by Cathy Ace
I knew I had to apply myself, so I pulled myself back from the brink of disappearing into paroxysms of delight. I asked, as innocently as I could, “Was there anything about the Palais that particularly interested Alistair?”
“Oh yes,” replied Gerard, swallowing quickly, “he is interested in the man who was the architect—he wants to know all about the building from the time when it was built until he arrives.” Gerard spoke slowly, his French accent guttural but understandable, his words chosen with care and pronounced carefully. “My father comes here as a gardener before the First War. I live here all my life, always in the same apartment. My father and mother live here. Now I live here. My father knows men who work on building the Palais when they are boys. They tell him stories, and he tells me. Ten men die building this,” he waved his arms around him, “it is very sad. But more blood than that is spilled here, as I tell M. Townsend.”
“Really?” I encouraged him. “In what way do you mean?”
“Ah, in many ways. The men who die building it, and, to be sure, there are more deaths here since—some are natural, as you expect; there are two duels in the gardens in the early years; in the 1960s a man kills his wife, then his mistress, then himself—all of them are residents here and, of course, there are the terrible things that happen in the war. But even before it was built there is a scandal. They are digging the foundations, and there are bodies. Not graves, but bodies. My father tells me all about this. M. Townsend says this story is most interesting. It is a tragedy.”
“Oh, I love an old story like that,” I lied, again. “Do tell me about it.”
Gerard pushed back in his seat and looked up at the dark sky, then directly at me, and slowly began. “The architect is appointed by the owner of the land. He is well established and, as you can see from the building, he favors the classic look for the Belle Epoque buildings in this area, which is very fashionable. He arrives from Paris in 1878 with his bride, who is very beautiful and thirty years less in age than him, and they set up home lower down the hill in the Carabacel area. They have a baby—a boy, but it is not an easy birth. The woman she can have no more children. She breaks down, as you say, and is not seen much from that time. Soon afterward they find the bodies. A workman who sees them tells my father they are four bodies. They are bones only. They are in a hole that is not deep. It is at the edge of the site for the building. One body is a woman—this they know because she wears jewelry. One is a man, who has a sword, and two look like children. The men who find the bones are afraid, so the architect he comes and takes them all away himself. Later, my father is told, the workers they see the wife of the architect at a party, and she is wearing the jewelry from the bones of the woman. They think that this is bad. They think it is against God. So they all give up their jobs and go to work on another building.”
“It must have been a difficult choice for them to do that—to leave steady employment,” I commented.
“No, it is not. There are many jobs in Nice at this time. This is 1880, the start of the Belle Epoque, when the railway is here from the north, the city grows very fast, and it is full of the English, the Russians and the Italians. Everywhere there is building. In any case, it is good that they leave because very soon there are many problems here. It begins with the young wife. She is having an affair with one of the assistants to her husband—a young man from Germany, of about her own age. There is a story that the architect challenges the man to a duel. In any case, the man disappears, and the wife as well. The child is still with the architect. Then men fall sick, there is talk of cholera—which kills many, many people in Nice fifty years before. There is terror. Many workmen leave the building. The owner of the land replaces the architect and gets another man to manage the making of the building, the architect has nothing left but his son, who dies when he is very young, then the architect himself is sick, and he kills himself at the building site one night.” Gerard’s eyes were sparkling and he was slightly flushed. It seemed that he thrived on tragedy.
“They all died? Very Shakespearean! Very sad.” What else could I say? “Did anyone see the jewelry again?”
“Ha! This is what Alistair says to me! All this sadness and you ask about this thing. Maybe you are like him?” I could see what he meant. I had to put him right on that one.
“Oh, no, Gerard—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to appear to be heartless, but I was talking to Beni about the necklace that is missing, the one that Alistair was going to give Tamsin for her birthday. And I wondered if that necklace might be the jewelry of which you speak.”
“Huh! I do not know this,” was Gerard’s somewhat sulky reply. “It is just a piece of metal, in any case. It is not beautiful. It is ugly. It is not as important as a human life. Why would anyone kill for a piece of metal? Life is what matters. Life is not to be replaced.”
Well, he wasn’t going to get any argument from me on that one, but, again, I’d seen people kill for “pieces of metal” before—and they hadn’t been priceless, ancient, and possibly mystic pieces of metal, either!
“Did Alistair really seem more interested in the jewelry than the lives lost?”
“Always. He is always asking more and more about the jewelry. But I know no more. This is what I know. It is what my father tells me. I do not know more than he tells me. It is impossible.” Gerard was starting to get a bit hot under the collar on the topic, so I was actually quite relieved when the buzzer sounded in the kitchen. I let Beni back into the front door of the building, and a few moments later he came out on to the balcony, looking pink in the face and huffing and puffing that he’d had to park at the bottom of the gardens because it was very busy at the Palais that evening. He wasn’t kidding—he’d been gone for ages.
It was almost as if Tamsin had been waiting until her entire audience was assembled ready for her entrance (in fact, I’m sure she was), and she wafted out onto the balcony almost immediately after Beni’s arrival, wearing something loose, flowing, and black. She looked appropriately tragic. I only shook my head in disgust internally.
“Hello. Ah—I’m famished,” she announced dramatically, waving a black chiffon scarf imperiously at the table, and she sat. Not one word of thanks for all the cleaning we’d done, not even a nod in my direction for having laid out what was, in my eyes, a feast. Ungrateful so and so! I seethed, and sipped my champagne. At that moment I was sorry I hadn’t opened a bottle of Dom after all. I was 300 per cent certain I wouldn’t be pouring her anything, anytime soon. Of course, Beni did the honors, pouring her champagne, trying to “tempt” her with the morsels in front of her and telling her how marvellous she looked, given the circumstances.
I was about a nanosecond away from needing a sick bag—I hadn’t over-indulged, I just find all that sort of hypocritical crap totally nauseating. I pulled myself together, kept repeating, internally, what Bud had said about not being judgemental, and decided to smile at the Widow Townsend.
“Come now, Tamsin, you must eat something. I’ve done my best with what’s here, but, at some point, you’re going to have to get some real food in so that you can look after yourself properly. Would you like me to get some groceries for you tomorrow?”
Tamsin looked puzzled, then she smiled, dabbed at her dry eyes, and said, “Oh Cait, I don’t really cook, or anything like that. Ally said I made good reservations so I didn’t need to be able to cook, and he was right. I do make good reservations. Don’t worry about me, I can manage to eat very well, thank you.”
“What if you don’t feel like going out?” It had to be asked.
“Oh, everyone will deliver to us. It’s not like England, or America, you know—all the good places deliver here . . . It’s not just pizza or curry, absolutely everyone will deliver everything.”
Well, that was me well and truly put in my place. After all, how could I have not known that? Bitch! And that was my considered judgement of the woman.
Beni came to my rescue. Or, at least, he tried to. “Cait would not know this. She does n
ot live here like us. She lives in a part of the world where this is not usual.” It was something of a back-handed compliment.
“Doctor Brunetti is correct, Tamsin,” added Gerard, “you must eat something. You must be strong for these days ahead. They will be difficult. There is much to arrange.” He nodded his head sagely. I wondered how many funerals he’d had to arrange in a life of more than eighty years.
“Oh no,” said Tamsin quite lightly, nibbling on a cracker and sipping champagne, “Ally made all his own arrangements. It’s a service in Holy Trinity Anglican, cremation and an urn to be kept here with me. He wanted to make sure it was all as he wanted, so he chose the hymns and wrote his eulogy for the Rector to read. All I have to do is to decide the date, and that’s it.”
I was pleased to see that I wasn’t the only one at the table to be stunned by this. Both Beni and Gerard were, literally, open-mouthed. I made sure I shut mine quickly. I don’t think they noticed. Tamsin’s body language spoke of no discomfort, no stress or even sadness. She was quite calm about the whole thing.
“You are very calm about the whole thing,” I said. It made sense to say what I was thinking, for once.
“Well, of course I am, silly, because it’s just his body. Ally’s gone. There’s no point worrying about arrangements for the leftovers, is there? All I’m concerned about is Ally’s spirit, and I know that’s gone to a good place. He was a good man. He loved life. He’ll be missed. To Ally!” She raised her glass by way of a toast.
As I raised mine I thought how remarkable it was that Tamsin, Beni, and Gerard had all used exactly the same phrases to describe Alistair. Quite remarkable. I’d have to give that some thought. I decided that, at that moment, it was more important that I took my chance to talk to the person who had, presumably, known Alistair the best—his widow. I suspected that she and I wouldn’t have many more chances for a heart to heart; our personalities did not promise a flourishing friendship, if you know what I mean!
“When will it be, Tamsin? Do you have to wait until the hospital knows how Alistair died?” I asked, trying to sound sympathetic.
“Oh, I know that already,” she replied casually. Again, the rest of us looked very surprised, and this time she saw it and reacted. “They told me at the hospital. Well, they would, of course, because I was his wife. He died from something digital.”
Well, given my size I know you could never really knock me down with a feather . . . but this was about as close as you’d ever be likely to come.
There was a trio of “How?” from the three of us, each in our own native tongue. Clearly, none of us understood what on earth she’d meant.
“They said it was digital,” replied Tamsin, blithely. “It can kill some people, you know, but if we’re all alright now, we’ll be fine,” and she ate another cracker.
Frankly, I was completely exasperated with her. Stupid woman!
“Tamsin, what do you mean, it was ‘digital’? He was zapped with something? What? Please explain yourself!” I knew I sounded cross, but, come on, I mean what was the woman prattling on about?
“Was it a poison or not?” asked Beni, in rather more measured tones than my own.
Tamsin put down the sliver of cracker she’d been holding and wiped her fingers on a napkin. She looked as though she was concentrating intently, the way a small child might look when you’ve asked them to spell something like “antidisestablishmentarianism.” When she spoke it was slowly, though still in that godawful Minnie Mouse voice of hers.
“The doctor came to me and said that the blood tests and the heart thingy tests showed we had all been affected by something digital. It had killed Ally because of his heart tablets. I asked would I be alright and he said we’d all be alright because otherwise we’d be dead already. There.” She looked very pleased with herself, and resumed her nibbling.
A lightbulb clicked on in my head.
“Do you mean ‘digitalis,’ Tamsin?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“Oh—yes, that’s it. Silly me. Digital-is. Don’t worry—we’ll all be just fine.”
“Digitalis, it is very dangerous,” said Gerard in something of a panic. “And this has happened to us all?”
“Don’t worry, Gerard,” I said calmly. “Yes, digitalis can be dangerous, but you need a pretty big dose for it to kill you and the doctor was right—if our bodies have coped with the initial dose, we’ll be quite alright now. It gets metabolized relatively quickly.” I could see confusion on the old man’s face, so added, “Our bodies take care of it quite quickly, so we are all as safe now as if it had not entered our systems. We must all have good hearts.”
“Yes, maybe,” chimed in Beni, “but Alistair had a bad heart. He took medication.”
“Did everyone at the dinner know that?” I must have sounded a bit sharp, but I didn’t care.
“Alistair made no secret of it,” answered Beni.
“I think everyone knows he has a weak heart,” added Gerard. “M. Townsend likes to play at it . . . to make us sorry for him, then laugh at himself.”
“Ah yes, that’s very true,” nodded Beni, “he would beat at his chest and say ‘Got to keep the old ticker going—what, what’ very often.”
I could imagine Alistair doing that. To the point of annoyance, I’d have thought.
“He was afraid, that’s why he made fun of it.” It was a comment I thought quite out of character for Tamsin, and it was spoken in a voice that was lower than her usual register, and seemingly more thoughtful.
“Why was he ‘afraid,’ Tamsin?” I asked.
Tamsin shot a glance at me that suggested she was the one who was afraid—but afraid of what? She answered me in her normal, dimwit tone, “Oh, you know, just afraid. Afraid he’d have a heart attack, I suppose . . .” She trailed off into shoulder shrugging, head bobbing, and a vacuous smile. “He didn’t like pills. Sometimes he didn’t take them, then he’d feel bad and take extra ones.”
I was pretty sure that, whatever he’d been prescribed, Alistair’s decision to fiddle with the doses wasn’t a good one. Maybe he’d contributed to his own demise by taking a high dose of something before dinner that then interacted with the digitalis, or maybe he hadn’t taken the pills that he should have taken, and that was why he died.
“Did the doctor say if he had a very high amount of digitalis in his system, Tamsin? Compared with the rest of us?”
“Yes,” she replied earnestly, with that look of concentration on her face again, “he said about five times more than any of us.”
“That sounds like a lot,” remarked Beni.
“Obviously, it was enough,” I said. I hadn’t meant to be flippant. It just came out.
“Yes, obviously,” replied Tamsin quietly, nodding. The heartlessness of my comment seemed to have passed her by. “It was in the food, of course, the snails, but they don’t know how, yet.”
At last! So we’d all been dosed on digitalis, in the snails. It was definitely murder, and by someone who knew enough about Alistair, his medication, and the effects of digitalis to be able to subject us all to its effects while only killing Alistair. I felt a great relief at knowing this, though it didn’t, on the face of it, seem to get me any closer to identifying the killer. While I pondered this, and while we were all, it seemed, deep in thought, the doorbell rang.
“I shall go,” said Beni, standing, apparently glad to leave the table. He returned moments later with Chuck Damcott at his side. Chuck was carrying a massive bunch of flowers, which he presented to Tamsin with a tragic look on his face and shaking his head.
“My dear, dear Tamsin . . . I am so sorry . . . We will miss him so much, but none of us as much as you. Here you are, my delicate one—these are to show you that there is still beauty in this world, even though Alistair has left us.” Yuk!
Tamsin took the flowers from the American. The bouquet looked even bigger in her tiny hands, and she was able to bury her entire face in the flowers, re-emerging with a beatific smile and a tear in her e
ye. I lit a cigarette in disgust.
Smiling, Tamsin looked up at Chuck and said, “Oh, they are so beautiful. You are right. Ally would want us to enjoy life. Won’t you join us for champagne?”
It was as though she were simply inviting the man for cocktails!
“I will get a glass,” said Beni, turning back toward the kitchen.
“Thanks,” called Chuck toward his receding back. He pulled a chair to within inches of Tamsin’s and sat down beside her.
Interesting.
“Tamsin’s been telling us that we were all dosed with digitalis in the snails last night, Chuck,” I offered by way of an icebreaker. I wondered how he’d react.
Chuck looked shocked. “Digitalis? Oh, my. I guess that’s why Alistair . . . um, died . . .” He seemed embarrassed to say the word. “I guess it overdosed him because of his medication. It’s just awful. Awful. We’ll all be the poorer without him.” I wondered if he meant because of Alistair’s wealth of bonhomie, or because of something else.
“Here is a glass,” said Beni as he offered a beer glass to Chuck. “I cannot find any more champagne glasses,” he added.
“I know where there are many,” replied Gerard, and he began to push himself up from his chair.
I shot to my feet. “Please, let me,” I offered.
Gerard smiled and shrugged. “It is easy for me to get them, but not easy to tell you where they are. Merci,” and he moved slowly toward the door of the kitchen.
I sat back down and returned my attention to Chuck. “Do you know what medication Alistair was taking?”
“Oh yeah, he was always waving that little silver box around. He was taking a digitalis-based medicine; he told me so. Helped with his heart arrhythmia, he said. Though I know he liked to mess around with his dosages. Thought he knew better than the medics. Alistair was kinda like that.” Chuck’s accent seemed to come from somewhere on the East Coast, rather than the West, and I was reminded that “where are you from” hadn’t been one of the questions I’d asked him the night before. Where we were at the time had seemed so much more important to him, in any case.
