10 September 2025
Wednesday. Tonight’s suspects arrived dressed for the hotel, and I confess I had to stand in the stairwell for a moment and compose myself.
Beaded dresses. Long pearls. A cloche hat. Waistcoats, braces, a bow tie and one pencil moustache, drawn on with eyeliner, which wobbled when its owner was thinking. One of them kept up a French accent for the whole hour, which I found moving, and also, in places, inaccurate.
There is no dress code. Nobody is turned away for arriving as themselves. But a party in costume suits the hotel, and the hotel suits them back, and I have noticed that a man in braces argues with more conviction.
They also arrived a quarter of an hour early, as the hotel asks, which gave them time to put their belongings away and listen to the briefing before Madame the lift took them up. Punctuality is the first virtue of a detective. The second is a good hat. They had both.
— Insp. A. Brochard, Gendarmerie
