It had been an exceptionally warm year across most of Europe, and even in London, in Montague Street, temperatures were still high at the beginning of autumn. I recall that when my business partner James Trelawney and I, Andrew Fowler Singleton, brought the shameful activities of the ‘gang of bell thieves’ to an end in the last days of September, we were in shirtsleeves, our foreheads beaded with sweat. It had been a truly incredible case which had taken us the length and breadth of Great Britain for a number of weeks, from Swansea to Ipswich; from Edinburgh to the tip of Cornwall.
Consequently, on the morning of Tuesday, 16 October 1934, with no new cases in the offing in London, I decided to go to Paris. I wanted to spend a few days trying to solve a particular mystery that I had put off for far too long.
As I was packing my travelling bag with a few essentials, James’s athletic form appeared in the sitting-room doorway – he had just dragged himself out of bed. I’d put my plan to him on numerous occasions but each time he’d merely looked doubtful. At that moment he was pondering the reason for my haste.
‘Still obsessed by the death of Gérard de Nerval?’ he asked, smoothing a recalcitrant lock of blond hair on top of his head. ‘For goodness’ sake, the man killed himself seventy years ago, Andrew! What on earth are you hoping to find out?’
‘I came across some disturbing information in this book,’ I replied, as I tried to push a biography of the poet2 acquired a few days earlier in a French bookshop in Kensington into my bag, alongside six volumes of his complete works published by Honoré Champion. ‘There are too many different versions of the discovery of his body in Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. And the number of medical checks carried out in the morgue afterwards seems very high for a simple case of suicide by hanging.’
‘You told me yourself that his friends were famous writers. It’s hardly surprisi
