The Splendour Falls

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Ah.”

  “Only he wasn’t playing the violin yesterday, it was a tape, and the opening allegro to Beethoven’s Third is at least fifteen minutes long, so he had heaps of time to run up the steps and push Paul off… I doubt if it takes me more than a couple of minutes myself to climb those steps, and I’m not nearly as fit as Neil.”

  “Ah,” Harry said again, as if my explanation were perfectly clear. “And why would this violinist want to push a Canadian kid off the château steps, pray tell?”

  “Because… because…” My chin trembled, and I realized the motive was no longer clear, not after what the gypsy Jean had told me.

  “You’re way off beam, love,” Harry told me, gently. “It was Valcourt who did the killing.”

  I didn’t take that in, at first—I only felt relief that nearly shook my body in a deep and swelling surge. It wasn’t Neil, my inner voice rejoiced, but I was half afraid to listen to it. I turned to the gypsy. “You’re absolutely sure?”

  He nodded, his black eyes calm and certain. “Yesterday afternoon,” he explained, “I am coming down from here to the town, through the souterrains, the tunnels. I stop at the door in the cliff. There is a space between the boards in the door, and so I look, like always, to make sure the way is safe.” He drew one finger along the line of his eyebrow, frowning. “But it is not safe. He is there.”

  “Monsieur Valcourt?”

  His nod this time held sadness. “He is sitting on the wall, beside your friend, the young canadien. They smoke, they talk—they talk like friends. But the boy, he is not on his guard. He is not watching Valcourt’s face, as I am, so he does not see the danger. When Valcourt gives to him another cigarette, the boy lifts up both hands to light it, and…” No brutal gesture, this time, just a small regretful shrug. “It is so quick, there is no time for noise. The boy falls and Valcourt walks very fast toward the château. When I cannot see him any more I open my door, I come out. It is terrible, what I have just seen, you understand?” A brief pause while he lit another cigarette himself, still frowning. “I go down at once to see if the boy… but he is dead. He is dead.” The gypsy glumly shook his head, and sighed a spreading pall of smoke.

  There was something unfinished about that story, I thought, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The little dog Bruno yawned with gusto and jumped onto my cousin’s bed, stretching himself into the blankets. And then I remembered. I remembered very clearly how I’d seen that dog the afternoon before, outside the phone box at the corner of the fountain square. Spurred by that memory, I took a stab in the dark. “So you went down and telephoned Monsieur Grantham, didn’t you?”

  “To Monsieur…? Ah, the one who plays the violin. No, I do not telephone to him, Mademoiselle. I telephone to the police, to say there has been an accident.” He shrugged. “And then I leave as quickly as I can. I come back here, to tell your cousin.”

  “I was asleep, I’m afraid,” Harry said, with a regretful smile, “and by the time I’d heard the tale from Jean all hell had broken loose at your hotel, which made it rather difficult to contact you.” His eyes were very gentle as he met my gaze. “I am a selfish bastard, aren’t I, love? I was so busy feeling sorry for myself I didn’t stop to think you might yourself be in some danger. I thought you’d be quite safe with Jean to keep an eye on you, and from what I heard I gathered Valcourt rather fancied you. I thought,” he said, a little sadly, “that it would be all right, you see. But when Jean told me Valcourt had just pushed your friend right down the château steps, I realized I was wrong. Of course, by then,” he went on, pushing himself upright on the pillows, “the word was out that the police were looking everywhere for Jean. His sister came to tell us that. So I could hardly send him down…”

  “I told you,” said the gypsy, “that your cousin, she would come to us.” He shrugged with the complacency of one who trusts the mystic course of fate.

  Harry smiled. “So you did.”

  It hardly mattered, I thought, whether I’d found them or they’d found me. What mattered was what all of us intended doing now. For, in spite of Harry’s evidently weakened state…

  I looked more closely at him. “God, I never thought. Were you very badly hurt? Do you need a doctor?”

  “No,” he told me, rather quickly, hitching higher up in bed. Although he looked more tired than normal, he really didn’t appear too ill. “No, I don’t need a doctor.”

  The gypsy also clearly thought the question daft. “My sister, she has seen him,” he explained. “She is better than a doctor. She finds us this empty house, to keep him hidden, and she comes each day to make for him the medicine. It is not good, she says, for him to move around too much.”

  Even so, it seemed to me unthinkable to simply sit here and do nothing. Two men were dead already, and my cousin’s life was hardly safe from harm. I frowned and cleared my throat and was about to speak when I was interrupted by a gentle, furtive tapping sound, like the faint patter of a branch blown by the wind against a window pane.

  Jean scraped his chair back on the floorboards and rose to answer the door. A different door than the one I’d entered the house by, but then the tapping sound had not come from the tunnels. It had come from the outside.

  The door swung open and I saw for the first time just where I was—the slanting view of narrow path and waving grasses and the smudge of rooftops far below was unmistakable. I must have walked straight past this house, I thought, when I’d come up that first day alone and by accident to the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde, and again when I’d returned to search with Paul. I would have to see the house from the outside, of course, to know just where along the path it stood, but all the same I knew that I was on the cliffs and just a stone’s throw from the lovely ruined chapelle. The tunnels had brought me this far.

  I’d scarcely registered the fact before my attention shifted to the woman standing in the doorway. She was quite young, with an arresting face and a figure that begged the word voluptuous. Had I met her on the street, I would have thought her looks exotic—Italian, perhaps, or even Turkish, dark hair and eyes and olive skin—but I’d not have taken her for a gypsy. She looked so… well, so modern, really, in her stylish jeans and jumper; so unlike my own conception of a gypsy, and yet seeing her beside her brother Jean one couldn’t possibly mistake the family likeness.

  This was, I thought, without a doubt Jean’s helpful sister with the healing hands, who came every day to nurse my cousin’s wounded head. Which probably explained why Harry had been so content to stay hidden, I thought drily. Already he had slumped again, wanting sympathy, assuming his most appealing little-boy-lost expression as he turned to face this newest visitor.

  From the exchange of greetings that followed I learned the woman’s name was Danielle. We were introduced, but she was clearly too preoccupied with other things to spare me more than a few words and a distracted nod. “They have taken Victor to be questioned,” she announced, her lovely face clouded with worry.

  Her brother nodded. “Yes, I know.”

  “You know? And yet you are still here? What kind of man are you, to let your friend face trouble in your place?”

  “They will let him go.”

  “Oh, will they?” She tossed her head, eyes very bright. “That isn’t what I hear. I hear they think he murdered this one here,” a jerk of the jaw toward Harry, “and that he tries to hide the evidence.”

  My cousin sat bolt upright. “What?”

  “Victor Belliveau?” I checked, and the woman Danielle turned her wild eyes on me.

  “Yes. They think he is a murderer because I hide the car in his old barn,” she said.

  My cousin’s car, I thought. Of course, it would have had to be hidden somewhere. I remembered the decrepit stone barn that faced Belliveau’s house, and how the locked door had moaned and rattled in the wind.

  Danielle went on, with feeling. “He doesn’t
even know about the car, poor Victor. That barn, he never uses it—I thought it would be safe. It is my fault,” she cursed herself. “And he has always been so good to us. And you refuse to help him.”

  “It is too great a risk…” began the gypsy, but my cousin cut him off.

  “All right,” said Harry, in a tone I recognized from countless lost arguments, “that’s it. I’m going down.”

  And he began to lever himself out of the bed, wincing with the effort, though I couldn’t be sure how much of that was for Danielle’s benefit. I knew better than to try to stop him, but Jean wasn’t privy to my years of experience with Harry’s moods.

  “The police, they will not listen—”

  “Then we’ll just have to make them listen.” Harry swung his feet to the floor and reached for his shoes. He had been resting fully clothed in bed, no doubt to guard against the creeping autumn chill that soaked through even these stone walls. His dusty jeans and crumpled shirt, together with his week-long growth of beard, made him look the sort of person one normally found skulking under bridges with a bottle of cheap wine—not at all respectable; yet through the rough exterior, my cousin’s odd heroic quality still shone, brilliant and compelling.

  Danielle moved to his side, drawn less perhaps by his heroic brilliance than by a practical and simple fear that he might fall and hit his head again. Certainly he seemed a little less than steady on his feet, although the obstinate determination in his face showed plainly that he had the will to override his weakness. If he was truly weak, I amended the thought, not missing his brief smile when Danielle took firm hold of his arm to help him balance.

  Jean sighed. “I will come too.”

  “No.” Harry shook his head. “No, you should stay up here I think, and out of sight, until I have a chance to clear this whole thing up with the police. Danielle can help me,” he said, brightening. “We can take the tunnel, like you do. Danielle knows the tunnels, doesn’t she?”

  “As well as Jean.” The woman raised her chin with pride. “I can guide you.”

  Oh, wonderful, I thought. Aloud, I said: “Shall I stay here, then?”

  Harry frowned. “Well, if you like. Although I would have thought… oh, right,” he realized, suddenly. “Tunnels. I quite forgot. My cousin,” he informed the others, predictably, “has a thing about tunnels. Why don’t you take the outside path, instead? It’s not the nicest of neighborhoods, I’m afraid, but it is still light outside and I’m sure you’d find the way back with no trouble. You could meet up with us outside the château, where the tunnel door comes out. All right?”

  “All right.” I nodded. A trace of apprehension must have seeped into my voice because Danielle looked up to meet my eyes across the room, her hands protective on my cousin’s arm.

  “Do not worry,” she told me. “I will take good care of him.”

  I thought that Harry looked distinctly pleased with the situation as his self-appointed nurse steered him to the cellar door. A moment later I could hear their footsteps slowly moving down the narrow stairway that led down into the darkness of the tunnels. I shuddered at the memory of that darkness, and turned my back on it. The gypsy Jean misread my action.

  “They will be fine,” he told me. “It is an easy walk down there, easier than along the cliff, and no one will see them until they have reached the safety of the town.” He walked with me to the front door, keeping to the shadows as he held the door open for me to pass through. “Take care, Mademoiselle,” was the only advice he gave me. And then the door was bolted once more behind me and I found myself alone on the cliff path, between the château and the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde, with the hollow eyes of half-decayed troglodyte dwellings staring at me blackly through a tangled web of weeds and sun-bleached grasses.

  The house looked larger, seen from the outside. It was unremarkable in design, like a child’s drawing of a house—four walls, peaked roof, two windows and a redbrick chimney, with no frivolous decoration to relieve the solid severe lines. Two stories tall it rose, which meant two rooms; two narrow rooms, at that, and yet it still looked somehow larger, perhaps because there were no other buildings nearby to lend it proper scale. There was only the hill rising up behind it and the gaping crumbled cliff dwellings snaking off on either side, and behind me the treacherous drop to the gray roofs of Chinon.

  I remembered this house, from my first foray up the path last Monday—the day I’d felt I was being followed. I’d felt afraid, outside this house. I remembered the barbed wire, and the leaning door, and the barking dog and the sound of the wind. How differently might things have turned out, I wondered, if I had knocked at the door of the house that day, instead of running? Had I found Harry then, we might be safely home in England, he and I, while the Chinon police dealt with Armand Valcourt and left Victor Belliveau alone. And Paul would be fasting with his brother, observing the holy day of Yom Kippur.

  Hindsight, I thought, was like a punishment, remorseless in its clarity and painfully unable to change what had gone before.

  Turning from the house, I pressed on down the path toward the château, which I knew lay some ten minutes’ walk away, although I couldn’t see it from here.

  Since I’d first gone into the tunnel after the gypsy earlier that evening, the wind had shifted subtly and the clouds were drifting in to catch the brilliance of the sinking sun. The air was cold and singing past my ears. A strand of hair whipped stinging in my eyes, blinding me for a moment until I could push it back and blink the tears away. I tucked my chin into my collar, dug my hands deeper in the pockets of Paul’s red jacket, and hurried on.

  The path wound round and down and up again, past caves and staring houses that hunched shoulder to shoulder to watch me scurry by. And then the houses blended to a single wall that guided me along the rising slope toward the narrow, soaring clock tower at the château’s gate. I bustled upwards, feeling the now-familiar burning of my labored lungs, and glanced at my wristwatch to check the time.

  Surprisingly, the walk had taken less than ten minutes—it was just past seven, which meant that, even though Harry and Danielle had started first, I was likely to arrive at the meeting place ahead of them, considering my cousin wasn’t moving at top speed and was moving in the dark, on top of that. I slowed my pace a little, to ease the pressure on my pounding heart.

  And then my heart, quite suddenly, seemed not to beat at all.

  Ahead of me, almost at the very spot where Paul had fallen yesterday, a man was sitting on the low stone wall. He sat with body angled forward, elbows braced on knees, head bent to contemplate his loose-linked fingers. He was frowning.

  Behind the pensive figure of Armand Valcourt, the château cast a stark and stretching shadow on the smooth deserted pavement. Deserted now, but not for long. At any moment now my cousin and his gypsy nurse would shuffle up the steps from the dank tunnel, and walk through that door just there… just there…

  My gaze swung past Armand’s bent shoulders to the cliff face further up the road. Fighting back the rising tide of panic, I struggled to reassure myself. There was a gap between the boards, so Jean had said, a gap that one could look through, to make sure the way was safe. Oh, dear God, let them have the sense to look, I prayed, in the fervent way that non-believers pray, when they hope to be proved wrong.

  I wasn’t the least bit worried, at that moment, for my own safety. Armand might be a killer, but he hadn’t struck me as a psychopath. He must have suspected, from the very first, that I was somehow linked to Harry, to the man who’d seen him leaving the scene of Didier Muret’s murder. He’d seen Harry’s face, after all; any fool would have noticed the resemblance between my cousin and myself. And Armand Valcourt was no fool.

  And yet, he’d always been a perfect gentleman. He didn’t know I knew, I thought—that was the key. And as long as I kept up a normal front I doubted he would try to harm me now. After all, I reasoned, there was no way Ar
mand could know that I’d just come from seeing Harry, not unless I told him myself, and I was hardly about to do that. I could just tell him I’d been walking on the cliff path—hardly a suspicious activity—and he’d have no cause to think anything had changed between us. No, he wouldn’t harm me, I decided, steadying my lurching pulse with a concerted effort.

  But if he came face to face with Harry, now, and Harry barely able to stand up straight, let alone defend himself…

  A crowd of tourists would have made the roadway safe, but it was suppertime and no one was about, not even a straggling student or a local resident—not one soul, just as it had been the afternoon before. I flicked another watchful glance toward the door set in the cliff face, and squared my shoulders. History, Harry always said, went round and round, repeating—but the tragedy of yesterday would not be replayed tonight, not while I had the power left to stop it. Forming a smile that felt natural upon my face, I took a bold step forward, and another.

  He was so deep in contemplation that he didn’t hear my footsteps drawing closer, and when I finally spoke to him his head came up with a startled jerk.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” was what I said. What thoughts did killers think, in private?

  He turned toward me, no longer frowning, his preoccupied expression fading to a warmer look of welcome. “My thoughts aren’t worth a penny,” he said evenly, in French. “You’ve been walking? By yourself?”

  “Just as far as the chapelle.”

  “The Chapelle Sainte Radegonde?” His eyebrows lifted a degree. “It’s not the safest walk, that, for a woman on her own.”

  “Quite safe in daylight, I should think.” So many things, I thought, were safe by daylight. Even talking to murderers. Or at least, that’s what I hoped. Mind you, there wasn’t that much daylight left, and I was running out of time to think of some way to make Armand Valcourt move from where he sat, leaving the way clear for Harry to get down to the police.