CHAPTER 62
Léonie waited for Anatole in the lobby, standing with her hands clasped in front of her and in silence. Her eyes were defiant, but her nerves were cracking for fear the patron would give her away.
Anatole descended the stairs without a word to her. He went to the desk, spoke briefly with the patron, then strode past her and out into the street where the fiacre was standing in readiness to convey them to the railway station.
Léonie gave a sigh of relief. ‘My thanks, Monsieur,’ she said quietly.
‘Je vous en prie, Mademoiselle Vernier,’ he said, winking at her. He patted his breast pocket. ‘I will see the letter delivered as you wish.’
Léonie nodded her farewell, then hurried down the steps to catch up with Anatole.
‘Get in,’ he ordered in a cold voice as she climbed into the carriage, as if he was speaking to a lazy servant. She flushed.
He leaned forward and slipped a silver coin to the driver. ‘Fast as you can.’
He did not address another word to her during the short ride to the railway station. Indeed, he did not even look at her.
The traffic through the town was slow in the drenched and sodden streets and they made the train with only moments to spare, rushing along the slippery platform to the first-class carriages at the front. The guard held the door for them and ushered them on. The door slammed shut. Isolde and Marieta were settled in the corner.
‘Tante Isolde,’ Léonie cried, forgetting her ill humour at the sight of her. There was not a drop of colour in her cheeks and her grey eyes were rimmed red. Léonie was certain she had been crying.
Marieta stood up. ‘I thought it better to stay with Madama,’ she murmured to Anatole. ‘Rather than withdraw to my carriage.’
‘Quite right,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Isolde. ‘I’ll settle it with the guard.’
He sat down on the banquette beside Isolde and took her limp hand.
Léonie, too, drew closer. ‘Whatever is the matter?’
‘I fear I have caught a chill,’ she said. ‘The journey, the weather also have quite worn me out.’ She looked at Léonie with her grey eyes. ‘I am so very sorry that, for my sake, you should miss the concert. I know how much you were looking forward to it.’
‘Léonie accepts that your health comes first,’ Anatole said sharply, not allowing her the chance to answer for herself. ‘Also that we cannot risk being stranded this far from home, despite her inconsiderate perambulations this afternoon. ’
The unfairness of his rebuke stung her, but Léonie managed to hold her tongue. Whatever the real reason for their hasty departure from Carcassonne, Isolde was clearly sickening. There was no doubt that she needed to be in the comfort of her own home.
Indeed, if Anatole had said as much, I would have made no complaint.
Resentment at how he had put her in the wrong pricked at her. She would not forgive him. She persuaded herself that Anatole had provoked the quarrel and that she, in fact, had really done nothing.
So she sighed and sulked and looked pointedly out of the window.
But when she stared at Anatole, to see if he was observing her displeasure, her mounting concern for Isolde started to eclipse the memory of her quarrel with her brother.
The whistle blew. Steam exhaled into the damp and blustery air. The train juddered forward.
On the opposite platform, a matter of minutes later, Inspector Thouron and two Parisian officers disembarked the train from Marseille. They were some two hours late, having been held up by a landslide brought on by heavy rain on the track outside Béziers.
Thouron was greeted by Inspector Bouchou of the Carcassonne gendarmerie. The two men shook hands. Then, holding their flapping coats tight about them and clasping their hats firmly on their heads, they battled their way down the squally concourse into the fierce headwind.
The foot tunnel linking one side of the station to the other was flooded, so the stationmaster was waiting at a small side gate that gave on to the street, holding the chain hard for fear it would fly back in the storm and break at the hinges.
‘Good of you to meet me, Bouchou,’ said Thouron, tired and ill-tempered after his long and uncomfortable journey.
Bouchou was a corpulent, red-faced man, close to the age of retirement, with the dark colouring and stocky physique Thouron associated with the Midi. But, on first acquaintance, he seemed an amiable enough fellow, and Thouron’s concerns that as northerners – worse still, Parisians – he and his men might be treated with suspicion seemed ill-founded.
‘Delighted to be of assistance,’ Bouchou shouted to make himself heard over the wind. ‘Although I confess I’m puzzled as to why someone of your standing should make such a journey in person. It is only a matter of finding Vernier to inform him of the murder of his mother, è?’ He turned a shrewd eye on Thouron. ‘Or is there more to it?’
The Inspector sighed. ‘Let’s get out of this wind and I’ll tell you.’
Ten minutes later, they were established in a small café hard by the Cour de Justice Présidiale where they could talk without fear of being overheard. Most of the clientele were either fellow officers from the gendarmerie or personnel from the prison.
Bouchou ordered two glasses of a local liqueur, La Micheline, then pulled up his chair to listen. Thouron found it a fraction too sweet for his taste, but drank gratefully all the same as he explained the bare bones of the case.
Marguerite Vernier, widow of a Communard and more recently the mistress of a prominent and highly decorated war hero, had been found murdered in the family apartment on the evening of Sunday 20th September. Since then, a month had passed and yet they had still been unable to trace either her son or her daughter, as next of kin, to inform them of their loss.
Indeed, although there was no reason to consider Vernier a suspect, at the same time a number of points of interest, irregularities quand même, had come to light. Not least the growing evidence that he and his sister had deliberately taken steps to cover their traces. This meant it had taken Thouron’s men some time to discover that Monsieur and Mademoiselle Vernier had travelled south from the Gare Montparnasse, rather than west or north from the Gare Saint-Lazare as previously believed.
‘In truth,’ Thouron admitted, ‘if one of my men had not been on his toes, we would have got no further than that.’
‘Go on,’ said Bouchou, his eyes sharp with interest.
‘After four weeks, you understand,’ explained Thouron, ‘I could no longer justify a full-time watch on the apartment.’
Bouchou shrugged. ‘Bien sûr.’
‘However, in the way of these things, one of my officers – sharp boy, Gaston Leblanc – has become friendly with a maid in the Debussy household, the family which resides in the apartment below the Verniers in the rue de Berlin. She told Leblanc that she had seen the concierge accepting money from a man and, in return, handing over some sort of envelope.’
Bouchou dropped his elbows to the table. ‘The concierge admitted it?’
Thouron nodded. ‘At first he denied it. These people always do. But under threat of arrest, eventually he admitted that he had been paid – and handsomely – to pass over any correspondence addressed to the Vernier apartment.’
‘By whom?’
Thouron shrugged. ‘He claimed not to know. The transactions were always done with a servant.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Yes,’ he said, draining his glass. ‘On balance, I did. The long and the short of it was that the concierge claimed, although he could not be certain, that the handwriting resembled that of Anatole Vernier. And that the postmark was Aude.’
‘Et voilà, so you are here.’
Thouron pulled a face. ‘It is not much, I know, but it is the only lead we have.’
Bouchou raised his hand to order another round of drinks. ‘And the matter is sensitive because of Madame Vernier’s romantic liaison.’
Thouron nodded. ‘General Du Pont is a man of some reputation and influence. He is not suspected of the crime, but—’
‘And you are certain of that?’ Bouchou interrupted. ‘It is not just that your préfet does not wish to find himself embroiled in some scandal?’
For the first time, Thouron allowed a smile to flicker across his lips. It transformed his face, making him seem younger than his forty years.
‘I do not deny that my superiors would have been rather . . . disquieted, shall we say, should there have been a case against Du Pont,’ he replied carefully. ‘But, fortunately for all concerned, there are too many mitigating factors against the General being responsible. He is, however, anxious not to have this shadow hanging over him. Understandably, he believes that until the killer is caught and brought to justice, there will be rumours, the possibility of a stain on his character.’
Bouchou listened in attentive silence as Thouron went through his reasoning for believing Du Pont innocent – the anonymous tip-off, the fact that the medical examiner’s estimated time of death was some hours earlier than when the body was found at which point Du Pont was attending a concert and in plain view, the issue of who had been bribing the concierge.
‘A rival lover?’ he suggested.
‘I wondered about that, yes,’ Thouron admitted. ‘There were two champagne glasses, but also a whisky glass broken in the grate. Also, although there was some evidence that Vernier’s room had been searched, the servants are adamant that the only thing taken was a framed family portrait that resided on the sideboard.’
Thouron produced a similar photograph from his pocket, from the same sitting at the Parisian studio. Bouchou looked at it without comment.
‘I appreciate,’ continued Thouron, ‘that even if the Verniers were in the Aude, they might not be so now. It is a large area, and if they are here in Carcassonne, or in a private house in the country, then it might be very difficult to gain information about their whereabouts.’
‘Do you have copies?’
Thouron nodded.
‘I will put out an alert in the hotels and boarding houses in Carcassonne in the first instance, then perhaps the major tourist towns to the south. They would stand out less in an urban environment than in the country.’ He looked down at the photograph. ‘The girl is striking, is she not? Such colouring is uncommon.’ He slipped the image into his waistcoat pocket. ‘Leave it with me, Thouron. I’ll see what we can do.’
The Inspector gave a deep sigh. ‘I am most grateful, Bouchou. This case drags on.’
‘Je vous en prie, Thouron. Now, some supper, I think?’
They ate a plate of chops each, followed by steamed plum pudding, washed down with a pichet of robust red wine from the Minervois. The wind and rain continued to batter the building. Other customers came and went, stamping the wet from their boots and shaking their hats. Word went round that the Mairie had issued a flood warning that the River Aude was close to bursting its banks.
Bouchou snorted. ‘Every autumn they say the same thing, but it never happens!’
Thouron raised his eyebrows. ‘Never?’
‘Well, not for some years,’ Bouchou conceded with a grin. ‘I think, tonight, the defences will be sufficient to hold.’
The storm hit the Haute Vallée at a little after eight o’clock in the evening, just as the train carrying Léonie, Anatole and Isolde south approached the station at Limoux.
Thunder, then a jagged fork of lightning slashed the purple sky. Isolde cried out. Instantly, Anatole was at her side.
‘Je suis là,’ he soothed.
Another crack of thunder split the air, making Léonie jolt in her seat, followed by a second burst of lightning as the storm rolled ever closer across the plains. The pins maritimes , the platanes, the beech trees swayed, then lunged, in the gusting crescendo of the wind. Even the vines, regimented in neat rows, shook with the ferocity of the tempest.
Léonie rubbed at the steamy glass and watched, half horrified, half exhilarated, as the elements raged about them. The train continued on its laborious way. Several times they were obliged to stop between halts while the rails were cleared of fallen branches and even small trees, loosened from the steep slopes of the gorges by the pummelling rain.
At every station, more and more people seemed to board the train, replacing twice over those who were alighting. Hats were pulled low over brows, collars turned up to provide protection against the rain that was driving into the thin glass of the carriage windows. The period of delay at each station became more and more interminable, the carriages increasingly crowded with refugees from the storm.
Some hours later, they arrived in Couiza. The weather was less ferocious in the valleys, but still there was no cab for hire and the courrier publique had long departed. Anatole was obliged to knock up one of the shopkeepers to send his boy by mule up the valley to fetch Pascal to bring the gig to collect them.
While they waited, they took shelter in a miserable restaurant building adjoining the gare. It was too late for dinner, even had the conditions not been so dreadful. But on seeing Isolde’s ghostly complexion and Anatole’s undisguised anguish, the owner’s wife took pity on their bedraggled party and provided cups of steaming oxtail soup and chunks of dry black bread, together with a bottle of strong Tarascon wine.
Two men joined them, also seeking refuge from the storm, bringing with them news that the River Aude was close to bursting its banks in Carcassonne. There were already pockets of flooding in the quartiers Trivalle and Barbacane.
Léonie went pale, picturing the black water lapping at the steps of the église de Saint-Gimer. How easily she could have been trapped. The streets through which she had walked were now, if the accounts were to be believed, submerged. Then another thought shot into her mind. Was Victor Constant safe?
The torment of imagining him in danger played on her nerves all the way back to the Domaine de la Cade, making her oblivious to the rigours of the journey and the struggle of the weary horses along the slippery and perilous roads leading home.
By the time they drove up the long gravelled drive, the wheels sticking on the wet stones and mud, Isolde was all but insensible. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to stay conscious. Her skin was cold to the touch.
Anatole charged into the house, shouting instructions. Marieta was sent to mix a powder to help her mistress sleep, another maid to fetch the moine, the bedwarmer and frame, to take the chill from Isolde’s sheets, a third to stoke the fire already burning in the grate. Then, seeing Isolde was too weak to walk, Anatole swept her up in his arms and carried her up the stairs. Strands of her blond hair, trailing loose now down her back, hung like pale silk against his black jacket sleeves.
Astounded, Léonie watched them go. By the time she had rallied her thoughts, everyone had disappeared, leaving her to fend for herself.
Frozen to her bones and out of sorts, she followed them up to the first floor. She undressed and climbed into her bed. The covers seemed damp. No fire burned in her grate. The room was unwelcoming and cheerless.
She attempted to sleep, but all the time she was aware of Anatole pacing the corridors. Later, she heard the clip of his boots on the tiles of the hall below, marching up and down like a soldier on the nightwatch, and the sound of the front door opening.
Then silence.
At last, Léonie fell into a restless half-sleep, dreaming of Victor Constant.
