by Allan Massie
He didn’t add: she’s the same sort of woman as your wife, so you may know how to speak to her.
When Moncerre had left, Lannes thought: actually I’m by no means certain that Moncerre and his wife speak to each other at all now. Or rather, from what he says, she speaks plenty, nagging him from the minute he sets his foot over the door; but does he reply?
Young René came in looking eager. He might be the most junior of the inspectors, but clearly he thought of this new case as being peculiarly his preserve. Which to some extent it was. His face clouded when Lannes told him of the assignment he had given Moncerre, but brightened when Lannes went on to say, ‘You’re the only one who speaks Catalan. So I want you to go among them, find out as much about poor Cortazar as you can, see if he said anything which might give us a clue. If he’s been worried. Anything, really.’
As René was about to leave, Lannes called him back.
‘And be sure to inquire if there has been any further sign of our friend who smokes these English cigarettes. What did you say they’re called?’
‘Goldflake.’
‘I’m sure he’s our man. Somebody must have seen him.’
The telephone rang.
‘Jean? Henri here. Something very strange has happened. I’ve just received a document, a disturbing one. Can you come round? Or would you rather I came to you?’
Certainly not; he didn’t want Henri coming to the office.
‘I’ll come to you. I’m waiting for a report but it may not be in for some time.
So I can spare you half-an-hour.’
In any case he’d be glad to be out of the office. He looked up and was surprised to see René still hovering by the door.
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know if I’ve done right chief, or stepped out of line, but I’ve a mate who works in the municipality and I thought I’d ask him about that fellow Brune. As it happens, he works in the same office which is the department responsible for public works, and he says Brune is a real creep, he wouldn’t believe a word he says. Of course it’s only my friend’s opinion, but I have to say he’s a good mate.’
‘I daresay he’s right.’
‘But he added that he’s the sort that’s careful never to step out of line, always covers his back, sucks up to the bosses, a toady or, as my mate put it more coarsely, an arse licker. I’ll be off then.’
Lannes lit a cigarette and made ready to follow him. Then there was a knock at the door and old Joseph came in with a letter.
‘This has just come by hand. I didn’t see who delivered it, for I was out of my box for a moment, answering a call of nature, but it’s marked urgent. What’s urgent to one isn’t necessarily urgent to another, we all know that. And what do you think of the news? Great, isn’t it? If you ask me the English will rat on us as they’ve ratted on the Norwegians. That’s always been their style.’
He hobbled away, grumbling under his breath, as was his habit. Lannes slit open the envelope. There was a single sheet of paper, which read:
Supperintendent Lannes, The count told me to call you. It’s important. Come to the rue d’Aviau at once. Marthe Descamps.
It was written with a scratchy nib so that the ink had flowed irregularly and it was the hand of someone unaccustomed to writing, though ‘Supperintendent’ was the only word spelled wrong. Should he go there before he called on Henri? The laconic message intrigued him. And Henri had spoken for a document which could surely wait. On the other hand he had sounded agitated. Finally the rue des Remparts was on his way to the count’s house. If you had asked him, he would have said that the old woman, Marthe, was probably illiterate.
The shop was shut. He rang the bell for the apartment. Henri let him in. As Lannes followed him upstairs he saw that his trousers now sagged behind.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ Henri said, ‘and disturbing. I’ve had a letter, a long letter, from Gaston. No, I haven’t gone mad, Jean. I should have had it weeks ago, immediately after his death. That’s what’s marked on the envelope: “for my brother Henri, in the event of my death”.’
‘So why the delay’.
‘It seems that he lodged it with a notary in Bergerac, who’s been ill, away in the mountains convalescing, didn’t learn of Gaston’s death till he returned the day before yesterday. Shocked and full of apologies. So in this way I get a letter from beyond the grave. Horrible. I hope it may help you, but I have to say it makes me feel worse. Not about Gaston, but Pilar, how I let her down. Take it away, Jean, I don’t want to watch you reading it.’
There was whisky on Henri’s breath: ten ’clock in the morning. He’s been weeping too, his cheeks were tear-stained.
‘Will you be all right?’
Henri shrugged: ‘Does it matter?’
‘I’ll call when I can, perhaps in the evening.’
But what condition would Henri be in by then?
He slipped the letter into his pocket. Temptation to stop off in a bar and read it was strong. But he held off. Yet his fingers itched for it as he crossed the Cours del’Intendance and made his way up the Cours de Clemenceau and the Cours de Verdun towards the rue d’Aviau. It was hot now and women were wearing summer dresses for the first time that year.
The door was opened for him before he could ring the bell.
‘You’ve taken your time,’ Marthe said. ‘He was dying when I sent for you. And now he’s dead. I wanted to call the doctor, but he told me not to. I should have disobeyed him. I don’t know why I didn’t. It’s not as if I haven’t, often enough. But something held me back.’
He was sure she wasn’t accustomed to speak like this.
‘He just repeated, over and over again, “call that policeman” and now that you’re here, I don’t see what use you can be. He died in my arms, that’s something.’
What had happened? The count had fallen down the stairs; that was all. She’d found him lying there when she got up, no, not then, of course not, she’d been up for hours, there was always so much to do and no one to help her, not that she wanted the help of a lazy slut such as young girls were now, you understand, but when she went to bring him his chocolate, and there he was.
As she spoke she led him upstairs, along a corridor and opened the door of a bedroom. Lannes was surprised to see the count laid out on the big Louis Quinze bed.
‘I wasn’t going to leave him lying there on the floor.’
It was no use to reprove her for interfering with what might be a crime scene. This was her idea of respect, what she owed to the man with whom for so many years she had snapped and argued, whom she had nagged but yet, he suspected, had loved in her own savage way more than any of his wives had.
The body looked very small, pitiably small, stretched out on the big bed. The count wore a dressing-gown in faded red brocade silk, and under it a nightgown. His feet were bare and he looked like a very old little boy, corrupt and wizened but still a child. There was a bruise on his left temple where he had hit his head in falling.
Why had he insisted on Lannes being called?
‘That’s for you to find out.’
‘Did he say anything else? Messages for his wife and any of the family?’
‘As if he would!’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Work it out for yourself. You’re the policeman.’
She was taking pleasure in witholding any information she might have, and yet she had summoned him as the count demanded before even calling the doctor.
He had her assemble the family in the big salon that ran the whole width of the house on the first floor. It was furnished and decorated in Second Empire style, no doubt by the count’s grandmother. The high-ceilinged room with its floor-length mirrors in dark-gilded frames and its pseudo-historical paintings made Lannes uncomfortable. The two daughters he hadn’t met sat side by side on a chaise-longue. Both wore black and one of them fingered a rosary. Madame Thibault de Polmont occupied a high-backed winged chair while the victomte, Jean-Christophe, l
olled on a sofa and busied himself with a gold toothpick. Maurice stood by the window, uncertain where to sit; he coloured when Lannes addressed him by name.
‘This is impertinence. I don’t understand it,’ Madame Thibault de Polmont said, ‘I’m not accustomed to being ordered about in this fashion.’
‘Be quiet,’ Marthe said, taking to their evident surprise a seat in the middle of the room. ‘It’s as your father instructed. Maurice, sit down, child, stop fidgeting, and listen to what has to be said. Get on with it, Mr Policeman.’
There was no doubt but that the old woman was in charge of proceedings, no doubt either than in a strange way she was enjoying herself. And yet Lannes would have wagered that she was the only one there feeling any real sorrow. As for what he had to say himself . . . well . . .
‘Let me explain why I am here. It’s by the count’s request, as Marthe has told you. He ordered her to call me, even as he lay dying.’
The two women on the chaise-longue – which was which? – simultaneously made the sign of the cross. The vicomte removed his toothpick and said, ‘But it’s ridiculous. There can be no question but that my poor father met with an accident. He’s been unsteady on his feet for years, it’s only a wonder, even a miracle, that it hasn’t happened before now. So why should a policeman intrude into a house of mourning?’
Lannes repeated, ‘I am here only at your father’s request.’
‘We have only Marthe’s word for that.’
‘And isn’t my word good enough for you?’ the old woman said.
‘Perhaps you would tell me, monsieur,’ Lannes said, ‘when you last saw your father?’
‘At dinner of course. When else? Nobody sees my father in the morning, except for Marthe. And, I suppose, his wife when she is here. On the rare occasions when she is here. So you see it couldn’t have been anything but an accident unless you are going to accuse Marthe of pushing him downstairs. In which case she would hardly have summoned you, would she?’
‘Where is Madame la Comtesse?’
‘Who can tell? I assure you I have no interest in her movements.’
And with that he restored the toothpick to his mouth and closed his eyes.
‘With her lover, I assume,’ said Madame Thibault de Polmont.
‘And he is?’
‘How should I know?’
Lannes changed tack.
‘As I think you all know, I came here first at the count’s invitation because he was disturbed by a series of anonymous letters he had received.’
‘He wrote them himself. I told you that.’
‘Indeed you did, madame, and you may be right. But if you are, then that suggests a new question. If his expressed reason for summoning me was spurious, what was his ulterior motive? Why was he so eager to draw my attention to this house and this family?’
Nobody answered. The vicomte continued to pick his teeth. Madame Thibault de Polmont emitted a little snort. Maurice shuffled his feet. The two spinsters looked blank, as if they hadn’t understood a word Lannes had spoken. Then came a cackle from the old woman, Marthe.
‘Oh he was a sly one. He knew there was something rotten about this lot.’
‘Be quiet, Marthe,’ Madame Thibault de Polmont snapped. ‘How dare you speak like that? It’s outrageous.’
‘I speak as I please. Outrageous, am I? But I’ve worked for my living. I haven’t sponged off an old man and robbed him blind.’
‘That’s enough, do you hear. More than enough. If you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head and remember your place, you must leave the room.’
‘I’ll leave when I please, Amélie-Marie, and not a moment sooner.’
Lannes said, ‘The police doctor will come to examine the body. I can’t yet say whether an autopsy will be necessary. It’s possible. And I’ll send one of my inspectors round this afternoon to take statements from you, all of you. I would like to know your movements this morning. Please don’t prevaricate with him. It simply wastes time, apart from arousing suspicion. He’ll ask you questions about these letters too. I’m not satisfied with what I have been told about them.’
It was all something he could have done himself, there and then. But the truth was he couldn’t wait to get out of the house. The two old girls on the chaise-longue might be all right, even if perhaps touched in the head, not really all there. But the other two disgusted him. He couldn’t say precisely why, but that’s how it was.
Out in the street, in the sunshine again, he wasn’t surprised to hear footsteps behind him, and then to find Maurice at his elbow.
‘You don’t think much of us, do you?’
‘What I think of your family is no great matter.’
‘But you think it wasn’t an accident, that someone pushed Grandpa down the stairs.’
‘It’s possible, but I have no opinion, one way or the other.’
‘Because he told Marthe to fetch you? That’s why, isn’t it?’
‘Again, I have no opinion.’
‘But he might have wanted to say something about the letters, even if he knew he was dying, to confess that he had written them himself.’
‘It’s possible, again. Maurice, do you know where Miriam is?’
‘You can’t suspect her.’
‘I haven’t said I do.’
‘Well, I don’t know but I can tell you this. She’s not with a lover. She doesn’t have one. My aunt Amélie-Marie has always hated her. That’s why she says such beastly things. She’s an awful liar.’
‘Yes,’ Lannes said. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
XIV
April 24, 1940 (continued)
Instead of returning to his office, Lannes settled himself at a table on the terrace of a café in the Place de la Comédie. The sunlight sparkled on the Corinthian columns of the theatre, and the atmosphere was animated, as if with the arrival of Spring it was possible to set aside all thoughts of the war. He ordered a beer to wash away the sour taste of that house in the rue d’Aviau, drank half the glass in one long welcome swallow, and took Henri’s letter from his pocket and began to read.
Dear Henri, I’ve had too many secrets from you, my dear twin, and it has seemed better that way. Everyone who knows himself to be a failure has secrets, unless he has arrived at that miserable point where pride and self-respect have withered and died. There are friends whom I would be ashamed to introduce to you, and yet they are friends and some have been more than friends.
But there is one secret I have kept from you for a respectable reason.
It concerns Pilar.
There, that’s broken the ice, and I can move forward.
I loved her, you know, with the strange sort of love that a man formed as I am may sometimes feel for a woman whom he recognizes as a dear sister.
She truly loved you, though you were never quite able to believe that, and thought you were the one who kissed while she only extended her cheek.
Yet I always sensed a timidity between you, perhaps because neither believed the other could fully understand.
Am I making sense? It’s curious how you can ponder a letter or any piece of writing for a long time and then find yourself unable to say just what you mean. But then it seems to me that it was a comparable inability to speak frankly and freely which led Pilar to deceive you.
There. It is out.
I don’t mean that she deceived you with another man, nor of course with a woman. She was virtuous, you can’t doubt that. No it was with an idea that she cheated you.
You know that her sympathies were of the Left, and I think you approved that. Where indeed but on the Left can anyone of sensibility be today? But, to cause you less anxiety, she let you believe that when she planned to return to Spain her purposes were purely humanitarian.
In reality she was engaged in the desperate attempt to get arms to the Republic. Her own association was with the anarchists. As you know, the Republicans have been a house divided. There has been a civil war within the civil war, and at the comman
d of Moscow, the Communists have sought to destroy the anarchists – and indeed the social democrats. Pilar was caught up in this internecine struggle and was betrayed. That was how she died: shot by the Fascists. But where she was taken and who precisely betrayed her, these are the questions to which I have been seeking answers.
My quest has taken me along strange paths. One of the Spanish refugees here, a Catalan, anarchist, by name of Javier Cortazar, has been a great help. He lives in the rue Xantrailles, number 35, in Meriadeck. Seek him out if anything befalls me, which it will have done if you are reading this letter.
I learned from him that Pilar, at great risk to herself and with great courage had infiltrated, under orders, certain Right-wing circles in Paris. I don’t know why she was required to do this.
But I have contacts there myself, if the connection is frayed. You will remember that I used to be friendly with the two sons of the Comte de Grimaud. I know that you disapprove of poor Jean-Christophe, doubtless with good reason. If I have remained in sympathy with him, it is because I understand what it is to be in the grip of a shameful obsession. As for Edmond, I used to write – long ago – for his review, though I haven’t seen him for years because I find his political views detestable. But I approached Jean-Christophe and asked him to act as an intermediary, which, if reluctantly, for he is also on poor terms with Edmond, he consented to do.
I have as yet had no direct contact with Edmond.
However one evening when I was talking with Cortazar in a café frequented by the refugees (all of whom arrived in France before the trickle fleeing the Fascists became a flood and our authorities started to incarcerate the poor creatures in camps), I noticed a Frenchman on the fringe of our group. He accosted me as I left, introducing himself only by his Christian name, Marcel, and told me he was an associate of Edmond recently returned from Spain. He was in a position, he said, to be of some help.
