The public prosecutor’s office, realising the importance of investigating before the snow melted, was quickly there. The deputy public prosecutor, the examining magistrate, the medical examiner and an inspector were on the spot before nine o’clock.
The victim, M. Eberhardt, a man in his sixties, had been killed by a bullet through the heart. Death must have been instantaneous and had occurred roughly twelve hours before. A bunch of keys had fallen beside the body. Inspector Lucas noticed that it had left a trace in the snow about ten centimetres long. He concluded that the murderer must have used the keys to lock the gate and then tossed them towards the corpse.
The facts were easily established: summoned by the bell, Eberhardt left the house. At the gate he recognised the visitor and let him in. The two men (the shoes of the other left no doubt about the gender) exchanged a few words and walked, side by side, towards the house. At the half-way point, where a small roundabout enclosed an anaemic climbing rose propped up by a sunshade, they stopped, face to face. After the briefest of halts, Eberhardt fell to the ground, dead. There was no struggle; the unfortunate victim had not moved a muscle. Surprised in mid-conversation, he had surely not even seen the murderous gesture. His assailant then took the keys and left, having never gone farther than the roundabout.
All that can be seen clearly from the snow, which also shows that death occurred after nine o’clock, by which time the snow had already stopped.
The body is clothed in brown trousers, a waistcoat of the same material, a jacket with a claret lining, and black carpet slippers over cachou socks. It has not been searched. The victim’s wallet is intact. And, because the house has not been visited, theft cannot be the motive for the crime.
The victim, as we said before, is M. Pierre Eberhardt, the owner of the house, built eleven years ago. He retired from the French railways eastern division and has been a widower for six years. A cleaning lady comes on Saturday afternoons. He takes care of his garden, does a bit of handiwork, and reads.
He knew his killer because he opened the gate for him. Thus we can only envisage two kinds of motive: revenge or gain. The investigation therefore points to that as the road to take.
Or, rather, to that dead end. Revenge? Highly unlikely! Before living at No. 39, Eberhardt had lived for eighteen years at No. 15 of the same street. The elders of the neighbourhood had known him forever. They all described him as honest, thrifty, hard-working, a decent man in every way. Whilst his wife was alive, he was always home at the same time, as soon as his shift finished. An aperitif on Sundays and a packet of cigarettes every two days were his only extravagances. At work, the same story. No matter how far you went back in his past, there was nothing shady, even for the most suspicious of natures.
Gain? Inheritance? Nothing to be found there either. Eberhardt had barely been able to scrape up enough to buy the house. His wife’s long illness and devaluation had forced him to mortgage it. All he had was his pension, which would disappear with him. No known parents from whom he could inherit, nor any kin awaiting a meagre inheritance.
In all this obscurity, only one fact: a neighbour, employed by a store in the town centre and hastening home at nine o’clock, had been accosted by a man who, very politely, had asked her to point out Eberhardt’s house. It was too dark for her to say much about the stranger. She remembered him as a man in his early thirties and of slightly more than average height, clean-shaven, wearing a grey overcoat with a trilby of the same colour. Despite the description, no trace of the man in the grey overcoat was found.
The autopsy revealed nothing new: Eberhardt had indeed been killed by a bullet to the heart, of calibre 7mm. 65. Probably fired from an automatic pistol of regular army issue.
‘So you can see,’ concluded Inspector Lucas, who had just conveyed the foregoing to the Dijonnais, ‘the dead end in which we find ourselves.’
The examining magistrate turned to Superintendent Pesci:
‘Could you describe your own case?’
‘It’s really curious the extent to which your crime and ours are similar. All the basic elements are the same. Only the surroundings and the execution differ. In Dijon, the murderer acted even more casually.’
And, installing himself comfortably in an armchair borrowed from an adjacent room, he began in a light-hearted tone:
‘In our town there is a town hall, the old Palais des Ducs de Bourgogne. Inside the building is a library, and inside the library there is a librarian.’
‘And inside the librarian?’
‘A rather addled brain. And also a heart. And inside that heart there is now a 7mm. 65 calibre bullet.’
‘That’s not strictly true,’ interjected the expert from Dijon. ‘I’ve actually got it in my pocket.’
‘The good fellow was named Mithon, Adrien. A war pensioner, he became a town hall employee in ’18 and was promoted to librarian ten years ago. Physically he was very tall and very thin, with a sallow complexion and a few scattered grey hairs. Age: a little over fifty. He only had two passions: books and the game of draughts. Mithon was the only employee of the library, which was just an office for lending
