Jacques Guillaume: Missing Lawyer

 Jacques Guillaume: Missing Lawyer

The office on the third floor of the old notary building still smelled of wet wool and carbon paper. Maître Hélène Vasseur had not opened her shutters in three days. Her clerk said she had left on Tuesday with a thin file under her arm and a promise to be back before the evening post. She had not come back.

Jacques Guillaume stood in the doorway and did not touch the desk. The blotter was clean. The appointment book stopped at 16:40: “C. Morel — quay.” No address. The clerk had already told the police that Morel was a dock broker who wanted a contract witnessed. The police had already told the clerk that brokers miss appointments and lawyers sometimes take trains.

Guillaume walked the quay at the hour named in the book. The cranes were idle. A boy selling roasted chestnuts remembered a woman in a grey coat who had argued, quietly, with a man in a leather cap, then walked toward the footbridge instead of back to the tram. Guillaume followed the footbridge to the river steps. On the third step down, caught in a crack, was a brass paper clip bent into a hook. Vasseur bent her clips that way when she marked a page she did not trust.

He found Morel in a café that did not put its name on the window. Morel said the meeting had been cancelled. Guillaume set the bent clip on the saucer and asked who had cancelled it. Morel looked at the clip a long time. Then he said the contract was not a contract. It was a list of names copied from a warehouse ledger, and Vasseur had refused to notarize it. She had taken the copy with her.

They found her that night in a room above a chandlery, alive, with the ledger copy sewn into the lining of the grey coat. She had not been taken for money. She had been held until she would say the list was ordinary. She would not say it. Guillaume did not ask her why. He walked her to the prefecture with the coat over his arm, and he let the clerk open the shutters in the morning.