Up To No Good

by Victoria Corby

  Silently we filed in and sat down on a row of those plastic moulded chairs which seem to breed in any public place in any country. A vague effort had been made to brighten the room with a few out-of-date magazines heaped on a table, but their homely effect was offset by the posters on the walls of villainous-looking men, a couple of women too, who were wanted for a variety of offences from murder to armed robbery. The wordy notices which threatened us with enormous fines for breaking various laws weren’t particularly cheering either since we couldn’t understand them, so everybody sat in silence, knees pressed together like obedient little mice, almost too afraid to move in case we contravened some regulation or other. Even Maggie was affected by the atmosphere. I could have sworn that I saw her nibbling on a nail, and Sally said reflectively, ‘I need a cigarette. Surely one in five years won’t really matter, will it? Have you got one on you, Phil?’

  ‘Wait until afterwards,’ said Oscar warningly. ‘It’s against the law to smoke in public places and I bet that bloke behind the desk would be in here like a dose of salts the moment he smelt anything.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sally weakly. There was a pause, ‘Aren’t you guilty until proved innocent in this country?’

  No-one replied though I think this thought had been lurking uneasily at the back of all our minds; it certainly had in mine.

  ‘All we’re needed for is to fill in a few details about last night, not because the police believe one of us did the deed,’ Oscar said rallyingly. ‘Where do they imagine we could have stashed the loot? The cottage is too small; there aren’t any hidey holes.’

  ‘The kitchen’s got lots of big cupboards,’ I said.

  ‘Come on,’ he said scornfully. ‘They’re all in use. Even Charlie would have noticed several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of picture propped on top of the spices as he groped inside the larder cupboard for the jam to go with his croissant.’

  Sally shook her head. ‘Doubt it. Charlie can’t focus more than a few inches in front of himself in the morn­ings until he’s drunk about three pints of coffee. Besides, he hasn’t got his own breakfast once since we’ve been here,’ she added with a mock ferocious glare.

  Charlie made a big show of covering his head protec­tively and promised hastily to do it tomorrow.

  Oscar looked at her adoringly and pressed his hands together. ‘You make breakfast? Oh bliss! You wouldn’t like to move in with me, would you, Sally? I’ve always thought you were something else, now I see you’re quite, quite perfect!’

  She laughed, her nerves fading away, and now the ice was broken we chatted, albeit in low voices, until the door opened and I was summoned.

  Why me first? I thought in a blind panic. Oscar leaned forward and squeezed my hand. ‘Bowden - you’re the first alphabetic­ally, that’s all,’ he whispered.

  I smiled gratefully. Afterwards I couldn’t understand why I’d been so frightened. The detective from Bordeaux was a dark-haired man in his early thirties wearing jeans and an open-necked blue shirt. He was going to fit every cliché Maggie and Sally might have imagined what a French detective should look like, even down to his English which was fluent and idiomatic but with a marked accent. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Fournier and couldn’t have been more friendly and charming, though something in his eyes made me feel that if I happened to get on his wrong side I’d see a sea change in his attitude as marked as the one in the gendarme this morning.

  He’d already interviewed Janey and she’d told him that we’d stopped by the Sydney and admired it, which wasn’t precisely how I would have described it but I couldn’t help appreciating her careful use of language, so he wasn’t particularly interested in hearing what I had to say about our conversation, which was a distinct relief. He wanted to know if I’d seen anyone lurking around in the courtyard when I put the picture cases in the car and more importantly, since Janey hadn’t been wearing a watch, if I knew precisely what time it was when we’d been chatting in the hall. I didn’t, to his regret.

  ‘And you did not see the picture again, not even when you left?’ he asked.

  ‘The cars were parked in the courtyard, so we left by the back door.’

  ‘And you went back to your friends after Madame Morrison went to look for her dog?’

  I nodded, then as a man in the corner who was upping my answers straight into the computer looked up with irritation, presumably gestures don’t count, said out loud, ‘Yes, I went straight back. Is that when you think the picture was taken?’

  ‘We have not made up our minds what happened yet, Mademoiselle,’ the Lieutenant said in a repressive voice. He didn’t say it was his job to ask questions not mine but he might just as well have for the suddenly chill atmosphere that settled in the little interview room. Just as I was beginning to imagine that the shadow of the oubliette was looming over me, he stood up and said, ‘Thank you for giving us your time, mademoiselle, you have been very helpful. You are planning to go back to London on Sunday?’

  ‘Thursday. I’ve a family party to go to.’

  He hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I do not expect there will be any problems in giving you permission to leave,’ he said then, as I made a sound of protest, ‘but it will not help our investigation if we allow all the... witnesses to leave the country before we are certain we have finished questioning them.’

  Since his first choice of word might have been ‘suspect’ I didn’t protest any further and meekly went to have my fingerprints taken, a much messier procedure than I would have imagined. I was then shown into another little room and segregated from the others until after they had given their statements, presumably so we couldn’t cook up matching stories. Quite why we would have found it necessary to wait until we were actually in the gendarmerie to start inventing alibis for each other was beyond me but I didn’t feel it would be tactful to question the police mentality in this way. I settled down to wait and amused myself by boning up on yet another selection of the local villains whose portraits were adorning the walls around me.

  CHAPTER 18

  Within twenty minutes of our getting back to the cottage Janey, looking tired and worn around the edges and with fingers still tinged with blue from fingerprinting ink, just ‘happened’ to pass by. Her excuse was that Lily needed exercising. Since she knew how nerve wracking one’s first encounter with the French police system could be, she thought, in best British stiff upper lip tradition, that a brisk walk was just what I needed. Actually, I would have far rather soothed my ruffled nerves with a stiff gin and tonic but I wasn’t allowed that option. We wandered off down the little road while Lily hunted for imaginary bunnies in the vines. It took only about thirty seconds once we were out of earshot to reassure Janey that I’d been thoroughly discreet with the police, and about another minute and a half to say that according to our post mortem in the gendarmerie car park, none of the others had had a par­ticularly bad time with the detective either, though they’d kept Charlie a worryingly long time. We were beginning to get seriously concerned when he appeared, completely unfazed, saying that he had been discussing Manchestaire’s chances in the European Cup with the desk gendarme.

  ‘How’s it going with you?’ I asked.

  She cast her eyes upwards in an expressive gesture. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said grimly, then promptly added, ‘it’s absolute hell! Tom’s in the most filthy mood. It’s under­standable, I suppose. He’s incredibly embarrassed by the way Venetia’s behaved to Rob and his picture’s been stolen, which is enough to put even the most amenable person into a bad temper, but there’s absolutely no need for him to take it out on poor Rob. He’s even taken to growling at him about not getting out of bed early enough this morning.’

  ‘What difference would that have made?’ I asked, wondering if I was missing something.

  ‘Don’t ask me. Tom seems to be beyond logic at the moment,’ Janey said in some exasperation. ‘I’ve given up asking, I just get snapped at too! Anyway I think Rob is behaving like an absolute saint, though if th
ings continue like this I won’t blame him if he moves out to the B & B in the village until the police say he can leave. I might join him there.’ She kicked a loose stone on the road out of the way and said gruffly, ‘Of course what’s really on Tom’s mind is the possibility that the insurance are going to refuse to pay up because we didn’t have the alarm on. I’m glad to say he hasn’t got around to pinning that on Rob’s shoulders yet.’

  ‘But if there was a fault...’ I began.

  ‘There’s a provision in the policy for when the alarm’s out of order, but if the insurance company discovers I told you it wasn’t on they’d certainly use it as an excuse to wriggle out of divvying up, wouldn’t they? Not that according to the police it would have made any difference.

  They say it would have taken any half-competent intruder about thirty seconds to realise it wasn’t on, but all the same...’

  ‘No wonder you were in such a paddy this morning.’

  ‘I hadn’t even thought of it then,’ she said wryly. ‘I just wanted to stop Tom finding out about what we’d been doing last night. And before we can start thinking of insurance payouts we’ve got to see if the picture’s going to be recovered, though the detective in charge doesn’t seem to think there’s much hope of that. He said it could already be out of the country and might well have been stolen to order.’ She pushed her hair out of her face with a dispirited gesture. ‘At least that’s a notion we can live with, although it’s not nice to think a stranger has been in your house. What’s worse are the sort of questions the police have been asking us, like do we have any ideas about who might have taken it - by which they mean our friends or employees.’ She laughed humourlessly. ‘We’ve already accused Venetia of larceny today, so we kept quiet about that.’

  She jerked to attention as a spotted bottom disap­peared into a half-derelict hut on the edge of the road. ‘Hey, Lily, get out of there! I don’t care if it is a cat you’re after!’ she shouted. ‘Tramps doss down in there for the night sometimes and there’s broken glass all over the floor from their wine bottles. She could cut herself.’

  We heard excited snufflings coming from inside the hut; Lily obviously wasn’t going to come out. I went in, wrinkling my nose at the smell - it appeared the tramps also used it as a lavatory - and grabbing Lily’s collar, pulled her away from the pile of wood she was sniffing at and dragged her out as fast as possible so that I didn’t have to take a second breath.

  ‘Thanks,’ Janey said, and began scolding her dog for being a silly disobedient hound. The Dalmatian didn’t show any visible signs of remorse. ‘We’ve had the scene of crime people crawling all over the house all day as well, and the mess is unbelievable. There’s so much fingerprint powder dusted around the hall it looks as if a flour lorry has had an accident in there. Josette, my femme de ménage, is throwing a total wobbly over how she’s ever going to clean it up again.’

  I swallowed nervously. I’d been leaning backwards, resting my hands on the hall table while I was talking to Janey last night. What were the police going to think about this irrefutable evidence that placed me at the scene of the crime? Yes, they already knew I’d been there, but the sheer quantity of prints were bound to give the lie to my implication that Janey and I had merely lingered a moment or two to glance at the picture before moving on. I’ve read quite enough detective novels to know that the instant the police reckon you haven’t been telling them the full and unvarnished truth you go straight to the top of their Most Wanted list. ‘My fingerprints are all over the hall table,’ I croaked.

  Janey laughed. ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. Josette saw a smear on it as she was going to unlock the front door this morning and whipped out the duster she always has in her pocket for those dusting emergencies and gave it a quick going over. The fingerprint man went ballistic, especially as Josette’s a complete star at polishing and there isn’t a print left anywhere except for a faint smudge at the back which may or may not belong to the thief, or could just be mine from when I was rearranging the photographs yesterday. To make it worse, Josette can’t even tell them if the picture was on the wall while she was busily destroying evidence; she says she has far too much to do to waste her time by looking at things'. She’s not sure if the front door was unlocked either; we often get up and unlock it before she arrives so it wouldn’t have struck her as unusual if it was. All she is sure of is that the loo window was open as usual, and the bunch of lavender which lives on the windowsill had been knocked on the floor, but as there aren’t any marks no one can tell if it was the cat who prefers the window to his catflap for some reason, or the thief who could have wriggled in and then gone out by the front door.’

  ‘Through the loo window?' I echoed. ‘But it’s minute.’

  ‘I’m assured that there are some very small thieves about these days,’ she said seriously. ‘It could even have been a child who then opened the door for his or her accomplices.’

  We contemplated this prospect in silence for a moment. ‘Still doesn’t explain how they got past the dogs,’ I said thoughtfully.

  ‘One of the detectives said the most likely explanation is that there was a specialist there whose sole job was to quieten the dogs while his mates lifted the picture; otherwise an opportunist could have walked in this morning while the dogs were cadging off Josette in the kitchen and failing completely in their duty of guarding the house.’

  I felt a cold shiver go down my spine. ‘He can’t be serious. Surely nobody would have the nerve to wander in like that?’

  ‘You’d be surprised. The fingerprint man was telling me about a case in the Medoc where Madame got out of her bath to fetch something and wandered into her bedroom wearing a light covering of bath bubbles to discover a strange man going through her jewel box.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  Janey giggled. ‘He took a good long look, said that with a magnificent figure like hers she’d have no problem in persuading her husband to replace everything, and stuffed the whole lot in his pocket before vamoosing out of the window!’ We both laughed.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she sighed as we reached a fork in the road, ‘I suppose I ought to get back and think about making something for supper, though I doubt anyone has much appetite. I’m certainly going to get indigestion if Tom goes on glaring at Rob like that! He’s even taken to muttering that if Rob had kept Venetia under better control she’d never have made a spectacle of herself in this way. As if anyone has ever been able to stop Venetia doing anything she doesn’t want to.’

  ‘How is she?’ I asked.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t care,’ Janey said in an exasperated voice, as we turned around and started back. ‘I know it’s just bad luck and bad timing that she should pull her dramatic little stunt at exactly the same time as the Sydney gets stolen, but somehow it’s so typical of Venetia to find a way to hog the limelight. She’s staying with Napier until the end of the week and then who knows? She rang me to ask if I thought she ought to come back, though she sounded more worried about letting Napier down than about any upset we might be feeling, but I said that after their argument this morning, it might be better if she stayed out of Tom’s way for a while.’

  ‘And what does Robert think about it all?’ I asked, trying not to seem too interested.

  I got a long, measuring look. ‘He isn’t saying,’ she said finally. ‘Though he did mutter that Napier was probably something she had to get out of her system and a week or so in his company should do the trick.’

  ‘That sounds unusually tolerant,’ I said after a pause.

  ‘Quite uncannily so,’ she agreed. ‘Maybe he’s decided that if he makes a fuss she’ll dig her heels in, whereas if he sits it out and pretends he doesn’t really care she’ll come back to him eventually.’

  I found I disliked this notion intensely. Not that it was any of my business. I doubted that once we’d both got back to London Venetia would be as keen to stay in contact as she claimed, and I certainly wouldn’t be seeing Robert, bu
t I still didn’t want him to be hurt. And if he was waiting for her to come back he almost certainly would get hurt. For if she did come back, she was bound to do a runner again sometime in the future. As my father used to say about my mother’s greatest friend, ‘Once a bolter, always a bolter,’ though to be honest Fiona used to bolt with just about anything that crossed her path in trousers (and in kilts on a couple of occasions), and Venetia hadn’t gone that far, but the principle was the same.

  It wasn’t my affair, I reminded myself again, and concentrated on Janey’s tale of a messy incident involving the twins and a fingerprint set that had been left unguarded. When we reached the gate to the cottage, I promised her I’d come up for coffee in the morning to catch up on the latest news and went in. I was so deep in thought that the blue BMW parked alongside the other cars didn’t register on my consciousness and it wasn’t until I was heading across the garden to where everyone was standing around a table at one end of the pool that I heard a familiar loud laugh and came to abruptly.

  ‘What’s the matter, Nella?’ Oscar asked in a concerned voice at my far from sotto voce ‘Oh bugger!’

  ‘Just cricked my ankle,’ I lied hastily. George was the last person I wanted to see just at this moment but there was no need to spell it out.

  Oscar wasn’t fooled. He gave me a distinctly wary look before saying, ‘Hugh and George brought back the car Venetia borrowed from Tom,’ as if to point out that for once he hadn’t set this up, while George broke off his conversation with Sally and Charlie and came over to give me a kiss.

  ‘Tom invited us to stay for a drink but we thought it would be a bit of an imposition, so we decided to come and see you,’ he said, smiling down at me as if he expected me to take this visit as a personal compliment and be delighted at it too. But then sensitivity to undercurrents has never been George’s forte. Nor had a well-developed sense of colour, I thought, doing my best to avoid looking at his shirt, an unpleasant shade of yellow which looked particularly bad against his colouring.