Édouard Paget

In Crimes haute couture, the France Televisions adaptation of Third Girl, Édouard Paget is the lead designer of the Maison Paget fashion house and the parallel of Andrew Restarick from the original novel. Édouard Paget is portrayed by Yannik Landrein.

Like Andrew Restarick, Paget also has a dark secret to keep. However in his case, it is not a false identity which could be compromised by old acquaintances. Here, the secret is more straight-forward. Fifteen years before the events in the episode, he had stolen a dress design from one of his employees, Julie Lemon whom he subsequently dismissed. Paget then went on to launch his successful design with that dress as his signature item. During the episode, Julie comes back to Lille and begins to blackmail Paget.

In order to safeguard his career, Paget has to kill Julie. But he also put together an elaborate scheme to pin the blame on his design assistant Patricia Nollet who is the Norma Restarick parallel. Like Andrew, Paget uses drugs to make Patrica more suggestible so that she would actually believe that she did the killing herself. Unlike the original novel, Paget had to set up additional murders as part of the plan. To begin with, a thuggish delivery main Paco Gomez is hired to harass Patricia and then killed off, with Patricia being convinced that she committed the crime. This is merely a curtain raiser to serve as psychological conditioning. Paget himself gives Patricia an alibi for this crime so that she would be available at the next killing, the actual one of Julie Lemon. Unfortunately for Paget, Patricia turned out to have an unexpected alibi for this event so he has to improvise a third killing, this time of his administrative assistant Louise Charpentier (not the same person nor an exact parallel of the other Louise Charpentier in the original novel.

To actually perform the various killings, Paget employed his co-conspirator, Gigi, the head seamstress of his fashion house, persuading her to help by promising her that she would be promoted to designer after Patricia is got rid of.