He turned over in his mind various possibilities.
They seemed so farfetched that he shrugged his shoulders.
Of course during the period, three-quarters of an hour at least, that Berger claimed he’d been strolling along the boulevard, he would have had plenty of time to get to Jordan’s apartment, a ten minutes’ walk from Jojo’s Bar, commit the murder, wash his hands, tidy himself up, and walk back again; but why should he have been wearing his wife’s watch?
He had one of his own.
His own, of course, might have been out of order.
The Commissaire nodded his head thoughtfully.”
Charley giggled.
“Really, Simon.”
“Shut up.
He gave instructions that plain-clothes men should go to every watchmaker’s within a radius of two miles round the house in Neuilly where the Bergers lived.
They were to ask if within the last week any watchmaker had repaired a watch in imitation gold or had put a glass in a small lady’s-watch with an oblong face.
Within a few hours one of the men came back and said that a watchmaker, not more than a quarter of a mile from the Bergers’ house, said that he had repaired a watch corresponding to the description and it had been called for, and at the same time the customer had brought another watch to have a glass put in.
He had done it on the spot and she had come in for it half an hour later.
He couldn’t remember what the customer looked like, but he thought she had a Russian accent.
The two watches were taken for the watchmaker to look at and he claimed that they were those he had repaired.
The Commissaire beamed as he might have beamed if he had a great plate of bouillabaisse set before him in the Old Port at Marseilles.
He knew he’d got his man.”
“What was the explanation?” asked Charley.
“Simple as A B C.
Berger had broken his watch and borrowed the one he’d given to Lydia.
She hardly ever went out and didn’t need it.
You must remember that in those days she was a quiet, modest, rather shy girl with few friends of her own, and I should say somewhat lethargic.
At the trial two men swore that they’d noticed Berger wearing it.
Jojo, who was a police informer, knew that Berger was a crook and wondered how he had got it.
In a casual way he mentioned to Berger that he had a new watch on and Berger told him it was his wife’s.
Lydia went to the watchmaker’s to get her husband’s watch the morning after the murder, and very naturally, since she was there, had a new glass put in her own.
It never occurred to her to mention it and Berger never knew that he had broken it.”
“But you don’t mean to say that he was convicted on that?”
“No.
But it was enough to justify the Commissaire charging him with the murder.
He thought, quite rightly as it turned out, that new evidence would be forthcoming.
All through his interrogations Berger conducted himself with amazing adroitness and self-possession.
He admitted everything that could be proved and no longer attempted to deny that it was he who had robbed all those women of their handbags, he admitted that even after his conviction he had gone on pinching cars whenever he wanted one; he said the ease with which it could be done was too much for him and the risk appealed to his adventurousness; but he denied absolutely that he’d had anything to do with the murder.
He claimed that the fact of the pieces of glass fitting Lydia’s watch proved nothing, and she swore black and blue that she’d broken the glass herself.
The juge d’instruction in whose charge the case was of course eventually placed was puzzled because no trace could be found of the money Berger must have stolen, and actually it never was found.
Another odd thing was that there was no trace of blood on the clothes that Berger was wearing on that particular night.
The knife wasn’t found either.
It was proved that Berger had one, in the circles he moved in that was usual enough, but he swore that he’d lost it a month before.
I told you that the detectives’ work was pretty good.
There’d been no finger-prints on the stolen cars nor on the stolen handbags, which when he’d emptied he’d apparently just thrown into the street and some of which had eventually got into the hands of the police, so it was pretty obvious that he had worn gloves.
They found a pair of leather gauntlets among his things, but it was unlikely that he would have kept them on when he went to see Jordan, and from the place in which the body was found, which suggested that Jordan had been changing a record when he was struck, it was plain that Berger hadn’t murdered him the moment Jordan let him into the room.
Besides, they were too large to go in his pocket and if he had had them at the bar someone would have noticed them.
Of course Berger’s photo had been published in all the papers, and in their difficulty the police got the press to help them.
They asked anyone who could remember having sold about such-and-such a date a pair of gloves, probably gray, to a young man in a gray suit, to come forward.
The papers made rather a thing about it; they put his photo in again with the caption:
‘Did you sell him the gloves he wore to kill Teddie Jordan?’
“You know, a thing that has always struck me is people’s fiendish eagerness to give anyone away.
They pretend it’s public spirit, I don’t believe a word of it, I don’t believe it’s even, as a rule anyway, the desire for notoriety; I believe it’s just due to the baseness of human nature that gets a kick out of injuring others.
You know, of course, that in England the Treasury and the King’s Proctor are supposed to have a wonderful system of espionage to detect income-tax evasions, and collusion and so forth in divorce cases.
Well, there’s not a word of truth in it.