by Sarah Dunant
Villemetrie was so small I must have missed it. No longer a village, just a scatter of houses and then on out into the countryside again. In front of me a straight stretch of road opened out, ending in a long slow curve in the distance. It was somewhere here that Batman and I had lost the car and turned back towards the iron gates. I slowed down and sure enough, over a line of trees I caught a glimpse of the rooftops of the house, square and rhythmical like a chessboard. I felt a small frisson of nerves in my stomach. Why don’t you drive on past, whispered a traitorous voice in my bowels, so low I thought it must be the wind in the fields. Lie in a wood, eat your bread and cheese and drink the wine, then fly home with a bottle of Calvados and memories of an early French spring. No lunch till after work, Hannah, boomed the rest of me. Get off your bike and get in there.
I searched around for a suitable place to leave it. Senlisians were no doubt salt-of-the-earth types, but living in London breeds a certain paranoia when it comes to stolen bikes and among the many possible scenarios imagined for this particular afternoon a three-mile hike back to town was not one of them. In the end I stuck it and the rucksack in a ditch by the edge of a field and covered it over with a few brambles.
The dogs were nowhere to be heard. I rattled the gates. Nothing. Maybe they were sleeping off the effects of a French peasant caught earlier in the day. In my bag were two kilos of best horsemeat wrapped up in polythene, just in case. The car from this morning was gone too. An afternoon take-over bid meeting or a garage? Hard to know. At the end of the drive the house shimmered in the sun. The gates seemed to be the only way in. Is this where the tradesmen came, marching milk and toilet paper up to the main house in full view of a score of blinking windows? Since I had most definitely not been invited, and I had nothing to sell, I decided not to risk it.
I followed the wall for maybe a quarter of a mile up the other side of the long hill until I found a place where the conjunction of trees and branches let me climb in. It was a five- or six-foot drop down the other side, but the ground was soft. I landed with a muffled thud. The forest closed in around me. No dogs, no birds, nothing. I stood for a while getting my bearings. The house was somewhere off to my right. I struck out in that direction. The land graduated downhill. Eventually at the bottom, slicing its way through a shallow valley I came across a small river fast running. The walk had made me thirsty but the water running through my fingers was none too clean and bitter to taste. I let it slide away. I climbed across a strategic bridge of stones and pushed my way along the valley floor. As the trees cleared I was rewarded with a sudden spectacular sight: a long rolling lawn punctuated by huge chestnut trees rising up until it reached the back façade of the house, grand and solid. Next to it a semi-circle of stables where horses had been long since gazumped in favour of houseguests or servants, and halfway across a sheet shimmer of light, the sun playing games with the surface of a long kidney-shaped lake covered in weeds and lilies. You could see how for your average aristocrat it was the kind of view that might lead you to forget the plight of the third estate.
I skirted around the edge of the lawn and approached the main house from the side. And as I did so the romantic gave way to the realist. Not before time. Running down the back walls of the house through the ivy I could make out at least a couple of alarm systems. I had cut my teeth on urban bedsits and the occasional locked car. This was not exactly the kind of challenge I was looking for. Even assuming Madame Belmont had a story to tell, how the hell was I going to get in to hear it from her?
For the second time that day fate interrupted. It made one hell of a noise. Maybe someone had just let them loose, or maybe they’d recently been fed and were lazy from full stomachs, but once they realized I was there they didn’t let up. They covered the distance between the side of the house and the back lawn in less than twenty seconds (or maybe it was ten, to be honest I wasn’t counting). At that speed they looked like hell hounds rather than dogs: not the kind of animal to check the name on the card before they started chomping. The stables were less than fifty yards to my left. In my bag my fingers squelched on raw meat. I pulled it out, ripping it from the paper and flinging it in a long arc across the grass. I didn’t stop to see if they were still hungry. I sprinted my way round the back of the stables and went for anything with a handle on it. There was a merciful pause in the sound effects, then from a long way away I heard a man’s voice calling out. The door wouldn’t budge, but the little window just above to the right rattled comfortingly. I gave it an almighty thump with my right shoe and it swung open. The sound of the dogs was closer as I hoisted myself in.
How come it’s always the loo? ‘Ventilation versus security’—a short monograph on the pleasures of breaking and entering. I closed the window behind me and lowered myself on to the loo seat. I could hear them, somewhere outside the walls exhorting me to come out and lay myself between their teeth. I sat stock still. The man’s voice was louder now. ‘Come on, come here boys, leave it alone. It’s gone. Come on.’ Hannah Wolfe, not so much a secret agent as a rabbit, run to ground. I stayed with my whiskers trembling for a while longer. Then when my heart had returned to its normal relationship with the rest of my body I got up and opened the door.
The first thing that greeted me was the stillness, an ocean of it, deep and dark. It humbled as well as reassured me. Houses that have been shut up for the season have a particular charged quality to the air, as if the silence had built up gradually over time until there is too much for the house itself and it starts pushing at the doors and window-frames, trying to get out. A wave of it hit me now as I stood there. I stepped aside to let it past. It’s one of the skills of the job, establishing a good relationship with silence. In my experience you can waste a lot of energy being frightened by things you haven’t heard. I waited for my eyes to reprogramme. In the dim light I picked out a quarry-tiled hall with three doors leading off. I picked the nearest. It was a large room, gloomy with light filtered through closed shutters. I made out a sofa and two easy chairs on a polished wood floor. Simple, nice. In high summer with the sun streaming in it must have been magical. I turned and went out.
The staircase led up into darkness. The banister was cold under my fingers. I counted seventeen treads in a wide wooden spiral. Then at the top more darkness and the impression of a landing stretched out like a girls’ dormitory, doors, like beds, in neat rows. I picked my way along the wall till I hit the first door. For my sins it was another bathroom, but at least in this one there were shutters not quite closing, out the light. And the door in the wall at the end had to lead somewhere.
It was like entering a secret garden, a bedroom, but big enough to be its own world, decorated by wide zebra stripes of sunlight slicing in through the half-open shutters. They flattened everything in their path; the double bed with its patchwork silk quilt, the chair, and the teak chest of drawers with a single art deco vase on it. My footsteps made sharp music on the wooden floor. Almost immediately I heard another sound in my head. That of dancers’ feet tapping out points rhythm on a rehearsal-room floor, their bodies reflected to infinity in a trap of wall mirrors. Maybe it was the light playing games, or the association of treading wooden boards, or maybe there was something about its sparseness and simplicity that reminded me of that other room so far away. Whatever it was I had this sudden sensation that this was it; that I was standing in a room where Carolyn Hamilton had been before me. I went to the window and eased open the shutters. The afternoon sun came streaming in and I looked out over a view of gardens and forest. But there was no sense of her out there. Only in here.
I had been waiting for this. I began to search. I went through the dresser and the bedside table. But all I found was soft lining paper and a clinging odour of pot pourri and mothballs. I upturned the vase and looked under the bed. If she had lived in this room for a while she would have left something of herself behind, however small. I went back into the bathroom. But here again everything was scrubbed clean. There was nothing: no tissues,
no nail clippings, no safety pins, not a single sign of human detritus. Either I was mistaken or someone had cleared up too well. In the end I admitted defeat. I closed the shutters and left.
Downstairs I had left the door to the sitting-room open. I moved in to close it and as I did so something caught my eye. On the wall near the half light of the window hung a picture, a figure in the middle. I went closer. It was a dancer, delicately painted in watercolour, standing on a stage, her chin held high into the spotlight, drinking in the light. Signs. They come in all shapes and sizes. If she had slept in a bedroom she would also have sat in a living-room. I slid off a shutter catch and propped it open a fraction. Outside the magic circle of the sofa and rug were now revealed a bookcase and a small desk. It was locked. On top there was a cut-glass paperweight and underneath it, two small keys. One of them fitted the lock. Inside it was just a regular writing desk, paper and envelopes in neat little stacks. And two small drawers. It was in the second I found them: a small stack of Degas dancers waiting in the wings, bent low over their shoes, caught like animals by the eye of the artist. I had seen them before, in a pink folder which I had studied on a train journey in the rain a million years ago. I picked them up. There must have been seven or eight of them. I was almost too scared to look at them. One by one, like the wrong playing cards in a game of poker, they turned over blank. Until the last. That one had an address on it: Miss A. Patrick, Rose Cottage, it read. And on the opposite side a simple message. It was so boring it made my fingers tingle. ‘Saw the Christmas Nutcracker at Covent Garden. Disappointing. Tour has fallen through. Plan to visit some time in the spring. Hope you are well. Happy New Year, love Carolyn.’ And in the corner a date. ‘14 January.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘He is not in.’
Whooppee, ‘I see, then I wonder if you’d tell Madame Belmont that I’m here.’
‘Who are you?’
You could tell even from the way she had opened the door that they didn’t get many uninvited visitors. Not surprising really, considering the dogs. I had sprinted the distance between the stables and the front and arrived mercifully unsavaged. We had already taken a cordial instant dislike to each other, she and I. For her part no doubt it was my dress sense: too much denim and decidedly muddy boots. For me it was her face, long and thin with a mouth that probably hadn’t smiled since the suppression of the student riots in 1968. I gave her my brightest little grin, usually reserved for traffic wardens. ‘If you just say I’m a friend of Carolyn Hamilton, from England.’
I suspect if it hadn’t been such obvious gross bad manners she would have shut the door in my face and left me on the doorstep. As it was she told me to wait in the hall, while she pitter-pattered her way off down the corridor, disappearing off through a door at the end like the white rabbit in search of the queen. I admired the decor, counted to ten then followed her.
Where I had anticipated eighteenth-century chintz I found greenery, acres of it. I was standing just inside a large conservatory, the sun streaming in through glass panels on to a jungle of plants. In the middle like a temporary safari camp was an elegant white cane three-piece suite and wrought-iron table on which stood a pot of coffee and a satisfyingly large cup. The air was heady with that sticky warmth that comes from too many plants and too few people to use up the oxygen. The word sanatorium came to mind. I caught sight of the housekeeper, a flash of dark hair amid the foliage, talking intently. Somewhere in the tropical rainforest the mistress was listening. I cleared my throat. The housekeeper turned, shot me a murderous look and hurled herself in my direction. I was getting ready to step aside, when a woman’s voice, cool and commanding, stopped her in her tracks.
‘Leave it be, Agnes. Since the lady has come all this way, of course I will see her.’
When she stepped out from the jungle I had trouble keeping my eyes in my head. If money can’t buy you love it can certainly get you beauty. Tall, maybe five nine or ten, with long slender limbs and a cap of short shining fair hair, Madame Belmont was a real stunner. She was also, I realized with a shock that was almost physical, very like somebody I already knew. Or at least felt I knew. Grow the hair, stick her in a pair of ballet shoes and an acre of tulle and what would you have but a second Carolyn Hamilton. Funny Belmont hadn’t seen fit to tell me. But then, of course, he wasn’t intending us to be introduced.
She walked forward smiling and offered me a hand. Close to she wasn’t as young as Carolyn, mid thirties, maybe older, but she was one of those women for whom age holds no terrors. Her bone structure had seen to that. She smiled, and it struck me that for a woman reputedly severely depressed she looked a picture of health. Even her skin glowed. Either she was on a miracle medication or someone had been telling a whopper.
‘Good afternoon. And are you…?’
‘Hannah, Hannah Wolfe.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Wolfe. We don’t get many unexpected callers these days. Would you like coffee? Or maybe you’d prefer tea?’ Her English was good, the accent light and charming in an Isabelle Huppert kind of way. She had probably been good at her job, although it must have been clear to everyone that she was destined for higher things.
‘Thank you. Coffee would be fine.’
She translated my preference to Agnes who clearly thought it was beneath her to wait on someone like me, but couldn’t quite bring herself to revolt. She snorted her displeasure then turned on her heel in the manner of a Prussian guardsman and flounced out of the room. I had the feeling I hadn’t heard the last from her. But for now it was just the two of us. I felt the sense of occasion upon us. I smiled at her. She beckoned me to sit down, then settled herself opposite, drawing her long silky legs up under her. I found myself staring at her. It didn’t seem to bother her. She was obviously one of those women who was used to being looked at. I was still working out which approach would best undermine her apparent sense of confidence when she said, ‘Were you a close friend of Carolyn’s? You must have been devastated. I still don’t quite believe it. She was so energetic. It seems almost impossible to accept that she’s dead.’
I slipped my hand underneath my chin just in case my mouth had fallen open involuntarily. ‘I wouldn’t want her upset in any way, particularly since I have kept the news of Carolyn’s death from her.’ The very words. For a war hero Jules Belmont may have gone for beauty but he had scant commitment to the truth. I decided not to model myself on him.
‘Actually, Madame Belmont, I’m not exactly a friend of Carolyn. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been employed to look into the circumstances surrounding her death.’
She stared at me for a moment, as if assessing the likelihood of my success. ‘Goodness. You look rather young for such a job,’ she said, then smiled. ‘But then I except people always tell you that.’
I nodded. The same could be said of you, oh third wife of an ageing war hero, I thought but did not say.
‘How did you find us?’
I told her briefly, leaving out the bits which involved theft. It sounded quite impressive.
‘I see. And now you want to ask me about Carolyn?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded. ‘Well, I’m not sure I know what to say. I think you’d be better off talking to my husband.’
‘I already have.’
And something flickered behind the eyelids. He must have warned her, surely. What else could they have talked of over lunch? ‘Well, I really don’t know what more I can add…’
‘He told me that you employed Carolyn Hamilton as a companion back in May. That she stayed for just over eight weeks, and then, when she discovered she was pregnant, she left.’
She held my gaze. For a moment she said nothing. I had a fleeting impression of something, a quality of concentration in her, the sense that she was watching me as hard as I was watching her. Then, suddenly, she dropped her eyes. ‘Yes, I think that’s more or less right. I’m afraid I’m not very good on dates.’ And above her head a banner unfurled. It read: �
��I am lying.’ Softly, softly, Hannah.
‘I wonder, Madame Belmont—during the time she was here did Carolyn ever ask you or your husband to post any letters or cards for her? From England.’
She appeared to think about it. ‘As far as I can remember, no. But you’d have to check with jules. Or perhaps Daniel. Daniel often travels to London for work. If she’d wanted something posted he could have taken it for her.’
‘I see. But I gather Daniel is away at the moment. On business.’
‘Is he?’ And this time she looked up, evidently surprised. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Why did she leave, Mrs Belmont?’
‘I thought my husband told you. She was pregnant.’
‘And you didn’t think of asking her to stay?’ I said this time in French.
The change of language threw her for a second. She frowned, as if she had not completely understood the question. I didn’t give her time to think about it.
‘Madame Belmont, I gather you and your husband have been trying for some years to have a child.’
Still she said nothing. Then she looked me straight in the eye. And I could tell she knew what I was thinking. ‘Yes,’ she said in a firm voice. ‘Yes, we have.’
‘But with no success.’
‘No.’
‘That must have been painful for you both. I mean especially since your husband’s only child died in the accident.’ It was so easy I was beginning to feel sorry for her.
‘My husband wanted a child very much, if that’s what you mean.’
‘And you?'
‘Me?’ And now we were really volleying, both our eyes firmly on the ball.
‘That must have been very important for you too?’
This time she hesitated. ‘I wonder how old you are, Miss Wolfe? Haven’t you ever thought about having a child? Don’t all women of around our age?’