by T D Griggs
The men slunk out, muttering, but no one had the nerve to confront him.
I said: ‘Henri, I’d better go. You won’t have any customers left.’
‘Don’t you dare leave! This is a free country, despite all appearances, and nobody tells me who my friends are.’ He raised his voice to carry around the room. ‘Especially not a bunch of small-minded village prigs. And if there are any more of them here, they can leave right now.’
Nobody moved.
Henri looked me firmly in the eye, and lifted his tankard. ‘To Dominic!’ his voice rang out. ‘Who never harboured a mean thought about anyone.’
My throat clenched, and I looked quickly down at my tankard, concentrating on the dribbles of condensation on its mirror surface.
‘Drink!’ Henri ordered me.
I raised the tankard. ‘To Dominic,’ I said quietly.
At the other tables people repeated the toast – even a family of bemused German tourists repeated it – and the tension seeped out of the room. A hum of conversation began. The concoction was as delicious as the last time I had tasted it, on my return from England, and the chill of it brought back my composure.
‘You remember the day you first came in here?’ Henri asked.
‘I remember.’
‘And I told you to forget that old wreck?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘Get Bourgogne to build you your own boat, I told you. Something with a bit of class. Something like The Gay Dog, I said.’ He gripped my shoulder with one hand and gestured expansively out of the window with the other. ‘Just look at what you might have had!’
I followed his outstretched arm. The Gay Dog lay at the quay, her timber decks gleaming the colour of port wine, her big breasted figurehead rising and dipping on the swell.
‘All finished, and ready for her maiden voyage,’ Henri said. ‘Once Gunther and I find someone to take us out.’
‘Can’t you take her out yourself?’
‘Good Lord, no. Too busy running a restaurant to learn all that salty seafarer stuff. We’ll get round to it, though. We thought we might drive her over to Rio for the Mardi Gras one day.’
‘Isn’t there a fairly large ocean in the way?’
‘Iain, don’t be so negative!’ He put his arm around me and gave me a hug. ‘Just look at her! Forget about that worm-eaten old tub of yours. Sneak down to the inlet one night and cut her loose, I would. The Gay Dog is yours for the asking. Any time you want to go out for a spin.’
From the pocket of his apron he pulled a pigskin key wallet embossed in gold with the boat’s name. He jingled the wallet at me invitingly.
‘Thanks for the offer, Henri, but I’m no good with boats either.’
‘Nonsense! With a father like yours? The sea’s in your blood.’
He grabbed our tankards and cruised off towards the bar, smiling benignly on the customers he had just intimidated. He hung the key wallet on a hook above the mirror, gave me a meaningful look and pointed at it, then detonated a second bottle of Moet.
49
I came out of Henri’s place half an hour later. After the champagne, the day sparkled. I had parked the car on the far side of the square and I strolled towards it under the plane trees, taking my time. I needed some fresh air before I drove home. A group of men were at a game of boules and I stopped to watch. Visitors, I thought, not locals; people who didn’t know anything about Dominic, or about wartime mysteries, or about me.
I enjoyed the musical clink of the balls and the players’ gasps and groans and laughter. A shining boule rolled across the gravel towards me, pursued by a man in a blue check shirt. I moved back and he thanked me and I smiled at him with a warmth which must have puzzled him. I felt better after that, and headed to the car.
The gouge ran from the rear light cluster, across both doors and on to the front wing, scoring the blue paintwork down to bare metal and pushing in both door panels. When I ran my fingertip along it, flakes of white paint came away on my skin. I looked around. A few tourists were wandering in the sunshine outside the Hotel de Ville, and a yellow Renault mail van was parked opposite. Some kids on bikes were performing dramatic wheelies in the grit. The postman returned to his van, opened the back door and tossed in his satchel. I caught his eye questioningly. He glanced at the damage, made a sympathetic face, and drove off.
I parked in the drive. The afternoon had clouded over, and the half-renovated house looked sad under the overhanging trees. There were no lights on in the hallway. Chantal was sitting on the veranda steps. She had been reading, or pretending to read, but now her book lay face down on the boards beside her.
‘Hi.’
She shifted around so that she could look directly at me. ‘Hi.’
I said: ‘How’s Kate?’
She flicked her hair over the nape of her neck. ‘She hasn’t been sleeping. So I gave her a couple of my special downers.’
Chantal could always lay her hands on emergency medical fixes. I wasn’t sure that all of them were strictly legal, but they always worked. If Kate had taken one of Chantal’s knock-out drops she would be anaesthetised from both love and loss for the foreseeable future. Part of me envied her.
‘The world will still be there when she wakes up,’ Chantal said. ‘Maybe they’ll even have found Serge by then.’
‘I’ve been talking to Sharif,’ I said.
‘Was he any help?’
‘No.’
She looked out over the garden. ‘I know you’re having a hard time, cheri. And I know I’m not being much use to you at the moment.’
I sat down on the step beside her. ‘I haven’t been a barrelful of laughs myself.’
We were quiet for a moment.
She said: ‘This came for you.’
The envelope had British stamps on it and a handwritten address. I didn’t recognise the writing. I slit the flap and pulled out three or four smudged copies of newspaper articles in old-fashioned type with almost impenetrably dark photographs. A sheet of notepaper was attached, from the Kent Police Museum in Chatham. It was signed by John Cruikshank. I found this in the files, he had scrawled. Nothing’s ever quite the way it seems, is it?!
The front page of the Kent Courier for the 12th of July 1966 read:
A manhunt spanning twenty years and two continents came to an end in New Zealand today when an Auckland post office worker, Clive Adrian Parslow, was charged with Kent’s notorious 1940s ‘Gold Sovereign Murders’.
He pleaded guilty in Auckland Crown Court to killing three Kent women: Edith Violet Morgan, 41, a Canterbury housewife, in October 1943; Astrid Hellaby, 27, a prostitute from Deal, in January 1944; and Sally May Chessall, 19, a WREN, in Dover in March 1944.
Parslow, 57, gave himself up at a central Auckland police station…
‘What is it?’ Chantal asked.
I handed it to her. She took her time reading it.
She said: ‘Hamelin didn’t kill her.’ She looked at me.
‘That’s right.’ I didn’t meet her eyes. ‘And, yes, as a police officer himself, my father would hear about this.’
‘He thought he’d left an innocent man to drown. Isn’t that what it means?’
I got up and walked down the veranda steps and stared out through the trees at the choppy water.
She said: ‘This is why he’d never talk about St Cyriac. Why he paid for a memorial to Hamelin, twenty years late.’ She got up and stood beside me and held my arm. ‘This answers all your questions, Iain. Doesn’t it? Please tell me it does.’
‘Why did he behave the way he did when he got back from France in 1944?’
She gave a little groan. ‘Oh, Iain.’
‘But he didn’t know Hamelin was innocent then. Why did he hide himself away, even from the woman he loved? Why let her think he was dead?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And the map – why did he burn it? Why did he have it in the first place?’
‘I don’t know that either.’
&
nbsp; ‘And now this so-called escape down the Vasse? The escape that couldn’t have happened? What does all that mean?’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know, and I don’t know.’
She walked a few steps away, stopped by the car and touched the gouge in the bodywork. She came back and looked me in the face.
‘Iain, I’m on your side. I always have been and I always will be. But in this life we don’t get all our questions answered. And there comes a time to stop asking them.’
She touched my cheek, and went into the house.
50
Just beyond the bridge the footpath branched left, down the spine of the headland. The way was overgrown with nettles and brambles, but I followed it without much difficulty for a couple of hundred metres. It took me behind and above Daniel Bourgogne’s house. I could see the roof through the trees. A little further and the track began to drop downhill towards the estuary again. I passed the overgrown concrete walls of the old German blockhouse, and emerged through a screen of gorse.
In my mind I still saw 2548 as she lay sleeping, tilted to one side in the mud. Now, with the rounded swell of her hull beneath the water, she looked lighter, sharper, sleeker. Daniel, as good as his word, had moored her hard up against the bank, where the curve of the shore protected her. I could see her quivering in the current.
I walked up to the edge of the bank, a step away from the deck, swallowed hard and clambered aboard. I sat down heavily on the hatch, gripping the edge of the coaming and shutting my mind to the muscular stirring of the launch beneath me. Sweat prickled on my face and neck. I bent down and unfastened the ties that held the tarpaulin over the hatch, and peeled it aside. Dominic’s makeshift wooden ladder was still in place. I swung myself over and climbed clumsily down into the hull.
I stood there, trying not to think of the weight of green water pressing on the frail skin of the vessel around me. I could hear the mooring ropes groan. There wasn’t much sign of Dominic’s presence. The tin box containing his little camping cooker was upended on the floor and a scatter of Tintin comics and sodden biscuits lay in a pool of bilge water which rocked at my feet.
Light spoked in around the edges of the forepeak hatch. I walked unsteadily towards it, running my hand along the hull for support and reassurance. Every few paces I stopped to tap at the hull, or to turn over some litter with my toe, or to run my hand behind one of the ribs or under the plywood fittings. I knew it was hopeless, but I had to try.
I was turning back towards the ladder, empty handed, when I heard a soft thump somewhere ahead of me. I froze, feeling my stomach clench. Quiet footsteps moved along the deck above my head, and paused at the main hatch. I stood utterly motionless, unwilling to acknowledge even to myself what I was so afraid of. A pair of expensive trainers appeared on the top rung of the ladder.
‘Felix,’ I said. ‘For Chrissake…’
His own surprise was so complete that he stumbled and slid down the last two rungs.
‘Iain! You frightened the life out of me.’
‘Ditto.’ I walked towards him, my heart banging in my chest.
‘Daniel wanted to put a new lock on the hatch. The police busted the old one.’ He took a shining padlock and key from his pocket, detached the key and dropped it into my palm. ‘I told him I’d do it, so he asked me to pass the key on to you.’
‘Couldn’t he manage that himself?’
‘I think he’d rather steer clear of you at the moment.’ He walked a few steps down the hull, kicking at the timbers, scuffing his trainers through the water which lay along the centreline. ‘Well, I’m no expert, but the hull seems sound enough to me. She’s taken a little water, but being afloat will close her up.’
‘Is that good?’
‘Yes, Iain,’ he said. ‘It’s good.’
‘Felix, what the hell am I going to do with her?’
‘Oh, she’ll keep for a week or two.’ He came back and clapped my shoulder in that familiar gesture of his. ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out.’
I couldn’t imagine how, but I was grateful for his encouragement.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here. I’ve seen livelier corpses than you.’
I didn’t need to be asked twice. I went up the ladder into the daylight and jumped the small gap onto the bank, leaving Felix to close the hatch and fix the new padlock. When he had finished he stepped ashore beside me, and we stood gazing at the old launch and out over the glittering water. We were only three hundred metres or so further along the estuary from her original resting place, but the prospect from here was quite different. The bend of the bank made it impossible to see back up the river towards the boatyard, and to our right the view opened directly out to sea.
Felix said: ‘Are you going to tell me what you were really doing on board? Or shall I guess?’
‘It was a shot in the dark.’ I gave him a neutral look. ‘The boat’s got a double hull. There are a thousand places you could lose little black diaries.’
Felix sighed, and shook his head. ‘Those damned diaries.’ All at once his voice trembled and he turned his face away from me.
‘Felix?’
‘They’re going to release his body tomorrow. So the village can bury him.’
I struggled to find the right response, but then I heard again in my mind the words he had used, and I realised that Felix’s distress was not just on Dominic’s account, but on mine as well.
‘You don’t want me at the funeral,’ I said.
He swung back to look at me, his eyes shining. ‘I hate to do this, Iain. But I have no choice. He deserves to be seen out of this world in peace, especially after the violence of his passing.’
I stared out towards the Shoals. ‘Do they all blame me?’
‘Iain, I know you’re hurting too. If it’s any comfort to you, I don’t believe you have a single thing to reproach yourself for.’
‘When will it be?’
‘Tuesday.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ll be thinking of you both.’
I let him go.
I had thought solitude might be welcome, but the sight of the launch creaking against her new moorings unnerved me. Quite soon I followed in Felix’s tracks, only stopping when I reached the bridge over the Vasse.
51
The house had a sad and abandoned air to it, as if had just been vacated rather than recently occupied. Evidence of Bonnard’s unfinished building work was everywhere – raw new timber on the veranda, a stack of slates, a blind window roughly covered with black plastic.
The impression of emptiness was so strong that when I reached the kitchen I was surprised to find Chantal seated at the pine table, her chin in her hands. Small intricate objects were spread on the tablecloth in front of her. Despite the daylight flooding through the window, she had set up a desk lamp which threw a brilliant glare over her work.
‘You’ve been a while,’ she said.
‘I went to check on the boat. And to see Felix, as it turned out.’
I saw for the first time what she was doing. She had arranged the components of her Hasselblad camera with geometric precision on the folded white tablecloth, lenses and shutter and half a hundred tiny cogs and screws and springs. Metal and glass gleamed. Chantal had never lost her love for the Hasselblad, now virtually an antique. It had been her first serious camera, and had been with her in deserts and shell holes and burning buildings, through flood and famine and earthquake.
‘I’m thinking of going back to work,’ she said. ‘Part-time, maybe.’
‘I thought that was all behind us.’
‘We can’t go on like this indefinitely.’ She sighed. ‘What did Felix want?’
‘Among other things, to tell me not to come to Dominic’s funeral.’
She lifted her head sharply. ‘Felix said that?’
‘He said he had no choice. I can see his point.’
She got to her feet, took both my hands in hers and looked up into my face. ‘This is my f
ault, Iain. I made us buy this place. We’d have been dining out in Paris if it hadn’t been for me, or cruising the vineyards in Provence.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘There’s no joy for us here.’
I said nothing.
She let go of my hands. ‘We’ll get someone to patch the house up, put it on the market. And we’ll get out.’
‘I’m not sure I’m ready for that.’
‘You’re not the only one involved, my love.’
‘Chantal, Dominic gave the diaries to my father.’
She stared at me.
‘I just worked it out, walking back from the boat,’ I said. ‘After the priest was killed, Dominic gave the diaries to my father for safekeeping. He probably hoped he’d take them to England. But my father wasn’t sure he’d get across the Channel, so he hid the journals at La Division.’
‘Iain – ’
‘I thought maybe they were in the launch. But all the time the answer was staring me in the face. They’re marked on the map. A box within a box. Those three lines aren’t bars or a grating, or whatever. They’re three objects. Three books. Under the main room at La Division. That’s where he must have hidden them.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Please, Iain.’
‘Of course I can’t be a hundred percent sure. But I think that’s what happened. One thing is for sure: he and Billington didn’t sail from the Vasse estuary. The tides are wrong, I told you that. They sailed from La Division, and before they did, he hid the books.’
‘Everyone knows how they escaped,’ she said tightly. ‘Dr Pasqual stood on the bridge and watched them sail down the river. He said so. Tides or no tides, he saw them go.’
‘I stood on that bridge just now. You can’t see the boatyard from there. You can’t see the estuary, even in broad daylight. You can’t see more than fifty metres down the river.’
‘So the old man lied about this, did he?’ Her voice was clenched with disbelief. ‘The whole village conspired to lie about it?’
‘Not the whole village. Four men. That’s all it took. Four men who had a secret to keep, so they made up their own story about that night, and passed it on. And that’s the story everyone believes.’