jockey, but he’d got warned off in England, and it turned out later that he’d done nine months at Wormwood Scrubs for false pretences.
He was thirty-six.
He’d been in Paris ten years.
The police had an idea that he was mixed up in the drug traffic, but they’d never been able to get the goods on him.”
“But how did the police come to question Berger at all?”
“He was one of the frequenters of Jojo’s Bar.
That’s where Jordan used to have his meals.
It’s rather a shady place patronized by bookmakers and jockeys, touts, runners and the sort of people with the reputation that we journalists describe as unsavoury, and naturally the police interviewed as many of them as they could get hold of.