The Body in the Castle Well

by Martin Walker

“It must have been before my time,” said Bruno. “I didn’t know he’d done that.”

  “His father’s name was Descaux or Descour, something like that. His mother was a Bourdeille, but without the particule that would have made her a member of the de Bourdeille family,” the grand master explained. “Our cher confrère conducted a long search of archives and baptismal records and established to his own satisfaction that his mother descended from a remote branch of the family or from the wrong side of the blanket, I forget which. There were some testy negotiations, but finally the family dropped their objections to his changing his name to de Bourdeille, so long as he abandoned any claim on the family estate or inheritance. He agreed, so long as they dropped any claim to inheriting his estate with its art collection. It made quite a stir at the time, but the joke was on them because his art dealings made him as rich as Croesus while the old family fell on hard times.”

  And now as Bruno reached Bourdeille’s chartreuse, smaller than a château but grander than a manor house, he wondered how rich the old man was. His home nestled among the smaller farmhouses where the tenants had lived when the place was the heart of a thriving farm. These days, the fields were mainly rented to a local veal-and-dairy farmer. Two of the farmhouses were holiday homes, bought by foreigners. Two more were for Bourdeille’s staff: one for his gardener and the man’s family; the other for the widow who was his housekeeper, Madame Bonnet.

  Madame Bonnet was dabbing at her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief that looked inadequate for the task when she opened the door. “We heard the news,” she said. “Madame Darrail called me. It’s such a tragedy, she was so young and so gifted. I liked her a lot and so did monsieur.”

  “When did you last see Claudia?” Bruno asked, stepping into a hall that seemed the grander for its very simplicity. Old tiles of large black and white squares covered the floor, and a handsome staircase curved its way up the rear wall, to the side of a large, slightly faded tapestry of a biblical scene Bruno could not quite identify. Tall double doors on each side opened into the wings of the chartreuse, and a full-sized classical statue in white marble of Pan with his pipes stood on a plinth in the center of the hall beneath a crystal chandelier.

  “Yesterday afternoon. She’d been working in the library all morning, and she and I had lunch together. She hardly ate a thing, which wasn’t like her. Then she went back to the library until monsieur had woken up from his nap, and they spent about an hour together before she came down to say goodbye to me. She said she would go back to Madame Darrail’s house before going on to some archaeological lecture at the castle. She was looking forward to it because it was about art.”

  Madame Bonnet gave a wistful smile. “She was such a one for knowledge. Even with her work here she was reading all the time about Lascaux and prehistoric art. She knew so much about it, even monsieur told me he was impressed. Did you know about the site they found in a cliff near here, twelve thousand years old, hundreds of shards of limestone, each one engraved with very similar animal shapes, mainly deer and horses, some retouched and corrected? It must have been an art school, the archaeologists say, where people learned to draw and then practiced to improve their skills. Claudia told me that. I’ll miss her and so will monsieur. Such a waste of a young life.”

  “You have my sympathies, madame,” Bruno said. “I only met her a few times, but I liked her and thought she was very impressive. And how did that farewell dinner go that she cooked before going to Paris?”

  “It was excellent. Monsieur was very pleased and ate more than he usually does. He normally eats like a bird, poor man. Of course, in that wheelchair, he doesn’t get much exercise.”

  “What was her mood when she left here yesterday?”

  “She wasn’t her usual self, not eating much, as I said. She told me it was her time of the month. I remember her wincing and clutching at her stomach as she got up from lunch. I sympathized, since I used to get terrible cramps when I was younger. She left early, disappointing monsieur, who was looking forward to his glass of wine with her.”

  “What time did she leave?” said Bruno, remembering that Madame Darrail had said she had arrived at her house around six.

  “About three, maybe a little before. She’d worked awhile in the library after lunch before seeing monsieur, but she said she thought she’d go back and lie down. She sometimes walked here and back, said it did her good to get some exercise.”

  That meant there were three missing hours to account for, Bruno noted to himself. He then asked if monsieur knew of Claudia’s death.

  “I was about to go up and tell him when you came.”

  “In that case I’ll break the bad news myself.” He headed for the staircase.

  “I’d better show you up, and then I’ll bring you some coffee, or would you like something stronger?”

  “Just some mineral water, please, unless you’re already making coffee.”

  “I will be. Monsieur lives on the stuff.” She led the way past the tapestry and toward a handsome curving staircase, and Bruno realized that the front of the chartreuse had concealed its real size. An extension had been attached to the rear of the hall. Through an open door Bruno saw a large kitchen with a dining area and other doors beyond, one of them looking like an elevator.

  “Is that where you live?” he asked.

  “No, just where I cook and where Claudia and I would have our little lunches. I have a cottage just a few steps away in the hamlet. It’s one of several houses that come with the chartreuse, where the farmworkers used to live in the old days.”

  “Was that an elevator I saw?”

  “It goes up to his floor and down to the cellar and makes it easier for me to take him his meals. Monsieur planned it very carefully. The extension has two stories, so on his floor you have his study, the library and his bedroom and bathroom, all designed for his wheelchair.”

  “So what are the other rooms of the chartreuse used for? They look pretty big from the entrance drive.”

  “They are big, with lovely high ceilings. There are three rooms on each side of the entrance, and monsieur has made them into galleries for his private art collection. He comes down every morning after his breakfast and wheels himself all the way around looking at them, and then again last thing at night. I’m sure he’ll be happy to let you see his collection before you go.”

  “Doesn’t he open it to the public?”

  “No. He sometimes says he would like to do so, but it would be a big problem for his insurance and le bon Dieu knows that costs enough already.”

  “Has the collection been valued?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of, but after Claudia had taken note of the contents, she told me that she was sure it was worth millions.”

  Chapter 8

  Bruno walked through the open door to the balcony where monsieur sat waiting in his wheelchair, a plaid rug tucked around his legs. A flimsy chair of wood and metal, like the ones at outdoor cafés, awaited Bruno. To the side of the wheelchair stood a small table with two glasses, a decanter of wine and a large ashtray half filled with cigarette butts. The old man was staring out over the valley, a filtered cigarette smoldering in fingers that were brown with nicotine. As Bruno stepped in to take the spare chair, he saw that while the old man’s dense and spade-shaped beard was white, his mustache had been stained to a youthful russet by his smoking.

  “I bring bad news,” said Bruno.

  “I know. Claudia is dead, drowned.” The old man held up a modern smartphone. “It’s on the Sud Ouest website. I hope you don’t share their foolish belief that it was an accident involving some damn cat. The Claudia I knew was far too shrewd for that.”

  “You think it was no accident?”

  “I don’t know, of course, but I very much doubt it. My former colleagues at the Louvre don’t send me many aspiring young art historians, but when they do, they’re usu
ally impressive. Claudia was the best of the lot. And she was by far the richest. Do you know of her background?”

  “We only just found her body. There hasn’t been time. From her credit cards I gather she’s connected to a financial trust that carries her family’s name, but that’s all I know. What else can you tell me?”

  “You’ll find it all on the Internet,” Bourdeille said, dropping the still-lit cigarette into the ashtray and at once lighting another from a pack of Royale filters he took from the pocket of his jacket. Quilted velvet, in a bold burgundy with silk lapels, it was a garment Bruno had seen only in ancient photographs or historical films.

  “Her father is chairman, founder and chief shareholder of a financial firm in New York,” Bourdeille went on. “If he’s not a billionaire, he must be close to it. He’s also politically active, a member of the finance committee for the campaign of that man who sits in the White House, so I imagine we’ll all be overrun by agents of the FBI.”

  “Do you always check out art students on the Internet?”

  “Yes, when they interest me. When her adviser wrote suggesting I see her, she sent along a copy of Claudia’s master’s thesis on Clouet. Nothing original, of course, you don’t expect that for a master’s degree. But it was very well informed and thoughtful. She’d done a lot of research into the allegories he used and knew the difference between the religious ones and folktales. I certainly didn’t expect that from an American.”

  “I see you respected her. Did you also like her?”

  “At my age, respect and liking tend to be synonymous. But I have never been able to take much interest in women since I had my encounter with the milice. Our young American knew something about that, enough to ask me about it, which suggested she had researched me just as I had her. That impressed me. And she had certainly read all my books, which I don’t expect you to do. From what I read in our local newspaper, mon cher confrère, you are far too busy. Or should I call you Lieutenant these days? I gather you’ve been promoted.”

  “Bruno will do.”

  “Good, and in that case why don’t you pour us each a glass of that Château Ausone 2000, the wine I was going to offer Claudia yesterday evening if she hadn’t left early. We can drink it in her honor.”

  “She told me you had taken her wine education in hand. I gather you had shared a bottle of Château Margaux.”

  “It was a pleasure for me to meet a young woman, particularly a young American, who appreciates good wine enough for me to enjoy sharing it.”

  “I’m honored to be included. Even on duty, I couldn’t possibly refuse such a wine,” Bruno said, lifting the decanter and pouring two glasses. He swirled the wine and sniffed, deeply and with appreciation, before taking a long sip. He let the wine rest in his mouth to reach the less-used taste buds near the rear of his tongue and then swallowed.

  “That’s a wonderful wine,” he said. “Is the vineyard really on the site of the villa of Ausonius?”

  “Who knows?” Bourdeille said, dabbing at his lip with a white silk handkerchief from another pocket of the garment Bruno suddenly recalled had been called a smoking jacket in its day. “But it makes a damn good story, a Roman governor who was also a notable poet as the first recorded connoisseur of the wines of our region. And a very fine wine it is.”

  “Did Claudia know much about wine?”

  “A great deal, although naturally she knew more about American wines. On her return from Paris she brought me a bottle of an extremely luscious Napa Valley Cabernet called Screaming Eagle. She claimed to have acquired it from the American ambassador’s own cellar but didn’t say whether she’d been invited to do so or just made off with the bottle. She told me that the ambassador’s an old and close friend of her father.”

  “Did you always see eye to eye with her, or did you ever argue about anything—art, for example?”

  “We had some delightful arguments. That’s why I enjoyed her company so much. She disputed two of my lesser-known attributions, then retracted handsomely when I made my case. And then she gave me something which she’d been sketching as we argued back and forth, hammer and tongs. I could never do two things at once, but Claudia certainly could.” He gestured to the magazine rack beside his wheelchair. “Take a look inside that leather folder.”

  Bruno opened it to see a pencil sketch of the old man, wearing his smoking jacket and holding a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, a roguish glint in his eye. A background of hills and trees had been artfully captured with a few almost careless lines. Bourdeille’s face had been portrayed in a level of detail that seemed to convey the depth of each individual wrinkle around the eyes.

  Bruno nodded. “That’s very impressive.”

  “I always told my pupils that they’ll never understand a painting until they learn how to draw. How else can one understand why an artist should compose his work as he did or appreciate the brushwork until he can at least command a pencil? And Claudia was a real artist as well as a scholar. You can see that at a glance.”

  Bruno leafed through some other sketches, evidently by the same hand, of Madame Bonnet; of Bourdeille’s chartreuse; of the old man dozing in his library, the books on the shelves below him seeming to hold him up even as those above threatened to tumble down and overwhelm him. A sketch of the meeting of the two rivers at Limeuil was enchanting, ripples on the water coming together in a way that made the confluence almost lascivious.

  “Did she ever paint?” Bruno asked.

  “Not that I know of. She said she had done some watercolors in Paris and promised to send me one. I suppose I’ll never get it now. Will they send her body back to America?”

  “If that’s what her family wants to do,” Bruno replied. “All that remains to be decided, and I’m not even sure the next of kin have been informed yet.”

  “Has anyone told that young man of hers? Jack, I think his name is. I know they met once in Paris and another time in London. She took a flight from Bergerac. I think she was something of a romantic at heart.”

  Bruno’s thoughts drifted back to the torn-up photo of a man signing himself Jack. “I don’t know anything about him,” Bruno said. “Is he American? English?”

  Bourdeille lit another cigarette, shrugging. “He’s American, a lawyer, based in London with some international law firm. I got the impression that the two families had known each other for years, and she and Jack had played together as children on summer vacations at some place where I read in the papers that American presidents like to go for their holidays, somebody’s vineyard—was it Mary’s vineyard? No, it was Martha’s. Then they met again at Yale.”

  “You don’t know his surname?”

  “No, she never said, and I didn’t ask. It depressed me, the thought that she might marry and start having children, interrupting what would otherwise have been a brilliant career, some of which I might have had the pleasure of watching from afar. My last pupil, and probably my best.” Bourdeille asked Bruno to refill their wineglasses, and he complied but left his own glass almost empty.

  “And you don’t think her death was an accident?”

  “How would I know? But I don’t think she fell into a well while trying to rescue a cat, and I’m sure it wasn’t suicide. I suppose we can’t rule out murder. But that’s far too melodramatic, even if she’d been here long enough to make enemies. So I suppose some kind of accident is possible.”

  “Why do you rule out suicide?”

  “Because she had plans, goals to live for and the means to carry them out.”

  “You mean getting her doctorate?”

  “Not only that. She was confident of getting her way in a current negotiation.” He gave Bruno a teasing grin, enjoying the knowledge that he knew something that Bruno did not. “She was too confident, perhaps.”

  “And what was this negotiation?”

  “She
was planning to buy my chartreuse, along with my library and my art collection, while offering to let me remain here rent-free for the rest of my life.”

  “You were going to sell everything?” Bruno was more than surprised.

  “Why the devil would I do that? What use would I have for money at my age? But every time I said so, she seemed to think it was a negotiating ploy to drive up the price. It became almost a game between us. She was sure she’d win.”

  “Did she have money of her own, as well as her father’s?” Bruno knew that wealth would always be a plausible motive if an autopsy found Claudia’s death was suspected murder.

  “She said she had her own funds.”

  “How much was she offering?”

  “None of your business, Bruno. But her initial estimate of the value of my collection was more than four million.”

  “Mon Dieu, was that in euros?”

  “Dollars. Would you like to see my collection?”

  “Very much.”

  “Take the stairs down to the hall and I’ll come in the elevator.” Bourdeille turned his wheelchair with the ease of long practice and rolled to the discreet wooden door where the elevator button was the navel of a small plaster cherub on the wall.

  “We’ll start with the oldest works, early fifteenth century, mainly Burgundian, although in those days that meant Flemish.” Bourdeille led the way to the last of three rooms and then turned, gesturing at the wooden panels that had been fixed to the plain white wall and protected with thick glass screens. In the center of the room was a wooden Madonna with a lusty child on her lap, clutching at her breast and looking more like a cheeky cherub than an Infant Jesus.

  “This was when wealthy merchants, usually from the cloth trade, began requesting that their faces be included in the religious scenes that custom required. I began acquiring them in the 1950s when they were quite cheap. Ten years later, I couldn’t have afforded them. Then these next two rooms are of sentimental value, works by young French painters who were working in the studios of Italian masters, late fifteenth century and early sixteenth. Again, they were cheap in the fifties when I found them, mainly in Italy and Germany. Then I published my book on the roots of the French Renaissance, and their value soared.