by Katie Penryn
We strolled down to the Esplanade for some fresh air and to walk the dogs. Jimbo made a half hearted attempt to build a sand castle on the beach, but he wasn’t in a holiday mood. Nor were we. Even a stop at one of the pavement cafés for a quick lunch and an ice cream didn’t shake us out of our fit of the miseries.
As we dragged our way back to the house a sleek red sports car, its throttles chortling, zoomed past us and pulled up inches away from the sea wall at the end of the road.
“Who on earth was that?” said Jimbo breaking into a run to have a look at the car.
“I’ve never seen that car before,” said Gwinny.
“Must be someone with a bit of dosh” was Sam’s comment as he sped up to catch up with Jimbo.
A well-dressed young woman in a tailored white linen summer frock with high heeled sandals to match climbed out of the car. Her pale blond hair was swept up under a turquoise straw hat with a wide brim.
“Hello,” she said.
I couldn’t see the color of her eyes for the sunglasses she was wearing.
Gwinny jabbed me in the side. “It’s her.”
“Who?” I whispered back.
The stranger said, “Isabella Tointon,” in a fluting voice and held out her hand. “Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for Mpenzi Munro. I understand she lives in this end house?”
Even I knew who Isabella Tointon was, only one of the richest and most successful film stars in the world.
“I’m Mpenzi,” I answered taking her hand.
I liked her immediately. Her handshake was firm, her manner friendly, and I was already a fan of her talent and success.
As I dropped her hand I said, “Would you like to come into the house out of the heat and you can tell me why you’re looking for me.”
She nodded gracefully and followed Gwinny and me into the house. I left Sam and Jimbo outside drooling over the car. She looked back at them and laughed. “Typical boys.”
I led her into the kitchen, and she sat down at the table as if she was at home there. She didn’t have any false airs and graces. As I’ve said, I liked her.
Gwinny fussed about fetching us all a glass of lemonade. For one moment I thought she wouldn’t be able to hold it together. When I used the word fridge she trembled and grabbed hold of the back of a chair to steady herself.
Isabella took off her gorgeous hat, shook out her hair and placed the hat behind her on the counter.
“Don’t want anyone to sit on it,” she laughed softly.
I waited for her to take a few sips of the cool drink before I asked her why she wanted me.
“It’s a long story—”
“What is?” Jimbo shouted out as he and Sam came bounding into the kitchen, followed by the dogs who made a beeline for Isabella and her pristine white dress.
I called them off but Isabella said, “No, let them be. They can probably smell my dogs. I have three wonderful Labradors, two black and one golden.”
After I had pointed out to Jimbo that his entrance had been less than polite and he had apologized, I asked Isabella to continue with her story.
“As you may know, my husband and I bought a château near here last month.”
Everyone in the world must have known they were looking to settle in France. It had been in all the newspapers and gossip mags. But I hadn’t known they had selected Beaucoup-sur-mer.
“Yes,” said Gwinny, gazing in awestruck wonder at this vision of movie fame sitting in our kitchen.
“Last week,” Isabella went on after another sip of lemonade, “we held a house warming party for a few good friends and a group of local dignitaries. At some point in the party a gatecrasher, who had drunk far too much, picked up a brass doorstop and hurled it at one of our antique mirrors smashing it to pieces. Of course, he’s the one who’s going to have seven years’ bad luck, but we’re left with an empty gilded frame and a large mark on the wall in the hall.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I don’t see where I come in.”
“I’ve come from lunch with Monsieur Bonhomie, the mayor. He told me you have an antiques shop. He said it has been closed up for several years but the stock is still there. He said I stood a good chance of finding a mirror to replace mine. I thought it was worth the chance as I was already in town.”
“Oh dear. We only arrived a couple of days ago.”
Sam kicked me under the table and I shook my head at him. I hadn’t been going to say anything about the murder. “Don’t be fooled by the orderly state of this house. That’s down to Gwinny.”
And I indicated her. She and Isabella smiled at each other.
Gwinny took her cue. “I didn’t even open the doors of the brocante.”
“Even better,” said Isabella. “It’ll be like a treasure hunt. First explorers for years. Goodness knows what we’ll find. Could we have a look?”
“Gwinny, do we have the keys?”
“They may be in that old box in the study, the one with the brass corners. I left it alone because I thought it was filled with your father’s private things. Shall I look?”
Jimbo bounced off his chair. “I’ll look. This is exciting.”
And he was gone to return a minute later holding up a bunch of filigree iron keys.
“All right then, everybody,” I said taking possession of the keys. “Shall we investigate?”
We shut the dogs in the house and made our way round to the high carriage doors facing the road at the front. There was no way we were going through the back yard. As we did so, a buffed up young man in jeans and white T-shirt pushed himself off the wall of the brocante. He ran his fingers through his dark blond hair cut en brosse. Satisfied with his coiffure, he lifted up his aviators and checked us all out.
As I inserted the key in the door of the brocante Gwinny nudged me and whispered, “That man is too close. Be careful. He’s following us.”
Isabella heard her and chuckled. “Sorry he scared you, Gwinny. That’s my bodyguard, Garth Jones. I’m too big a target for kidnappers to travel about on my own. He’s ex-SAS,” she added giving him a friendly knuckle punch on his tattooed bicep.
He grinned back but corrected her. “Threat management expert, not bodyguard, Mrs Tointon.”
Isabella winked at me, one girl to another.
I returned my attention to the key which refused to turn. Years of dirt and the rusting effect of the sea air had clogged up the lock. Isabella beckoned to Garth and he yanked the key round, but still it wouldn’t turn.
Garth tutted. “It doesn’t need muscle. It needs a bit of magic.”
Jimbo gave me a funny look and whispered, “Magic?”
Garth crossed the road in giant strides and opened the trunk of his car. He ferreted around and drew out a tin of WD40.
“What’s good enough for the astronauts is good enough for us.”
A quick squirt and the lock surrendered, yielding to the key. A mighty tug from Garth’s powerful biceps and the huge door creaked and groaned until it was open all the way out over the pavement and pinned back against the front wall. Sam and Jimbo tugged the other half open.
The shop window Sam and I remembered stood before us with a second lock. Another squirt of engineering magic and the smallest key on the bunch turned this lock with no trouble and we were in.
We stood in a tight group inside the door staring into the gloom at the chaotic mountains of dust cloth shrouded heaven-knows-what.
“Lights?” asked Garth.
“Haven’t a clue,” I answered. “You try to the right and Sam, you go to the left. Don’t anyone else move.”
Gusts of dust floated up as the men crossed the floor feeling for the lights. Soon we were all coughing and choking.
“Are you sure you want to continue?” I asked Isabella.
She gave a deep-throated chuckle. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for the world. It’s the most fun I’ve had for ages.”
Two strip lights clicked on revealing the thick layer of ancient dust lying ever
ywhere. Amputated spiders’ legs and flies’ wings sprinkled the top like hundreds and thousands. Another click and several chandeliers lit up.
Jimbo ran forward before I could stop him and tugged at the first dustsheet to hand. Clouds of dust billowed up into the air diffusing the light and sending us all out onto the pavement choking.
“Jimbo, come here,” I yelled.
He emerged from the cloud like a sepia ghost clutching an old newspaper. Sam grabbed it off him holding it high above his head so Jimbo couldn’t snatch it back.
“Give it here. Give it back,” Jimbo shouted, but Sam retreated to the sea wall to look at his booty.
“Hey,” he called out. “This paper’s dated 1941. Do you think it’s been here for over seventy years?”
We all shrugged. How could we tell? Perhaps someone had left the paper there later. Perhaps it was an antique itself.
Isabella finished banging the dust off her dress and shook her hair. “The mayor told me this brocante had not been open during his lifetime and he’s about fifty-five. So it’s been here at least that long.”
“Wow!” Jimbo’s eyes were as wide as moons. “All this stuff must be ancient.”
“Shall we call it a day?” I asked everyone, raising my eyebrows at Isabella in particular.
“Certainly not,” she said. “We’re all filthy now, anyway. I suggest we pull all these sheets off — carefully so as not to disturb the dust too much. Slide rather than tug.”
“Yeah, man,” Jimbo shouted running back into the shop and making for the next shape. For the next twenty minutes we tugged and pulled and sneezed and snorted until we had all the dustsheets piled up in rough bundles on the pavement outside. Only then did we stop inside the shop and find ourselves gazing at a wonderland of antique furniture, paintings and objets d’art. No one spoke for several minutes as the possible monetary and artistic value of what lay before us registered on our twenty-first century minds.
I was the first to pull myself together. “Back to business, chaps. Take care as you walk around. Don’t knock anything. We’re looking for a large old mirror. How big, Isabella?”
“At least four feet wide by five feet high. And please call me Izzy.”
“Anything that big will be propped against a wall,” said Sam. “We haven’t uncovered the stuff leaning against the walls yet.”
More tugging and a further great billowing of dust laid bare an array of gilded and ornamented mirrors, and countless paintings stacked several deep.
“Izzy and I will edge our way round the room checking out the mirrors while everyone else has a careful look at what else is in here,” I said, taking hold of Izzy’s arm and leading her over to the left-hand wall.
We passed three racks of paintings and two mirrors which were too small. The third mirror was a possibility. Izzy sent Garth out to the car to fetch a tape measure. No, it was not tall enough. On we went. The three of us reached the last mirror on that side. I asked for the tape measure and Garth dropped it into my hand. It was the most splendid mirror I had ever seen with beveling so thick it had to weigh a couple of tons. The frame was twelve inches wide. The gilding was rubbed on one corner to show the cherry wood base. I reached out to test whether it was real gold or paint. A sharp buzzing shot up my arm and I snatched my hand away.
“This one won’t do,” I said.
“Which one?” laughed Izzy. “You’re measuring an old door. Maybe you’re too tired to carry on?”
An old door? Someone here was mad? And it wasn’t me. Mad…or… Oh no! Not that magic stuff again. So there was a magic mirror in the brocante. Possibly? Was I losing my mind?
By the time I had finished my musings, Izzy and Garth had moved on to the right hand wall and were working their way back towards the front.
“Found one, Penzi,” Izzy called across to me. “It’s perfect. Just the right size and just what I want. Come and tell me how much you want for it.”
Stepping gingerly round the piles of furniture, I hurried to join them. I had no idea how much something like that was worth. It could have been genuine Louis XIV for all I knew. It was a handsome piece of work with no silvering, the gilding in good condition.
“Um….” I thought wildly.
One that size would cost about 150 Euros in a designer shop, multiply by three for age. “Let’s say 450 Euros.”
“Don’t be so ridiculous. It’s worth at least five thousand. I’ll give you five thousand. Now, let’s get out of this dust and we’ll talk about payment and delivery,” said Izzy, all businesslike now she had found her heart’s desire.
We moved back into the house and Gwinny made us tea. I accepted Izzy’s check for five thousand Euros. I phoned Monsieur Camion and asked him if he had a van to deliver the mirror to the château.
“Of course,” he said. “And I won’t charge you. I would love a chance to see inside those medieval walls.”
Izzy added, “You must escort them in your own car, Penzi, to make sure everything is all right and we can have tea together. I’ll show you around.”
Jimbo coughed.
“And you can bring Jimbo…and Sam…and Gwinny.”
“Thank you,” they all breathed, happy to socialize with a famous film star.
*
Inspector Dubois phoned in the evening to say that the time of death had been estimated at between midnight and two in the morning although he was still awaiting full results of the autopsy and the toxicology tests. When I asked him, he told me that the woman had not been identified yet.
“Can’t you put a photo in the local newspaper?” I asked him.
“A photo? It would be much too horrific.”
“An artist’s impression then?”
He hummed and hawed for a moment before saying that the mayor had issued instructions that there was to be no publicity for fear of frightening away the tourist trade.
It seemed silly to me. How could one hope to solve a murder if one didn’t know who the victim was?
As I was to find out that didn’t bother anyone least of all Dubois.
Chapter 9
As soon as we had cleared away the breakfast things next morning, we grouped around the kitchen table for a family pow wow. Yes, Gwinny was now sort-of family but I still withheld myself from granting her a daughter’s devotion. Jimbo loved having her around and cries of Mum this and Mum that rang out around the house all day long. Sam, like me, was more reserved.
The topic of the discussion was the brocante. What should we do about it?
We invited Gwinny to offer her suggestions. “The first thing is to clean the place so we can see what is what.”
“Okay, would you draw up a schedule and make a list of the products we need to buy?”
Gwinny nodded.
“Sam?”
“As soon as it’s all clean, we need to establish a preliminary inventory.”
“You make the list on your laptop while the rest of us will help with identifying the objects.”
“Fine.”
I carried on. “I see two main problems. One, we have no idea of the value of the items let alone their provenance. We’ll have to find an expert to help us with that. Two, we need advice on running a business here in France. There might even be inheritance tax issues. I probably broke the law selling the mirror to Isabella — sales tax and so on.”
“You could see the mayor, Monsieur Bonhomie. Isabella likes him.”
I ruffled up Jimbo’s hair, teasing him knowing that he hates me doing that. “Great idea. I’ll make an appointment for next week. That should give us time to knock everything into shape here. Now, who wants to walk into town with me?”
Before anyone could answer a squeal of brakes sounded out on the street. We ran to the window. A police car had pulled up followed by a blue van marked GENDARMES.
“It’s that Dubois again,” said Jimbo as the officer’s tall frame uncoiled itself from the car.
Gwinny uttered one of her soft moans and collapsed back into her ch
air. As I watched Dubois’s official progress, chest puffed out, powerful strides, a presentiment of impending trouble ran down my spine. Now what?
Sam went to open the front door catching Dubois with his hand poised in the air ready to knock. Dubois pushed past Sam and the two gendarmes tagged on behind.
“Where is Madame Munro?” he barked out as he took up position in the hall.
Sam asked, “Do you mean my mother or my sister?”
“Madame Guinivere Munro.”
Gwinny clutched my arm. “What does he want me for?”
I patted her hand. “I’m sure it’s just more questions.”
Sam came back into the kitchen. “Inspector Dubois is here to speak to Gwinny. Shall I tell him he can come in?”
I didn’t have a chance to answer Sam. Dubois was right on his heels.
He gave us a curt nod and a sharp bonjour.
“Yes?” I said.
“I am here to arrest Madame Guinivere Munro on suspicion of the murder of Edna Yardley.”
Gwinny cried out, “No.”
She shrank back into her chair as if that would stop Dubois from taking her away.
“Is that who the murdered woman was, Inspector? This Edna Yardley?” I asked him.
“That is correct. She was identified by her partner early this morning.”
“But Madame Munro doesn’t even know this woman. She didn’t even know her name. Did you Gwinny?” I said turning to Gwinny who was by now on the point of tears.
Gwinny shook her head vigorously unable to speak.
“We have reason to believe differently. Madame Munro had both the means and the opportunity.”
I couldn’t believe that Dubois imagined Gwinny could have carried the victim out into the garden and shoved her into the fridge.
“Just how did Madame Munro manage to carry this Edna Yardley out into the garden and cram her into the fridge, Inspector? Without a fight, moreover.”
Dubois looked down his long nose at me. “The toxicology results show that the victim was drugged with rohypnol.”
