Strange Images of Death (24 page)

The manservant led him through the ground floor which had been left as an open space, largely plain and unfurnished, though the stone floor had been covered agreeably with a softening carpet of local weave. One boot-rack stacked with highly polished riding boots stood by the door and, at the far end of the room, a mahogany table held a cargo of two heavy wooden church candlesticks in which fat wax candles had been very recently lit and a matched pair of silver vases filled with bunches of white lilies. The scent in the enclosed space was overpowering.

A winding staircase led to a first-floor office with a stout oak door, the twin of the one in Petrovsky’s apartment. The manservant knocked gently and entered. Joe hung back and heard him say: ‘Excuse me, sir. I’ve got that Englishman with me. The policeman.’

And the gruff response: ‘Tell him I’ll see him. Just give me a minute, will you, Félix.’

There was the sound of furniture creaking, foot-stamping and nose-blowing, and Guy de Pacy appeared in the doorway, rubbing an unshaven face. ‘Thank you, Félix. That’ll be all.’ Even red-eyed and black-bristled, he cut an impressive figure, Joe thought.

Joe went in and took the chair being pointed out to him. ‘Forgive the squalor,’ mumbled de Pacy, making a careless gesture around the room..

Joe looked for the squalor and saw that it consisted of one jacket flung around a chair back. Everything else was neat and comfortable, a working room supplied with arm-chairs and bookshelves. A phonograph standing in a corner was giving out a moody piece of Mahler that Joe thought he recognized.
Kindertotenlieder.
De Pacy hurried to lift the needle arm and turn the record off.

‘Now—where in hell did
you
get to this morning?’ de Pacy said, beginning to stride about the room. ‘I was looking to you to exercise some control over your fellow countrymen. Have you walked through the great hall? I peered in this morning and decided to leave them to it. Jacquemin thought it would be a good idea to keep the lot of them herded in together. Mad notion! He’ll find he’s got more corpses on his hands than he knows what to do with. By the end of the day, we’ll be looking at the Black Hole of Calcutta! And I’m quite sure I don’t care a button!’

The steward was talking in his bluff tone to fill a gap and distract Joe from an examination of his emotion-racked face.

Joe decided to have none of his nonsense.

‘I was in Avignon,’ he said. ‘At the morgue. She didn’t suffer, Guy, the pathologist assures me. She could hardly have been aware of what was happening to her. She looked very peaceful. I paid my last respects to Estelle and her baby.’

De Pacy uttered a strangled cry and went to collapse on the other chair, turning his face from Joe.

‘How the hell …?’

‘It’s not usual to make the sign of the cross twice over a body. Not unless, perhaps, you understand a second tiny life to have been lost also.’

‘My child,’ said de Pacy. ‘And I was only aware of his existence for one day. I say
his
because Estelle was quite certain that we would have a son. It might well have been a girl. Would they have been able to tell?’

The naive question wrung Joe’s heart and made him feel uneasy. Responding with kindness to the man’s grief: ‘It’s thought you would have had a son,’ he lied. Somehow he judged the devious answer would bring comfort to this military man.

The vision of Estelle in her blue Worth dinner gown came back to Joe with a memory of her perfume and the elation he’d sensed in her. Elation not chemically achieved as he’d thought, by cocaine, but by love. Orlando had had it right. She was in love. And Joe was looking at the object of her affections. Dishevelled and sniffling, de Pacy slumped in his chair and it was suddenly hard to see in this man the hero Estelle had clearly fallen for.

‘She loved you very much, Guy,’ Joe said quietly.

‘How do you know?’ The drooping head shot up. Far from distressing him further as Joe had feared, it seemed he’d triggered in de Pacy an eagerness to hear his reassurances.

‘I was with her on that last night. The night she wore her blue gown. She took me on to the roof … No! In all innocence, I assure you, old man! To give evidence. To tell me what she’d observed from up there on the night of the statue-smashing. She had an assignation—with you, I think—and she dashed off to keep it. But not before I’d got the clear impression that here was a woman in love. Not a sight I’ve had any
personal
experience of, I confess. Something similar but not like this. Once seen, never forgotten. You have been a fortunate man, Guy, to have known such affection.’

A watery smile rewarded his insights. ‘That was the last night we spent together. It was the night she told me. That she was having a child and that it was mine. You won’t understand the feeling, Joe. News like that turns your life around. It can be devastating … It can be elevating. It made me twice the man I was. I was damn nearly destroyed by the war …’

To Joe’s dismay, he began to peel away the grey kid glove from his right hand to show a twisted claw from which the skin had been burned away. The two men looked at it silently. De Pacy with revulsion, Joe with politely concealed embarrassment. In his tight London world, men did not go about revealing their war wounds. And, he suspected, in de Pacy’s world also. He was being granted a sight of the depths of despair to which the man had sunk over the past two days and he steeled himself for further revelations.

‘This isn’t pretty but, by God, it’s nothing compared with the state of my soul or whatever you like to call that inner spark.’ De Pacy gave a bitter smile. ‘I’m not a religious man, Sandilands, but I find myself using their vocabulary. I’m talking about that bit of us that is truly who we are. Is that the soul? Mine was atrophied like this claw. And then, one night, Estelle kissed my hand and burst into tears over it. And suddenly, what had been a bit of an unexpected fling for me became something far more serious. I knew I loved her. I asked her to marry me and she agreed. The future was suddenly in focus.’ He looked about him wildly. ‘I was ready to leave this suffocating place behind us, the years of servitude and subordination, and take off with her wherever she wanted to go. I’d even have gone with her to England. I have resources of my own. We’d have managed.’

He looked Joe in the eye. ‘How did he find out, Joe? How in hell did my cousin know? We were so careful. It started out as a flirtation and then an indulgence and, before we’d realized it, we were in it up to our necks and there was no going back. At my age! But then they say that love, like the measles, catches you harder the older you are. And I had a bad case! I knew he’d disapprove. Send her away. Find a way to hurt her. We decided to affect a cooling off and put on a show of dislike for the audience. We’d spend our days staring coldly at each other and our nights in each other’s arms. Estelle flirted with the other men—even you came in for a little attention—to put everyone on the wrong track and I pretended I didn’t mind. I was sure Bertrand was fooled.’

‘You were so afraid of your cousin finding out?’

‘Yes. Bloody mad Silmont! He hated her, discovered what we had become to each other and killed her because of it. Why did he have to kill her? She didn’t want any of this … his possessions … not any of it.’ He waved his arms around. ‘But I am his heir. He wouldn’t risk her presence, her influence over me contaminating the estate. If I’d married her, I’d have been—in his eyes—bringing back an infection into the family.’

‘You say you are his heir. Tell me, de Pacy—it may all be different in France—but what’s to prevent him, on a whim, changing his will and leaving his worldly goods elsewhere? In England, cats’ homes and donkey sanctuaries are known to thrive on last-minute changes of mind by vindictive old maniacs.’

De Pacy glanced briefly at a file on a top shelf and smiled. ‘Don’t be concerned. All arrangements are made and will be executed according to the law. And should there be any awkwardness about possessions I could call on the testimony of a specialist in Paris whom I insisted my cousin consult some time ago. The demented have no more legal powers than they have in your country. He knows this. He knows Silmont will be mine. He couldn’t bear the thought that a golden-haired, foreign and—I admit it—promiscuous girl, the image of Aliénore, should share it with me. That
her
son might inherit one day.

‘I’m warning you, Sandilands—he’s not going to get away with it! If you don’t take his rotting carcase away from here, I’ll finish him off myself. But—don’t be concerned! I’ll kill him cleverly … neatly. You won’t be called on to arrest me.’

‘No need for that, Guy. No need for violence of any kind. Calm down! Your cousin didn’t murder Estelle. I have myself confirmed his alibi. He it was who smashed the statue as a prelude, indeed, to offering up Estelle as some mad sacrifice to the full moon. But he was thwarted. His plans went awry. He was in a paroxysm of fury when he returned from his bridge-playing session to find someone had beaten him to it. And using the very method he’d planned himself.’

‘You’re sure of this, Sandilands?’

‘Completely.’

‘Then, if I am to accept this … and I suppose I must … what are we to understand? That someone in this household has been aware of everything from the beginning?’

‘Yes,’ said Joe quietly. ‘You’re right. Someone here has been close enough to Silmont to wriggle inside his diseased brain and follow his sick thoughts to their conclusion. There’s some human spirochete about—someone in our company who’s as mad as he is.’

‘Hideous thought, indeed, Sandilands.’

Joe got to his feet and prepared to leave. He gestured to the phonograph. ‘I’ll leave you in peace with your grief,’ he said. ‘“Wenn dein Mütterlein”, wasn’t it, the song I interrupted? …
Oh, light of your father’s life—a joy lost too soon.
I don’t have that quite right—but near enough, I think. My condolences, de Pacy.’

De Pacy looked uncomfortable as he murmured his thanks. ‘You know who it is, don’t you?’ he persisted, walking to the door with Joe.

‘I’m almost certain. But I do nothing without firm proof. And this I hope to have in my possession,’ he smiled and continued, ‘before nightfall. Or I risk the grave displeasure of Lady Moon and her devoted acolyte!’

De Pacy groaned. ‘Much longer in this madhouse, Sandilands, and you’ll be as barmy as the rest of us. Hang on to what’s left of your wits, man!’

Joe walked swiftly down the stairs to the reception room where the manservant was standing waiting by the door.

‘Thank you, Félix, I’ll find my own way back.’ And he added, in a spirit of mischief: ‘I think you may extinguish the candles now. And—leave the door open for a blast of air, would you? One could choke on the funereal fug in here.’

Joe stepped outside into the sunshine, seized on his sanity with both hands and breathed in a deep, clean lungful of the breeze blowing from the pine-clad hills.

Chapter Thirty

Joe stood for a moment, trying to shake off his bleak mood, and was surprisingly uplifted to spot a familiar figure in a red-striped dress striding over the drawbridge and heading towards him.

‘Dorcas!’ he shouted and went to meet her. On impulse he seized her and swung her round his head like an infant. ‘You arrive in time to save my sanity, child!’

‘Gracious, Joe,’ she said, wriggling to the ground. ‘What’s got into
you
?’

‘Other people’s madness is what! I’m reeling from a double dose. And your fresh face is just the antidote I need. Shall we fire up the old Morris, climb aboard and leave them all behind to kill each other off? I think it might be a kindness in the long run.’

‘Oh, I see! No arrests yet, then? I was hoping you’d have someone in a dungeon by now and be sounding the all-clear for the boys to come back.’

‘Not yet. But I do know who planned and carried out Estelle’s murder. My hands are tied in the matter. I can only report my suspicions to Jacquemin and leave the heavy stuff to him. But, tell me, miss—what are you doing up here? Have you deserted your charges?’

Dorcas smiled. ‘That officer who’s been asked to guard us all was an inspired choice! He’s a country boy and he’s set himself to chopping logs, repairing the out-house roof, feeding the chickens. The boys follow him everywhere, adoring. They have no father, you know, though they remember him. And their grandmother’s a widow too.’

‘And how are you getting along with the old girl?’

A broader smile greeted the question. ‘She’s wonderful—compared with the granny fate dealt
me
! She’s their father’s mother and took them all in when Monsieur Dalbert died—belatedly—of wounds he got during the war, three years ago. She’s well able to keep the boys safe and entertained. It’s a small house and I thought I might be in the way but I think I made myself useful.’

As they spoke, they were making their way over to the great hall. ‘Look, Dorcas,’ Joe said hurriedly. ‘I’ve been busy but not so busy I’ve forgotten about your … er … commission. In fact I was in Avignon this morning in pursuit of your instruction, searching the archives of the local paper.’

‘With any success?’

‘Yes. Great progress! I have your mother’s name. I know the name of her village. It’s just a few miles down the valley. I thought I’d go and make some enquiries this afternoon if Jacquemin can spare me. We’re close, Dorcas. Very close.’

Dorcas stopped, turned and looked him straight in the eye. This honest gaze, he’d discovered, was usually followed by a whopping lie and he prepared himself to hear one. ‘Listen, Joe. For once, I’m going to say something sensible. Something you’ll want to hear. I’ve been thinking. You have far too much on your plate. Truly important things. It would be selfish of me to expect you to go on searching on my behalf and I want you to stop now. That’s really what I’ve come up for … to tell you this.’

Joe listened on, waiting for an explanation.

‘I want you to forget what I told you and that I ever asked you to find my mother. I’ve thought about it some more and I’ve come to a conclusion—that if I did find her, it would all be a mess. She mightn’t want to see me. After all, she
did
go off and leave me to be brought up by Nanny Tilling, didn’t she? She almost certainly wouldn’t want to see Orlando again. I expect his annoying ways were what drove her away in the first place.’

‘You’re not telling me everything, are you, Dorcas?’

She began to find the toes of his shoes especially interesting and was no longer able to meet his eye. Was she about to tell the truth or sink to a lower level of fibbing? ‘I think I don’t want to find her, after all. Seeing the boys—the Dalbert family—close up … well, it made me think a bit. These villages—they’re all much the same. If we found her perhaps I’d have to spend some time with her and whatever family she has. It would only be polite, wouldn’t it? I mean—“Hello, I’m the daughter you left behind thirteen years ago … Well, I could just stay a few minutes to get reacquainted …” It wouldn’t do. Would you think me a spoilt little twerp, Joe, if I said my heart would sink at the thought of living here? It’s not my place. It seemed to me that I had two choices and each ruled out the other one. I can’t have two lives in two different countries. And I’d die if I didn’t have Orlando and my brothers and Rosie and Aunt Lydia. And, before you say it—why didn’t I think of this before?

‘Well, I did. Of course I did. But staying here—it’s changed the balance somehow. And I think I’ve done a bit of growing up. There are other people in this equation with me, Joe, and I can’t cancel out their thoughts and feelings. They’re every bit as important as mine. I’m selfish but I’ve seen the error of my ways. I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time.’

‘They do say you should be careful what you wish for …’ he replied. ‘It’s not my place to offer advice or tell you what to do. I was enjoying the chase, I must admit, but I abide by your wishes. And don’t worry about the time. No charge! Consider instructions revoked. Sandilands off watch. Now go and find your family. The children are driving poor Orlando round the twist!’

She heaved a sigh of relief and started to skip away.

Oddly, she hadn’t even asked him to tell her what her mother’s name was.

He hoped his quick compliance with her wishes at least hadn’t raised her suspicions. He called her back: ‘Dorcas! I forgot to say—it’s good to have my assistant back. I’ve been missing you!’

She turned a suspicious face on him. ‘What do you want, Joe?’

‘Well, if you’re offering, there is one small thing. Could you, before you get involved with the circus you’ll find in the great hall, just sneak upstairs? There’ll be no one about. There’s something I want you to check for me …’

Jacquemin was all smiles and efficiency when Joe returned. He patted the neat pile of pathologist’s notes in front of him on the desk with satisfaction.

‘Well! All just as we expected. And the bonus of a motive for murder. Blackmail. It’s a blackmail attempt that turned sour. Someone didn’t want to be revealed as the father of this child. Or to pay Miss Smeeth to keep her mouth shut. A child conceived—let’s say—at the beginning to the middle of June. Eight weeks gone out of a forty-week pregnancy.’

‘Oh, you have forty weeks in a French pregnancy?’ Joe enquired, smiling. ‘In England it’s generally reckoned to be thirty-eight.’

‘Whatever it is, we’re thinking that the perpetrator had to be one of the men—or menservants … there are some very well-set-up young fellows amongst the ranks, had you noticed?—who were in residence here in the fortnight or so after her arrival. I’ve compiled a list. The Lord Silmont heads the list of runners and riders, as you see. Though
physically
he carries quite a handicap. Can you imagine—’

‘Let’s not try,’ Joe interrupted.

‘Well, let me have your guesses. Go on—tell me which bloke your money’s on, Sandilands.’

Joe took the list from him, picked up a pencil and circled a name.

‘Guy de Pacy? Bugger me! What makes you say that?’

‘I don’t say that—
he
does. Pin your ears back, Jacquemin, and hear the confidences and confessions I’ve just had thrust at me by these two warring gentlemen. You’re going to enjoy this!’

After twenty minutes of question, answer, speculation and reference to Jacquemin’s copious notes, Joe caught the Commissaire’s eye over the littered desk and risked a sly smile. The smile was reciprocated. At least the moustache twitched briefly in a not unfriendly manner. An acknowledgement, finally, that the two men were working together. At different rhythms and with different methods but working satisfyingly towards the same objective.

‘We’re nearly there, Sandilands,’ the Commissaire said. ‘It’s a jigsaw and we’re looking for the last piece. Where to look?’

‘I usually find it down the back of the sofa or under the table,’ said Joe. ‘You have the notes on interviews with the inmates? Did you have time to get through them all? There are two witnesses in particular I’d like to hear from.’

Jacquemin indicated a box packed with notebooks and papers. ‘Yes, everyone. Ready to be typed up at HQ. I thought we’d keep them here in case we need to check something. We’ve got sketches of the crime scene—Martineau has a flair for that sort of thing—everybody’s fingerprints have been taken and rushed off to Avignon. Photographs also have gone to the laboratory. Everything done by the book. The answer’s in there.’ He sighed. ‘We’re just going to have to grind through it again.’

‘Did you check the contents of the brown attaché case?’ Joe asked. ‘What have you done with it? Nathan Jacoby and I didn’t disturb the contents when we found it at the scene. Left it for you. I just noted that it contained the red dress and espadrilles she’d taken off in the chapel. I presumed she’d smuggled the white nightdress and satin slippers in that way. Jane said she’d seen Estelle carrying it minutes before she disappeared—she remarked that the girl looked as though she was taking off for the weekend, case in hand. Too much to hope for a note in the dress pocket—
Meet me at six in the chapel, your lover, Pierre-Auguste, head stable-lad
, or some such?’

Jacquemin scrabbled about under the table, picked it up and passed it to Joe. ‘Here, check for yourself. We found nothing.’

Joe eased the shoes and the folded dress out of the case and examined it. It smelled delicately of her perfume. The rest of the case contained no surprises. He replaced it on the floor next to the package he’d brought back from the hospital.

‘I say—did you have time …?’

‘No. Not yet,’ said Jacquemin. ‘Shall we do that now?’

He cleared a space on the table top and carefully upended the bag. Out spilled the white garment, folded to show its bloodstained section on top, and a pair of knickers. The garments were accompanied by a sheet of paper and a brown envelope. The brief note, typed by the pathologist’s assistant, listed three items. Jacquemin read it swiftly: ‘One: dress … Two: undergarment (one piece only) … and Three …’ He froze and looked across at Joe.

‘Open up the envelope,’ he snapped. ‘Something odd going on here!’

Joe tore open the flap, tipped out the contents and stared. ‘That’s it!’ he muttered. ‘The missing piece. It was under the table, Jacquemin. Let’s hear what the good doctor has to tell us, shall we?’

Jacquemin began to read out the accompanying notes. ‘He starts with an assurance that we may handle the object—it’s been tested for fingerprints, revealing three different subjects. These are being compared with records of prints they’ve been promised from the force at the château and they’ll send word when they have a result. It was found grasped in the victim’s left hand. Unremarked by the officers discovering and transporting the body because rigor had preserved it clenched in her palm. It fell to the floor when the period of rigor relaxed her limbs on the pathologist’s table. Well, bugger me! Remind me, Sandilands. How were her arms placed when you found her?’

‘Like this.’ Joe demonstrated. They were crossed over each other just underneath her bosom, exactly imitating the statue. He picked up the small round object in his left hand and crossed his arms again, left under right. ‘Well tucked up, you see. Quite invisible.’

‘It wasn’t hypnosis or mesmerism that got her on to the slab, lying perfectly still, eyes closed, smiling gently, was it?’ said Jacquemin. ‘It was something much more simple. All the killer had to do was ask nicely.’

‘Nathan Jacoby had it right, you know,’ said Joe thoughtfully. ‘While we were standing looking at her, he said Estelle would do anything for a joke. He sneered at her English voice …
Oh, do let’s! What a cracking jape!
or something like that. And that’s the only impulse that would have led her to offer herself up without resistance. She was all co-operation! Imagine—someone suggests to you what a laugh it would be to make use of the cleared space on the altar top to stage such a scene. A beautiful girl lying in exact imitation of the alabaster lady, next to the sixhundred-year-old knight. But this one, recognizably someone known to whoever their chosen audience was to be—someone still very much alive … at least at the moment the shutter clicked—that
would
be entertaining. Because that’s what it was all about. A sick English joke.

‘It’s just the sort of nonsense you see printed in the society magazines every week back home. It’s all the rage to have yourself photographed in some surreal pose in fancy dress. Inside a mummy case, on top of a gatepost … Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray—they wouldn’t have been able to resist either. So, laughing together, Estelle and the would-be photographer meet in the chapel.’

‘Just as the child reported,’ said Jacquemin.

‘Yes, indeed. Inconveniently, Estelle spots the child Marius in some distress and takes the time to haul him in, with a view to sorting him out when the little photographic session is over. Thinking his presence may not be entirely appropriate to the occasion—what with the disrobing that’s about to occur—she hides the small person in the confessional and proceeds with the lark. She changes into her white costume, clambers up and assumes the recumbent position.’

‘She took her clothes off, right there in front of her killer?’ Jacquemin wondered.

‘Again—there’s the aspect of
intimacy
in all this. I don’t think Estelle would have stripped off so readily in front of someone unfamiliar. And the photographer armed with camera … and concealed knife … encourages:
That’s just perfect. Hair spread. Dress folded just so. Feet on the greyhound. Eyes closed. We’re ready. Oh, drat! Could you just hold my lens cap for me? Thanks, darling.

‘The moment her eyes are shut and she’s keeping rigidly still, the camera is put down, the dagger picked up. If Estelle is conscious of her companion leaning over her, manoeuvring, arranging, breathing deeply perhaps—well, that’s photographers for you. And that’s a photographer’s model for you! She spent her days keeping still in strange poses. The killer can take as long as necessary to position the point exactly where it will do its swift job, Estelle won’t move, because she trusts her killer absolutely. She’s smiling, enjoying the joke, possibly even muttering: “Oh, do get on with it!”