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Personal Journal of Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lisieux
Wednesday, 14 July 2297
Dunkelheim System
The Jean Bart arrived in the Dunkelheim system before ship's dawn.
Our schedule allows two full days for surface visits, local passengers, cargo transfer, business, dining, and the usual exchange between respectable travelers and those colonists sufficiently wealthy to come aboard and pretend they live this way all the time.
The ship began discharge operations almost immediately.
I had expected a quiet morning.
Instead, I met Armand Valette.
M. Valette represents the insurance concern responsible for underwriting much of the Ruffin Collection.
This fact alone was not enough to prejudice me against him.
His suit, however, fitted poorly.
He accepted a drink, but declined to drink it.
He then opened the conversation by telling me that he had heard a rumor.
I distrusted him immediately.
Valette claimed that an object in the Ruffin Collection had been stolen and replaced with a copy.
This was interesting for one very obvious reason.
No theft had been formally reported, only the vaguest rumor of a "disturbance".
I asked how an insurance lawyer knew that an artifact had been stolen before the curator, the ship's security service, or apparently anyone else aboard had reached such a conclusion.
He became evasive.
I asked where he had heard the rumor.
He became more evasive.
This continued until I pointed out that a man who approaches an officer investigating a murder and announces knowledge of an unreported crime should be prepared for a degree of curiosity.
Eventually, Valette admitted that his source had been Henri Valois.
The dead Henri Valois.
This improved matters considerably.
Valette had known him professionally. Indeed, he had helped arrange the transfer of one particular artifact from Valois to Étienne Valcour, who subsequently loaned it to the Ruffin Collection.
The object in question is known as the Black Thread Cylinder.
I vaguely remember seeing it in one of the collection's exhibits.
It was not particularily impressive.
A small black cylinder wrapped or threaded with metallic filaments, apparently recovered years ago by asteroid miners in the Nyotekundu system. No reliable archaeological context. No known maker. No demonstrated function. No convincing date.
Most specialists apparently regard it as either an elaborate curiosity or a fraud.
Valette claimed Valois believed the original had been removed and replaced.
He further claimed Valois had implicated Assistant Curator Émile Danton.
This left several possibilities.
None were reassuring.
It was conceivable that the Cylinder had always been false.
It was conceivable that the false Cylinder had then been replaced by another false Cylinder.
It was conceivable that the purpose of the second substitution was precisely to conceal the falsity of the first.
It was conceivable that Valois had known this and been killed because he threatened to reveal it.
It was further conceivable that the provenance of the object had been manipulated at a considerably higher level than either Valois or Danton.
At this stage the name of Nicolas Ruffin necessarily entered consideration.
No one accused M. Ruffin of anything.
I merely observed that once one begins replacing false alien artifacts with exact copies of false alien artifacts in order to disguise the fact that the false artifact was false in the first place, one has entered a level of deception where ordinary motives no longer suffice.
Sergeant Blanc stared at me for some time after I explained this.
He eventually asked whether I had been drinking.
I considered the question insulting.
It was noon.
Of course I had been drinking.
Valette's own behavior remained suspicious enough that I asked Security to hold him while the matter was clarified.
He objected.
I reminded him that he had voluntarily approached us with knowledge apparently derived from a murdered man concerning an unreported theft.
This did not improve his position.
We then reviewed the exhibition's surveillance recordings.
They revealed almost nothing.
The gallery is monitored continuously, but continuous monitoring is not the same thing as complete coverage. Display cases, partitions, environmental equipment, architectural recesses, and temporary exhibition structures create numerous small blind areas. Moreover, the collection staff legitimately handle artifacts outside public hours.
We had no image of Danton dramatically putting the Black Thread Cylinder inside his coat.
Real investigations are distressingly inconsiderate in this respect.
With Colette still missing, we considered the possibility that she might attempt to leave the ship during the Dunkelheim stop.
If she had killed Valois and taken the Cylinder, this would be her best opportunity to escape.
We therefore prepared a trap.
Passengers were allowed to assemble normally for surface transfers. No announcement was made. Once boarding was sufficiently advanced, Security conducted an unexpected inspection of passengers and baggage.
Marceau was not among them.
The trap failed.
It did, however, discover a substantial quantity of narcotics aboard an arriving shuttle from Dunkelheim.
Not the success we wanted, but I would note that an operation which uncovers an entirely separate crime cannot properly be described as unsuccessful.
Doctor Okafor provided more useful news.
Her expanded toxicology report confirmed beyond serious doubt that Henri Valois had been murdered.
The method was subtle.
Valois was already in poor health and took regular medication. Someone had gradually substituted or contaminated that medication with a toxic compound. The poison accumulated over time until his body failed.
This explained why Sergeant Blanc had been unable to protect him.
One cannot intercept a bullet fired days earlier.
More importantly, the precise time of death appears not to have been predictable. Whoever poisoned him wanted him to die and wanted the death to resemble the natural failure of an unhealthy man.
They did not necessarily intend him to die on the night he did.
That suggested planning.
It also strengthened our suspicion of Marceau.
As a purser, she had routine access to passenger quarters. She could have entered without forcing a door, alarming Valois, or attracting attention.
And our recordings already placed a woman we believed to be Marceau near his quarters on several occasions.
Émile Danton was therefore brought in for questioning regarding the Cylinder.
He admitted enough almost immediately to establish that something had indeed happened.
According to Danton, Valois paid him five thousand livres to replace the Black Thread Cylinder with a three-dimensional printed replica.
Five thousand livres is not a fortune, though it is sufficiently close to one for a poorly paid assistant curator to reconsider his principles.
Danton insisted, however, that no object of genuine value had been lost.
The Cylinder, he said, was already a fake.
His copy was therefore merely a copy of a fraud.
No one had been deprived of a genuine artifact because no genuine artifact had ever existed.
This was, naturally, exactly the sort of statement one would expect from a man involved in replacing a false artifact with another false artifact.
It also fitted remarkably well with several elements of my developing theory.
Blanc disagreed.
He suggested that the theory had by then acquired so many moving parts that it might require its own engineering staff.
This is one of the problems with enlisted men. They lack imagination and vision.
Danton identified Valois as the man who paid him.
Valois was dead and therefore unavailable for comment.
Conveniently so.
Still, we now possessed:
- a murdered artifact trader;
- a missing purser;
- an admitted substitution;
- an insurance representative who knew about the substitution before anyone else;
- an allegedly worthless alien artifact;
- and a dead man's accusation against his own assistant curator.
I felt we were making excellent progress.