The Red Widow by Sarah Horowitz

Author:Sarah Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

At 4:00 a.m., Meg, Marthe, and M. Chabrier set out in the darkness for the police headquarters. It’s not clear why they decided that this was the appropriate hour for Meg to amend her account. When they arrived, they first had to wake up the sleeping police officer who complained, “What, you again? You are not going to leave us alone.” In turn, he had to wake up Hamard, who greeted them in his nightdress and slippers.13

Hamard was evidently surprised to see Meg and undoubtedly furious at the Meg-ness of it all: her insistence that the police be at her beck and call and the complete disregard for anyone else’s schedule. But whatever anger he felt, he didn’t show it.

After he dressed, he ushered Meg into his office. She quickly told him, “I falsely accused Rémy Couillard of having killed my husband and my mother. I put the pearl in his wallet. It was also me who put the small diamond which your inspectors discovered the day before yesterday in the groove of the floorboard.”

Meg had finally admitted guilt, and the authorities could release Rémy. That provided some measure of relief. What came next did not.

She continued, “The author of the crime is not Couillard, it’s Alexandre Wolff, the son of Mariette Wolff.”

To explain why she had been hiding the truth for all these months, she said that it was “Because of Mariette Wolff, the mother of the criminal. She was so good to me that I didn’t want to make her sad by telling her that her son was a murderer.”14

The story was ludicrous. Meg had made so many public declarations that she was determined to find the murderer, avenge her husband and mother, and clear her name, no one would believe that she had known who it was all along and had kept silent to spare the feelings of her cook. Yet Meg’s statement was enough for Hamard to send his men to fetch Alexandre. The police already knew a bit about him, thanks to his proximity to Meg. He was a horse trader who belonged to a rough-and-tumble world and was known to be violent.15 They also knew that he had a rock-solid alibi: on the night of the crime, he had gone to a large dance with some of his friends. Plenty of people could attest to the fact that he was nowhere near Impasse Ronsin.16 Months before, when the police were investigating servants and models, they had concluded that there was no way Alexandre could have been involved in the double murder.17

On the one hand, Hamard wanted Alexandre in his office so that he could confront Meg with this latest set of lies in the hopes that she’d drop them. Unlike Rémy, Alexandre was never charged with a crime or thrown into jail, never seriously considered a suspect. On the other hand, had Meg accused a banker or a judge or someone else in her social circle, Hamard might not have rushed to bring him to police headquarters, as he did when she named Alexandre.

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