The Three Evangelists (22 page)

‘Don’t worry,’ said Lucien. ‘We’ll be finished in another half-hour.’

‘Good. Are you making progress?’

‘Can I ask you something?’ said Marc. ‘Did your stepson have a part in “Elektra”?’

‘The Toulouse production? I think so,’ said Siméonidis. ‘He was in all her shows between 1973 and 1978. It was later that he gave up. But don’t waste time on him, it’s not worth it.’

‘When Sophia was attacked that time, during “Elektra” did she say anything to you?’

‘Sophia didn’t like talking about that,’ said Siméonidis after a silence.

When the old Greek had gone downstairs again, Marc looked at Lucien, who had flopped into a battered armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, fiddling with his press cutting.

‘Half an hour?’ he cried. ‘You’re doing bugger all, you’re dreaming of your war diaries, there are masses of things to copy out, and you think you’ll be away in half an hour?’

Without stirring, Lucien pointed to his rucksack. ‘In my bag,’ he said, ‘I have two-and-a-half kilos worth of laptop, nine kilos of scanner, some aftershave, spare underclothes, heavy-duty string, a duvet, a toothbrush and a baguette. Now do you see why I wanted to take a taxi from the station? Get your documents ready, I’ll scan anything you like, and we can take them back to the house with us. See.’

‘How did you manage to think of all that?’

After what happened to Dompierre, it was foreseeable that the
flics
would want to stop anyone else copying the archives. To anticipate the
actions of the enemy, my friend, is the secret of successful warfare. The official order will come soon, but we’ll be out of here. So get a move on.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Marc. ‘I’m very jumpy just now. So are you, in point of fact.’

‘No, I get carried away, in one direction or another. It’s not the same.’

‘Is all that stuff yours?’ asked Marc. ‘Is it valuable?’

Lucien shrugged. ‘It’s on loan from the university. I’ve got to give it back in four months. Only the cables belong to me.’

He laughed and switched on the machines. As they copied the documents, Marc started to breathe more easily. Perhaps there wouldn’t be anything to find in them, but the idea that he could consult them at his leisure, in his medieval study on the second floor was comforting. They copied most of what was in the file.

‘Copy the photos,’ said Lucien with a wave of his hand.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes, send them through.’

‘They’re all just of Sophia.’

‘No general view of the company on parade, or after their dress rehearsal?’

‘No. Just Sophia. I told you.’

‘OK, we won’t bother.’

Lucien wrapped his machines in the old duvet, and tied it all up firmly with string, leaving one long end. Then he opened the window and lowered the fragile bundle carefully to the ground.

‘Every room has an outlet,’ he said, ‘and where there’s an outlet there must be some kind of surface underneath. This one is the yard with the dustbins in, which is better than the street. It’s reached the ground now.’

‘Someone’s coming up,’ said Marc.

Lucien let go of the string and closed the window without a sound. He returned to his armchair and took up his nonchalant pose once more.

The policeman came in with the satisfied air of one who has just shot a brace of pheasants.

‘It’s forbidden to make copies of anything or to consult any of these papers,’ said the policeman. ‘New orders. Bring your things and leave this room.’

Marc and Lucien obeyed, grumbling, and followed him. When they went into the sitting-room, Mme Siméonidis had laid the table for five. So they were expected to stay for dinner. Five, thought Marc, the stepson must be coming too. It would be good to set eyes on him.

They expressed their thanks. The young policeman frisked them before they sat down, and emptied the contents of their bags, which he turned inside out and examined every which way.

‘Alright,’ he said. ‘You can pack it all up again.’

He left the room and went to station himself in the hall.

‘If I were you,’ said Lucien, ‘I would stand in front of the door to the archives until we leave. We might go back up again. Aren’t you taking a bit of a risk, officer?’

Looking annoyed, the policeman went upstairs and posted himself right inside the archive room. Lucien asked Siméonidis to show him the way to the yard with the dustbins and retrieved the bundle, which he stuffed back inside the rucksack. Dustbins seemed to be looming large in his life just now.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said to his host. ‘All your originals are still up there, I give you my word.’

The son arrived rather late to take his place at the table. A slow-moving, plump forty-year-old, Julien had not inherited his mother’s anxiety to appear indispensable and efficient. He smiled nicely at the two guests, but looked unprepossessing and indeed rather pathetic. This seemed a pity to Marc. He felt sorry for this so-called useless and indecisive character, stuck between his busy-busy mother and his patriarchal stepfather. Marc was easily impressed when people smiled nicely at him. And after all, Julien had cried when he heard about Sophia. He was not ugly, but his face was rather puffy. Marc would have preferred to feel distaste or hostility for him, or at least some more convincing emotion, to turn him into a murderer. But since he had never seen any murderers, he told himself that a malleable person, dominated by his mother and
smiling sweetly, might very well be the type. Shedding a few tears was neither here nor there.

The mother might also be the type. She was fussing about, far more than was necessary to serve the meal, and was more talkative than necessary trying to make conversation. Jacqueline Siméonidis was tiring. Marc took in her neat chignon, her busy hands, her artificial voice and manner, her stupid insistence as she served everyone with their chicory and ham, and thought that this woman might stop at nothing to acquire more power, and more capital to help resolve her son’s precarious finances. She had married Siméonidis-out of love? Because he was the father of a famous singer? Because that would help Julien get on in the theatre? Yes, either one of them might have a motive for killing, and possibly a good opportunity. Not the old man though. Marc watched him cutting up his food with firm gestures. His authoritarian ways would have made him a perfect tyrant, if Jacqueline had not been well able to defend herself. But the patent distress of Sophia’s father ruled out any suspicion they might have. Everyone could agree on that.

Marc hated ham and chicory unless it was very well cooked, which was not often the case. He watched Lucien wolf it down, while he toyed with the bitter slimy vegetables that nauseated him. Lucien had taken a leading role in the conversation, which was now turning to Greece in the early twentieth century. Siméonidis was replying with short answers, and Jacqueline was showing an exaggerated interest in everything.

Marc and Lucien caught the 22.27 train home. Siméonidis took them to the station, driving fast and competently.

‘Keep me informed,’ he said as he shook their hands. ‘What’s that in your bundle, young man?’ he asked Lucien.

‘A computer with all we need on it,’ said Lucien, smiling.

‘Well done,’ said the old man.

‘By the way,’ Marc said. ‘It was the file for 1978 that Dompierre looked at, not 1982. I thought I should let you know, in case you find something we missed.’

Marc watched the old man for a reaction. It was offensive of him, a father doesn’t kill his daughter, unless he’s Agamemnon.

Siméonidis did not respond. ‘Keep me informed,’ was all he said.

The journey back took an hour, during which neither Marc nor Lucien spoke. Marc was thinking that he liked being in a train late at night, and Lucien was thinking about the war diaries of Frémonville senior, and how he might get hold of them.

XXX

GETTING BACK TO THE HOUSE AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT, MARC AND LUCIEN
found Vandoosler waiting for them in the refectory. Exhausted and incapable of classifying the data he had collected, Marc hoped the godfather was not going to keep them up too long. Because it was obvious he was expecting a report. Lucien, on the other hand, was in fine form. He had carefully unloaded his rucksack, with its twelve kilos of equipment, and poured himself a drink. He asked where the Paris phone books were.

‘In the basement,’ said Marc. ‘Be careful, they’re holding up the workbench.’

They heard a crash from the basement and Lucien appeared, looking delighted, with a directory under each arm.

‘Terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘Everything collapsed.’

He settled down with his drink at the end of the large table and started going through the phone book.

‘There can’t be all that many René de Frémonvilles,’ he said. ‘And with a bit of luck, he lives in Paris. That would make sense, if he’s a theatre and music critic.’

‘What are you two looking for?’ asked Vandoosler.

‘It’s just him that’s looking, not me,’ said Marc. ‘He wants to find a theatre critic whose father kept a lot of diaries during the Great War. He’s completely obsessed. He’s praying to all the gods past and present that the father was a peasant. It seems this would make it very rare. He was praying all the way back in the train.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ asked Vandoosler.

‘You know perfectly well,’ said Marc, ‘that for Lucien nothing to do with the Great War can wait. You wonder sometimes if he knows it’s over. Anyway he’s been in this state since this afternoon. I’ve had it up to here with his bloody war. He only likes violent action. Are you listening, Lucien? It’s not history, it’s sensationalism.’

‘My friend,’ said Lucien without looking up, as his finger ran down the columns of the directory, ‘investigation of the paroxysms of human activity obliges us to come face to face with the essentials that are usually hidden.’

Marc, who was a serious person, took in this statement. It quite rattled him. He wondered whether his own preference for working on the everyday aspects of medieval history, rather than on its most sensational moments, was blinding him to the hidden essentials. He had always thought hitherto that little things were revealed in big things and vice versa, in history as in life. He had started to think about religious crises and devastating epidemics from another perspective, when his godfather interrupted his train of thought.

‘Your historical reflections can wait too,’ said Vandoosler. ‘Did you or did you not find anything at Dourdan?’

Marc jumped. He came back across nine centuries and sat down in front of Vandoosler, visibly somewhat stunned by the time-travel. ‘What about Alexandra? How did the questioning go?’

‘As well as it could do, of a woman who wasn’t home at the time of the murder.’

‘So Leguennec knows?’

‘Yes. The red car wasn’t parked in the same place this morning. Alexandra had to withdraw her first statement, and got a serious talking-to. Then she admitted that she had been out between eleven last night and three in the morning. More than three hours, quite a spin, eh?’

‘That’s bad,’ said Marc. ‘And where did she go?’

‘Out along the motorway towards Arras, according to her. She swears she went nowhere near rue de la Prévoyance. But since she had already been caught out in a lie … They’ve narrowed down the time of the
murder. Between half-past twelve and two o’clock. Right bang in the middle of the time she was out.’

Oh God, that’s bad,’ Marc repeated.

‘Very bad. It wouldn’t take more than a smidgeon now to make Leguennec wrap up the investigation and send his conclusions to the examining magistrate.’

‘Well, take care he doesn’t get his hands on that smidgeon.’

‘You don’t have to tell me. I’m holding him back by his braces as it is. But it’s getting difficult. So, have you come up with anything?’

‘It’s all on Lucien’s laptop,’ said Marc, indicating the rucksack. ‘He scanned a whole lot of papers.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Vandoosler. ‘What papers would those be?’

‘Dompierre consulted the file on a production of Strauss’ “Elektra” in 1978. I’ll fill you in on it. There are some interesting aspects.’

‘Got it!’ said Lucien, closing the directory with a bang. ‘R. de Frémonville is listed. Not ex-directory. That’s a stroke of luck. Victory in sight.’

Marc carried on with his explanations, which took longer than expected, because Vandoosler kept interrupting him. Lucien had had another drink and gone to bed.

‘So,’ Marc finished, ‘the most urgent thing is to find out whether Christophe Dompierre was related to this critic, Daniel Dompierre, and if so how. You can do that, first thing tomorrow. If he was, the answer might be that the critic had found out something unsavoury about this production, and told his family about it. But what? The only thing out of the ordinary was the attack on Sophia. We need to check the names of the bit players who didn’t turn up for work next day. But that’s virtually impossible. Since she refused to lodge a formal complaint, there was no police enquiry.’

‘That’s very odd. That kind of refusal is nearly always for the same reason: the victim knows the attacker-husband, cousin, boyfriend-and doesn’t want a scandal.’

‘Why would Relivaux want to attack his own wife in her dressing-room?’

Vandoosler shrugged.

‘We don’t know who it was. It could be anyone. Relivaux, Stelios …’

‘But the theatre was closed to the public.’

‘No doubt Sophia could let in someone if she wanted to. And then there was Julien. He was in the show, wasn’t he? What’s his surname?’

‘Moreaux, Julien Moreaux. He looks like an old sheep. Even fifteen years ago, I can’t see him as a wolf

‘You don’t know much about sheep, I see. You told me yourself that Julien followed Sophia around in her productions for five years.’

‘Sophia was trying to get him launched. He was her father’s stepson, after all, and her stepbrother. Maybe she was fond of him.’

‘Or he of her, more likely. You said he pinned photographs of her up in his bedroom. Sophia was about thirty-five then, she was a beautiful woman and famous. That’d be enough to turn the head of a young man of twenty-five. A smouldering passion, but frustrated. One day, he ventures into her dressing-room … Why not?’