Murder is a Long Time Coming

by Anthony Masters

  ‘He hated the Nazis?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Yet he carried on with his job?’

  ‘It was a good front for my mother.’

  ‘That was a conscious decision?’

  ‘Of course.’ Marius’s voice was firm. ‘We were never close but we did talk about that – and besides, Alain told me.’

  ‘Alain?’

  ‘Leger. He’s the family lawyer – and my father’s oldest friend. He was in the Resistance too. And is quite certain of my father’s innocence.’

  ‘These letters –’ began Lebatre.

  The sweat broke out on Marius’ forehead.

  ‘Did you know the content?’

  ‘Apparently they simply rambled on about the trial – and my father’s alleged guilt.’

  ‘That is all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you actually see them?’

  ‘Never.’

  Suppose he asked the Legers, thought Marius, blind panic coursing through him. Suppose they tell him about Jean-Pierre? Suppose he had to admit to the pathetic blackmail attempts? But what if he did, Marius tried to rationalise. A childhood experience? Mainly. Monique would be the first to understand. Slowly the panic drained out of him.

  Another vehicle drove on to the weed-strewn gravel outside. Peering from one of the small, latticed windows, Marius could see that it was an ambulance.

  ‘They’re going to take him away,’ said Lebatre quietly.

  Marius turned away from the window and sat down abruptly.

  ‘Would you like to see him go?’

  Marius shook his head. ‘Have you any more questions?’ He saw again his father’s blood – like a red lake around him. As if he was a stuck pig, drained and withered.

  ‘A few.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘I’ll be quick.’

  Suddenly Marius wanted to prolong the interview, however dangerous it was. The longer Lebatre stayed, the longer he could put off seeing his mother.

  ‘These letters from Marie Leger. How seriously did your father take them?’

  ‘Not seriously at all. They constituted no threat.’

  ‘When were they received?’

  ‘Last Spring.’

  ‘Did he receive any other letters? Any written threats?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘Was he frightened?’

  ‘Yes. He was also very angry. He didn’t think I was doing enough.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t. I was frightened of what I might unearth.’ He paused, realising he was contradicting himself, betraying doubts about his father’s innocence. ‘I only ran through the motions just to satisfy him – which it didn’t. I realise I was prevaricating,’ he added rather lamely.

  ‘Does Commissaire Rodiet know of any positive evidence against your father?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘This – incident – in the war. What exactly happened?’

  ‘It was in 1944. A German officer was murdered – and half a dozen young people were executed in revenge.’

  ‘And Rodiet’s mother?’

  ‘She tried to intervene.’

  Lebatre was silent. Then he said: ‘Commissaire Rodiet was in the Resistance himself. He’ll know more.’

  Marius shrugged. ‘Perhaps he does.’ There was another long uncomfortable silence.

  ‘Are there any more questions?’ asked Marius abruptly.

  ‘No. Not for now. I don’t need to say that you shouldn’t talk to the press.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Don’t get involved professionally.’ Lebatre’s voice was prim.

  ‘How can I not get involved?’ snapped Marius. What the hell did the man expect him to do? Detach himself from the whole affair?

  ‘I’m very sorry about what has happened,’ said Lebatre with the empty ring of official condolence.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Lebatre got heavily to his feet, putting his glass down carefully on a little rafia mat. He looked out of the window. ‘Commissaire Rodiet is coming across.’

  ‘He’ll find his way in.’

  ‘Goodbye, monsieur. I’ll ring you later.’ Lebatre walked out, his enormous frame still retaining dignity. Marius tried not to listen to his whispered exchange with Gabriel in the hall. Then Gabriel came in.

  ‘Did Lebatre handle it?’

  ‘Carefully.’

  ‘They’re taking your father away.’

  ‘I know. I don’t want to go out there.’

  Gabriel nodded. Then he said, ‘They’re still dusting for fingerprints in the conservatory – it’ll be a while yet.’

  ‘I must go to my mother.’

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  Marius shook his head. ‘There must have been a lot of people who hated him.’ His voice was flat.

  Rodiet shrugged. ‘Gossip doesn’t necessarily imply intense hatred.’

  ‘But there is someone who hated enough,’ replied Marius.

  André phoned Annette from the office. She stood in the bedroom of the tall house overlooking the plane trees, imagining him sitting on the swivel chair behind the large empty desk, the computer screen in front of him, the faint hum of the newsroom behind the heavy partitions.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Looking out on the trees, watching old Madame Pelier walking across to the café.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘It’s two. I was going to have a siesta.’ She had felt particularly depressed about their relationship today.

  ‘I’ve had some news. Henri’s dead.’

  ‘What?’ Annette found it hard to register what he was saying.

  ‘Henri. He’s dead.’

  She sat down on the bed, shaking, the sweat clammy on her body. Shock waves filled her; everything else was driven out of her head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ He seemed very concerned.

  ‘I’m all right.’ But she was wondering if she was going to be sick.

  ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was emotionless but her stomach churned.

  ‘You don’t sound surprised.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I don’t know – I suppose I never expected anyone to do it, in the end.’

  ‘Why not?’ Her voice trembled.

  ‘I never thought he was hated enough. Now I feel partly responsible.’

  ‘Don’t be so feeble.’ Her voice was hard, contemptuous. ‘If you can’t take the consequences you shouldn’t have printed that piece.’ But all the time she was thinking, Henri dead at last? She still couldn’t believe it. Annette stared out of the window, anxious to touch normality, but the street looked oddly out of true. Perhaps it was the hard early afternoon sunlight that made the distortion. Henri murdered? Killed by the Journal, more likely.

  ‘His throat was cut.’ He sounded more authoritative now.

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Larche. Marius Larche. In the conservatory. Rodiet says the police are “pursuing their enquiries”, as they say.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘The place was wiped clean of fingerprints.’

  ‘So it’s quite a professional job?’

  ‘Not exactly. A clumsy attempt was made to make it look as if he had committed suicide.’

  ‘Will you be home late?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got to put this together – see if there’s anything else we can find out.’

  ‘That story’, she said flatly, ‘will run and run.’

  His voice was more confident as he said goodbye and rang off.

  Annette walked to the window. She felt calmer now, and when she looked out into the street, the plane trees, the stone benches on the paved area in the middle, the wilting flowers, the empty café tables, the urinoir – all were normal. But now it was as if sound had been removed. The whole street was relentlessly silent. She hardly dared breathe as she stared out at the desola
tion, listening to Henri’s voice:

  ‘You’ll leave.’

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘Get out.’

  Annette remembered Henri’s words exactly as she continued to gaze down at the bleached-out street.

  ‘But why? I’m doing a good job.’

  They were in the cluttered study; she could see Henri’s livid, working face. There was a smell of dried flowers in the air.

  ‘You shouldn’t have opened the letter.’

  ‘I always open your correspondence.’

  ‘That was personal.’

  Annette shook her head as she had shaken it then. What did the old fool mean? He had been writing a kind of memoir and she had been checking it for him. At first it had been pleasant to work in the crumbling château. She had been bored and the opportunity to work with a suspected collaborator had appealed to the curiosity in her. Life with André had been better then, but she had needed an occupation. Since their marriage she had taken care not to accept his offer of a job on the newspaper.

  Annette had been brought up in Paris, the only child of a rich property developer who had converted a number of old studios into studio apartments of immense size, style and vogue. They were sold at vast profit and, as a matter of course, Annette went to a school in Switzerland on some of the proceeds and then to the Sorbonne where she had met André. Later she had become a secretary to the editor of Paris Soir while André joined Le Figaro as a junior reporter. A year later they married and she watched him change jobs and loyalties with amazing speed until the Journal post came up in Aix. Giving up her work, hoping for children, she moved with him. The work with Henri had been a panacea.

  ‘Get out!’ She heard his voice again as she looked down at the still-silent street.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ She had been close to tears.

  ‘You shouldn’t have opened it.’ He sounded childish and resentful.

  ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t read anything.’ But of course she had and Henri had known she had.

  ‘I’m not trying to clear my name,’ he had told her when she had first been employed. The Lyon trial was over then by three years. ‘I’m merely trying to bring a sense of order into my life. I’m going to write a memoir of my war experiences – just as they happened. I’ve kept diaries – those I would like you to check and type up.’

  So – the old lady had accused him. Didier knows, she had written. Didier knows you killed them. She had been disturbed by the bitterness of Marie Leger’s writing, but she had no idea who Didier was – and she had not read on. She felt sorry for her – and for the tired old man.

  ‘You couldn’t contain your curiosity, could you?’ he had sneered at her, but his eyes weren’t challenging. They were terrified. Was his agitation due to Didier? Or was it the fact that Marie’s vitriol had also included allegations about Marius Larche’s homosexual affair? Screwing, she had scrawled. Unnatural screwing. Then Henri told her again to get out – and this time she went. But when she arrived home, something prevented her telling André. Perhaps she pitied the old man. Perhaps she didn’t trust Andre’s nose for a story. Either way, she kept quiet, putting her departure down to a trivial disagreement and gathering boredom. He believed her.

  Now, Annette looked at her watch. Three o’clock already. She must have been staring out of the window musing for nearly an hour. She would have to go to the restaurant soon. But still she lingered, wondering, waiting. Thinking of Henri. Thinking of his murderer. Thinking of the letter and its poisonous abuse. Didier. Screwing. Somehow she felt contaminated.

  Alain was walking in the forest that connected Ste Michelle with Letoric. The afternoon light filtered through the pine trees into light golden patches on the hard earth. He smelt dry, sandy soil, and wafting up on the light wind, the fragrance of the lavender fields below him. Alain had walked up the hill into the pines wanting to think of his dead friend, to put time and space around him.

  They had often walked up here, through the sun-drenched lavender, into the cool, dusty shade of the pines. From here he could see the crouched town with its orderly avenues and deserted central square. Siesta time. A car crawled towards the tennis courts, a burst of music blared from behind closed shutters and was as abruptly silenced. The whole somnolent afternoon in the timeless streets seemed light years away from him. He was up here in a different world. With Henri.

  This was their favourite place, particularly since they had both retired. Alain was a widower – Hélène had died ten years ago with a quick forgiving cancer that had taken her away in weeks. They had one daughter, Gaby, who was an accountant in Paris. Ste Michelle was large, roomy, well cared for, with ornamental gardens and a fountain whose cherubs, unlike those at Letoric, gushed water from practically every orifice. But it was run by the servants – a middle-aged cook-housekeeper and her chauffeur husband who served him his meals but were unable to keep him company. So, Henri had been family in a way. They saw each other most days – for a drink, for chess, occasionally for dinner and regularly, usually each Sunday afternoon, for a walk amongst the trees on the parched hill.

  They had known each other from childhood. Alain was a little older, more extrovert, a keen sportsman who had, over the years, taken on the role of protector to the younger, more bookish Henri. Their families had been close. There had been parties and tennis and boules and hunting for wild boar. Then there had been marriage and the birth of their children – Marius and Gaby. As a child she had been outgoing and full of vitality – the very opposite of Marius, who was introverted, moody, given to fits of passion.

  Alain knew the boy was close to his mother – that Henri was remote for him. They had talked about it many times. Henri had minded, had wanted to reach him. But saw no way of doing so.

  ‘He shuts himself away – keeps me out,’ he had told Alain when Marius was about eleven. ‘I can’t get near him. It’s my fault – I neglected him while he was growing up. Damn my career – that’s what’s done it. My own selfishness.’

  Throughout the occupation, Alain and Solange had grown close as they ostensibly functioned as innocent civilians by day – and saboteurs by night. It had been a heady existence, planning, intriguing, carrying out the wrecking of German communications. There had been about twelve of them, including the young boys Didier and Gabriel, working in the foothills, smuggling arms and explosives, relatively unchanged by the occupation. He had once wanted to make love to Solange, but she had gently refused and after that he didn’t ask her again. She had been so beautiful, so daring in her successful clandestine operations. Then towards the end of the occupation she had had Marius – and her work for the Maquis had ceased. From then on, Alain had seen her only occasionally, socially, and he received the unspoken message that she wanted to keep him at a safe distance.

  Alain often looked back to the war which had been such a central focus of everyone’s lives and their work with the Resistance which had been so vital. To this day he still remembered the exact location of the clandestine meetings on this very hill, and the cache of weapons and explosives behind a partition in the cellars of Letoric that the Gestapo had never found despite their frequent random searches. He had risked his life every week and so had Solange but Henri had remained detached.

  ‘I would be too much of a threat,’ he had said, justifying his lack of involvement. ‘If they suspected me, they would soon start suspecting all of you.’

  Alain had never questioned the logic of this at the time, but now he had to acknowledge that it was simply that Henri was too selfish and too timorous as well.

  Then there was Didier. Occasionally Alain went to see him and very occasionally Didier recognised him. But most of the time he was locked up in his own self-created world: the only place he could inhabit now – although Alain considered him institutionalised rather than mad.

  As he walked to the brow of the hill, he felt desperately, unbearably alone. Then he saw the man, standing just underneath the brow of the hill, sitting on a grassy outcrop, staring
down at Letoric. He instantly recognised him. Jean-Pierre Claude – the farm labourer who lived with his mother in the old cottage near the end of the weed-tangled Letoric drive. What did he want, wondered Alain indignantly, forcing his limbs into a more hurried stride. He must know he was trespassing – and trespassing to Alain was a major crime. The Ste Michelle estate was his own world, and he believed passionately in the privacy of his own property – the place he had even wrested away from his own sisters who he had known would only mismanage it. To have seen Ste Michelle divided into three shares would have been intolerable, and besides, he knew that they would be tempted to sell some of it as building land. To Alain, his family home and its land was sacred and he would fight to the bitter end to protect every inch of it.

  4

  The old man suddenly came into view. He was tall and gaunt, impressive despite his slight stoop, with a full head of startlingly white hair and a white moustache. Jean-Pierre had always admired his looks. Landowner Leger, brother of the two old girls, a recluse who was said to have been a Resistance hero, and who now was so passionate about his deep love for his own particular patch of native land. There had been some kind of dispute with his sisters over the estate and they didn’t speak. Jean-Pierre knew he was trespassing, but he often did and had rarely seen anyone here at the top of the hill. He wanted to look at Letoric – the scene of the crime – and perhaps catch a sight of Marius. For a long time now, Jean-Pierre had been obsessed with him. It seemed like a lifetime since Jean-Pierre had seduced him as a young man, mostly for the fun of having the local toff. Recently the obsession had grown deeper, and lately he had thought of him every day – the days that stretched into eternity – a life sentence of toiling on the land. Meanwhile Marius Larche had his rich professional life; a high ranking policemen who might care about the past enough to part with some money. After all, he was up to his neck in scandal already. Surely he didn’t want any more. The money, and with it the chance of escaping a life in the fields, were only what he deserved.

  Sometimes he went for a weekend in Lyon where he could make money as a prostitute. He knew his way around, knew what to give and what to receive. But he was in his forties now and the drink and his mother’s generous food had ruined his figure. The bastard owes me, he thought. And with Henri dead, maybe Marius would be more vulnerable.