The Splendour Falls (28 page)

‘Why?’

My cousin answered that. ‘Jean had to think rather fast that day, I’m afraid. He had to come up with a story that would keep you from worrying, without tipping off the murderer. So he left a message that I’d been delayed – brilliant, really, considering he hardly knew me – and then he kept an eye on you, to see that you weren’t harmed.’

The gypsy smiled. ‘We frighten you, Bruno and I, I see
this. But it is difficult, you understand. Always the killer he is very close to you.’

‘Yes, I know.’ I looked away more sharply than I meant to. A log fell into the fire with a hiss, and it was an ugly mocking sound, like an old woman’s wheezing laugh in that stale room. My eyes stung and I blinked the wetness back.

‘I see the way you smile at him,’ the gypsy said, ‘and I think no, she will not believe me.’

‘Well, you’re wrong.’ I felt the stubborn lifting of my jaw. ‘And you could have warned me when I first arrived, you know. I hadn’t met him, then.’

The gypsy frowned. ‘But …’

Behind us, on the bed, my cousin shifted. ‘My dear girl,’ he said, quite clearly, ‘of course you’d met him. The bastard dropped you off at your hotel.’

‘It didn’t half give me a shock, I can tell you,’ my cousin went on, shaking his head. ‘I mean, of all the bloody people for you to meet, your first day out!’

I slowly turned to stare at him, feeling rather stunned, like a racing driver who’d gone almost round the course at top speed only to slam into a brick wall at the final bend. ‘But it can’t be Armand.’

The two men shared a knowing look. ‘Look, love,’ said Harry, ‘I know you like the man, but—’

‘No, it isn’t that.’ I shook my head, impatient to make him understand. ‘It’s just that I know who killed Paul, you see, and it wasn’t Armand Valcourt. It was Neil.’ There, I thought, I’d said it; I’d finally put a voice to the painful thought. I stilled the treacherous quivering of my mouth, aware both men were staring at me. Couldn’t they see, I thought, how much I wanted to believe …?

My cousin frowned. ‘Who the devil is Neil?’

‘Neil Grantham. He’s a violinist, staying at my hotel.’

‘Ah.’

‘Only he wasn’t playing the violin yesterday, it was a tape, and the opening allegro to Beethoven’s Third is at least fifteen minutes long, so he had heaps of time to run up the steps and push Paul off … I doubt if it takes me more than a couple of minutes myself to climb those steps, and I’m not nearly as fit as Neil.’

‘Ah,’ Harry said again, as if my explanation were perfectly clear. ‘And why would this violinist want to push a Canadian kid off the château steps, pray tell?’

‘Because … because …’ My chin trembled, and I realised the motive was no longer clear, not after what the gypsy Jean had told me.

‘You’re way off beam, love,’ Harry told me, gently. ‘It was Valcourt who did the killing.’

I didn’t take that in, at first – I only felt relief that nearly shook my body in a deep and swelling surge.
It wasn’t Neil
, my inner voice rejoiced, but I was half afraid to listen to it. I turned to the gypsy. ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

He nodded, his black eyes calm and certain. ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ he explained, ‘I am coming down from here to the town, through the
souterrains
, the tunnels. I stop at the door in the cliff. There is a space between the boards in the door, and so I look, like always, to make sure the way is safe.’ He drew one finger along the line of his eyebrow, frowning. ‘But it is not safe.
He
is there.’

‘Monsieur Valcourt?’

His nod this time held sadness. ‘He is sitting on the wall,
beside your friend, the young
canadien
. They smoke, they talk – they talk like friends. But the boy, he is not on his guard. He is not watching Valcourt’s face, as I am, so he does not see the danger. When Valcourt gives to him another cigarette, the boy lifts up both hands to light it, and …’ No brutal gesture, this time, just a small regretful shrug. ‘It is so quick, there is no time for noise. The boy falls and Valcourt walks very fast towards the château. When I cannot see him any more I open my door, I come out. It is terrible, what I have just seen, you understand?’ A brief pause while he lit another cigarette himself, still frowning. ‘I go down at once to see if the boy … but he is dead. He is dead.’ The gypsy glumly shook his head, and sighed a spreading pall of smoke.

There was something unfinished about that story, I thought, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The little dog Bruno yawned with gusto and jumped onto my cousin’s bed, stretching himself into the blankets. And then I remembered. I remembered very clearly how I’d seen that dog the afternoon before, outside the phone box at the corner of the fountain square. Spurred by that memory, I took a stab in the dark. ‘So you went down and telephoned Monsieur Grantham, didn’t you?’

‘To Monsieur …? Ah, the one who plays the violin. No, I do not telephone to him, Mademoiselle. I telephone to the police, to say there has been an accident.’ He shrugged. ‘And then I leave as quickly as I can. I come back here, to tell your cousin.’

‘I was asleep, I’m afraid,’ Harry said, with a regretful smile, ‘and by the time I’d heard the tale from Jean all
hell had broken loose at your hotel, which made it rather difficult to contact you.’ His eyes were very gentle as he met my gaze. ‘I am a selfish bastard, aren’t I, love? I was so busy feeling sorry for myself I didn’t stop to think you might yourself be in some danger. I thought you’d be quite safe with Jean to keep an eye on you, and from what I heard I gathered Valcourt rather fancied you. I thought,’ he said, a little sadly, ‘that it would be all right, you see. But when Jean told me Valcourt had just pushed your friend right down the château steps, I realised I was wrong. Of course, by then,’ he went on, pushing himself upright on the pillows, ‘the word was out that the police were looking everywhere for Jean. His sister came to tell us that. So I could hardly send him down …’

‘I told you,’ said the gypsy, ‘that your cousin, she would come to us.’ He shrugged with the complacency of one who trusts the mystic course of fate.

Harry smiled. ‘So you did.’

It hardly mattered, I thought, whether I’d found them or they’d found me. What mattered was what all of us intended doing now. For, in spite of Harry’s evidently weakened state …

I looked more closely at him. ‘God, I never thought. Were you very badly hurt? Do you need a doctor?’

‘No,’ he told me, rather quickly, hitching higher up in bed. Although he looked more tired than normal, he really didn’t appear too ill. ‘No, I don’t need a doctor.’

The gypsy also clearly thought the question daft. ‘My sister, she has seen him,’ he explained. ‘She is better than a doctor. She finds us this empty house, to keep him hidden,
and she comes each day to make for him the medicine. It is not good, she says, for him to move around too much.’

Even so, it seemed to me unthinkable to simply sit here and do nothing. Two men were dead already, and my cousin’s life was hardly safe from harm. I frowned and cleared my throat and was about to speak when I was interrupted by a gentle, furtive tapping sound, like the faint patter of a branch blown by the wind against a window pane.

Jean scraped his chair back on the floorboards and rose to answer the door. A different door than the one I’d entered the house by, but then the tapping sound had not come from the tunnels. It had come from the outside.

The door swung open and I saw for the first time just where I was – the slanting view of narrow path and waving grasses and the smudge of rooftops far below was unmistakeable. I must have walked straight past this house, I thought, when I’d come up that first day alone and by accident to the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde, and again when I’d returned to search with Paul. I would have to see the house from the outside, of course, to know just where along the path it stood, but all the same I knew that I was on the cliffs and just a stone’s throw from the lovely ruined chapelle. The tunnels had brought me this far.

I’d scarcely registered the fact before my attention shifted to the woman standing in the doorway. She was quite young, with an arresting face and a figure that begged the word ‘voluptuous’. Had I met her on the street, I would have thought her looks exotic – Italian, perhaps, or even Turkish, dark hair and eyes and olive skin – but I’d not have
taken her for a gypsy. She looked so … well, so modern, really, in her stylish jeans and jumper; so unlike my own conception of a gypsy, and yet seeing her beside her brother Jean one couldn’t possibly mistake the family likeness.

This was, I thought, without a doubt Jean’s helpful sister with the healing hands, who came every day to nurse my cousin’s wounded head. Which probably explained why Harry had been so content to stay hidden, I thought drily. Already he had slumped again, wanting sympathy, assuming his most appealing little-boy-lost expression as he turned to face this newest visitor.

From the exchange of greetings that followed I learned the woman’s name was Danielle. We were introduced, but she was clearly too preoccupied with other things to spare me more than a few words and a distracted nod. ‘They have taken Victor to be questioned,’ she announced, her lovely face clouded with worry.

Her brother nodded. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘You know? And yet you are still here? What kind of man are you, to let your friend face trouble in your place?’

‘They will let him go.’

‘Oh, will they?’ She tossed her head, eyes very bright. ‘That isn’t what I hear. I hear they think he murdered this one here,’ a jerk of the jaw towards Harry, ‘and that he tries to hide the evidence.’

My cousin sat bolt upright. ‘What?’

‘Victor Belliveau?’ I checked, and the woman Danielle turned her wild eyes on me.

‘Yes. They think he is a murderer because I hide the car in his old barn,’ she said.

My cousin’s car, I thought. Of course, it would have had to be hidden somewhere. I remembered the decrepit stone barn that faced Belliveau’s house, and how the locked door had moaned and rattled in the wind.

Danielle went on, with feeling. ‘He doesn’t even know about the car, poor Victor. That barn, he never uses it – I thought it would be safe. It is my fault,’ she cursed herself. ‘And he has always been so good to us. And you refuse to help him.’

‘It is too great a risk …’ began the gypsy, but my cousin cut him off.

‘All right,’ said Harry, in a tone I recognised from countless lost arguments, ‘that’s it. I’m going down.’

And he began to lever himself out of the bed, wincing with the effort, though I couldn’t be sure how much of that was for Danielle’s benefit. I knew better than to try to stop him, but Jean wasn’t privy to my years of experience with Harry’s moods.

‘The police, they will not listen—’

‘Then we’ll just have to make them listen.’ Harry swung his feet to the floor and reached for his shoes. He had been resting fully clothed in bed, no doubt to guard against the creeping autumn chill that soaked through even these stone walls. His dusty jeans and crumpled shirt, together with his week-long growth of beard, made him look the sort of person one normally found skulking under bridges with a bottle of cheap wine – not at all respectable; yet through the rough exterior, my cousin’s odd heroic quality still shone, brilliant and compelling.

Danielle moved to his side, drawn less perhaps by his
heroic brilliance than by a practical and simple fear that he might fall and hit his head again. Certainly he seemed a little less than steady on his feet, although the obstinate determination in his face showed plainly that he had the will to override his weakness. If he
was
truly weak, I amended the thought, not missing his brief smile when Danielle took firm hold of his arm to help him balance.

Jean sighed. ‘I will come too.’

‘No.’ Harry shook his head. ‘No, you should stay up here I think, and out of sight, until I have a chance to clear this whole thing up with the police. Danielle can help me,’ he said, brightening. ‘We can take the tunnel, like you do. Danielle knows the tunnels, doesn’t she?’

‘As well as Jean.’ The woman raised her chin with pride. ‘I can guide you.’

Oh, wonderful, I thought. Aloud, I said: ‘Shall I stay here, then?’

Harry frowned. ‘Well, if you like. Although I would have thought … oh, right,’ he realised, suddenly. ‘Tunnels. I quite forgot. My cousin,’ he informed the others, predictably, ‘has a thing about tunnels. Why don’t you take the outside path, instead? It’s not the nicest of neighbourhoods, I’m afraid, but it is still light outside and I’m sure you’d find the way back with no trouble. You could meet up with us outside the château, where the tunnel door comes out. All right?’

‘All right.’ I nodded. A trace of apprehension must have seeped into my voice because Danielle looked up to meet my eyes across the room, her hands protective on my cousin’s arm.

‘Do not worry,’ she told me. ‘I will take good care of him.’

I thought that Harry looked distinctly pleased with the situation as his self-appointed nurse steered him to the cellar door. A moment later I could hear their footsteps slowly moving down the narrow stairway that led down into the darkness of the tunnels. I shuddered at the memory of that darkness, and turned my back on it. The gypsy Jean misread my action.

‘They will be fine,’ he told me. ‘It is an easy walk down there, easier than along the cliff, and no one will see them until they have reached the safety of the town.’ He walked with me to the front door, keeping to the shadows as he held the door open for me to pass through. ‘Take care, Mademoiselle,’ was the only advice he gave me. And then the door was bolted once more behind me and I found myself alone on the cliff path, between the château and the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde, with the hollow eyes of
half-decayed
troglodyte dwellings staring at me blackly through a tangled web of weeds and sunbleached grasses.

The house looked larger, seen from the outside. It was unremarkable in design, like a child’s drawing of a house – four walls, peaked roof, two windows and a red brick chimney, with no frivolous decoration to relieve the solid severe lines. Two storeys tall it rose, which meant two rooms; two narrow rooms, at that, and yet it still looked somehow larger, perhaps because there were no other buildings nearby to lend it proper scale. There was only the hill rising up behind it and the gaping crumbled cliff dwellings snaking off on either side, and behind me the
treacherous drop to the grey roofs of Chinon.

I remembered this house, from my first foray up the path last Monday – the day I’d felt I was being followed. I’d felt afraid, outside this house. I remembered the barbed wire, and the leaning door, and the barking dog and the sound of the wind. How differently might things have turned out, I wondered, if I had knocked at the door of the house that day, instead of running? Had I found Harry then, we might be safely home in England, he and I, while the Chinon police dealt with Armand Valcourt and left Victor Belliveau alone. And Paul would be fasting with his brother, observing the holy day of Yom Kippur.

Hindsight, I thought, was like a punishment, remorseless in its clarity and painfully unable to change what had gone before.