My real fear had been that he would tell me something personal. That he was going back to his wife. That he’d met an enchanting American. That he was going into a monastery. That he’d decided not to hire me again. Anything final, irrevocable, that would mean I’d lose him. Not that I wanted him . . .
We walked back through the rustling trees. There was a breeze, a cooler breeze. ‘I think the weather’s breaking,’ I said. ‘About time. And I’m glad you told me what you’ve been up to, the last few months.’
‘Why?’
He thought I was going to say something intimate. For a moment, so did I. But I wasn’t ready yet to make concessions. I had to think, about what I wanted from him, about what we were going to do and be together. So I didn’t. ‘At least I can empathize with you now,’ I said. ‘You being mentally challenged, and all.’
Saturday, June 6th
Chapter Twenty-Five
Toulouse has a manky little airport, new and clean and smug, but at first sight, I quite liked the town. It reminded me of Birmingham, which isn’t London but is a long way from country. Apart from that, it was hot and dusty and Southern, with the combination of big-city grubbiness and potential for violence which I find exhilarating.
So far, I’d only seen it from the ring road. We’d been met at the barrier by a chauffeur in full uniform carrying a placard:
Mlle TANNER, Alex
I’d sent Claudia with my driving licence to pick up the hire car, and now the smart black Citroen and its smart French driver was piloting us and the hired Peugeot, through heavy traffic on the way out of Toulouse.
We went on to a motorway, and took a ticket: off the motorway, and paid the toll with Claudia’s francs. I hadn’t asked her to get any, but she had. Her common sense wasn’t bad. Then we were on winding country roads, full of fruit trees, heavy with blossom. We couldn’t go fast on the minor roads. I wound my window down, felt the sun on my arms, and listened to the first of Beethoven’s late quartets. Claudia was being dutifully silent.
I was trying to enjoy myself and leave Rissington Abbey behind in England. I hadn’t slept much the night before. I’d been thinking too much. Partly about Barty, partly about Martin Kelly. I’d found only more questions, no answers, on both subjects.
We were in deep country: the villages were tiny. We were just through one which seemed only to be inhabited by a very old woman, manning the petrol station, and a recumbent old dog enjoying the sun, when the Citroen slowed down and turned between large stone gates and up a hill towards a big, square stone house. ‘More like a chateau than a shack,’ Plummer had said. In fact it was a chateau, according to the sign: the Chateau Touffailles.
We parked at the top of the hill on a gravel space beside the Citroen and I saw that the house wasn’t a completed square, it had one side missing, the side that faced the parking area. The chauffeur led us through a formal garden with a fountain in the centre towards the front door. He pulled the bell and introduced us to the maid who answered it.
The maid and Claudia talked French, then Claudia turned to me. ‘M’sieu le Baron would like to speak to you alone. I’m to wait down here.’
Fine by me. We went inside: the house was built in several levels on the side of the hill so the staircase which led off the stone hall went downwards, not upwards. The maid took Claudia down the stairs, out of my sight, and tucked her away somewhere. Then she came back for me and we went to the right, along a stone-flagged tapestry-hung corridor to a corner room.
‘Mlle Tanner,’ said the maid, and I went in.
‘How do you do,’ said the Baron, and went into light chat about my journey. He was an aristocratic Frenchman of whom Central Casting would have been proud. About five-ten, dark, with grey wings of thick hair, dark eyes, a lean elegant face, and an elegant body draped somewhere near Savile Row in expensive English light tweed cloth. He was also nearing seventy so I didn’t fancy him but I reckoned he’d pull ninety per cent of females over forty-five. He spoke really beautiful English, much better than mine, and his accent was distinctly more upper, which as he’d been to Eton seemed reasonable. He even managed ‘th’, which seems to be Beecher’s Brook for Francophones.
He gave me one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had, poured from a silver set which would have cost a bomb back in the eighteenth century. The room was a study, with bare stone walls lined with bookcases containing books in French, English, and German. I was envious. Imagine if you could read in three languages. Many, many, many more books. Still, I’ve got enough to do with English. I’ve always comforted myself with that. And I can read a bit of Ancient Greek. Greek is wonderful. It’s like Shakespeare and the Bible, you keep meeting bits you know. I’d looked forward to meeting the word for ‘sea’ because I thought I knew it from the Persian Expedition – ‘thalassa, thalassa’. Except when I met it, it was ‘thalatta’ because of the dialect, which just goes to show that the closer you get to knowing the more you find out you don’t know.
So I sat looking round the study, at the thick dark carpet, Persian I thought, the ornate gilded desk, the velvet chairs, the open wood fire with logs cut and hauled by his servants ready for the winter, and the narrow stone windows with spectacular views over the valley. The windows were as wide open as they’d go and the soft air billowed into the smallish room and filled it. The Baron looked tired, as if he’d not slept. The lines around his eyes were crumpled and yellow and his tension showed in the absent-minded manner of his courtesy, and after he’d asked (twice) if I’d visited France before, I thought I’d better help him out.
‘Would you like an interim report?’
‘Please,’ he said, looking relieved.
‘I’ve spent the last few days at Rissington Abbey. The Headmaster thinks I’m doing preliminary interviewing for a documentary on education. So far, there is no suggestion that Olivier was anything but happy on his last day. My sources are his roommate, Tim Robertson, his friend Peter Newman, and his housemaster and teacher, Alistair Brown.’
‘Well done,’ he said.
Silence. He looked unhappy and uncomfortable. I’d have to prise him loose.
‘M’sieu le Baron,’ I said (that’s what Claudia’d told me to call him. I was pleased with the stab I made at the sounds, half-clearing my throat on the ‘r’) ‘you must get on with it, otherwise this’ll take hours. I don’t believe that it’s you who wants to know the information I was hired to find. I don’t believe that you’d fly me out here just for a progress report. I don’t believe that Olivier is the child of your son and Miss Pertwee.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And what conclusions have you drawn from these – suppositions?’ ‘None, so far. That’s what I’m waiting for you to tell me.’ He looked sad, for a moment. Not so much sad, I thought looking more closely, as crushed, as if someone had taken his heart and squeezed. There’s no mistaking real pain, and this was it. ‘Were you very fond of Olivier?’ I asked gently.
‘No,’ he said, and we were silent again.
There is something about grief which settles you. It doesn’t exactly make you feel guilty for being happy. It’s more a sort of awe. Pity and terror, I suppose.
‘I think you’re going to have to talk about it,’ I said. ‘I can’t guess. I know it’s painful.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think you do. Miss Tanner, you’re not quite what I expected. Plummer said you were young, and inexperienced. It was on that understanding that I employed you.’
‘I am youngish. And inexperienced, as a private investigator. Why did you want someone incompetent?’
‘Not exactly incompetent.’
‘Not quite competent, then.’
‘What do you expect me to say?’ he asked with a graceful shrug and a thoroughly French spread of his hands in mock-surrender.
‘I expect you not to waste my time,’ I said. ‘This is a Saturday. I had to cancel arrangements to be here. So far, I can’t see any urgency in our meeting.’
‘There is, I assure you.’
<
br /> ‘So tell me,’ I said, exasperated. ‘Spit it out.’
‘The urgency is not mine,’ he said, getting up and going to look out of the window, presumably because he couldn’t face me. ‘It is Freedom’s. To do with the stars. The aspects change tonight. Jupiter leaves the third house, or some such nonsense.’
‘OK. What happens when Jupiter leaves the third house?’
‘Come here, please,’ he said, and waved me to the window beside him. ‘My wife,’ he said, and pointed. Just below us, in a garden at the side of the chateau, was a woman sitting in a wheelchair with a rug over her knees. What I could see of her was very thin, and yellow with illness (cancer?), probably younger than the Baron but looking older, looking one breath from dying, really. ‘She loves the garden. Even now, she sits outside when she can, in the full sun. She feels the cold, you see.’
‘Is she very ill?’ I said gently.
‘I’m afraid so, yes.’
That was the source of his pain, not Olivier. ‘Look, Baron,’ I said, ‘you’ve hired me, and I always stay hired. When push comes to shove, I do what my employers tell me. Following that principle I’ve produced some of the worst documentaries in the history of television. Better one bad general than two good generals.’
‘Napoleon,’ he said, but he pronounced it French and it took me a second to recognize the name. ‘And so?’
‘And so you’re the bad general. Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me what I need to know to do it well, and I’ll never repeat it.’
‘And your assistant?’
‘The same goes for her.’
‘I don’t know if you know much about Freedom?’
‘Tell me.’
‘She’s – she’s not very serious.’
‘An airhead,’ I said.
‘I do not know the expression. But she is – like a child. In the seventies, she was very pretty, very young, very spontaneous, with bare feet and a laughing face, always searching for happiness and truth.’
‘And you slept with her.’
He shrugged. ‘Not often. But she came to stay, with my son, and she believed in free love.’
‘Was Olivier your child?’
He shrugged again. ‘It’s possible. I have dark eyes. So have many Frenchmen. But Freedom decided that I was. And now, in her search for truth, she has a spiritual guide. A Tibetan. She lives with him and other seekers for truth in a commune not far from here, funded by her. Her guide has told her she must set herself right with everyone she has injured in her life, if she is to reach a higher plane of awareness. She wrote to Olivier to tell him that my son Michel is not his father, and that I am.’
‘Selfish cow,’ I said.
He made a French noise, with pursed lips, like Pffff. ‘Olivier was a very pragmatic boy. I did not expect it to disturb him unduly. But when he died, she feared he had read the letter and committed suicide. I knew this could not be the case.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if Olivier knew, he would have written or telephoned to me.’
‘Were you close?’
‘Not at all. You misunderstand. He would have asked me to increase his allowance.’
‘I have reason to believe that Olivier didn’t read his letters from his mother. He didn’t even open them, unless they contained a cheque,’ I said.
‘Unfortunately the unopened letter was not among the belongings returned to his mother. So she was disturbed, and she wanted to know what his last day was like, whether he had killed himself. She asked me to find out.’
‘So you hired me.’
‘I wanted a woman, and someone – not insensitive.’
‘You wanted someone who wouldn’t find anything.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And you’d have shut Freedom up with my report. Why did I have to come over, then?’
‘It is the aspect of the stars, I told you. Freedom’s guide told her that she must deal with this matter before Jupiter moves, tonight.’
‘Why couldn’t we have spoken on the phone?’
‘Her guide must meet you, to feel your cosmic vibrations, to see if you’re telling the truth.’
‘What happens if he doesn’t believe me, or she isn’t satisfied?’
‘Then she will speak to my wife.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Half an hour later Claudia and I were back in the car, following the chauffeured, empty Citroen. This time Claudia was driving while I explained. ‘So we’re going to a commune in the Gers,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been to a commune.’
‘Neither have I.’
‘The poor, poor Baron.’
‘Poor Baron my foot. He shouldn’t have banged his daughterin-law if he didn’t want trouble, especially not a hippy twit like Freedom. Besides, his wife probably knows anyway, she’s been married to him for long enough, and if she’s dying she’ll have more important things to think about than a legover eighteen years ago.’
‘Why does he annoy you?’
I nearly denied it. Then I realized what a bad example I’d be setting. Most cock-ups, in my experience, are compounded by people covering because they don’t like looking foolish. She’d hired me to train her. So I’d train her. ‘Because I feel humiliated,’ I said. ‘I was pleased when Plummer gave me the job. Now I’ve found out I was chosen to fail. I don’t like that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Not your fault. Anyway, some good’s come out of it. He’s agreed to keep paying me until I’m satisfied that Kelly’s death was suicide and nobody at Rissington was involved. It was the least he could do.’
We drove for forty minutes, through some dead villages and a medium-sized town with a city-sized traffic problem, not helped by the French habit, which I rather admired, of parking their cars wherever it suited them. Then the country roads got smaller and smaller, and finally the Citröen stopped. The chauffeur got out and Claudia went to meet him.
‘The commune is here. Down this lane,’ she said, getting back in the car and waving goodbye to the chauffeur.
The lane was narrow, overgrown, and deeply rutted. It would be a nightmare in winter. It wasn’t a barrel of laughs in summer, and I was glad it wasn’t my car’s suspension it was punishing. It was also steep: we were going down the side of a small valley. About three hundred yards along the view opened out and I could see a cluster of buildings below us. A farmhouse, outhouses, a barn, all built in the local greyish-white stone, in a reasonable state of repair. There was a small area of grass shaded by a large tree in the quadrangle formed by the buildings, with a group of children dressed in flame-red flimsy cotton, playing. Both boys and girls wore loose trousers gathered at the ankle and knee-length tunics.
Beyond the buildings, on ground sloping down to the valley floor, there was an orchard. About twenty men and women, also in flame-red cotton, were working among the trees. It reminded me of Rissington: only the costumes were different, and the hairstyles. Long hair and beards for the men, long hair for the women, but otherwise it was a fatigue party. There were no other buildings or farms, as far as I could see, in the valley. There’s a lot of empty country in France.
Claudia stopped the car and we went towards the farmhouse; I didn’t expect Freedom or her spiritual guide to be working. The front door was open.‘Hallo,’ I shouted.‘Anyone at home?’ I waited. Claudia looked at me for direction.‘Someone’ll come,’ I said.‘You’ll see.’
Freedom came, barefoot under her red shift. The colour was too strong for her: it washed out her pale skin and hair. She hadn’t changed her hairstyle since 1969; it was still straight, and parted in the middle with a fringe. She looked bony and stupid and vain, or perhaps I was prejudiced, maybe she just looked bony. She had huge feet.
* * * * *
We were sitting in the main room of the farmhouse, on cushions on the wooden floor. There was no furniture. Books were piled around the walls: there was a star-map over the rough plaster of one wall, an astrological chart on another; the other two
walls were hung with brightly coloured Eastern materials, some with small circular mirrors as part of the pattern. The room smelt of damp, pot, incense, and yesterday’s curry, and reminded me of the Portobello Road.
I didn’t say so: I was on my best behaviour. I wanted to get the business done for the Baron and get out of there. My other encounters with fringe Eastern guru-crooks didn’t give me any grounds for optimism on that score. They can usually bore for the cosmos, and if you try to hurry them they lapse into spiritual silences.
This one, according to the Baron a Tibetan, was small and dark and entirely bald, though judging by his five o’clock shadow only some of the baldness was natural, in a white shift and trousers. He sat cross-legged on a bigger, more impressive, probably more comfortable cushion than ours. He spoke only French. He spoke. Freedom translated.
‘You are welcome to our ashram.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You must say “Guru”,’ prompted Freedom.
‘Guru,’ I said.
She translated. He spoke. ‘In the matter of the child of light Olivier,’ she said. ‘My daughter Freedom must know whether his spirit soared un—un—’
‘Unfettered,’ suggested Claudia.
Freedom didn’t look grateful for the help. ‘Unfettered by earthly cares.’
‘It soared unfettered,’ I said. ‘He was happy, the day before he died. Guru.’
‘Do you have proof of this?’
‘His friend Peter Newman says so. His friend Tim Robertson, who shared his room, says so. Guru.’
‘You need not say “Guru” each time, like that,’ said Freedom. ‘It is a term of respect.’
She was sharper that I’d thought. I resolved to weave my respect into the garbage I was talking like a seamless garment.
In At The Deep End Page 18
