The King of Fools
Page 12
My one moment of heroism had come the previous day, when the jury had declared me guilty of murder with malice aforethought.
“How did you do it, Mr Brett?”
He was daydreaming on his side of the car, and took a few moments to rouse himself.
“Do what, Mr Valaise?”
“Find out the truth?”
“I went through every statement in the folder with meticulous care: yours, and those of the witnesses.”
“And so?”
“And so, one detail caught my attention. Mrs Faulks and Mrs Morton both assured me that you had called Nevil Faulks on the telephone, because he called you back. I went to your hotel and the manager, who also operated the switchboard, was positive. You hadn’t called anybody. But he couldn’t be certain that you had spent all evening in your room. He was down in the television room, and he thought you might have gone out again between nine and ten thirty. And so I concentrated on the second telephone call: the one Nevil had made to confirm your meeting. In the bed and breakfast, Mrs Morton makes outside calls at her guests’ request, then connects them to their rooms. Her memory is poor, so she jots the numbers on a blackboard. The board is covered with numbers. But none corresponds to the telephone number of the Fort William Hotel. And yet you took Faulks’s call at the Fort William!”
I was genuinely impressed.
“You are a fine detective, Mr Brett.”
“Thank you.”
“And what did you do next, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My men applied themselves to the task of checking every telephone number on Mrs Morton’s board. Eventually, we found one that interested us. A furnished studio apartment, rented the day before the Faulkses arrived in Edinburgh, to a certain Mr Brent, from London. I decided to find out what the gentlemen in question looked like. I lay in wait, and he arrived…”
Brett was unable to resist… He removed his pipe from his pocket and began to fill it hurriedly. He hastened to take a couple of puffs before reaching police headquarters.
“And after that, Inspector?”
“When Brent arrived at the wheel of a pale-coloured MG, I felt I was on the right track. And so I allowed myself a small indiscretion. Once he was indoors, I searched the MG, though I had no warrant. In it, I found, how shall I put this… the key to the mystery! I’ll show you just now, in my office.”
“Come in, Mrs Faulks! I do apologize for this hasty call-out.”
She entered the office with her habitual, light step. She was wearing black this time, and had applied no make-up. Her freckles looked like splashes of acid on her skin. When she saw me, she frowned slightly, then turned her head to indicate her clear intention to ignore me henceforward.
Brett showed himself eager, and attentive.
“Take this seat. I hope you didn’t have any urgent business this morning?”
“I was returning to London!”
“With the transport strike still on…”
“In the hearse,” she retorted, drily.
“Oh! I do beg your pardon, Mrs Faulks. Of course! Whatever was I thinking?”
Then, seating himself opposite her in the corner of the office, Brett looked her in the eye and said, very quietly:
“I thought you were planning to leave in Mr Brent’s MG.”
Marjorie’s complexion turned an evil, earthy shade. Two dark circles had appeared under her eyes, and it seemed to me that her face had grown longer.
A faint buzzing was heard: Brett’s tape recorder. It sounded like sweet music to me now.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Inspector.”
Brett opened a desk drawer and took out an object wrapped in white fabric. He pulled the fabric aside to reveal a revolver. One I thought I recognized.
“I’m talking about the man who owns this odd-looking weapon.”
He pressed a button on his intercom.
“Come in for a moment, Morrow, and bring a white coat.”
A few minutes passed. Brett swung his leg, and sniffed. Marjorie, her features a blur of anxiety, stared at the revolver and seemed to be having difficulty breathing. As for me, I felt I was watching some occult ritual whose proceedings were a complete mystery.
Morrow, the French translator with the appalling squint, came into the room. He had put on a white coat that was several sizes too big. Its front panels flapped about his ankles.
“Hello, Morrow!” Brett greeted him in jocular tones. He was in mischievous mood now. “Have you ever been shot at point-blank range?”
Morrow recoiled in mock horror.
“A bullet to the heart, my dear fellow! Here you go!”
Brett pointed the gun at Morrow’s chest and pressed the trigger. A loud shot made the objects on Brett’s desk shudder. A thin puff of smoke snaked around the room, floating on the air. I stared at Morrow’s white coat, dumbfounded. For a moment, I thought Brett had killed his colleague. A large red stain was spreading over the cross-eyed man’s chest.
“The powder’s singed the coat a little, sir,” Morrow observed, phlegmatically.
“Order another and charge it to the case!” said Brett.
And, turning to me:
“No expense spared. Whoever said we Scots were mean folk, eh, Mr Valaise?”
“That’s the weapon I fired the other day, on the lawn, isn’t it?”
“It is. The only thing it fires are haemoglobin capsules. But the illusion is perfect. Mrs Faulks led you away quickly, leaving you no time to discover the trick. Brent got up and cleaned himself off; he must have brought what he needed along with him. That evening, you were lured out of your hotel so that you had no alibi. It was Brent who called you. Certain that you were out and about in the deserted city, he met with poor Faulks, who was waiting for him, and led him to the deserted lawn. I have no idea under what pretext. This time, he fired a real bullet at the man’s head, and it was a mask of real blood coating Faulks’s scalp when you found him there the following morning.”
“If you’ve been taken for the king of fools…”
Marjorie knew all was lost. She stood frozen, impassive, inhuman, staring out of the window at a world from which she was banished for ever.
“Your performance was beyond all expectations, Mr Valaise! These people allotted you a role, and your played it with rare gusto! Brent is your lover, naturally, Mrs Faulks?”
She made no reply.
“And you wanted rid of your husband. The crime was very cleverly constructed. A brilliant idea, to secure the collaboration of an innocent man from far away, unfamiliar with the country in which the murder would take place.”
The word “innocent” had a pejorative sound in Brett’s mouth. Or I was imagining things? The king of fools reads insinuations into everything.
Brett went to the door leading to the corridor and called out in loud, triumphant tones:
“Do come in now, Mr Brent.”
Before Brent entered the room, I moved close to Marjorie, took her chin in my hand, and gazed ardently into her face.
“What if I hadn’t fired?” I stammered. “Eh, Marjorie? If I hadn’t fired, you would have failed completely?”
She gave a small, enigmatic smile.
“If you hadn’t fired, Jean-Marie, then I would have done it myself. Me! Came to the same thing, didn’t it? You’re a brave man.”
I must have blushed. I whispered a timid “Thank you” because her words comforted me a little.
Brent entered the office. He knew exactly what was afoot now, and gave a nod of defeat when he saw us.
“Take a seat, Mr Brent. You wrote the letter that was sent to Mr Valaise, did you not?”
Only a policeman would begin questioning a man accused of murder with something so seemingly unimportant.
Brent concurred, drily.
“I must warn you that whatever you say from now on will—”
“I know, Inspector.”
“And it was also you who wrote the note that Mrs Faulks dropped
on the pavement?”
“Naturally.”
“How did Mrs Faulks come to have it in her hand at that moment?”
“She was going to leave it at the Learmonth. When she saw Mr Valaise, she decided to pass it to him in that way instead.”
“And what if I had taken a good look at her husband just then?” I objected.
Brent turned to look at me.
“Marjorie would have told you later that I wasn’t her husband, just a friend.”
Marjorie! He pronounced her name in extraordinary, adoring tones, leaving no one in any doubt that he loved her, and would love her madly till the end of their adventure.
I felt a pang of envy.
“What did you tell Faulks, to get him out at such a late hour?”
“I knew about his business affairs, from Marjorie. I called him on behalf of one of his clients, who was due to leave on a cruise the following morning. I said there had been a last-minute decision… He was in bed and almost didn’t come.”
“I urged him to get up and go. And that was when he called Willy back, to tell him an agreement had been reached.”
We were getting to the murder, the real murder. I felt a sudden reluctance to witness the rest of the interview.
“May I leave the room, Inspector? I have no business here now.”
Brett stared at me in surprise, but I believe he understood.
“Could I see Nevil Faulks’s body?” I asked.
The request seemed incongruous, yet there was a perfectly logical explanation for it.
“That’s not possible for the moment,” said Brett, “but you should know that Brent and Faulks were wearing the same suit. It’s hardly surprising that you noticed nothing untoward on the lawn the next day, given the circumstances.”
“May I step outside?”
“From the room, not the building. You are still guilty of concealing a body, Mr Valaise. I’m not able to free you here.”
23
But the jury did, the next day.
When the king of fools becomes entangled in a plot of such complexity, pity and sympathy for his plight are the natural response.
With my acquittal came the end of the transport strike, and it was Brett himself who arranged for my seat on the plane.
In short, after a two-hour flight, I was back in Juan-les-Pins. It was 10 a.m., and Denise was already on the beach.
She was alone under our parasol. In just a few days, her skin had turned as dark as a prune.
She recognized my shadow before spotting me in the flesh, and quickly looked up.
“Tiens! Ivanhoe returns!” she sighed.
I dropped onto the burning sand beside her.
I gazed around, looking for the volleyball players, but the net hadn’t been stretched into place.
“Are you looking for Narcissus?”
“Yes.”
“He’s not here yet. But don’t bother about him. I was making it up. There was nothing between us.”
“You’re just saying that to—”
“I’m saying that because it’s true. I wrote the letter in a fit of rage. When a girl discovers she’s hitched herself to an utter creep for life, she’s allowed the occasional tantrum, surely?”
“But what you said about Marjorie and the car…”
“All fibs! Anyway, it must have been fairly inspired stuff, because you came back. Admit it, without that telling detail, you would have stayed right there.”
“You’re right, that detail did the trick.”
I gave a great, ferocious laugh. A laugh to devour the whole world. Denise’s act of revenge had saved my life.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because I’m happy!”
“Tell me…”
“What, my love?”
“If… if it had been true, Narcissus and me, what would you have done?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you have killed him?”
“Perhaps…”
“Truly? You wouldn’t dare.”
My laughter died. I pulled myself up under the parasol until my head was inside the dark circle of shade. And it was a short while before I replied, gruffly:
“Oh, but I would!”
Did you know?
One of France’s most prolific and popular post-war writers, Frédéric Dard wrote no fewer than 284 thrillers over his career, selling more than 200 million copies in France alone. The actual number of titles he authored is under dispute, as he wrote under at least 17 different aliases (including the wonderful Cornel Milk and l’Ange Noir).
Dard’s most famous creation was San-Antonio, a James Bondesque French secret agent, whose enormously popular adventures appeared under the San-Antonio pen name between 1949 and 2001. The thriller in your hands, however, is one of Dard’s “novels of the night” – a run of stand-alone, dark psychological thrillers written by Dard in his prime, and considered by many to be his best work.
Dard was greatly influenced by the renowned Georges Simenon. A mutual respect developed between the two, and eventually Simenon agreed to let Dard adapt one of his books for the stage in 1950. Dard was also a famous inventor of words – in fact, he dreamt up so many words and phrases in his lifetime that a special dictionary was recently published to list them all.
Dard’s life was punctuated by drama; he attempted to hang himself when his first marriage ended, and in 1983 his daughter was kidnapped and held prisoner for 55 hours before being ransomed back to him for 2 million francs. He admitted afterwards that the experience traumatised him for ever, but he nonetheless used it as material for one of his later novels. This was typical of Dard, who drew heavily on his own life to fuel his extraordinary output of three to five novels every year. In fact, when contemplating his own death, Dard said his one regret was that he would not be able to write about it.
AVAILABLE AND COMING SOON FROM PUSHKIN VERTIGO
Jonathan Ames
You Were Never Really Here
Augusto De Angelis
The Murdered Banker
The Mystery of the Three Orchids
The Hotel of the Three Roses
María Angélica Bosco
Death Going Down
Piero Chiara
The Disappearance of Signora Giulia
Frédéric Dard
Bird in a Cage
The Wicked Go to Hell
Crush
The Executioner Weeps
The King of Fools
The Gravediggers’ Bread
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Pledge
The Execution of Justice
Suspicion
The Judge and His Hangman
Martin Holmén
Clinch
Down for the Count
Alexander Lernet-Holenia
I Was Jack Mortimer
Boileau-Narcejac
Vertigo
She Who Was No More
Leo Perutz
Master of the Day of Judgment
Little Apple
St Peter’s Snow
Soji Shimada
The Tokyo Zodiac Murders
Murder in the Crooked Mansion
Masako Togawa
The Master Key
The Lady Killer
Emma Viskic
Resurrection Bay
Seishi Yokomizo
The Inugami Clan
Also Available from Pushkin Vertigo
“This short, sly novel of the night has more than enough substance and mystery to keep readers awake and engrossed” The National
“The French master of noir” Observer
“Disturbing from the outset with strong echoes of Dard’s hero Simenon” Sunday Times Crime Club (star pick)
Copyright
Original text © 1952 Fleuve Editions, département d’Univers Poche, Paris
First published in French as La Pelouse in 1952
Translation © Louise Rogers Lalaurie, 2017
First published by
Pushkin Vertigo in 2017
This book is supported by the Institut français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess Programme
ISBN: 978 1 782272 90 8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
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