The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (19 page)

They paused in the olive groves to make sure that Schweigen was still behind them.

‘Your parents grow olives, don’t they, Gaëlle?’ The Greffière was sitting beside her, mute and truculent, rattling her jewellery like a gladiator’s weapons.

‘Yes. Et alors?’

‘Did you help with the ramassage when you were little?’

‘I had to. We all bloody well had to. They made me work in the olive groves and I hated it. I hated being stuck in that tiny village, where everybody knows everything about you. I shall never live in the country again. Ever.’ Gaëlle gazed at the vines and groaned.

The Judge stifled her laughter and concentrated hard on Schweigen’s blue Clio speeding behind them beside a line of swaying cypress trees; these looked rickety and overweight, bulged into one another and loomed over the road. She glanced at Gaëlle, and amusement transformed into affection; the Judge hoped that she had never worn her heart upon her sleeve with such obvious and unselfconscious charm. Gaëlle would be no good as a judge; when she was angry she glowered, when she hated people she told them so, and then proclaimed all her reasons, while her death’s head symbols glittered with aggression.

The Domaine Laval swept upwards across the glossy slopes, long shimmering rows of vines glistening in the windy sun. The house faced south-west; they caught sight of the façade for a moment as the Judge pulled up the narrow road towards the iron gates. The buildings gathered together, unpretentious, but massive, great walls of fortress stone and glowing red tiles, the windows often narrow, shuttered. The roofs, recently repaired using a mixture of old and new tiles, tricked the eye, so that it was difficult to guess which slope had been entirely resurfaced. Cypress trees nuzzled the walls, dark against the glowing stone. The wealth of the Lavals lay before her, in the long red slopes of their terroir, and the stony red earth that had been cultivated, tended and loved for thousands of years.

DOMAINE LAVAL

VIGNOBLES DU LANGUEDOC

VENTE DIRECTE

VIN EN VRAC

The symmetrical cross of Languedoc at the heart of the family crest completed the sign and appeared as the label on their bottles. The red wines won prizes, but connoisseurs bought the rarer sweet white wines from the higher slopes. The gates stood open and the roar of agricultural motors thumped towards them, then sputtered and receded. Two Dutch cars, the sun roofs half open and buzzing with trapped insects, occupied the yard. The dogs, laid out on the concrete, raised their heads, then slumped back twitching beneath the soft ministering hum of fattened flies.

The arched stone entrance to the vast caveau rose up directly before Gaëlle and the Judge, and on the right stood the smoky glass doors to the offices; this was the yard, upon which the house turned its back. The immense walls of the cellars were two metres thick, the roof constructed of domed stone like a cathedral. The Domaine’s working buildings crouched against the hill and a large part of the deep storage cellars tunnelled underground, so that the temperature within remained at
18
ºC, winter and summer. Every known form of credit card, spattered like bunting down the frame, decorated the main office doors and inside lurked the various millésimes, displayed in gift boxes upon a row of barrels. Someone was in the barn, hosing down a trailer, singing.

The Judge parked next to the Dutch, peered into the office and waved at the woman tempting her tourists with tiny gulps of wine in smart glasses, also available in gift boxes, engraved with the family crest.

‘Myriam!’ she mouthed.

‘Excusez-moi!’ The other woman bounded through the glass door and hugged Dominique.

‘Madame le petit Juge! Are you here to see Marie-T?’ She stared at Gaëlle, whose murderous expression intensified when Schweigen appeared in the yard. ‘Mon Dieu, le Commissaire. That won’t go down well. I ought to tell you, not after what happened in February. He hasn’t been back since.’

Schweigen was climbing out of his car. The Judge raised her voice. She knew perfectly well what had happened in February, but decided to make use of the debacle.

‘What went wrong before? No one’s told me in any detail.’

‘Tell you later,’ hissed Myriam, looking anxiously first at Schweigen and then at the Dutch, who were helping themselves to another swig from a bottle worth over three hundred francs. ‘But Marie-T was expecting to see you, only you. And she wants to talk. Only to you. But – ’ Schweigen loitered on the edge of their conversation. Myriam shrugged, gave up and raised her voice. ‘Go round to the front. You know the way. Give them a call when you get to the steps.’

The Judge nodded and marched off with her Greffière clamped to her heels like a bloodhound.

‘Gaëlle? Do you know exactly what happened?’

‘Oh yes. I’m sure I told you. Schweigen came here with his thugs. There was probably a punch-up. And they got thrown out. He made the Composer sound like the aggressor in his report. But I bet it was fifty/fifty.’ Gaëlle managed an evil smirk. She got out her notebook, ready to record the next ugly scene. ‘How do you know Myriam? Is she your spy in the house?’

‘Not exactly. We went to school together.’ Schweigen joined them, took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The Judge turned on him, fur bristling. ‘André, keep this civil and courteous. Let me do the talking. Marie-T is only seventeen and we’ll get more information out of her by being kind and listening.’

Myriam hovered, gesticulating, just inside the office door. The Judge smiled back as they turned the corner.

_{*  *  *}

She had danced with Myriam at the New Year’s Ball, here in the Great Hall at the Domaine Laval, twenty-five years ago. Those were the rich days when the old man, Bernard Laval, her father’s friend and hunting companion, still ruled as master of the Domaine. Mademoiselle Marie-Cécile Laval blossomed, playing her part as the elegant older daughter, recently married, inheritor of the greater part of her father’s wealth; her beauty ogled, envied, admired, the woman every young girl at that New Year’s dance had wanted to become. She was the first to take the floor after dinner when the musicians struck up, nestled in her father’s arms. But no one else stood up to dance, despite the voluble encouragement of everyone over fifty still installed at the tables or standing smoking in the bar. The boys, all wearing white ironed shirts, proved too shy to stand up with any of the younger girls, and so Dominique Carpentier bowed to her friend, serious as a chevalier come a-courting, and Myriam, resplendent in a flowered dress sewn up at home, for no money ever ran spare for impractical clothes, tucked her hair behind her ears, blushed, and then offered up her slender waist to her partner’s nervous grasp. They whirled away across the old stone floors, intoxicated with champagne, woodsmoke, the smell of pine cones blazing in the grates, breathless, giddy, delighted. When the boys plucked up courage and sauntered towards them the girls were off, laughing, spinning, taunting, teasing, their skirts flared and their faces glamorous in the firelight. And the old men and women clustered on the benches clapped and shouted at their audacity – Dominique Carpentier, the boyish clever one in spectacles, and Myriam, just sixteen, whose full lips and breasts pleased the old ones. Here was a girl full of promise and sensual opulence, a foreshadowed future overflowing with love and children. The Carpentier girl will never marry. She has some other work to do in this world. And now the two gazed at one another through glass, one woman cheerfully wed these past ten years and mother of three, working for the Domaine where she once danced, and the other, solitary, inflexible, stalking her quarry through the vineyards of her childhood.

_{*  *  *}

The little party of three rounded the corner of the house. The vines surged like a green wave almost to the bottom of the steps. A narrow grassy path, now burned back and browning in anticipation of the great heat, delivered them to the main entrance. Huge pottery vats overflowing with red geraniums topped the stone balustrades. The long terrace stood in shadow, sheltered by an orange-and-white-striped electric awning, which protruded from the medieval walls like a grotesque decorated tumour. At the far end where the terrace circled the house and two solid doors gave access to the kitchens, the table was already laid for lunch, three places, real white starched napkins laid across the plates, lovingly encircled with engraved silver rings.

‘Est-ce qu’il y a quelqu’un?’ called the Judge, leading the attack. ‘Marie-T? C’est Dominique Carpentier.’

The salon remained dark with shadows, all the shutters blank against the sun. Is there anybody there? The Judge began to climb the steps.

The Composer loomed suddenly above them, a terrible apparition, his unsmiling face and white hair as arresting and eccentric as that of the disturbed Count, discovered lying in his native earth.

‘Bonjour, Madame Carpentier. We are expecting you, but not your companions.’ He stepped into the bright sun and blocked their advance. His face clenched against the glare; he nodded at Gaëlle, but scowled at Schweigen.

‘This isn’t a social call, Monsieur Grosz,’ snapped the unwelcome Commissaire, ‘and we haven’t come to see you.’

‘I am Mademoiselle Laval’s godfather and legal guardian. I will not have her interrogated, especially not by you, Monsieur le Commissaire. You may remain, Madame Carpentier. But I must ask your Greffière and Monsieur Schweigen to leave at once.’

Impasse. The Judge made a snap decision.

‘Very well.’ She turned around so that the Composer could not read her face and flung all her persuasive intelligence into a long hard stare at Gaëlle and Schweigen. If there hadn’t actually been a punch-up in February a real fight seemed inevitable now. Back down, André, for God’s sake, back down. This is my decision, and I will take the consequences.

‘Gaëlle, guide Monsieur le Commissaire back to the village. You know the way. I’ll ring you at your parents’ later on and pick you up on my way back.’

Schweigen opened his mouth to object. The Judge raised both her eyebrows. Schweigen muzzled himself with a massive shudder, but held his ground. Va-t’en André! Mais vite! The sweat was running down both sides of his clamped jaws. He turned without a word and rampaged back down the steps and round the corner of the house. Gaëlle lingered; anger rising like a red tide from her collarbone stained the side of her throat in a glut of blood. Stand-off. The Greffière is the recorder. Her juge d’instruction should not conduct formal interviews without her recorder. The young woman would not be dismissed.

‘Gaëlle?’ prompted the Judge.

‘We are the servants of Isis, sworn to obey Her commands,’ snarled the Greffière and bolted. The Composer intervened as she stormed off down the steps.

‘Isis? What does she mean? What’s she talking about?’

‘Gaëlle is teasing me a little,’ smiled the Judge.

This was so clearly not the case and the menace of Isis so obviously offered as an outraged insult that the Composer threatened to pursue the vanishing Greffière. He glared, hesitated and then set off after the girl. What on earth did he intend to do? Box her cheeky ears with all their pierced studs and cuffs? The Judge touched his arm gently and stopped him in mid-stride, and it was this gesture, unpremeditated, peculiarly intimate, which transformed the space between them. He turned to face her and looked straight into her eyes, past her glinting lenses, past her redundant diplomatic smile. Suddenly the Judge questioned her own judgement. Why had she decided to remain alone with this man? She remembered the weight of his hands on her shoulders, and a vivid, bitter taste rose in her mouth; she heard the stifling intensity of Wagner’s strange music, sensed the tears pouring down her cheeks. The Composer’s face unravelled into a mass of indecipherable lines, and she knew he was remembering the same things. Then she saw something else in his eyes; an electric attention, not to her role as the Judge, but to her, Dominique Carpentier, and to her alone. She caught her breath and sucked out the dry taste from under her tongue. The Composer relaxed and bowed to her, ushering her back up the steps, returning her smile at last. His whole face changed when he smiled, as if the dictator’s mask peeled back, revealing another man, one anxious to conciliate and to charm.

‘Marie-T and I were speaking of you last night. I wanted to see you again. Very much. But how to approach you? I couldn’t think of an excuse. And then – pouf! – it happens like magic. Three months go by and we are thousands of miles apart and then you ring up to say that you are coming. I am delighted. Marie-T thinks I have rubbed the lamp three times. Will you have lunch with us, Madame Carpentier? We were hoping you would stay to lunch.’

He guided her into the cool interior. She had passed over the threshold.