101 Mystery Stories

70 The Secret of Fort Bayard Georges Simenon

We missed the most terrible part of this adventure, G.7 and I. But the case remains my most vivid nightmare. The most sinister prison seems to me a delightful spot compared with Fort Bayard.

This fort is on an islet off La Rochelle. Two large islands, Re and Oleron, here lie parallel to the coast, thus enclosing a magnificent roadstead which was formerly of strategic importance. Napoleon, among others, bestrewed it with forts which still stand amid the waves. The best known of these is Fort Bayard.

In the center of the roadstead, hardly a mile from Bayard, lies the island of Aix, on which a hundred or so inhabitants live — mostly on fish and particularly on oysters.

The setting is a harsh one, even in the summer season. In November it is sinister. The ocean roars and surges, and the people of Aix are sometimes cut off from the mainland for weeks.

When we arrived, the excitement aroused by the affair had not yet died down, but the worst was over. We landed on the island of Aix one foggy noonday. The gasoline lamps were already lit in the houses. You could believe that it was twilight.

G.7 had George’s house pointed out to him. This George was the only fisherman on the island who had his own small cutter to haul his net. We found him at home, before the fireplace, surrounded by his wife and three children. He was a man of about forty, large, strong, rough-looking, but with a disconcerting calm about him.

Despite which, public opinion had accused him of the most hideous crime. The woman’s eyes seemed to me dead and lightless. Even the children seemed crushed by the atmosphere of suspicion that pressed down on the house.

The dialogue was brief:

“Will you take us to the fort?”

George didn’t stir. “Now?”

“Yes, now.” G.7 showed his badge.

The man rose, took down his oilskin from a hook, threw it around his shoulders, and changed his wooden shoes for hip boots. For a moment he looked at us in our city clothes, then shrugged as though to say, “So much the worse for you...”

A quarter of an hour later, we were on the bridge of the cutter, clinging to the rigging as we pitched unceasingly, our eyes fixed on the black walls of Fort Bayard.

It’s a dangerous spot, full of rocks. The fishermen never go there unless for some very good reason. The crumbling walls are a danger, too. Though there is a narrow opening through which you can get into what’s left of the fort, no one ever had the curiosity to do so, for fear of a blow on the head from one of the rocks that fall from time to time.

The yachting party were strangers to the district and lacked the natives prudence. That is how they came to make their monstrous discovery.

There was a being living in the fort. A human being. A woman.

You’d have to see the place to realize how much those words mean. The papers are fond of sob-stuff about the hard lot of the lighthouse-keepers, isolated out in the ocean. But lighthouses are livable. At least other men come there occasionally. At Fort Bayard, the wind whirls in through a hundred holes. The rain pours down through a roof that is now nothing but a few beams.

The woman was naked. When she saw strangers, her first movement was to flee.

And now, while we were sailing to what had been her prison, she was in a mental sanitarium in La Rochelle, surrounded by doctors.

She was eighteen. A girl.

But what a girl...! Knowing nothing of human speech, casting frightened glances about her like a hunted animal, hurling herself avidly upon her food...

As I said at first, we arrived only when the case was almost over. The photograph of the girl had appeared in all the papers. And already a man had come from Amsterdam who had recognized her, who had given a name to that enigmatic face: Clara Van Gindertael.

“Here! Grab the ladder!”

George held tight to the helm. We had reached the fort. The surf could shatter our boat against it. G.7 grasped an iron rung and passed a mooring rope over it.

So this was the examination of the scene of the crime. What should one call it? A prison? But even prisons have roofs...

Four ancient walls. Loose rocks. Seaweed. Rubble and rubbish of all kinds. I could imagine the girl crouching in some corner...

I tried to imagine the man who must have brought her food regularly. Mechanically I turned to George, who seemed calmly detached from all that lay around us.

When the yachting party had found Clara Van Gindertael, there had been a stock of provisions for her not more than a month old. Public rumor accused the fisherman. People remembered that he was the only man who ever dared the dangers of this region and dragged his net near the fort.

I examined his features. I asked myself if it were possible that this man, whom I’d just seen at home with his children, could have been coming here for thirteen years, bringing monthly provisions for a human being.

Thirteen years! Clara was five then. Much the same age as George’s children... It was horrible. I felt unhappy. I was impatient to get away from this accursed fort.

The magistrates had already questioned the fisherman.

His answers had cast no light on the problem: “I don’t know anything. I never saw the woman you’re talking about. I used to fish around the fort, but I never set foot inside...”

He ended his deposition with a question which embarrassed his examiners: “Where am I supposed to have picked up this little girl?”

The fact is that she was kidnaped in Paris, where George had never been. G.7 had showed me an old newspaper clipping:

Pieter Claessens had arrived at La Rochelle three days after the discovery of the girl who was still known only, in the phrase of the press, as “the Fort Bayard Unknown.” He read in the papers the account of the yachtsmen’s find. There was a photograph of the girl. And there was the statement that she had on her left wrist the scar of an old burn.

This was what clinched the identification for her guardian. He said that she had received the burn when she was only four, from the explosion of an alcohol heater.

That was as far as the affair had gone. You can imagine the many questions that arose:

Who had kidnaped Clara Van Gindertael thirteen years ago?

Why had she been taken to Fort Bayars?

Who had regularly brought her provisions?

What interests were at work behind this maddening drama?

The one most concerned, the victim herself, could not speak a word. According to the doctors, it would take many years to make a normal human being of her. Some specialists doubted that it could ever be done.

Reporters argued furiously over Fort Bayard. Photographs of the spot had appeared in all the dailies. The most unlikely hypotheses had been seriously considered.

It was a wonder that George was still at liberty. I knew myself that this was at the express order of G.7, who had telegraphed from Paris to La Rochelle as soon as he got wind of the affair.

What was his own opinion? And why had our first step been to visit the fort, though it has seemed more logical to me to start off by seeing the victim herself, especially since we had to come through La Rochelle?

I had no idea.

G.7 was as calm as the fisherman.

The two men were not without certain points of resemblance. One was as niggardly with words as the other. They both had the same clear eyes, the same imposing figure.

Was their silence with each other a sort of challenge?

I was ill at ease. I wandered clumsily around the square enclosure, my feet slipping on the seaweed. The empty food containers had a more sinister significance here than elsewhere.

There was a mountain of them.

It was beginning to get dark all around us, though it was only three o’clock. We heard the prow of the boat striking against the wall with every wave.

As for G.7, he paced up and down with long slow strides, his head lowered.

“You’ve been married how long?” he asked suddenly, turning toward George.

The fisherman started, then answered promptly: “Eighteen years.”

“You... you love your wife?”

I saw his Adam’s apple quiver. It was some moments before he spoke. At last I heard a dull murmur: “... and the kids...”

“Let’s go!” G.7 concluded unexpectedly. He turned toward the only break in the walls through which we could get back to the cutter. He took my arm. And he whispered, while George hoisted the sails, “The affair has only begun!”

I heard the rest of his speech in snatches. There was a storm coming up. I kept my eyes riveted on George, who sat motionless in the stem, wrapped up in his oilskin, the helm between his legs, his attention fixed on the swelling of the sail.

“The guilty man,” G.7 said, “betrayed himself, you see. Reread that clipping I gave you. Reread the description of the child. The point at that time was to give the most complete description possible, wasn’t it? A description that would help find her? It lists the details of shoes, even socks. And it doesn’t say a word about the burn on the wrist. Why? Because that burn didn’t as yet exist! Thanks to that, I knew the truth even before we came here...

“Or listen: Pieter Claessens has no fortune of his own. But he’s the uncle and guardian of Clara, who is very rich in her own right. At the same time he is the child’s heir...

“Is he afraid to commit, strictly speaking, a crime?... Does he fear that he’ll be accused... I don’t know... At any rate he shuts up Clara, or has her shut up, in Fort Bayard and there abandons her to her fate... She is sure to die there...

“After the delays of legal formalities, he inherits. He returns to his own country. He doesn’t think of the child again...

“Then why, suddenly, after thirteen years, does he feel this intense need of knowing what’s become of her, of making sure that she’s really dead? I’ll bet anything you please that he had his eye on an inheritance which only the girl herself could receive...

“Claessens tells himself that she may be alive, that people may have picked her up... He comes back secretly to see... At Fort Bayard, he finds her...

“But still he has to find her officially. There still has to be his official identification. Merely a resemblance, after so many years, wouldn’t do for the courts... Some identifying mark is better... a scar, for example... He has only to burn the girl’s wrist...

“Claessens returns to Holland and waits long enough for the scar to seem reasonably old. The girl’s exposed life would help there. His accomplices play out the comedy of the yacht and the discovery. The papers announce the find. He rushes to the spot — too fast, in fact. Beforehand he spreads the story of the scar...

“There was the slip! I repeat, if that scar had existed at the time of the kidnaping, it must have appeared in the description...

“Do you understand now that the affair has only begun? That man thinks himself safe, free from all suspicion... Another man has been accused.”

“George?” I asked.

G.7 glanced at the fisherman and lowered his voice. “And George won’t talk... He hid his discovery for motives that I can’t explain to myself too clearly... These simple people can sometimes have horribly complicated souls. Was he afraid that they’d think his story was a myth? That his wife might suspect him of palming off as a foundling a child of his own? Again, I don’t know... He fed the child. Little by little she became a woman... Now do you begin to see? It is monstrous, I know. They say that Clara, despite her strange life, is beautiful...”

Up till then I had never stopped looking at George. Now I turned abruptly to the sea. It was a relief to lose myself in the tumult of the raging elements.