The Body in the Castle Well

by Martin Walker

  “This is my glory room,” Bourdeille said as he led the way across the hall, taking out a very advanced-looking key and, from a separate pocket, a small fob, which seemed to undo a separate electronic lock. “My insurance company requires these precautions for this room. There are only four works of art, but these are the ones that modern fashion deems the most valuable. I almost agree, but not quite. Money and art have always seemed to me such unhappy bedfellows.

  “But here they are.” He opened the door with a flourish and then touched a small light switch, and three gentle spotlights lit one painting and three sketches that left Bruno feeling awed, less because of his artistic knowledge than because of the drama Bourdeille had infused into their presentation.

  “Antoine Caron, François Quesnel and Valentin de Bourgogne, known as the French Caravaggio,” he said. “One came to me as a gift from a grateful client some forty years ago. Another was a bequest from a dear and lamented friend. The third I got cheaply because its provenance and authorship were both disputed. But I was certain and wrote an essay to explain why and gave a lecture on it at the Louvre. Not everyone was convinced, but most of those I respect were persuaded.

  “I found the Valentin through pure luck at a flea market in Brussels in 1960,” Bourdeille said, and Bruno could hear both pride and glee in the old man’s voice. From an ornate table in the center of the room he pointed to a folder of soft dove-gray leather. “In there you will see a photograph of how it looked when I first saw it.”

  Bruno took out a photo, the same size as the painting, and saw a drab and clumsy painting in the cubist style. The colors were lifeless, dirty yellows and dull browns with a small black oblong off-center. Bruno had never warmed to cubism as a style of painting.

  “It belonged to a Jewish dealer who had covered it with this daub when the German army was at the gates of Brussels. He knew what was coming and entrusted this and some other paintings to his gardener, who later died in a bombing raid. Heaven knows what happened to the other paintings, but the moment I looked at this squalid little work in the flea market I felt an urge to turn it around and saw that the wood of the frame was hundreds of years older than it should have been. I got it for the equivalent of less than fifty euros, took it back to my workshop and cleaned it, and you now see what I found underneath.”

  “Did the Jewish dealer have an heir?” Bruno asked.

  “Not one. The dealer was originally from Vienna. He and all of his family were sent to Auschwitz. I advertised, of course, and contacted the office for the restitution of artworks in Paris and tried the Israeli embassy. There were no claimants and no evidence of the painting’s existence, so I could establish my own claim to ownership. Then I began my own research into its provenance. I’d like to bequeath this to the art museum in Tel Aviv in the names of the dealer and his family, but I doubt whether France would grant an export license.”

  Bourdeille looked up. “Am I boring you?”

  “Quite the reverse,” said Bruno, fascinated as much by the old man’s excitement as by the painting itself.

  “I found it had belonged to Talleyrand, Napoléon’s foreign minister, and it was listed in the archives of his château at Valençay. But when Napoléon installed his brother Joseph as king of Spain, the real king was housed at Valençay. Doubtless in retaliation for the French looting of Spain, the Spaniards made off with several of Talleyrand’s treasures and sold them off in Austria to defray expenses during the Congress of Vienna that ended the Napoleonic Wars. Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, bought it, but it disappeared when his home was looted during the revolution of 1848, and it hung in a Viennese café until the Hapsburg Empire collapsed. Vienna was in chaos, and the father of the art dealer who later fled to Brussels became the owner.”

  “What a strange journey it took,” said Bruno, peering closely at the painting. “You must have enjoyed the hunt almost as much as the painting.”

  “Indeed I did. But there are so many wonderful stories and so many strokes of luck. I only knew about the Valençay archives because of another strange tale of the Congress of Vienna. Having betrayed Napoléon and maneuvered to restore the Bourbon monarchy, Talleyrand was France’s representative at the Congress of Vienna. In return for his services the Prussian king made him a duke of a minor German principality called Sagan. So when France was defeated in 1940, and Göring’s little band of art thieves in Luftwaffe uniforms came looking for loot, Talleyrand’s descendant was able to claim that because he was the Herzog of Sagan, the château of Valençay was German property and could not be touched. Disciplined as they were, the Germans accepted this, and the Louvre then sent some treasures, including the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, there for safekeeping throughout the war. I was part of the team the Louvre then sent to Valençay to check that everything had been accounted for, which is how I knew Talleyrand’s archives.”

  Infected by the almost boyish delight of Bourdeille as he recounted this story, Bruno was grinning as he said, “It would have been a loss to art, but you’re also a loss to my own profession. You’d have made quite a detective.”

  The expression on the face of Bourdeille darkened suddenly into an angry glare, but then he shook his head, his features relaxed, and he said, “I’m sure you mean that as a compliment. Forgive me, I did not mean to be rude. But it was a policeman who put me into this wheelchair when I was just a boy.”

  “Not a policeman, a Fascist thug from the milice,” Bruno replied. “But I understand. And I did mean it as a compliment.”

  “Thank you, but the policeman was a Frenchman, nonetheless, acting under the authority of a French government with a claim to legitimacy.” Bourdeille took a deep breath and collected himself. “I’m tired and need to rest, but I hope to see you before long and show you the rest of the collection. Madame Bonnet will call you to arrange a suitable time. I enjoyed your visit, despite the sad death of Claudia which prompted it. À bientôt, Bruno.”

  Chapter 9

  Back at the castle in Limeuil, Bruno scanned the list David had assembled of those who’d attended the previous evening’s lecture. Not greatly to Bruno’s surprise, several of his friends were among them. He could have predicted that Horst and Clothilde from the prehistory museum at Les Eyzies would have attended, but the baron had joined them with Pamela. Joe, his predecessor as the St. Denis policeman, had also attended with his wife. Micheline from the St. Denis tourism office had been in the audience with her husband, the local taxi driver, along with Julien from the town’s vineyard. There was a retired English couple whom Bruno knew slightly from the tennis club and a group from Montignac, friends of the speaker, who was one of the curators at the new Lascaux center for cave art.

  He saw Florence’s name listed, along with three of her pupils from the collège, and Bruno’s English friend Jack Crimson. The surprise was to see Laurent’s name on the list, along with two friends he had brought along, their names unknown. There were more than twenty people to be interviewed, including some from Limeuil whom Bruno did not know. But Bruno knew he’d be seeing his friends in a few hours at the usual Monday evening supper at Pamela’s riding school. He took a snapshot of the list on his mobile phone.

  Bruno began by phoning Joe to ask him to put together a list of the attendees he recalled. Then he phoned Juliette, the policewoman in Les Eyzies, to ask her to check with Horst and Clothilde if they could remember any others at the lecture. He e-mailed her the list from his phone. Then he called Louis, the policeman at Montignac, and asked him to do the same with the speaker and his guests. He called at the various addresses in Limeuil, trying to assemble a full list for the town. But only two of them had noticed Claudia leaving early, and nobody had seen any others leaving before the end of the lecture.

  Back in St. Denis, he checked his list with Micheline and then went to his office to log on to the police computer and download the list onto the case file J-J had op
ened. J-J’s visit to Laurent had established that Laurent had been at the lecture with two friends, the falconer and his wife, who each said the three of them had stayed until the end and then dropped Laurent at Marty’s farm on their way home. J-J had added that a toxicology report was expected the next day, and a full autopsy would follow later. As he was dealing with other e-mails, Bruno’s desk phone rang, and he recognized the American accent of Hodge, the FBI agent who was legal attaché at the American embassy in Paris.

  “Thought I’d better warn you that this news has gone right to the top,” Hodge began. “The girl’s father is a close friend of the ambassador, a big player on Wall Street and a major donor to the president’s election campaign, so the ambassador let the White House know about her death. Now he wants me to come down to help with your investigation. I’ll try not to get in your way.”

  “You’re always welcome,” said Bruno, who had got on well with Hodge on a previous case. “Would you like me to book you a room at a hotel in St. Denis?”

  “Sure, get me a nice one. But the girl’s father, Abraham J. Muller III, is going to want his own investigation. Since he’s in finance, he won’t be going to a detective agency but to the people he uses on financial inquiries. You know these specialist firms, they charge like lawyers, a thousand bucks an hour. And for that kind of money, Muller will want results. And he’ll get them, right or wrong. If these financial gumshoes can’t find anything you guys have missed, they’ll start looking at you and J-J so they can write a report that blames it all on the incompetent French police.”

  “Right now, it looks like a tragic accident while the girl was using powerful medication,” said Bruno. “She had fentanyl and oxycodone in her room, prescribed by an American doctor and issued by an American pharmacy. She tried to get some more here from a doctor who refused, saying it was too dangerous. You met Fabiola when you were here. She prescribed ibuprofen instead.”

  “Jesus, fentanyl and oxy, that’s all we need,” said Hodge. “J-J only told me that he was waiting for a toxicology report. Can you give me the details?”

  Bruno read out from his notebook the name and address of the New Haven pharmacy, the prescribing doctor and the other details he’d taken from the medicine containers.

  “I’ll check those out. When will you get the toxicology report?”

  “It’s due tomorrow,” said Bruno. “Two more things you should know: she seems to have had an American boyfriend named Jack, but his photo was torn up and tossed in the wastepaper basket. I’m told he’s a lawyer, based in London, and they were childhood playmates. And she had a couple of family photos pinned onto her mirror. There’s one that looks like her as a young girl with her parents, and another shows the same guy a few years on, but the photo is truncated as though the second person had been cut out. Do you know if her parents were divorced?”

  “I’ll find out. I’ll come down from Paris tomorrow morning, ambassador’s orders. I imagine her father might want to fly in, and they’ll certainly want the body.”

  “Under French law, they can’t have it until our investigation is complete. You know that. And whatever the report, after what you’ve said about this girl’s political connections, J-J will want an autopsy.”

  There was a long pause followed by a heavy sigh from Hodge. “I understand, but the ambassador won’t. He’s already called your foreign minister, and I’ve been asked to use all my French police connections.”

  “That’s what you’re doing,” Bruno said.

  “They’ll want an American autopsy, if there’s to be an autopsy at all.”

  “The best you’ll get is for an American doctor to attend our autopsy, and even then you’ll need to pull a lot of strings. Do you want me to call Prunier?” Bruno asked, referring to the police commissioner for the département.

  “No, I’d better do that myself. I’ll get the early morning fast train to Bordeaux and then rent a car and drive to see Prunier and J-J. I’ll try to be with you in the afternoon. Just make sure that everything you do is by the book and logged. Like I said, Muller’s private investigators will be looking for someone to blame for this, and sure as hell it won’t be Muller’s daughter, whatever drugs she was on. Throw in the ambassador and the White House and this could finish your and J-J’s careers and maybe Prunier’s, too. I’m serious, Bruno. This is going to get rough.”

  “If her father wants someone to blame, you should know that we’ll probably be taking action against the builders who failed to secure the well properly.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Bruno,” Hodge said patiently. “The guys who’ll be coming down on your neck will want some real heads to roll. Builders are little people, so they don’t count.”

  “This is France,” said Bruno, bridling despite his respect for Hodge. “They will get French justice under French law.”

  “I hear you, Bruno, but good luck with that when our president calls your president and makes it personal. I’m just trying to warn you of what you’ll probably be dealing with here, and I count on you to let J-J and Prunier know just how heavy this could get. I’ll see you tomorrow. By the way, I saw Isabelle the other day at one of the antiterrorism coordination meetings. She’s looking well, put some weight on, which she needed to do. She asked if I’d heard from you, and said to send you her love if we spoke.”

  “Give her my love when you next see her,” said Bruno, an automatic response. He didn’t want to think about Isabelle just now. Their occasional reunions, snatched weekends between Isabelle’s high-powered job on the antiterrorism task force, were no way to conduct an affair even if there had been the prospect of a steady relationship, even a family, at the end of it. And with Isabelle, that was never going to happen.

  Hodge hung up, and Bruno sat back, thinking, not greatly surprised by Hodge’s warning. Policing and high politics were always a difficult mix, and the police usually ended up taking the blame. He logged back in to the computer to add to the case file Muller’s name, his wealth and his connections to the American ambassador and to the White House, but without any reference to Hodge as his source. He’d pass on Hodge’s warnings privately to J-J and Prunier. Then he went in to relate it all to the mayor of St. Denis, a man with his own political connections at the Élysée Palace. If there was to be a diplomatic fuss over this, the sooner the staff of the president of France knew about it, the better.

  An hour later, after a phone call that persuaded J-J to ask the pathologist to perform the autopsy on Claudia first thing the next morning, Bruno was mounted on his horse, Hector. As he waited for his basset hound to catch up, he watched the majestic sweep of the clouds drifting toward him. Their edges were gilded by the slanting rays of the sun sinking in the west, somewhere far out over the Atlantic. Man, horse and dog, all three of them were catching their breath after a gallop along the ridge overlooking the twin bridges where the River Vézère flowed into the wider Dordogne. The village of Limeuil climbed sinuously up the hill to the new château and then to the stone walls and the neo-Moorish castle on the summit, itself dwarfed by the height of the sequoia tree.

  Someone at this spot the previous evening, he mused, would have had no knowledge of the drama being played out in the castle gardens, Claudia tumbling down the well to fall into the water below, past the kitten whose cries, Bruno assumed, had attracted her. Suddenly he stopped his train of thought. Where had the kitten been when it had started the plaintive meowing that had caught Claudia’s attention? It could not have been on the workmen’s platform. That had been hauled up high when Bruno had first arrived at the well. He had noticed no ledge or projecting stone on which the kitten might have sat. Could it have been on the lip of the well? In that case, Claudia might have clambered up, reached for the kitten and, with her sense of balance blurred by the medicine she had taken, fallen into the well.

  But if it had been an accident, what had happened to Claudia’s bag and the la
ptop it contained? Might someone have had a motive to help her on her way? There were questions to be asked about that lawyer boyfriend, Jack, and whether she had broken off their relationship. And perhaps Bourdeille had been more troubled than he had admitted about her questioning of his attributions. And what of Claudia’s family? Presumably she had made a will of her own, despite her youth. With a fortune at her disposal, sufficient to think of buying Bourdeille’s estate, that might provide a motive for someone to have killed her. He’d have to ask Hodge about the fate of Claudia’s estate.

  Perhaps he should ask her adviser in Paris again about Claudia’s life in the capital, about any friends or connections she might have made, someone who could help Bruno learn more about her. And there was her professor back at Yale, with whom she had exchanged regular e-mails about her research. He might know more about Claudia’s private life.

  Bruno pulled out his notebook to check for the professor’s e-mail address and thought about the way he should phrase his questions to an English speaker. He shrugged and used his phone to send an e-mail that read simply: I have sad news about your pupil, Claudia Muller. She died yesterday after falling in a well at Limeuil, where she lived while studying with art historian Monsieur de Bourdeille. Please call or e-mail me to arrange a time to talk. Chief of Police, Vézère Valley, Benoît Courrèges.

  He added his phone numbers and hit Send. It would be early afternoon in the United States, so he might get a reply that evening. Pamela might be able to help when his English failed him. He nudged Hector with his heels and turned to canter back to the riding school, Balzac racing along behind with his short legs and flapping ears, doing his best to keep pace. After he dropped onto the hunters’ trail and turned back toward Pamela’s place, Bruno saw the rest of his friends trotting in line along the valley floor. They had already left for their evening ride when Bruno arrived, but he’d called to say he’d catch up with them.