Murder on French Leave

by Anne Morice

  ‘What bit of knowledge?’

  ‘Oh, simply that the alibis for Mrs Baker’s murder are only half the story. It would be just as important to know what all our suspects were doing when old Vishna died. I think Ellen has grasped that, and I do so wish I’d thrashed it out with her, instead of trying to bury it out of sight.’

  ‘I wish you’d tell me what you’re on about, Tessa?’

  So I reminded him of Ellen’s remark when we were leaving the concert and how it tied in with Mrs Baker’s distraught mood when I met her a few days later.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry too much about that,’ he said. ‘Ellen is rather given to dramatic pronouncements and I daresay this was just such another. Even if it did have some factual basis, nothing could ever be proved, one way or the other. The old man’s body was flown home the very next morning and we know what happens to Hindus when they die. So whatever Ellen saw, or imagined she saw, she’s no real danger to them. I think you’re the one they’re scared of and my own hunch is that Jonathan’s to blame for that. It would never surprise me if he claimed you had actually solved the case. Very childish, of course, but you never know whose guilty conscience may have been at work to persuade someone it was true.’

  ‘It’s not all that childish, though, Robin. The fact is that I really have come up with some theories about the murder and, what’s more, I think they provide the answer. I had meant to tell you about it, naturally, but I only hit on the solution today, and now this business of Ellen has changed everything. The trouble is, you see, that I have none of what the police would call proof. The best that could happen, if they took me seriously, is that they’d go dumping off in all directions, hammering on doors and asking a lot of more or less pertinent questions. The murderer would get the wind up, guess who was responsible and probably take it out on Ellen. I couldn’t risk it.’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,’ Robin said, ‘but obviously it doesn’t include the concept of Dr Müller as the murderer.’

  ‘No, and I can’t believe that you include it, either; not after that telephone call. That made it quite clear that the murderer is still very much alive. However, I’m all for letting them believe they’ve fooled everyone with Dr Müller’s fake suicide, at any rate until Ellen is safely back. After that, if they’ve kept their word, I shan’t care what happens. They can wipe out half the population of France before they’ll hear a squeak out of me.’

  Robin was looking thoughtful: ‘All the same, Tess, I think you should tell me a little about these inflammable theories. It’s just possible they could point to a way of getting Ellen safely back, without quite such drastic consequences.’

  ‘And I know you’d be the one to find it,’ I said, ‘but I’ll only tell you if you give your solemn word not to pass it on to the police.’

  ‘You have my solemn word,’ he replied.

  So then I told him, and he looked more thoughtful than ever.

  (v)

  In asserting so positively that breaking my contract was a mere triviality in this crisis, I had been a little less than frank and quite a lot holier than me. The truth was that, had I still possessed a heart to be broken, this would have been the thing to do it, and the unforeseen patience and friendliness which, from the producer downwards, they had all shown me made it even harder to bear. The thought of all the trouble and expense I should be putting them to was a bitter pill and the fact that I should have felt almost as treacherous if my non-existent appendix had really been to blame was no consolation at all.

  None of this altered by one jot the conviction that Ellen’s safety was the vital factor, but it did add the last small drop to my sadness and sense of failure. No doubt sensing this, Robin advised me to relax and get a few hours’ sleep. I protested that I not only could not, but would not contemplate such a thing. To indulge myself in that way, with Ellen alone and possibly scared, would have been the worst betrayal of all. He refrained from pointing out that lying awake all night would bring no comfort to her, but patiently suggested that I should need all my wits about me the following day, when a little quick thinking might prove crucial. This was unanswerable and I compromised by saying that I would lie down for a few hours, though confident I should never be able to close my eyes. With a little help from Jonathan, I almost managed not to.

  It was around one o’clock when the doorbell rang. Robin turned over, swearing as he woke, then sat bolt upright; but I was halfway across the room by that time, heading for the hall.

  When I saw him through the peephole, I was tempted to creep away and leave him there, but he looked so wild and farouche, with a red scratch down one side of his face and red blotches on the other, that I was afraid he might alarm the neighbours by trying to break the door down.

  ‘Where’s Ellie?’ he demanded, in his usual pretty way, as I opened the door.

  ‘Not here. Did you expect her to be?’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I was hoping you might tell me. You’d better come inside before we wake the whole building. It’s long past midnight, in case you didn’t know.’

  He followed me into the salon and pushed some of the hair out of his eyes.

  ‘Where is she?’ he said again.

  ‘We don’t know. I thought I’d made that clear. I’ll explain in a minute, but first I want to hear a few things from you. When did you last see or speak to Ellen, and where was she at the time?’

  Robin joined us at this point and took over the interrogation. In his expert hands, even the mulish Jonathan became as putty, and we got the whole story in under half an hour. The fact that it added nothing relevant to what we already knew did not lessen the achievement.

  He told us that he had spent the night alone in the Rue des Quatre Pigeons and, having overslept, was awakened by his stepfather arriving home in a taxi. Not wishing for a confrontation, he had pulled the bedclothes over his head. A short while later he had heard the front door slam and had nipped out of bed and over to the window, just in time to see Sven crossing the courtyard, with a small suitcase in his hand.

  He had then dressed and made himself some breakfast, and while eating it had tried to telephone Ellen; but Lupe had answered and he couldn’t get any sense out of her.

  Unaware that Ellen had gone to the airport, he had set off in search of her, in drug-stores and various other haunts which they both frequented. During this odyssey he had tried a couple more times to call our number, but there was no reply. Concluding, with sublime egocentricity, that the only conceivable reason for this was that Ellen was trying to avoid him, he had become deeply depressed. Moreover, at various stops along the way he had paused to down a reviving rum and Coca-Cola. At his last port of call he had run into some acquaintances, who, hearing of his plight, had endeavoured to cheer him up with several more of the same.

  Since it was by then late afternoon and he had eaten nothing but a few spoonfuls of cereal since the previous evening, he began to feel somewhat peculiar and had eventually weaved his way back to the Quatre Pigeons, more or less stoned.

  On arrival, he found that his mother had returned from the country and was in a flat spin about something or other, although he hadn’t the energy to find out what it was. When she saw the condition he was in she became more incensed than ever and had commanded him to go soak his head in cold water; but he had explained that he first of all had to make an urgent telephone call to his friend Ellie. Whereupon she had struck him across the face and locked him in the bathroom, where he had promptly passed out on the floor.

  He could not tell what time it was when he came to because his watch had stopped, but it was already dark. He strained his ears, but could hear no sound at all, not even the dogs yapping, and concluded that he was alone in the flat. Stiff as a board and drenched in self-pity, with a splitting head, he had lain for some while hopeless and inert on the floor. Then he remembered that the bathroom cupboard contained cures for at least some of his ills and he had got up and mixed himself
a fizzy drink. This so far revived him that he was able to take stock of his situation and formulate plans for getting out of it.

  The window was high up and tiny, but the bathroom was on the ground flowed he reckoned that if he could squeeze through he would only have a few feet to fall. He managed to break the glass with a tin of scouring powder, but did not make a very neat job of it, leaving a jagged rim round the frame, which he could not gouge out, and on the first attempt to crawl through had scratched his face. It was not a deep cut, but it bled ferociously and so he had to retreat inside again, to mop himself up and apply disinfectant. He had wrapped his head in a bath-towel for the second attempt, and this one was successful.

  It was only after he had picked himself up, crammed the towel back through the window and was making for the street that he realised that the afternoon’s debauchery had cleaned him out, and that he did not even possess the price of a telephone call. It also dawned on him that he was mad with hunger.

  Moody, but still not entirely bowed, he had trudged off towards the centre of Paris, then over a bridge to the Left Bank. He had staggered round in the area of Boulevard St Michel for what seemed like hours, scanning the bars and cafés as he went. The quest this time was not rum and coke, but any sympathetic acquaintance who might be prevailed upon to underwrite him for a sandwich and a métro ticket, if not a bed for the night, but it met with no success.

  I considered that, even allowing for a little exaggeration, this saga showed a lot more guts and enterprise than I had formerly associated with Jonathan, and at this point in the narrative I left the room to knock up some bacon and eggs. So I missed the concluding paragraphs, which Robin told me later amounted to little more than that, catching sight of the Sorbonne clock and finding it was past midnight, he had decided to throw himself on our mercy. To which end he had slogged the two miles over to Suffren.

  Robin was doing the talking when I returned and, watching Jonathan intently as he waded into the bacon and eggs, he gave him a factual account of Ellen’s kidnapping, plus the conditions which had been imposed for her release.

  It was difficult to judge Jonathan’s reactions, because he kept his head bent over the plate and his hair hung forward, shielding his face like a thick black curtain. It was noticeable, however, that his ravenous appetite was soon sated and after a while he abandoned the pretence of eating and pushed the tray aside. If Robin noticed it, too, he ignored it and launched into a brief account of Dr Müller’s suicide. He added that it was doubtless the shock and distress brought on by this event which had caused Adela to behave so harshly. I imagine that his move in putting all these cards on the table was to jerk some response out of Jonathan, which would reveal whether or not he knew more about Ellen’s disappearance than he pretended; but, if so, it failed completely, for he did not utter a word.

  Probably the most practical thing would have been to give him Ellen’s room, but this would have been tantamount to admitting that I had abandoned all hope of her returning that night and this, although dawn was only a few hours away, I obstinately refused to do. So we got out all the pillows and wraps which Lupe had tidied away, and once more went through the laborious process of making up a bed on the floor. Jonathan made no attempt to help us, but sat like a lump on the sofa, legs apart, elbows on knees, and his chin cupped in his hands, still in stony silence.

  ‘Poor chap’s completely whacked,’ Robin said indulgently, when we were back in our own room. ‘He doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.’

  He wasn’t the only one. I flopped on my bed, checked with my travelling clock on the number of hours still to be got through before daylight, and in two minutes was fast asleep.

  Eleven

  I could tell by the level of the sun streaming in at the window that it was around eight o’clock when I woke up, and I lay still for a few more minutes, wondering what it was that I was so unhappy about. When I had got that sorted out, I rose and began to attend to some of the rest. There was oceans of time because Lupe was not due for another two hours, but any activity was preferable to wilting away under the sickening sense of defeat and apprehension.

  I found both passports and put Ellen’s in an envelope, with a covering note addressed to Cook’s. The only thing needed before sealing it down was five hundred francs in cash, and I found that my purse did not contain even half this amount. Robin was still asleep and it would have been pointless to wake him, for he had unloaded practically all his French money on to me, before leaving for the airport.

  This small setback, coming so early in the proceedings, almost threw me, for there is nothing a French bank hates so much as parting with cash. There was little chance of their doing so, were Lupe to present my cheque, and with my acute appendicitis I could hardly take it to them in person. Luckily, just before the last frail thread of self-control snapped in two, I recollected the emergency hoard in the sideboard drawer.

  For purposes of burglar thwarting, it was kept in a chocolate box among the packs of cards and scrabble board, and except at weekends when we regularly exceeded our budget, it normally contained a fairly tidy sum.

  In my impatience to get at it, I had no compunction in disturbing Jonathan, which was just as well because when I entered the salon he was not there.

  It was a grisly scene, with the plate of congealed bacon and eggs still on the table, and the pillows and sheets, my velvet wrap and a pair of Robin’s pyjamas all scrumpled up together on the floor. I turned my back on it and concentrated on the sideboard. The chocolate box was in place and also the notebook in which I methodically entered each deposit and withdrawal. I do not quite know why I did this, except that it made me feel businesslike and efficient, but I was apt to be fanatical about it. On this occasion the system paid off, in a sense, because only a glance was needed to show that the box should have contained four hundred and three francs; and a second one brought the news that it actually contained precisely two hundred.

  ‘Does Lupe know where you keep it?’ Robin asked, when I had stumbled back to the bedroom to apprise him of this outrage.

  ‘Of course she does. She uses it for the shopping, but she always gives me an account of every penny. Ellen does the same. They both know all about my obsession. You know what I think?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘I think that fiendish little Jonathan took it.’

  ‘Oh, would he do a thing like that?’

  ‘You bet he would. I expect he’s seen Ellen taking money for the movies and so on, and he told us himself he was cleaned out.’

  ‘Well, if he did borrow it, I’m sure he’ll bring it back as soon as the banks open.’

  Privately, I was of the opinion that he was more likely to squander the lot on rum and coke, but fortunately the situation was not desperate. Robin unearthed a fifty-franc note, which he had kept back for the duty-free shop, and by pooling our resources we were able to scrape up the required amount, with exactly two francs over. If the driver or wheel-chair attendant expected a tip, it was going to be just too bad.

  Lupe arrived punctually, and with her the last faint hope of waking from this nightmare oozed away. She had found only one letter in our box and it contained the doctor’s certificate. The practitioner’s name, Dr Mathieu Baudouin, was printed at the top, over an address in Neuilly, and the typed message declared that, in the opinion of the sous-signé, the patient was unfit for work and in need of urgent surgical attention. As a matter of fact, the sous-signature consisted of three dashes, two vertical and one horizontal, but perhaps legibility in that context would have been even more suspect.

  I gave Lupe the Cook’s envelope and, on Robin’s advice, explained that I was obliged to go to London for a few days, for health reasons, but that we wished her to carry on as usual, since Monsieur would remain in residence. Her obstetrical obsessions came in handy at this point, because she immediately began to treat me with the veneration usually reserved for the Virgin Mary, and thereafter tumbled over herself to gratify my every whim.
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  ‘Did you remember to tell the office downstairs that we had changed the locks?’ Robin asked, when she had departed.

  ‘No. At least, I did try once, but there was no one there and then I forgot all about it. Is it important?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Oh Lord! I’m awfully sorry. What can I do?’

  ‘Very important indeed,’ he said, giving me a hug. ‘In fact, it’s the most constructive bit of forgetting you’ve ever done. Now, come on, what about those telephone calls? It would be best to appear to be doing everything according to the book.’

  ‘Not just appear to; actually do so.’

  ‘Well yes, that may apply to you, but I consider myself a relatively free agent.’

  ‘Very relative, remembering your solemn oath. You’re not up to anything, are you?’

  ‘No, you’ll be relieved to hear that my policy is to keep well in the background. I still feel that we have a slight edge in that they don’t know I’m in Paris and that we might somehow turn it to our advantage.’

  ‘Very well, I’ve no objection to that,’ I said, picking up the telephone, to put those clogged wheels in motion for a call to London.

  The difficulties proved surmountable for once, and I had two unforeseen strokes of luck, as a bonus. My agent was so flabbergasted by my request and so choked with rage by my refusal to spend a couple of nights at the Anglo-American hospital and get the whole matter tidied up with a few injections that after the initial outburst she could hardly bring herself to speak at all. Had my life really been in danger from acute appendicitis, I might have found her attitude a trifle heartless, but as it was I could only be grateful for her brief and surly responses.

  By the time I got through to my doctor’s number, he was out on his calls, so all I had to do was spell out the message to his secretary. Not a word had been spoken by anyone concerned which could not safely have been overheard by the enemy.