The Three Evangelists

by Fred Vargas

  ‘Do you think the same as Mathias? That someone has killed Sophia?’

  ‘Slow down, my boy. St Matthew is jumping to conclusions.’

  ‘Mathias jumps to the right conclusion when he has to. Hunter-gatherers are like that sometimes. But why does it have to be a murder? It might have been an accident?’

  ‘An accident? No, we’d have found a body long ago.’

  ‘So you think it really is possible? Murder?’

  ‘That’s what Leguennec thinks. Sophia Siméonidis is extremely rich. Her husband on the other hand is at the mercy of a change of government and a return to a subordinate job. But we haven’t found a body, Marc. No body, no murder.’

  When Leguennec emerged, he and Vandoosler conferred again. He nodded and went off, a small determined figure.

  ‘What’s he going to do?’ asked Marc.

  ‘Open an official enquiry. Play cards with me. Try to reel in Relivaux-and it’s no fun being reeled in by Leguennec, believe me. He has infinite patience. I’ve been on board a trawler with him, I know what he’s like.’

  Two days later, the news came as a bolt from the blue. Leguennec announced it that evening, though in measured tones. The fire services had been called out the night before to an intense fire in a deserted alleyway in Maisons-Alfort, in the southwest suburbs. The fire had already spread to some nearby houses, all empty and abandoned, by the time the firemen got there. It had not been put out until three in the morning. In the ashes were three burnt-out cars, and in one of them an unrecognisable body. Leguennec had been informed at seven o’clock, while he was shaving. He went to find Relivaux in his office at three that afternoon. Relivaux had positively identified a little piece of volcanic rock which Leguennec showed him. It was a fetish that Sophia had always had with her; it had been in her handbag or her pocket for the last twenty-eight years.

  XVIII

  ALEXANDRA, DISBELIEVING, SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON HER BED, HEAD in hands, was insisting on details and facts. It was seven in the evening. Leguennec had authorised Vandoosler and the others to stay in the room. It would be all over the papers in the morning. Lucien was watching to see whether the little boy had marked his carpet with his felt pens. He was concerned about that.

  ‘Why did you go to Maisons-Alfort?’ Alexandra was asking. ‘What did you know?’

  ‘Nothing at that stage,’ Leguennec assured her. ‘But I’ve got four missing persons in my zone. Pierre Relivaux didn’t want to report his wife missing. He was sure she would come back. But because you had arrived, I had, let’s say, persuaded him to make the report all the same. Sophia Siméonidis was on my list, and in my mind. I went to Maisons-Alfort because it’s my job. I wasn’t alone, I can tell you that. There were other inspecteurs, looking for missing teenagers and vanished husbands. But I was the only one looking for a woman. Women go missing far less often than men-did you know that? When a married man or a teenage boy disappears, we don’t worry so much. But when it’s a woman, there are reasons to fear the worst, you understand? But the body, forgive me, was unidentifiable. Even the teeth were gone, burnt to ashes.’

  Vandoosler interrupted him: ‘You can spare us the details, Leguennec.’

  Leguennec, he of the jutting jaw, shook his bullet head. ‘I’m trying, Vandoosler,’ he said. ‘But Mademoiselle Haufman wants facts.’

  ‘Go on, inspecteur,’ said Alexandra quietly. ‘I need to know.’

  The young woman’s face was swollen with weeping, her black hair was ruffled and on end, from the times she had repeatedly run her wet hands through it. Marc wished he could dry it for her, comb it tenderly back into shape. But there was nothing he could do.

  ‘The lab’s working on it, and it’ll take several days before we get any more results. But the burnt body was small, indicating a woman. The wreck of the car has been gone through with a toothcomb, but there was nothing, not a shred of clothing, no belongings, nothing. The fire must have been started with many cans of gasoline, and quantities of it had been thrown not only all over the body and car but on the ground around it and the façade of the nearby house, which fortunately was empty. Nobody lives in the alley. It’s down for demolition and there are only a few abandoned cars there. Tramps sometimes use them to shelter in at night.’

  ‘So the place had been chosen deliberately, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes. Because by the time the alarm was raised, the fire had already done what it was meant to.’

  Inspecteur Leguennec kept twisting with his fingertips the plastic bag containing the black stone, and Alexandra could not take her eyes off this exasperating movement.

  ‘And then?’ she asked.

  ‘Beside the feet, we found two lumps of melted gold, which suggested a ring or a chain. So it was someone well-enough off to have some gold jewellery. And finally on what was left of the front passenger seat, we found a little black stone that had survived the fire, a chunk of basalt, probably all that remained from a handbag placed on the seat by a woman driver. Nothing else. Keys ought to have survived too. But oddly enough, there is no sign of any keys. I placed all my hopes on the stone. You understand? My other missing persons are all men, and big tall ones. So the first person I called on was Pierre Relivaux. I asked him if his wife took her keys with her when she went away, as most people would. And no, she didn’t. Sophia used to hide her keys in the garden, like a child, according to Relivaux.’

  Of course,’ said Alexandra with a fleeting smile. ‘My grandmother was scared stiff of losing her keys. She taught us all to hide our keys like squirrels. We never carry them about.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Leguennec. ‘That makes things clearer. Then I showed Relivaux the piece of basalt, without telling him what we had found at Maisons-Alfort. He recognised it at once.’

  Alexandra held out her hand for the plastic bag.

  ‘Aunt Sophia picked it up on a beach in Greece, the day after her first big success on stage,’ she said softly. ‘She never went anywhere without it. In fact that used to annoy Pierre. The rest of us would laugh at her about it, and now this little stone … One day they went off to the Dordogne, and had to go back when they were already a hundred kilo-metres out of Paris because Sophia had forgotten her stone. It’s true, she put it in her handbag or in her pocket. On stage, whatever kind of costume she had, she insisted they sew in a little pocket for it. She never went on stage to sing without it.’

  Vandoosler sighed. How tiresome Greeks could be sometimes.

  ‘When you’ve finished your enquiries,’ Alexandra was saying in an undertone, ‘and, you know, if you don’t need it, I’d like to have it. Unless, that is, Uncle Pierre …’

  She gave the plastic bag back to Inspecteur en chef Leguennec who nodded.

  ‘We’ll hold on to it for now, of course. But Relivaux didn’t say he wanted it.’

  ‘So what are the police concluding?’ asked Vandoosler.

  Alexandra liked to hear the voice of the old policeman, the uncle or godfather of the one with the rings, if she had got it right. She was a little distrustful of the ex-commissaire, but his voice had a very calming and encouraging effect, even when he wasn’t saying anything in particular.

  ‘Shall we go into the other room?’ said Marc. ‘We could have a drink perhaps.’

  They moved as one in silence and Mathias put on his jacket. It was time for him to go to work in Le Tonneau.

  ‘Juliette hasn’t closed the restaurant?’ asked Marc.

  ‘No. But I’m going to have to do all the work. She can hardly stand upright. When Leguennec asked her to identify the stone, she asked for explanations.’

  With a distressed expression, Leguennec spread his short arms.

  ‘People will ask for explanations,’ he said. ‘It’s normal, and then they wish they hadn’t, and that is normal too.’

  ‘See you this evening then, St Matthew,’ said Vandoosler. ‘So what do you conclude, Leguennec?’

  ‘That two weeks after disappearing, Madame Siméonidis has been f
ound. As you won’t need me to tell you, the state of the body, which is burnt to cinders, makes it impossible to say when she died. She could have been killed two weeks ago, and hidden in the abandoned car, or she could have been murdered last night. In that case, what was she doing in between times, and why? Or she might have gone into the alleyway herself, to wait for someone, and was taken by surprise. The state the alley is in now, it’s impossible to draw any conclusions. There’s soot and rubbish everywhere. Frankly, the investigation is going to be difficult. All our lines of approach are weak. The angle “how did it happen?” is stymied. The angle “who has an alibi?” is no use, because we’ve got a timescale of two weeks. As for physical clues, it’s hopeless. The only line of questioning we have left is “why?” with all that that entails. Possible inheritors, enemies, lovers, blackmailers, all the usual suspects.’

  Alexandra pushed away her empty cup and went out of the ‘refectory’. Her son was on the first floor, where Mathias had settled him at a small desk, to do some drawing. She came downstairs with him and took a jacket from the bedroom.

  ‘I’m going out,’ she told the four men sitting round the table. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back. Don’t wait up for me.’

  ‘With your little boy?’ said Marc.

  ‘Yes. If I’m late back, Kyril will sleep in the back of the car. Don’t worry. I just need to get away.’

  ‘Car? What car?’ asked Marc.

  ‘Aunt Sophia’s car. The red one. Pierre gave me the keys and said I could use it when I wanted to. He has his own.’

  ‘You’ve been over to see Relivaux again?’ said Marc. ‘On your own?’

  ‘My uncle would have been surprised, don’t you think, if I hadn’t even been to see him for two days. Mathias can say what he likes, but Pierre was just fine with me. I don’t want the police harassing him. He’s got enough on his plate without that.’

  Alexandra was at the end of her tether, clearly. Marc wondered if he had not been too hasty after all, to take her in. Perhaps they should send her to stay with Relivaux? No, it really was not the right moment. And Mathias would bar the door again, like a rock. He looked at the young woman, holding her son firmly by the hand, with an expression on her face that was hard to fathom. The waterfall of disillusions, he had almost forgotten the waterfall. And where would she go now in the car? She had said she knew nobody in Paris. Marc ran his hand through Kyril’s curly hair. The kid’s hair was absolutely irresistible. That did not stop his mother being a complete pain when she was worked up.

  ‘I want to have supper with St Mark,’ said Kyril. ‘And St Luke. I don’t want to go in the car again.’ Marc looked at Alexandra and gestured that it would be no trouble to look after the little boy for the evening, he was not going out.

  ‘Very well,’ said Alexandra. She kissed her son, told him they were really called Marc and Lucien, and walked out stiffly, with arms folded, after a nod to Inspecteur Leguennec. Marc suggested to Kyril that he finish his drawing before supper.

  ‘If she thinks she’s going to Maisons-Alfort,’ said Leguennec, ‘she’s wasting her time. The street’s cordoned off

  ‘Why would she go there?’ Marc asked, suddenly irritated, forgetting that a few minutes earlier he had been wishing Alexandra would go elsewhere. ‘She’s just going to go somewhere for the sake of it, that’s all.’

  Leguennec shrugged and spread his hands without replying.

  ‘Will you have her followed?’ asked Vandoosler.

  ‘Not tonight. She won’t get up to anything significant tonight.’

  Marc stood up, glancing from Leguennec to Vandoosler and back.

  ‘Follow her? What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘Her mother will inherit, and Alexandra stands to gain,’ Leguennec said.

  ‘So what?’ cried Marc. ‘She’s not the only one, I dare say! Oh, for God’s sake, take a look at yourselves. The original hard-boiled cops! Never giving an inch! Always thinking the worst! This girl goes off, absolutely shattered with grief, she’s just going to drive round the streets, and you’re already thinking of having her followed. Because you think, aha, there’s no way she’s going to pull the wool over our eyes, we weren’t born yesterday. Well, that’s bullshit! Anyone can play that game. You know what I think of people who like to “control the situation”?’

  ‘Yes, we do know,’ said Vandoosler. ‘You can’t stand them.’

  ‘You bet I can’t stand them. There are times in this world when it’s better to behave as if you were born yesterday. Cynical, case-hardened, or what? I don’t think they come much worse than you, uncle.’

  ‘Meet my nephew, St Mark,’ Vandoosler said to Leguennec, smiling. ‘The least little thing and he’ll rewrite the gospel for you.’

  Marc shrugged, finished his glass of beer and banged it down on the table.

  ‘I’ll let you have the last word, uncle, since you’ll take it anyway.’

  He left the room and went upstairs. Lucien followed him quietly and caught him by the shoulder as they reached the landing. Unusually for him, Lucien spoke in a normal voice.

  ‘Calm down, soldier,’ he said. ‘We’ll win through in the end.’

  XIX

  MARC LOOKED AT HIS WATCH AS LEGUENNEC CAME DOWN FROM Vandoosler’s attic. It was ten past midnight. They had been playing cards. Unable to sleep, he heard Alexandra come in at about three in the morning. He had left all the doors open, so as to be able to look out for Kyril if he woke up. Marc told himself it would not be proper to go down and listen. Nevertheless, he did go down and cocked his ear from the seventh stair. The young woman was moving about quietly, so as not to disturb anyone. Marc heard her fill a glass with water. It was as he had thought. You go shooting off, confidently into the unknown, you take a few firm, if contradictory decisions, but in fact you are just going nowhere, and you end up coming back home.

  Marc sat on the seventh stair. His thoughts were in a whirl, clashing or diverging. Like the plates that move along on top of the hot heaving magma underneath, the molten mantle of the earth. It’s a scary thought, those plates sliding in all directions over the earth, unable to stay put. Tectonic plates, they’re called. Well, he was having tectonic thoughts. The thoughts were sliding about inside his head and sometimes, inevitably, they clashed. With the usual sodding consequences. When tectonic plates move apart, there’s an earthquake, and when they meet, there’s an earthquake. What was Alexandra Haufman up to? How would Leguennec’s interrogation sessions go? Why had Sophia been burnt to death in Maisons-Alfort? Had Alexandra been in love with Kyril’s father? Should he wear some rings on his right hand, why on earth do you need a piece of basalt in order to sing well? Ah yes, basalt. When the plates move apart, basalt comes erupting up, and when the plates clash it’s something else. What was it? Andesite. That was it, andesite. And why was there that difference? No idea, he had forgotten the answer. He heard Alexandra preparing to go to bed. And as he sat there at three in the morning, on his stair, he was waiting for the tectonic activity to subside. Why had he shouted at his godfather? Would Juliette make an tie flottante pudding for them tomorrow, as she usually did on Fridays? Was Relivaux going to own up about his mistress? Who was going to inherit Sophia’s money? Were his ideas about village trade a bit too far-fetched, and why did Mathias go about in a state of undress?

  Marc rubbed his eyes. There comes a time when your thoughts are in such a godalmighty tangle that you can’t get a needle through them. All you can do then is drop everything and try to go to sleep. Retire in good order, as Lucien would put it, away from the firing line. And was Lucien in a state of eruption? Could you say that? No, Lucien was more a case of chronic low-level volcanic activity. What about Mathias? Not tectonic at all, Mathias, he was like water, but a vast stretch of water, an ocean. The ocean cools down the lava flow. But on the ocean bed, things aren’t as calm as all that, there’s a lot of bad stuff down there: rifts, trenches, and even some revolting forms of animal life.

  Alexandra had gone to
bed. There were no more sounds from downstairs, no lights showing. Marc was drowsy but he didn’t feel cold. A light came on on the landing, and he heard the godfather coming softly down the stairs until he reached his level.

  ‘You really should go to sleep, Marc,’ whispered Vandoosler.

  And the old man went on down with his pocket torch. He was going to take a leak outside, presumably. A simple, straightforward and healthy act. The older Vandoosler had never shown any interest in tectonic plates and yet Marc had often talked to him about them. Marc didn’t want to be sitting on the stairs when the old man came back up. He ran upstairs, opened his window to get some fresh air, and lay down. Why was the old man carrying a plastic bag, if he was just going to take a leak outdoors?

  XX

  THE NEXT DAY, MARC AND LUCIEN TOOK ALEXANDRA TO DINNER AT Juliette’s restaurant. The questioning sessions had begun and they were turning out to be slow, long-winded and unproductive.

  Relivaux had been called in that morning, for the second time. Vandoosler passed on to all the information he’d gleaned from Inspecteur Leguennec. Yes, Pierre had a mistress in Paris, but he didn’t see what business that was of theirs, or how they knew about her already. No, Sophia had not known about it. Yes, he stood to inherit one-third of her estate. Yes, it was an enormous sum of money, but he would have preferred Sophia to be alive. If they didn’t believe him, they could go and take a running jump. No, Sophia didn’t have any personal enemies. A lover? That would surprise him.

  Next came the turn of Alexandra Haufman. She had had to tell them everything over again, four times. Her mother would inherit a third of the estate. But her mother would certainly not refuse Alexandra anything, would she? So Alexandra would have a direct interest in all this money coming into the family, wouldn’t she? Yes, agreed, but so what? Why had she come to Paris? Who could confirm Sophia’s invitation to her? Where had she been last night? Nowhere. And you expect us to believe that?