by Sarah Dunant
‘Of course, I wouldn’t need to tell her. I would just—’
‘I’m sorry, Miss Wolfe, the answer is no.’
I accepted defeat, keeping my bad grace to myself. ‘One other question. Your nephew, Daniel Devieux. He presumably knew about all of this?’
‘Of course.’
‘Was he involved at any stage?’
‘Once again, I’m afraid I—’
‘I gather from one of the applicants that she was in touch with him. I just wondered…’ I let myself trail off.
He smiled. ‘You have been busy. I hope they are paying you what you deserve. I was taken unexpectedly ill during last spring, just after the original advertisement was placed. My nephew stepped in to help with the arrangements.’
‘So he met Carolyn?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they get on well?’
‘Miss Wolfe, I appreciate you have a job to do, but if you’re asking me whether or not my nephew could possibly have been the father of the child, then the answer is categorically no. And in response to your next question I’m afraid the answer is still no. Daniel flew to Tokyo on business last night. Although no doubt when he returns in ten days’ time he will be only too delighted to tell you all this himself. Now, if I can be of no further assistance…’
The audience was most definitely over. As if by magic the door behind us opened and Cerberus bounced in. Belmont offered me his hand again, the same cold dry touch. Like shaking hands with an iguana, I thought, even though I’d never done it. I was still on reptiles when the lift deposited me downstairs. No problem with pregnancy there. Just lay an egg and get on with it. Madame Belmont could even have done the sitting.
Outside, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. I know how you feel, I thought, as I stood underneath the outside awning, watching the man of iron being pummelled by a sheet of rain. Fat lot of use his thunderbolt. Needless to say I had no umbrella. Back inside I called a taxi and wondered what to do next.
Mild schizophrenia took over. If Belmont’s story was correct then I had just fallen down the longest snake on the board. All I had to look forward to was a plane ride home and a week throwing the dice to get the six I needed to start playing again. So much for schizo. Phrenia, on the other hand, had other ideas. According to her a story was only a story until it was verified by at least one other source. And since Devieux was airborne—a good deal too coincidentally for my liking—and Cerberus clearly wasn’t the gossiping type, that meant tracking down Madame Belmont to hear her version of English companionship and fertility. It was just a question of finding out where to look.
The girl at the reception desk told me my car had arrived. I picked up my bag and left Belmont Aviation behind. Outside it was still lashing down. I wondered how much it would cost to take the cab all the way back to Paris, but after last night I didn’t have the chutzpah to charge it to Miss Patrick. I gave him the name of the railway station and sat back and watched the rain.
CHAPTER TEN
I’ve always been a great believer in free will over destiny. I mean even if you fuck it up occasionally, making your own decisions has to be preferable to the idea that it’s all been agreed already and you’re just playing out the moves in someone else’s game plan. So I’d like to think of what happened next as an example of positive nihilism; an act that had absolutely no meaning except what others, or in this particular case, I, chose to get out of it.
The car must have been parked in front of us all along. You’d think I would have registered a shiny black limo big enough to sublet, but it was pissing down, I was worried about my suit, and I had just decided to stop being a detective for a while. But even I couldn’t miss the sight of the entourage that now emerged from the Belmont foyer. First came a security guard holding a huge black umbrella. He walked to the back door of the limo and stood there, umbrella poised above his head, waiting. Then came another man, hidden behind a hat and wielding another equally large umbrella. He positioned himself outside the foyer door. For a moment nothing else happened. It looked like a freeze frame before a musical sequence bursts into action: Americans in Paris dancing in the rain. Alas, the star of the show couldn’t hoof it. He was a little too old. But he certainly wasn’t an invalid. In fact for a man who just fifteen minutes before couldn’t get up to shake hands he was pretty nifty on his feet. He was wearing a smart black raincoat, belted, with the collar turned up and an even smarter trilby. It took him maybe thirty seconds to make the journey from the door to the car with his henchmen providing a roof of umbrellas to save him from the smallest raindrop, and during that time nobody else either entered or left the building. I got the impression that the rest of the staff were all lined up behind the glass doors watching him go, like the servants at Manderley wishing goodbye to the master. No doubt Mrs Danvers was even now ordering them back to their posts.
The door to the limo slammed shut, leaving the security guard standing in the rain. The show was over. I was so busy wondering when to applaud I almost missed the next act. In front of me the taxi driver had been equally mesmerized. Now the spell broke.
‘Where d’you say you were going?’ he asked over his shoulder, as the limo started its engine and signalled to pull out from the forecourt.
You will, I hope, forgive me if I admit to a certain shiver of vocational pleasure at my next remark. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Follow that car.’
Of course, it was touch and go. I mean he could have told me that he didn’t do stunt work, or asked to see the colour of my money before showing me his finesse with the gears. In my experience taxi drivers are a bit like first dates, either they work out, or they’re an unmitigated disaster. Still, after last night I deserved a romantic break. He shot me a fast frowning glance and said with more than a hint of professional pride, ‘Do you want it obvious, or shall I keep my distance?’
‘Keep your distance,’ I said, trying to make it sound like the sort of decision I made every day. ‘That is, if you can do it.’ He offered me up the kind of look which a Frenchman reserves for legless frogs, swung back to the wheel and let out the clutch.
The first ten minutes or so went strictly according to the movies. The limo was so large and so fast that it didn’t have to boast and it took the cruise through the industrial zone at a quiet pace. Monsieur cabbie, who had evidently seen the same films as I had, lit up a cigarette and relaxed back into his seat, keeping at an easy distance. The zone ended on the outskirts of Roissy. Left took you back into town, right was signposted to the autoroute. The limo turned right and started to pick up speed.
The autoroute sorted out the men from the rally drivers. The limo slid straight into the fast lane and never looked back. The gap between us widened. In the back I could feel the palms of my hands getting moist. The taxi driver moved into the middle, wound down his window and tossed away the cigarette butt. Then he put his foot down. For the first few minutes I still thought we were going to lose him. But for a little car it had a big engine and gradually the distance between us began to diminish. I wondered vaguely about a speed limit, and how an important businessman such as Belmont would probably like to be seen as someone who upheld the law, in little ways at least. Anyway, why should he rush? He didn’t know he was being chased. The gap between us was constant now, the limo well within our sights. The French countryside zipped past looking much like any other landscape in fast forward. I felt a certain exhilaration at the smell of the chase and the pleasure of a cliché come true. We’d been going for another few minutes and had just passed the turn-off for Charles de Gaulle airport when I first thought about the meter.
The big hand was already reading 197 francs and the little dial on the right was whizzing round fit to bust. I had a sudden horrible thought, too horrible to share with the cab driver. I slid my handbag on to my knee and felt inside for my wallet. I had cashed a hundred pounds at the airport, but it had been a lousy rate and I had intended to change more at a bank in town today. One hundred minus yesterday’s c
abs, lunch, drinks and my half of dinner must have come to at least fifty-five. I fingered through the notes. Delacroix’s revolutionary flag-carrier flashed her breasts at me, four times. Four hundred francs. Plus some small change, which I was too frightened to count lest he hear me from the front and realize the problem. I looked back at the clock: 215 and rising. Funny how you never come across this one in the movies. In front of us the limo was cruising confidently. What had the first taxi driver told me that morning in Roissy? While other tycoons live close to the office Belmont goes where his work force is. Oh Christ.
I timed the meter against the second hand of my watch. The centimes positively raced by. At 150 kph we were clocking up nearly a pound a minute. At this rate in less than twenty minutes I would run out of money. Great. How come everyone else’s classic moments were always my most shabby? I began rehearsing an eloquent little speech about personal cheques and the value of the English pound, while the meter spun round in joyful abandon. We were hovering on 300 when the driver cursed and braked swiftly. I looked up in time to register the limo cutting across us ahead of us into the far right lane and signalling its intention to take the next slip road. A sign flashed by announcing a place beginning with S, but I couldn’t make out any more. Wherever it is, please God make it close to the autoroute.
The rain had turned to drizzle now. The taxi driver cut into the slow lane four or five cars behind. Sure enough, the limo took the right fork off the autoroute. We followed, but at a distance. For the first time since I had started practising maths I noticed the countryside. It was flat, with long rolling fields, and pockets of quite dense forestation against the horizon. The taxi driver pulled back; we were the only cars on the road now and to be too close would only draw attention to ourselves. The road curved and we lost the limo in the folds of the hedgerows. I went back to the clock: 347 and rising steadily. We slowed right down to take a sharp descending bend, passing a small stone cottage, half derelict, on the left and a sturdy handsome farmhouse opposite, all coloured bricks and freshly painted shutters. And then, as we came out of the long curve a pair of iron gates flashed by on the right with a glimpse of a long gravel road and a large building at the end of it. The road ahead was straight for the next fifty, maybe hundred yards, but the limo was nowhere to be seen. The driver put his foot down and we ate up the gap between us and the edge of the immediate horizon. Another long slice of road greeted us, dipping and meandering, but still visible and still deserted. He slammed on the brakes, said something deeply disparaging about the Virgin Mary and did a three point turn in two.
Twenty yards before the iron gates he stopped again and turned to me, glancing at the meter on his way round. It was flashing a triumphant 368. ‘You want to get out here or do you want me to wait for you?’ he asked abruptly and the half-naked French women in my bag shivered in anticipation. Fuck it, I thought, I don’t know.
‘How far is it to the nearest town?’
He grunted. ‘Senlis? Three, maybe four kilometres.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Look, I’ve got four hundred francs in my bag. If you waited for me, just for a few moments, then drove me there would I still have enough money to pay you?’
He stared at me for a moment then said darkly. ‘And what would you have done if the meter had said 410 now?’
I smiled. ‘I suppose I would have got out 10 francs ago.’
He shrugged his shoulders in one of those extravagant, irrefutably French gestures which bad English actors love to copy. And then he laughed. Thank God for the Second World War, I thought. Who says history doesn’t count? ‘OK, I wait. But you make it quick. And’—I was halfway out of the door already—‘you leave your handbag here.’
Even seen at a distance through the gates it was the kind of house which made you understand why the French had had a revolution. It wasn’t so much its size as its arrogance. Look at me, it said with utter confidence, aren’t I more beautiful than the landscape? And so it was: perfect symmetry and a simplicity of elegance that was dazzling. I counted ten windows on the top floor and four from the top down to the bottom. What did they do, the Belmonts—rotate slowly through the year, or keep the odd wing in splendid Miss Haversham-type decay? Certainly the place looked deserted, and but for the limo, lying like a large well-groomed black cat near the doorstep, you might have been fooled into thinking there was no one at home. What would happen if I creaked open the gates and crunched my way up the gravel to the big front door? Having come so far, would he really refuse to let me see her?
I put my hand up to the gate, to see if some faithful old retainer would come shuffling out from a concealed gatehouse to take my calling card. I rattled the lock. The retainer, it turned out, had friends. They came bounding out from the bushes to the left of the house, yelping and yowling, three streaks of black pedigree muscle built out of the French equivalent to Alpo and the odd leg of trespasser. I forced myself to walk and not run back to the car. Inside, the driver started the engine. In the mirror I watched him trying to keep a straight face.
Senlis took ten minutes. I was too busy with the meter to give it a lot of attention, but the square where he dropped me was old and cobbled, though the vehicles more Renault than Jean de Florette. The clock read 427 francs. I counted out the four notes and then added three ten-franc coins that had grown warm in my palm as I clutched them over the last mile or so. He took the money and looked at it. Then up at me. ‘Is this it?’
I registered a small ripple of panic. ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I only had four hundred francs and some coins. Unless you’re willing to drive me to a bank and wait while I try to cash some foreign notes, that’s all I have.’
He made a face and pocketed the notes. Then he gave me back the three coins. ‘You might need to buy yourself a coffee while you wait for the bank to open,’ he said, grinning broadly. He started the engine. ‘Oh, and if you want to find the house again, tell the taxi driver you’re looking for the Belmont château, near Villemetrie. Everyone knows it.’ And he chuckled to himself as he pulled away into the traffic. I looked down at the three coins in my hand and thought idly about what could have been the bus fare from Roissy to Senlis. ‘Hannah, my darling,’ Frank’s voice said in my left ear, ‘how many times have I told you, expenses are expensive and there’s usually a cheaper way to get what you want.’ Oh, get stuffed Frank, I said out loud as I turned and started looking for the bank.
By lunchtime I had money in my purse and a place to stay. More a guesthouse than a hotel, but clean, quiet and cheap enough to assuage my conscience about a hundred quid frittered away on meals and a taxi cab. I called the hotel in Paris and told them if they needed the room they could have it. I would be back in a day or so to pick up my things. Then I followed the landlady of the pension up ever-narrowing stairs to the top of the house. From my window I could see a pattern of old roofs rising up to the spire of the cathedral. Exquisite. I told her so. She nodded approvingly and hovered behind me in the doorway. I used it as an excuse for conversation. I asked her about local colour and historic houses and it didn’t take long to get on to Villemetrie and the lovely château hidden behind green gates. Oh yes, everyone knew the Belmont estate. Built in the mid seventeenth century it had belonged to minor aristocracy whose descendants had survived the guillotine only to go slightly batty through inbreeding. Belmont had bought it twenty years ago and gradually refurbished it, room by room, back to its former glory. That much was civic knowledge; but not much else. The Belmonts, it seemed, were not a sociable couple, especially the new Madame. She kept herself very much to herself, except for the times when she was in Paris buying her way through the department stores. Senlis was evidently too small and too provincial for her. She delivered this information with a certain curl of the lip. Two hundred years after the revolution the nouveau riche, it seemed, were no more democratic than the old first estate. So much for politics, what about transport?
Three p.m. saw me out on the road to Villemetrie, my skirt tucked up under the s
addle and my bag, with a bottle of wine and a baguette, clipped to the back panier. It was not the kind of model to tour France in, but the gradients were gentle and according to Madame, who had hired it to me for the day, it had been around long enough to know the roads of its own accord. In the old days, she said, like an advert for the French tourist board, people had cycled everywhere, and the countryside was better for it. After the first couple of kilometres I stopped feeling like something out of the French resistance and got into my stride. Even the physical activity felt good after so many days spent grubbing around in the inner recesses of my brain. The rain had long stopped and the sun had come out. Some way outside town I had to stop to take off my jersey. Thanks to the destruction of the ozone layer the air was definitely too warm for March, but as a Friend of the Earth I was able to take pleasure from it without being crippled by guilt. I passed two other cyclists on the way, an old man and a younger woman with a baby on her back. We greeted each other with a wave. For a while I saw no one. I began to feel as if I were travelling through time. Maybe when I arrived at the Belmont château I would be met by aristocrats in shepherdess gowns playing at poverty, and Carolyn Hamilton would be just a memory in the future. Carolyn Hamilton, my client’s adopted daughter: a young dancer who had pirouetted off a river bank with a baby inside her struggling to get out. The mystery. The reason I was here. I had not thought of her since this morning and already this morning seemed a long time ago. Now, as a form of discipline, I imagined myself following in her footsteps, whistling down country lanes to the sound of French crickets and the occasional carrion crow. Had she been happy here? For how long? And whose seed did she have sprouting in the summer sun? Maybe I was riding on the edge of an answer. I could almost feel it, ripe in the bushes of the Belmont estate, waiting to be plucked. The road dipped and the bicycle flew towards the bottom of the hill. If there was ever a moment of invincibility it was now.
