The Body in the Castle Well

by Martin Walker

  Most of the musicians were regulars. He could never fail to invite the town’s own rock group, which included Lespinasse from the garage on drums, the church organist on the keyboards and Denis from the newspaper shop on lead guitar. Robert, the architect who sang as well in English as in French, played bass. And the massed elders from the local retirement home would hang Bruno from the town bridge if he ever failed to provide the accordion group that played the old bal musette numbers that got them on their feet and dancing with the enthusiasm if not quite the energy of their youth. The church choir always gave one lively concert of nonreligious songs, and the mayor insisted on at least one string quartet to play chamber music.

  Other than those essential events, Bruno had a free hand. And this year he was very proud indeed that his friend Amélie Duplessis, a young magistrate working at the justice ministry, would be singing. She had made a couple of jazz albums and had agreed to spend a week of her vacation in St. Denis to give two riverbank concerts. He allowed himself a smile of satisfaction knowing that Amélie would now be able to return to Paris eleven hundred euros better off. Bruno’s own budget for the concerts was limited. He could pay her two hundred euros and provide her with room and board and train fare. But he had managed to negotiate another two hundred for her to give a concert at Montignac, and two hundred more from Les Eyzies. He had previously secured a contract for five hundred euros at Château des Milandes, a special concert of the songs of the legendary American jazz singer Josephine Baker, whose home the château had once been.

  This was likely to be a less agreeable meeting, despite the pleasure Bruno always took in the château and its setting on a low ridge above the River Dordogne. It had been built at the end of the fifteenth century by the seigneur of the imposing fortress of Castelnaud at the behest of his young and famously beautiful bride. She had persuaded him to build a new château, in the fashionable style from Italy that was becoming known. The young countess wanted a pleasurable home rather than a bastion of war, a dwelling that would be lighter, more airy and stylish, with windows rather than arrow slits and balconies rather than battlements. And he had built her a jewel, overlooking one of the loveliest stretches of the Dordogne Valley.

  Warned that their investigation into Claudia’s death was likely to be double-checked and questioned, J-J had asked Bruno to take formal statements from the three people at Milandes. Suspicion was bound to fall on Laurent as an ex-convict who had been in touch with the dead woman, and J-J had asked Bruno to nail down Laurent’s alibi for the evening. The task proved simple enough. He started with the chief falconer, Arnaud, a man in his early sixties who had taken up the art after retiring from the army after thirty years in the signal corps. Bruno’s own military career provided an instant bond when he spotted the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre on Bruno’s uniform.

  Arnaud gave Bruno a statement, wrote lu et approuvé, read and approved, on the bottom and then signed and dated it before taking Bruno home for a coffee, where his wife gave her own statement. Laurent had been with them throughout the evening since they had left Milandes soon after six until they had dropped him off at Marty’s farm at about ten-thirty.

  “I gave him a chance on the recommendation of the man who taught me falconry,” Arnaud said over the coffee. “I’m glad I did. He’s a natural with the hawks, patient but firm. I’ll be happy for Laurent to take over the flying displays for the tourists next summer. I know about his past, but he more than paid for his mistake. Ten years was a ridiculous sentence for what was a tragic accident. Anyway, he’s in the clear on this latest business about this poor girl. Laurent was stunned when he heard the news from that colleague of yours, the detective who came by yesterday. Not that he showed his grief—he’s got a lot of self-control. But I could tell he was badly shaken. Laurent went off to his hawks, sat quietly for a while with the redtail he trained and then cleaned out all the mews.”

  “The mews?” Bruno asked.

  “That’s what we call the cages. They have to be big, the size of a bedroom, so the birds can more than spread their wings. They need to do that. And I always like to have a safety chamber, a kind of vestibule where I can go in and close the outer door before going into the mews.”

  “How did he get the hawk?”

  “It’s his own bird, a redtail he trained in the Jura. People usually start off with a smaller hawk. I started with a Harris hawk, like most people in France. The red-tailed hawks came from America originally, but they’ve become very popular recently. They’re a good hawk to start with. The falconer who trained me and then Laurent arranged for someone to bring his redtail down here when I told him I was happy to take Laurent on. You should have seen his face when they were reunited. And the hawk seemed just as pleased to be with him again.”

  “Laurent’s a decent man, always helpful and polite,” said Arnaud’s wife, Myrtille, whose Périgord accent was even more marked than her husband’s. “We think we’ve found a place for him to stay here, a cottage on the estate that’s been used just for storage, but the roof and walls are good and there’s an old woodstove for heating and cooking. We’re giving him a hand in fixing it up.”

  Arnaud took Bruno to the row of mews, where seventy different owls, eagles and several kinds of hawks were housed, and each of them stared impassively at Bruno as he watched. Arnaud pointed out his own pride and joy, two peregrine falcons he’d raised and trained.

  “What are those cords on their legs?” Bruno asked.

  “We call them jesses, and we use them to tether the hawk to the falconer’s glove and in training. That’s probably what Laurent is doing now. You’ll find him beyond the steps somewhere.”

  Laurent was in the garden beyond the mews, a falconer’s bag slung crosswise over his left shoulder and hanging down at his right side. He wore a heavy gauntlet on his left hand and forearm, but there was no hawk in sight.

  “Hi, Bruno, good to see you, but don’t come too close and don’t talk yet,” Laurent said, speaking softly and barely turning his head to look at his visitor. “Strangers make him nervous, and I’m trying to get him accustomed to his new neighborhood. He’s up in that pine tree, looking for squirrels.”

  Bruno wondered if there would be any squirrels left, this close to the raptors of Milandes. He knew little of falconry and the various sizes of game they would hunt. He knew there had been some concern among farmers about their newborn lambs when Milandes had brought in the first eagles, but there had been no reports of their being taken. There had been claims of some free-range chickens being lost, but since the avian-flu warnings all chicken coops now had to be covered in netting.

  Suddenly Bruno caught a flash of movement high up in the pine, and then the hawk swooped, not down to the ground but into the open air above the garden. He climbed and then circled, once, twice, and Bruno heard the rasping kree-ee-ya screech that seemed to go on forever until the tone dropped and the noise died. The wings were now outstretched in a glide so perfect and graceful that Bruno caught his breath before the hawk swept effortlessly overhead and beyond the château roof before wheeling back to Laurent and seeming to hang motionless in the air for a long moment before settling onto the glove. Laurent gave his bird some morsel to eat, fastened the jess to a small ring on his gauntlet, tying the falconer’s knot with one practiced hand, and then told Bruno he could approach.

  As he came closer and could judge its size against Laurent, Bruno saw that the hawk was almost the same height as Laurent’s arm, close to half a meter tall. And its wingspan when it had hovered before perching was at least a meter wide, making the bird much bigger than Bruno had expected. Its folded wings were dark brown, its belly white and its chest feathers mottled, brown and light gray. The feathers continued well down the bird’s legs, almost as though it wore trousers, and Bruno was surprised by the size and evident strength of the talons. The red tail feathers that gave the breed its name spread out over Laurent’s gauntlet, des
cending a good ten centimeters below what Bruno thought of as its rump. There would probably be some falconry term for it. Bruno’s eye returned to the beak, which looked suitably lethal, curving down like a scimitar before ending in a pronounced hook that seemed perfectly adapted to catching and fixing its prey.

  “Does your hawk have a name?” he asked, seeing a flash of yellow in the hawk’s eyes before Laurent slipped a leather hood over its head. Taking one end in his teeth and the other in his right hand, he tightened the two straps that secured the hood, and the bird seemed to relax, almost as if it were dozing.

  “I just call him Hawk. They aren’t remotely human, so I never saw a point in giving him a human name.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Nearly two years old, almost ready to start breeding. I’ve had him since he was a chick. Arnaud wants to breed him to one of his Harris hawks. He reckons it will make a good hybrid. I’m not so sure. Redtails often like to hunt in pairs and then tend to stay loyal to their mate, so I might try to find him a female.”

  “How do they hunt in pairs?”

  “When they’re after squirrels, they each take one side of a tree. One swoops in to drive the squirrel to the other side or down, and then its mate takes the kill.”

  “What were you feeding him when he landed?”

  “A bit of raw beef. Mainly he catches mice and voles, sometimes a rabbit.”

  “I know rabbits breed fast, but I’m surprised there are any left around here, with all these hungry raptors at the château.”

  Laurent smiled. “Hawks are carnivores, so they’ll eat any meat, even worms and beetles if they’re hungry. There’s no shortage of food for them around here, although you can get some competition at twilight when the owls come out. And they can range a long way, maybe not as far as St. Denis but certainly beyond Beynac Castle.”

  “Those talons look very strong.”

  “For their weight, hawks are by far the strongest living creatures as well as the fastest. Those talons can exert five hundred kilos of pressure per square centimeter,” Laurent replied. “But that’s not what you came here to talk about. Let’s walk back to the mews, but there’s nothing I can add to what I told that detective yesterday.”

  “That was just preliminary questioning when we were trying to understand what happened to Claudia. I’m here to take a formal statement. I just took ones from Arnaud and his wife, so your movements are accounted for. It will be a formality.”

  “I’ve heard that from cops before,” Laurent said stiffly, looking straight ahead as he plodded up the stone steps. “I thought from what the detective said that it was an accident.”

  “Probably—she was taking some strong medication that could have made her dizzy. And there was a kitten somewhere on or in the well, and it looks like she tried to help the cat and fell in, but you’ll understand that we have to rule out the other possibilities, and you were one of the few people she knew around here.”

  “I met her a few times. You were there the first time at the station and again when we went to that lecture at the history society, and then she got in touch through the château here and asked me if I wanted to join her on a visit to Lascaux. She came here to pick me up, and I showed her the raptors and my hawk, and then we drove to Montignac. And I saw her Sunday night at Limeuil.”

  “Did you like her?” Bruno asked. “Were you attracted to her? She was a lovely young woman, it would be natural enough.”

  Laurent paused as he came to his hawk’s mews and turned to face Bruno. “It was a very good day we had together; perhaps the best I’ve had since I got out of prison. She was friendly and open and more than just intelligent. Claudia has, or rather she had, a very lively mind. She was genuinely interested in all sorts of things from my hawk to the château to the cave paintings.”

  Laurent paused again, then looked away across the valley as if searching for words and phrases he barely knew. When he spoke, it was haltingly, coming in bursts.

  “Claudia was eager about life, confident about everything, infectious in the way she spread her own happiness. I’d never known anyone like her before. So yes, I was attracted, but not in the way you think. She was too young, too innocent, almost childlike in a way. She seemed to have no idea that the world could be a hurtful place, and I’d have hated to see that realization come to her.”

  “When you went to Lascaux, did you spend the whole day together?”

  “We spent the morning here with the birds, and I showed her around the château and the Josephine Baker exhibition, then we left in a car she’d borrowed. She’d brought a picnic, so we stopped by the river at La Madeleine and ate bread and cheese, some salami and apples and drank cans of Orangina like a couple of kids.” He smiled at the memory.

  “Then we went to Lascaux and walked around St. Léon Vézère on the way back. It was perfect, two youngsters on a day out without the grown-ups. I hadn’t felt like that for a long time, and it was great. When she dropped me off, we hugged each other goodbye like brother and sister.”

  “What about Sunday night at the lecture in Limeuil? You must have seen her again then.”

  “Yes, but she looked tired, with dark shadows under her eyes, as though she wasn’t feeling well. And she was quieter, distracted. I thought she had something on her mind. And I was with Arnaud and Myrtille, and there were other people that Arnaud wanted me to meet, so we only exchanged a few words over a glass of punch, and then she hurried out soon after the lecture started. I never saw her again.”

  He opened the outer door of the mews, took his hawk inside through the inner door, checked its water and then returned.

  “Let’s go and write down my statement but only the facts, Bruno. I don’t want to include all that flowery stuff I told you.”

  He led Bruno to a hut that seemed to be an office for the falconers, with a small bookshelf, a table made of plywood atop two waist-high filing cabinets and two hard-backed chairs. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling, and an electric kettle and some mugs stood on a shelf above the books, all of them about birds and falconry.

  “I’ve got instant coffee or tea,” he said.

  Bruno accepted tea, took out a statement form, filled in the details and began to take down Laurent’s slow, deliberate dictation. Laurent read it over, approved and signed it. Then Bruno took Laurent, Arnaud and Myrtille to the château office, where a woman in jeans and a sweater who looked overworked agreed to witness the three statements. Bruno was surprised but impressed that she read them aloud to each of the three before appending her own signature.

  “Are you the policeman from St. Denis who arranged the Josephine Baker concert?” she asked when the paperwork was complete. Bruno said that he was, and the woman told Laurent and his friends that she would like to talk with Bruno, since she had some queries about the playlist and the concert.

  Bruno sat in a stiff-backed chair, studying the woman on the other side of the desk as he shifted mental gears and tried to recall the discussions about the performance. Her dark hair was tied up in a loose bun, and she wore no makeup, no rings and no jewelry. She had good cheekbones and brown eyes and looked to be in her forties, maybe a little more. Her figure was hidden by the baggy woolen sweater she wore. Even with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, it was far too big for her, and Bruno suspected it had belonged to a man. Maybe it still did.

  A large computer screen took up part of her desk. She pulled a wireless keyboard toward her, and her fingers danced over it with easy familiarity to call up something on the screen, presumably the contract.

  “I didn’t come prepared for this, so I don’t have the contract with me, and I’m working from memory,” Bruno began. “I negotiated the contract for the concert with a Monsieur Varin at the château here, and there was an appendix to the contract. It included the playlist, about twenty songs, along with a verbal tribute to Baker and her career. We a
greed on a total performance time of ninety minutes with a half-hour break.”

  “That’s all fine, but we’d like to add a song, ‘C’est un Nid Charmant,’ before the finale of ‘J’ai Deux Amours.’ It’s a favorite of one of the important guests who’ll be attending from the conseil régional. I have a CD here for you that includes the song so your singer can be familiar with it, and then there’s the question of costumes. I think there was some discussion of her wearing one of the original costumes from our collection, but I’m afraid that the insurance costs rule that out. Still, I’m sure we can arrange for a copy or two.”

  “Monsieur Varin said that a decision on costumes could wait until Amélie, the singer, arrives in the Périgord,” said Bruno. “She already has a white satin dress and fur cape. But I made it clear that she would definitely not be wearing the banana skirt that Baker made famous at the Folies Bergère. Nor will Amélie perform topless. That’s already in the contract.”

  “Of course, that wouldn’t be appropriate, but we were hoping that for the last song of the first act, ‘Aux Îles Hawaii,’ Amélie might agree to wear a lei, a Hawaiian necklace of flowers, which would completely cover her breasts.”

  “Monsieur Varin and I discussed that and agreed that it would mean the distraction and interruption of a costume change.”

  “Yes, but now we have a short newsreel film of Mademoiselle Baker that we could screen while your singer changes.”