The Missing Masterpiece
Page 22
He looked at me as if I were a witch, or a soothsayer, or something. I sighed. ‘Let someone else tell you about “cookies” and the Web. I don’t know enough about it to get it right. I wouldn’t know anything at all, except I have a young friend who’s an expert on these things and has taught me to be careful. But it’s plain to me that Peter’s forger runs that site you saw, and that he’s going around sending interesting little hints to people who show interest. It’s easy, and doesn’t cost him anything, so if nobody bites, he hasn’t lost anything but the time it takes to hit send. But you bit.’
‘I didn’t go back to that site!’
‘No. You came here instead, and started looking around for anything to do with Abelard.’
‘And lying about it.’ That was Alan, sounding neutral.
‘Well – yes. See, if I did find something, I wanted it to be my own discovery.’ He looked abashed, as well he might. ‘And I guess … oh, hell, I guess I was just too much of an amateur for the bad guys to worry about me.’
‘Very well. Sam, it’s your turn.’
‘You’re lucky, A.T. I’m not an amateur, and I got half-drowned and almost kidnapped. And to tell the truth, I’m wonderin’ why. These guys want somebody to find their forged manuscript, right? Why were they drivin’ me off?’
Peter shook his head. ‘They wanted me to find it. That was the whole point of the thing. See, if I could find a genuine Abelard, there’d be every sort of glory in it for me – and Laurence, as we’d planned it. If someone else found it, it would all fall flat for us. And if someone like you, sir, found a forged one, there would be too good a chance that you’d recognize it for what it was. That’s why they wanted you out of the way, but killing you would have brought the police in with a vengeance. I’m nearly certain that whoever enticed you onto those sands was also the one who rescued you.’
I shook my head at the convoluted criminal mind and let Sam continue.
‘There’s nothin’ secret about why I came here. Except I didn’t broadcast it to my colleagues, ’cause I didn’t want ’em to get here ahead of me. I heard the rumours – I guess you and your pals planted ’em, son – and I came to see if I couldn’t find me a long-lost Abelard song or two, and I’ve had nothin’ but trouble ever since.’
‘And you still say you told no one about your plans?’ asked Alan.
‘Not a livin’ soul.’
‘Then I don’t understand how the villains apparently knew who you were and what you intended.’
I gasped. ‘But I do. I just this minute figured it out.’ I was almost scared, because it meant we could all be in danger. ‘Sam, you told us you brought a book with you, from home, and you’ve read it out in the public lounge. Is it this book?’ I pointed to the volume lying carelessly on the coffee table. It was a dull-looking paperback entitled Historia Calamitatum. ‘I don’t read Latin, but this is pretty easy. It’s Abelard’s story about his life, isn’t it? History of Calamities, or something like that?’
‘The Story of My Misfortunes, it’s usually translated,’ said Sam. ‘And I was idiot enough to leave it lyin’ around where anybody could see.’ He smacked his forehead. ‘I guess as a cloak-and-dagger type I make a pretty good bus driver.’
‘But, Alan …?’
‘Yes, love.’ He gave me a reassuring look. ‘What my wife has just grasped is that someone with access to this hotel is the one who knew why Sam was here. Unless you read the book anywhere else?’
Sam shook his head. ‘I didn’t wanna leave it someplace. I’m bad for puttin’ things down and forgettin’ where, and I don’t wanna lose this. Cheap paperback, but I’ve made lotsa notes in the margins.’
‘So someone saw you reading it. Someone who knows enough about Abelard to recognize one of his principal works. In Latin, so the person reading it must be something of a scholar.’
‘It ain’t,’ said Sam with a wry smile, ‘your usual vacation reading.’
‘No.’ Alan wasn’t smiling. ‘So. This hotel does not serve any meals except breakfast, and that only to guests. There is therefore no casual traffic. The person who saw this, and acted upon the knowledge is either an employee, or a guest.’
‘Or the guest of a guest,’ I added, looking at Peter and A.T.
‘Right.’ Alan ran his hand down the back of his head in his favourite gesture of frustration. ‘And this would have happened before you were attacked, which was on …’
I consulted my notebook. ‘Tuesday, the twentieth. A week ago yesterday.’
‘Great Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, is that all it’s been? A week? Feels like years.’
‘Yes,’ said Alan wearily, ‘and the point is: how many guests have been in and out of this hotel in that time? And how are we going to trace them?’ He stood and pulled his phone out of his pocket. ‘Time for another call to Henri.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m tired and I’m starving, and we need a break. We’re going to the best restaurant anyone can recommend and have a thumping good lunch, and we’re not going to talk about anything medieval or criminal while we do it.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was rather a silent meal. Several times someone opened his mouth, thought better of it, and resumed eating. I imagine the food was good; it’s hard to get a really bad meal in France. I don’t remember a single thing I ate.
We jammed ourselves back into Alan’s car, since we had become wary of separating, and drove back to l’Ermitage, where we sat around in the small lounge of Sam’s suite and looked blankly at each other.
I’d been mulling over an idea all through lunch, and now, I decided, was the time to air it.
‘Have any of you ever watched a magician do card tricks?’ I asked, throwing the remark into the silence.
Four heads swivelled my way. Three faces looked bewildered. Alan’s looked speculative.
‘No, I haven’t suddenly gone round the bend. There’s a technique called forcing a card. A friend of mine who used to do parlour magic explained it to me. When the magician tells you to “pick a card, any card”, a skilled operator can be sure which one you’ll pick, and of course he already knows what it is. I can’t do it; it takes some skill and practice. But I know it can be done.
‘I’m beginning to wonder if our villain, probably Laurence or the mysterious forger, or the pair working together, hasn’t been forcing a card on us – the Abelard card. “Calamities” keep on happening, à la Abelard. Every time we turn around, there’s that medieval monk disappearing just around the corner – and we keep on chasing him. Come to think of it, maybe the analogy I want isn’t the card trick but the good old familiar red herring. We’re all concentrating on Abelard – his connection with the Abbey here, his lost music, his manuscripts. What if, like “The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring, Tra-La!” he has nothing to do with the case?’
‘But everything we’ve seen and heard—’ Sam began to object.
‘Exactly. And who was it who first brought the name of Abelard to our attention?’
‘Peter, I suppose, to you and Alan. But I was following the trail much earlier than that, and so was A.T. here.’
‘Yes. But I remind you that you, Sam, were led in by rumours, and you, A.T., by an anonymous email. And we know who started those rumours, and we think we know who sent that email.’
Peter looked utterly miserable. ‘You’re saying it’s me, that I’m the one responsible for the whole mess.’
‘No, Peter. If I’ve understood my wife correctly, she thinks it’s your colleagues who are up to some hocus-pocus.’
‘Especially the unnamed American forger. And now you’ve used the word, I want to change my analogy again. What we have here is hocus-pocus, all right, but it’s in the form of misdirection – the heart of all illusions. Make the audience look elsewhere while you’re switching the hat, or the bowl, or whatever. And somehow I have the feeling the rabbit that’s going to come out of this hat will be a particularly ugly one. Alan, Laurence and his pal have got to be found!’
‘Laurence has in fact been found,’ he said heavily.
Peter caught the implication first. ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. The police responded to a call about a man in the ditch near the shuttle car park. He wasn’t drunk, as the people who found him had assumed. He had been assaulted with something large and heavy. I’m sorry, Peter. He’s dead.’
After a silence that filled the room, Peter said, ‘I think I knew it. He wouldn’t have just disappeared.’
‘But he did, I’m afraid. He has been dead for only a few hours. Twenty-four at most, the police think. We still know nothing about where he’s been since he was last seen in Paris.’
Laurence’s death meant that the full powers of the police were invoked. Peter was interviewed extensively, as were Alan and I as potential witnesses to a plot. Sam, A.T., and even poor Bruce Douglas had their turns. Everyone who might have seen or heard or known anything was questioned, including the staff at the Scriptorial and at the Abbey, as well as a few members of the Community and most of the shopkeepers in Mont-Saint-Michel and the surrounding villages.
Henri, in Avranches, asked Alan to convey the bad news to the English police, so he called Derek, who had the unenviable task of telling the parents. Derek reported back that, predictably, Laurence’s mother had hysterics and blamed Peter for the whole thing, ‘luring my boy to his death’ and so on. Alan didn’t feel obliged to pass that along to Peter, who had troubles enough. The police finally decided he could go back to England. They weren’t entirely happy about it, but there was no evidence that he had any involvement in Laurence’s death, and quite a lot of indication that Peter was damaged, both emotionally and otherwise, by the event.
The authorities took pictures of Laurence, taking care not to show the back of his head, and showed them around. They took his fingerprints and, from that piece of routine procedure, got their first lead.
‘The car,’ Alan told me a couple of days later. ‘The one we connected at first with Sam? It was hired by Laurence at the airport in Paris. He used a false name, of course, but his fingerprints were all over it, and the hire firm is, fortunately, a small one. The agent recognized his picture. He was a good-looking chap before … um. And the agent is a young woman. Our first bit of luck.’
Well, it was nice to know that much, but I didn’t see that it got us much further. ‘Okay, so we know how he got here. And when, I guess, if he came directly here. But we don’t know where he was staying, or what he was doing, or – or anything, really!’
‘The police are working on it, Dorothy. It won’t be too hard to find where he was lodging, now that they have a picture. Even if he was staying in a private house, someone will have seen him about. It’s just a matter of time. As for what he was doing, we can hazard a guess that he was up to no good with his partner in crime.’
‘And we still don’t know who the partner is. “An American” isn’t worth much, what with the hordes of tourists around here. And lots more coming, according to Jacques at the other hotel.’
‘Yes,’ said Alan absently, ‘it’s the beginning of school holidays for much of Europe, so families will be coming here en masse.’
‘And here we are, pretty well stuck in the role of babysitter.’ I looked around our little lounge to make sure Sam was still upstairs shaving, and lowered my voice. ‘Alan, I hate to say it, but much as I like Sam, I’m getting awfully tired of this arrangement. Don’t you suppose Sam could afford to hire a bodyguard?’
Alan sighed. ‘Nobody thought it would drag on this long. For myself, I wish the bloke would decide to go home.’
‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘He’s stubborn. He’s not going to leave until he knows exactly what’s been going on and who’s responsible.’
‘Well, then, let’s take him on a sightseeing tour.’ He waggled his booted foot. ‘I can walk a lot farther on this than I could a week ago. Why don’t we go to the Mont? We haven’t seen much of it together. I might even be able to climb up to the Abbey, if I take it in easy stages.’
I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic. The crowds would be awful, I pointed out. It was a hot day. What I really wanted to do was get some answers to the mess we’d become embroiled in. In short, I was feeling, and acting, like a sulky three-year-old.
‘Love, there’s nothing we can do at this stage. The police have it well in hand. Our role just now is to stay out of their way. Snap out of it and come along. We’ll get Sam to buy us omelettes. He can certainly afford it.’
‘I refuse to eat an omelette that costs thirty-five euros, no matter who’s paying for it! But we might as well go to the Mont, I suppose. There’s nothing much else to do.’
‘We can decide after breakfast.’ There was Alan’s favourite ploy again. Feed her and she’ll feel better. Oh, well. I took his hand to get me out of the squashy armchair, and, Sam returning just then, the three of us went in to breakfast.
Sam was all in favour of the little expedition to the Mont, and I felt better about it once I’d had a good breakfast – drat it all! I was genuinely uneasy about Alan climbing all those stairs, but it wouldn’t do any good to tell him so. Within certain limits, we don’t tell each other what to do. It seldom works, anyway!
I did insist that he take along his cane, just in case. And of course Sam would be along to provide assistance, if needed. I thought about suggesting a wheelchair for Alan, but one look at his face when he saw me thinking about it made me change my mind. And it was true that the going was pretty tough on the cobblestones. I put on my sturdy walking boots, the better to negotiate those cobbles, and brought my own walking stick. Thus armed against any hazards I could foresee, we set out for the shuttle stop.
It was a really lovely day. Streaks of soft cloud floated in a sky of that indefinable ‘French blue’ that I’ve never seen anywhere else I’ve travelled. A gentle breeze kept the sun from feeling too hot, and it must have been too early, in the day or in the season or both, for an objectionably huge crowd of tourists.
Sam was eager to get up to the Abbey, but he took it slowly in deference to Alan’s ankle. I was watching my husband closely for winces or other signs of pain, which is probably why I didn’t notice the man striding out of the shop door straight into our path.
We were moving at a stroll. He was in a hurry, and he wanted to go back down the street as we, and most of the other people, were going up. He ploughed straight into Alan and almost knocked him off his feet. His cane went clattering to the cobbles, entangling itself in the hurrier’s feet.
I was furious. Fright on Alan’s behalf mixed with wrath over the man’s rudeness, and I lost my temper completely. ‘Idiot!’ I cried. ‘Do you have to bang into— oh! It’s you! I should have known! You never do watch where you’re going, do you? You just barge along your own way, never mind who you might knock down, never mind about anybody else’s welfare—’
‘Listen, lady, I never saw you before in my life, and if I never see you again—’
‘Oh, yes, you did! Your little boy ran his stroller into me a while ago! He must take after you! And then you pushed me aside last week, and said it was my fault. You must injure so many people you forget who they are!’
‘Will you get the hell out of my way!’
By this time Sam had restored Alan’s cane to him and come up behind our attacker, looking very solid and formidable. ‘Pal, you want to watch your language to a lady! Seems to me you owe these people an apology.’
‘I … oh, for God’s sake! Okay, okay, so I apologize. Now can I go about my business?’
‘Not much of an apology,’ observed Sam, not moving an inch. ‘This gentleman has a broken ankle. If you’ve made it worse, you might be looking at a lawsuit, mister.’
The man rolled his eyes. ‘I was in a hurry. You were just standing there in front of the door. I did
n’t see you. I didn’t hurt anybody.’ He reached in his breast pocket, and Sam moved in a little closer. ‘Here!’ He’d pulled out his wallet. ‘Maybe you’ll think this is a little better apology.’ He handed Sam a wad of banknotes. ‘Have a drink or two on me. Now, let me through!’
He pushed past. The other tourists had scattered, as people will to avoid unpleasantness, so he was able to go down the street at a near-run. I tried to suppress my wicked wish that he would trip on the cobbles and fall headlong. He didn’t. He was sure-footed as a goat, and was gone around a corner before any of us had quite recovered our wits.
‘Waall, I’ll be hornswoggled! Lookee here!’ Sam held out the handful of money. ‘The little skunk don’t maybe got manners, but he sure is generous!’
With a sense of shock, I saw that most of the notes were pinky-purple and bore the large numeral 500. ‘But … but there’s thousands of Euros there!’
‘Yep,’ said Sam.
‘I would be interested to know,’ said Alan, ‘first, whether they’re real, and second, how that miserable specimen came by them. And I would like to sit down.’
There was a café just across the street. Alan and Sam headed for it, I paused a moment to pick up some debris that had fallen out of the man’s pocket when he pulled out his wallet. ‘He’s a litterbug, on top of everything else,’ I said, laying the oddments on the table Sam had managed to snag. ‘Is there a rubbish bin somewhere?’
‘Wait.’ Alan laid his hand on the little pile of paper. ‘I’d like to keep this.’ He held up a business card. ‘It probably isn’t his. People give these things away, and one tucks them into a pocket and forgets them. But just in case …’ He looked at it carefully. ‘Hmm. Pretentious. The type is so very elegant one can hardly read it, but I can just make out a New York address. It could belong to the boor, at that. You said he was from New York, Dorothy, after our last encounter with him.’