A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  She cycled home in the dusk. It had been so easy. It was going to be easy. She knew now what she was going to do.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Theo and Ariane were walking round the walnut plantations in the late afternoon. They moved in silence under the cage of branches that ribbed the seductively mild blue of the sky.

  Theo was thinking that he knew what had happened to Henri, could guess what had happened to Ariane, but he still didn’t know what had happened to the major. Nikola, Vernhes, Ariane; each had denied killing him. He glanced sideways at his wife, who was absorbed in thought oblivious of where she was. He wondered why he believed them and not her. They had all denied it, yet each wished to have done it. One of them must be lying and have fulfilled the wish.

  Nikola could have left the survivors of his group in safety to return alone. Bonnemort would have been the obvious place for him to have come for news of Henri. But Theo had no difficulty in believing that if he enquired further, among other members of Group Rainbow, he would find Nikola’s story confirmed: that he was miles away on the night of the major’s death, camped beside a fire in the middle of the forest, or tending his wounded comrades in the barn of a friendly farmer.

  Vernhes had good reason to kill, to eradicate a witness to his treachery. He had the ruthlessness and the will. He could have made his way to Bonnemort during the evening, and waited there for the major’s return to complete his plan. The case against him was plausible. But Theo could not convince himself that Vernhes had been the killer. For all his military airs during the liberation, he was a politician, not a soldier; a man who worked from behind the scenes; a puppet master, not a man of action.

  Ariane, in every way the least probable killer, was the most likely suspect. She had been present at Bonnemort; she had motive and ability. Petignat had assumed that the major had been kidnapped somewhere on the road and his body returned to Bonnemort. It was more likely that he had been killed at Bonnemort and his body dragged to its final position in the courtyard. The actual killing place would have been obvious, but Petignat had made no effort to search the area to discover the scene of the murder. She had been given all the time she needed to clean it up. There was no doubt that a woman, or women, could have done the killing, once they had stunned their victim.

  The image of Ariane and Florence in the farmyard, their concerted power in hoisting the sack into the barrow, came back to him. Of course, he thought, they were all in it, all the women, Micheline as well as Florence. He could even imagine the aunts covering up, perjuring themselves if necessary, to save Ariane. His conviction that she had killed the major had revolutionised his understanding of what had happened here. Vernhes had locked her into a relationship with the major; she had been trapped in a situation with no escape.

  He stopped for a moment, and she halted too. The trees stretched in every direction, their lines and rows perfectly accurate, adapting themselves to the folds of the land. The symmetry of the plantations, the wide avenues between the trees, had always pleased him as a child, the imposition of human control on the wildness of the landscape. The spring ploughing beneath the trees had started and ahead he could see where Franco, the Spanish labourer, was turning the oxen at the end of a furrow.

  ‘What sort of person was he, the major?’ he asked.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘What did he look like, what was he like, as a man?’

  ‘He was like … He was a Nazi. Physically, he was not a little runt like Hitler; he was one of the Aryans. Tall, well-built, athletic.’

  Theo heard Petignat echoing and confirming her, ‘… a fine man.’

  ‘… but damaged. He’d lost a hand fighting in Russia and been wounded there as well. As for his psychology, it’s hard to know whether it was his war experiences that affected him, or whether he was always like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Cruel. He had a passion for power. When he arrived, Aunt Odette wanted to believe that he was like the German officers of the First World War. She thought that the French and German officer corps had the same ideals, came from the same backgrounds. She wanted to think that the major was just like you, only German. But he wasn’t. His family lost their estates in Poland in 1918, so he said. His father, who had been wounded in the trenches and was not fit, became a minor bureaucrat in the police service in Bavaria. The son fell for Hitler at school, joined the SS, went to the SS officer school at Bad Tolz and fought in every campaign since 1939: Poland, France, Russia.’

  ‘You know a great deal about him.’

  ‘I know even more, if you’d care to hear it. I know about his mother and sisters, his school friends, about his neighbours, the Jewish family whom he denounced, and about his war in the East. I sat night after night watching him and the lieutenant eat and drink and talk. You learn a lot that way.’

  ‘Was he happy to be in France, sitting at your table, eating your food?’

  ‘No. The lieutenant was. He was glad of the respite. He judged that the time would come again for fighting and he was happy to wait for it. The major was humiliated to be left with the job of rounding up terrorists when his regiment was at the front in Normandy. He was an arrogant, angry, impatient man.’ Her tone was detached, without hatred or affection. ‘I sat with them every evening but I didn’t eat. Did they tell you that? It was a stupid idea. Someone, one of the refugees from Paris, left me a copy of Vercors’ novel The Silence of the Sea. I only remembered it after they had arrived, and I realised that not only had I spoken to them, I had used their language. I had failed to meet the standard of resistance from the first moment. So although I spoke to them, I wouldn’t eat with them. It wasn’t a very good idea, but it was all I could think of.’

  ‘How did they take it?’

  ‘Oh, the major used it to draw a little lesson on French decadence. He was a perverse idealist. I never saw his ideals in action, but I heard enough about duty, faith and honour. He functioned in an abstract universe, because in reality he was entirely without awareness of others. Most people were outside the circle in which his idealism operated, so nothing was due to them. He spoke of Jews and Slavs as if they were diseases to be wiped out to cleanse the world. We French did not quite come into that category, although our persistence in not understanding what was good for us exasperated him. When I think about what he did at Lepech, shooting Henri, hanging the other maquisards, I realise that he was applying a Russian solution to a French problem. It’s what they did all the time over there.’

  ‘Did you see him again, after he told you they were leaving?’

  She sighed, a resigned release of air that at last they had reached the point when she had to tell.

  ‘Yes, but – you must believe me – not alive.’

  ‘Tell me what happened, exactly what happened,’ he repeated. ‘How did you find him? Was he lying in the courtyard where Petignat found him?’ They were walking again, blindly, simply patrolling up and down the avenues of walnut trees.

  ‘No, no he wasn’t.’ She spoke slowly, forcing herself to explain. ‘We put him there.’

  ‘Why did you move him? What was the point?’

  ‘The point was to make it look as if he had been dumped there. We were afraid that they would come back, the Germans, I mean, looking for him, when he failed to meet them. If it were clear that he had been killed here at Bonnemort, there would have been no hope for us. If it appeared that he had been killed somewhere else and brought back here, we might have stood a chance. It wasn’t a very good idea. I don’t suppose it would have fooled them, or that they would have even tried to work out the significance of where he was found. In the end, no one paid any attention to what had happened to him. The Germans had gone for good and Petignat just carted him off and that was that. And we were overwhelmed by Henri’s death.’

  ‘Don’t rush.’ Theo patiently brought her back to the facts. ‘When Micheline and Florence called you, where was he?’

  ‘He was lying on the cliff path. His feet
were uphill, as if he had been dragged that far and then abandoned. We took him up to the courtyard and then cleared up. He had been killed in the winepress, which was like a slaughterhouse. We sluiced it with water. We burned his uniform and the girls’ dresses and my blouse in the fire under the linen boiler.’

  ‘The girls’ dresses? Were the girls there?’

  ‘Yes, they discovered the body in the winepress … They were covered … Look, Theo, I can’t talk any more about this, it was hideous, hideous, I’ve not spoken about it before now, never, we don’t mention it …’

  She was gabbling, out of control. She stopped and turned her face away from him. Theo put his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Anane, I have to know. You must see that. Now that I’ve got this far, I must know the rest.’ He could feel her listening to him. They began to pace again. ‘Let me get this right. The Germans came back for the last time after carrying out the executions in Lepech, loaded up their trucks and left in the middle of the night. I suppose they did so because they had actually been ordered to leave that day, 17 August, and had delayed their departure in order to hang the maquisards, so they had to reach wherever they had to go by first light next day. You say that you heard them leave, but after that you heard nothing and saw nothing else until you were woken by Micheline in the morning.’

  He paused so that the significance of his summary was felt by them both. Finally, he said, ‘Ariane, I don’t believe you. I can’t conceive of anyone settling down to sleep in those circumstances.’

  She made no attempt to convince him.

  ‘What you haven’t told me is whether you went to see him. Did you keep the appointment that he made?’

  Reluctantly, she said, ‘I did.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Involuntarily she saw the false hand that they had found in the corner of the winepress, the cobbles running with blood, the dogs licking the water in the runnels of the drain. ‘Don’t ask, Theo. What I’ve told you is the truth. It’s really too much to describe it. Skip it if you can. It would take me from now to eternity to explain it to you and still you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘If the bit you want to leave out is the story of how you came to be the major’s lover, that’s fine, we’ll skip it. We’ll take it as read that he forced you. Go on from there. What happened when you went to meet him?’

  * * *

  As she waited for the appointed time, she had told herself that she would not go. This was the end and there would be no consequences to fear from now on. She was about to be free. But, although she struggled to persuade herself to stay where she was, she knew that she would go for the last time. She went out of the tower, across the courtyard and down to the winepress, like a bead on a string. The moon was a quarter full, low in the cloudless sky, the stars clear and brilliant, lighting her way with the curious dark brilliance of summer nights. Hating herself, doing what she could not prevent herself from doing, she ran down the path. The doors of the winepress were half-open, so she knew he must be there already, waiting for her. Although she paused for a moment, her hand on the worn wood of the door, sensing his presence, she had no premonition of what she was to find as she pulled open the doors. Her eyes were already accustomed to the dark, and she saw him immediately, stretched out at her feet. It was as if her wishes had been full of power and she had felled him by her thoughts alone.

  Her heart began to race with grief and terror. She had had moments of fear before. When she had hidden in the ditch watching a German patrol pass; when she had been stopped by the Milice and had had to explain her reasons for being out on her bicycle forty kilometres from home; but never had she experienced the terror she felt now. Sweat broke out on her body, turning instantly cold. She crouched down beside him. His eyes were wide open and there was a mark in the centre of his forehead. She passed her hand in front of his eyes; his glassy stare remained fixed on the rock roof of the winepress. She remained beside him for no more than a minute before she closed the doors and raced up the path, back into the house, into her room.

  The question for her was never who killed him, but why hadn’t she done it herself. She should have done. She had every reason to kill him. Why had she gone down to the winepress? He was leaving. What could he do to her? But she had gone. And it had never even occurred to her to kill him.

  * * *

  ‘Was he dead?’ Theo asked.

  ‘Of course he was dead.’

  ‘His throat had been cut. There must have been blood everywhere.’

  ‘No, there was no blood.’

  ‘So he was simply stunned at that stage. Did you listen to his heart, or find a pulse, or put a finger in front of his nostrils?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Do you think he was still alive, and was finished off later?’

  ‘How do you account for the cut throat?’

  ‘I can’t, I don’t. I don’t account for anything.’

  ‘You could tell if he was still alive when you saw him by how much blood he had lost. If he had lost a lot of blood by the time you found him in the morning, he was still alive and the blood was pumped out of the severed artery. If he had not lost much blood, then his heart had already stopped and he had been killed by the blow on the head. Think about how you kill a pig. It has to stay alive for as long as possible, so that the blood pumps out of the body. It’s the difference between Islamic and Jewish butchery and Christian slaughtering practices …’

  ‘Theo, what does it matter whether the blow or the cut killed him? He was dead. If he wasn’t dead then, as I thought, he was certainly dead in the morning.’

  ‘You didn’t think of doing anything for him that night? Helping him, removing him?’

  ‘No.’ She was speaking more slowly now as the pressure of memory slackened. She sounded exhausted. ‘No, I thought he was dead, so there was nothing to be done for him. The one thing I knew was that I couldn’t be the one to find him there. I had to get out of there and let someone else discover his body. So I ran away.’

  Chapter Thirty-six

  They walked towards the house, poised above them on its grassy ledge, between the cliff and the forest. Theo took the path that led along the edge of the lake and Ariane guessed his intention at once.

  ‘Theo, no, please.’

  He made no reply, continuing on his route. Soon he heard her footsteps hurrying after him and stopped to let her come abreast of him.

  ‘I’ve talked to the children,’ he said, ‘and told them that you were working for the Resistance. I explained to them that you were trying to learn what you could from the SS.’

  ‘Oh, Theo,’ she protested, ‘what’s the point?’

  ‘It was the right thing to do. They know far more than you think, or would like. They used to spy on you and the major. I’ll show you how. Do you see that?’ He pointed to the clump of elm saplings and wild clematis in the field in front of the house. ‘In there is a rock chimney which drops into the winepress. They used to climb down there and hide in the loft.’

  They climbed the path, single file, until they reached the double doors of the winepress. Theo pulled them open and stepped inside. It was years since he had been in here. When he was young, the great vat had still been in place, in the circle that marked the centre of the floor. The funnel used by the children had had a purpose then: the grapes had been loaded onto a cart in the vineyards and then brought to the cliff top where they had been tipped directly into the vat in the cave below. The wine had never been very good, sharp and dark, only fit for drinking on the estate. After the last war the vines had been pulled up and the equipment dismantled. Against one wall were the slaughter bench and all the utensils for pig-killing. Micheline had told him that the secret pig, Lou Moussou, was always slaughtered in the winepress, to hide it from the Requisition.

  Something had struck the major so powerfully that he had immediately fallen to the ground, thrown backwards by the force of the blow. Had she been waiting here in the dark, ready to strike? It seemed
an unnatural, difficult method of attack. From Petignat’s description the blow had landed in the centre of the forehead, and it was hard to imagine how she would have achieved such an angle, or such force. She would have had to be above him.

  He climbed the ladder to the loft, crawling on hands and knees, as the rock roof sloped inwards towards the darkness of the rear of the cave. Ariane was inscrutable, a silhouette in the doorway. Looking down at her, he saw what had been invisible from ground level: a pulley wheel fixed into the rock in the centre of the roof. The rope threaded through it was secured to a beam of the loft and the free end was looped back and caught in the same place. It must originally have had some use in lifting baskets of grapes, or barrels of wine during the processing of the grapes. Later it would have hauled hay into the loft, and hoisted the dead pigs vertical to be butchered.

  He suddenly saw what its most recent purpose had been. It must have been that hook that had hit the major in the forehead, as Petignat had described. No wonder he hadn’t seen it coming. It would have swooped at him from above eye level. Theo loosened the rope and called to Ariane to stand clear. He let go of the hook; it swung straight at the door. The pendulum swung his thoughts on a new arc.

  Could it have been an accident? A man hated by a whole community, killed by a random blow? If the hook-end of the rope was loose, lying on the edge of the loft, could the opening of the door by chance have caused it to fall free the whole of its length, just sufficient to catch the major on the top of his head? It did not seem very likely, but it had to be considered as a possibility if Ariane was speaking the truth: that he was already lying concussed or dead when she found him. But whatever had happened at that moment, nothing so far explained the cut throat. That could not have been an accident.

  He wondered if he would succeed in peeling back any more layers of Ariane’s confession, or whether it was even wise to try. He was now more doubtful that she had killed the major. The story that she told rang true for the very reason that it explained nothing. If you were going to fabricate a story, it would at least be one that fitted the facts. This tale of finding him dead but uninjured was too implausible to be anything except the truth. But not the whole truth. The gaps in her story, the killing itself, the slashing of the throat, the fountain of blood that must have pulsed out of his neck, his dying cry must be too horrible for her to recall. She had probably told him as much as she could bear and he could not expect any more.