by P. D. James
There were footsteps, light but definite, approaching through the archives room. And now, for a second, remembering that murdered wife, he was touched with a slight shiver of superstitious awe. Then sense reasserted itself. These were the footsteps of a living woman and he knew whose.
Claudia Etienne stood in the doorway. She said without preamble: ‘Will you be long?’
‘Not very long. Perhaps an extra hour, maybe less.’
‘I shall be leaving at half past six. I’m turning off the lights except on the stairs. Will you turn those off when you leave and set the alarm?’
‘Of course.’
He opened the nearer file and appeared to be studying it. He didn’t want to talk to her. It would be unwise now to be drawn into any conversation without the presence of a third party.
She said: ‘I’m sorry I lied about my alibi for Gerard’s death. It was partly fear, mostly the wish to avoid complications. But I didn’t kill him, none of us did.’ He didn’t reply, nor did he look at her. She said, with a note of desperation: ‘How long is this going to go on? Can’t you tell me? Haven’t you any idea? The coroner hasn’t even released my brother’s body for cremation. Can’t you understand what that’s doing to me?’
Then he looked up at her. If he had been capable of pity for her, seeing her face, he would have felt it then. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t discuss it now.’
Without another word she turned abruptly and left. He waited till the footsteps had faded then went out and locked the door of the archives room. He should have remembered that Dalgliesh wanted it kept secure at all times.
59
At 6.25 Claudia locked away the files she had been working on and went upstairs to wash and fetch her coat. The house was ablaze with light. Since Gerard’s death she had hated working alone in the darkness. Now chandeliers, wall sconces, the great globes at the foot of the stairs, illumined the splendour of painted ceilings, the intricacies of carved wood and the pillars of coloured marble. Inspector Aaron could turn the lights off on the way down. She wished she hadn’t given way to the impulse to go to the little archives room. She had hoped that, seeing him alone, she might have extracted some information about the progress of the inquiry, some idea when it was likely to end. The thought had been folly, the result humiliation. She wasn’t a person to him. He didn’t see her as a human being, a woman who was alone, afraid, burdened with unexpected and onerous responsibilities. To him, to Dalgliesh, to Kate Miskin she was only one, and perhaps the chief, of their suspects. She wondered whether every murder investigation dehumanized all those caught up in it.
Most of the staff parked their cars behind the locked gate in Innocent Passage. Claudia was the only one who used the garage. She was very fond of her Porsche 911. It was now seven years old, but she wanted no replacement and disliked leaving it ungaraged. She unlocked the door of number 10, moved across the passage and opened the door into the garage. Putting up a hand to the light she pressed it down. There was no response; obviously the bulb had gone. And then, as she stood there irresolute, she was aware of the sound of gentle breathing, the knowledge, immediate and terrifying, that someone was standing there in the darkness. And at that moment the noose of leather came down over her head and tightened round her neck. She was jerked violently backwards, and felt the crack of the concrete momentarily stunning her and then its scrape against the back of her skull.
It was a long strap. She tried to reach out to struggle with whoever was holding it, but there was no strength in her arms, and every time she tried to move the noose tightened and her mind swam through an agony of pain and terror into brief unconsciousness. She thrashed feebly on its end like a hooked and dying fish, her feet scrabbling ineffectively for a hold on the rough concrete.
And then she heard his voice. ‘Lie still, Claudia. Lie still and listen. Nothing will happen while you lie still.’
She ceased her struggles and at once the dreadful throttling eased. His voice was speaking quietly, persuasively. She heard what he said and her numbed brain at last understood. He was telling her that she had to die, and why.
She wanted to shout out that it was a terrible mistake, that it wasn’t true, but her voice was throttled and she knew that only by lying totally motionless could she stay alive. He was explaining now that it would look like suicide. The strap would be tied to the fixed wheel of the car, the engine would be left running. She would be dead by then but it was necessary to him that the garage should be full of a fatal gas. He explained this to her patiently, almost kindly, as if it were important to him that she should understand. He told her that she had no alibi for either of the murders now. The police would think she had killed herself from fear of arrest or remorse.
And now he had finished. She thought: I won’t die. I won’t let him kill me. I won’t die, not here, not like this, hauled about like an animal on this garage floor. She summoned up her will. She thought: I must pretend to be dead, fainted, half dead. If I can get him off his guard I can twist round and seize the strap. I can overpower him if only I can get to my feet.
She summoned up her strength for this last move. But he had been waiting for just this, he was ready. As soon as she moved, the noose was jerked taut again and this time it did not slacken.
He waited until at last the body’s dreadful contortions were stilled, the last gurglings silenced. Then he let go of the strap and, bending, listened for the absent breath. He got up and, taking the bulb from his pocket, stretched up and replaced it in the socket in the low ceiling. Now, with the garage lit, he could see to take the keys from her pocket, unlock the car and tie the end of the strap round the wheel. His gloved hands worked swiftly and without fumbling. Lastly he turned on the engine. Her body lay sprawled as if she had flung herself from the open door of the car, knowing that either the noose or the fatal exhaust fumes would finish her off. And it was at that moment that he heard the footsteps coming down the passage towards the garage door.
60
It was 6.27. In Frances Peverell’s flat the phone rang. As soon as James spoke her name she knew that something was wrong.
She said at once: ‘James, what is it?’
‘Rupert Farlow is dead. He died in hospital an hour ago.’
‘Oh, James, I’m so terribly sorry. Were you with him?’
‘No. Ray was. He only wanted Ray. It’s so strange, Frances. When he was living here the house was almost intolerable. Sometimes I dreaded coming home to the mess, the smells, and the disruption. But now he’s dead I want it to look as it did then. I hate it. It’s prissy, affected, boringly conventional, just a show house for someone who’s dead at heart. I want to smash it.’
She said: ‘Would it help if I came over?’
‘Would you, Frances?’ She heard the note of relief in his voice with joy. ‘You’re sure it won’t be any trouble?’
‘Of course it won’t be a trouble. I’ll come at once. It’s not half past six yet, Claudia may still be here. If she is I’ll get her to drop me at the Bank and take the Central Line. That’ll be the quickest. If she has left, I’ll call a cab.’
She put down the receiver. She was sorry about Rupert but she had only met him once, years before, when he had come to Innocent House. And surely for him this long-expected death, awaited in such uncomplaining agony, must have come as a release. But James had called for her, needed her, wanted her to be with him. She was possessed with joy. Grabbing her jacket and scarf from the hall peg, she almost flung herself down the stairs and ran into Innocent Lane. But the door to Innocent House was locked and there was no light shining through the window of the reception room. Claudia had left. She ran into Innocent Walk thinking that she might still catch her getting out the car, but could see that the garage door was closed. She was too late.
She decided to call for a cab from the wall telephone in the passage at number 10. That would be quicker than going back to her own flat. It was as she came up to the garage doors that she heard unmistakably the sound of a
running engine. This surprised and disconcerted her. Claudia’s Porsche, her beloved 911, was too old to have a catalytic converter. Surely she realized that it was unsafe to run her engine in a closed garage? It was unlike Claudia to be careless.
The door to number 10 was locked. That wasn’t surprising; Claudia always came into the garage this way and locked the door behind her. But it was strange to find the light still on in the passage and the side door to the garage ajar. Calling Claudia’s name, she dashed to it and threw it open.
The light was on, a harsh, cruel, shadowless light. She stood transfixed, every nerve and muscle paralysed by a second of instantaneous revelation and horror. He was kneeling by the body, but now he got to his feet and came quietly across to her, blocking the door. She looked into his eyes. They were the same eyes, wise, a little tired, eyes that had seen too much and for far too long.
She whispered: ‘Oh no! Gabriel, not you. Oh no.’
She didn’t scream. She was as incapable of screaming as she was of movement. When he spoke it was in the same gentle remembered voice.
‘I’m sorry, Frances. You do see, don’t you, that I can’t possibly let you go?’
And then she swayed and felt herself falling into the merciful dark.
61
In the little archives room Daniel looked at his watch. Six o’clock. He had been here for two hours. But the time hadn’t been wasted. At least he had found something. The two hours of searching had been rewarded. It might not be relevant to the investigation, but it had some interest. When he showed the confession to the team, AD might feel that his hunch had been vindicated, even if less fruitfully than he had hoped, and call off the search. There was no reason why he shouldn’t stop now.
But success had revived his interest and he was nearly at the end of a row. He might as well take down and examine the last thirty or so files along the top shelf. He preferred a job to have a defined and tidy ending, and it was still early. If he left he would feel obliged to go back to Wapping. He didn’t feel at the moment that he wanted to confront either Kate’s understanding or her pity. He moved the step-ladder further along the row.
The file, bulky but not abnormally so, was lodged tightly between two others and as he pulled at them it slipped from the shelf. A few papers, detached, fell over his head like heavy leaves. He carefully dismounted and gathered them up. The rest of the papers were tagged together, presumably in date order. Two things struck him. The file cover was of heavy manila and obviously very old, while some of the papers looked fresh and clean enough to have been filed within the last five years. The file was unnamed, but among the early papers he was scrabbling together the word ‘Jew’ caught his eye time and time again. He took it with him to the table in the little archives room.
The papers were not numbered and he could only assume that they were in the correct order, but one, undated, caught his eye. It was a proposal for a novel, inexpertly typed and unsigned. It was headed Submission to the Partners of the Ρeverell Press. He read:
The background and the universal and unifying theme of this novel, provisionally to be called Original Sin, is the cooperation of the Vichy regime in France with the deportation of Jews from France between 1940 and 1944. During these four years nearly 76,000 Jews were deported, the great majority to die in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. The book will tell the story of one family divided by war in which a young Jewish mother and her four-year-old twins are trapped in France by the invasion, are hidden by friends and are provided with false papers, but are subsequently betrayed to be deported and murdered in Auschwitz. The novel will explore the effect of this betrayal – one small family among thousands of the victims – on the woman’s husband, on the betrayed and on the betrayers.
Working through the papers he could see no response to this proposal and no communication from the Peverell Press. The file contained what were obviously working and research papers. The novel had been well researched, extraordinarily well researched for a proposed work of fiction. The writer had either visited or written to a remarkable variety of international and national organizations over the years. The Archives Nationales in Paris and Toulouse, the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, Harvard University, the Public Record Office and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and the West German Federal Archives in Koblenz. There were extracts, too, taken from the journals of the Resistance movement, L’Humanité, Témoignage Chrétien and Le Franc-Tireur, and minutes from prefects in the unoccupied zone. He let them pass in front of his eyes, letters, reports, scraps of official documents, copies of minutes, eyewitness accounts. The record was both broad-based and in places peculiarly precise; the number of deportees, the times of the trains, the part played by the policy of Pierre Laval, even changes in the German power hierarchy in France during the spring and summer of 1942. It was quickly apparent that the researcher had taken care to ensure that nowhere should his name appear. Letters from him had his signature and address cut off or blacked out, letters to him had the name and address of the sender but all other identifying marks had been obliterated. There was no evidence that any of this particular research had been used, that the book had even been started, let alone finished.
It increasingly became apparent that the researcher was particularly interested in one region and one year. The novel, if that was what it was, was becoming more focused. It was as if a cluster of searchlights had played over a wide terrain highlighting an incident, an interesting configuration, a single figure, a moving train, but had now coordinated their beams to illumine a single year: 1942. It was a year in which the Germans had demanded a great increase in deportations from the unoccupied zone. The Jews, after being rounded up, had been taken either to the Vel d’Hiv or to Drancy, a huge apartment complex in a suburb north-east of Paris. It was this camp which served as the staging post to Auschwitz. There were three eyewitness reports in the file: one was from a French nurse who had worked with a paediatrician in Drancy for fourteen months until she could no longer stand the accumulated misery, and two from survivors, apparently in reply to a specific inquiry from the researcher. One woman wrote:
I was rounded up on 16 August 1942 by the Gardes Mobiles. I was reassured because they were French and were very correct at the time I was arrested. I did not know then what would happen to me but I remember that I did not feel that it would be too bad. I was told what possessions I could take with me and medically examined before I was in transit. I was sent to Drancy and it was there I met the young mother with the twins. Her name was Sophie. I cannot recall the names of the children. She had been first in Vel d’Hiv but was later transferred to Drancy. I remember her and the children well although we did not speak very often. She told me little about herself, except that she had been living under a false name near Aubière. All her concern was for her children. At the time we were in the same hut with fifty other inmates. We lived in great squalor. There was a shortage of beds and straw for mattresses, the only food was cabbage soup and we were suffering from dysentery. Many people died in Drancy, I think over 400 in the first ten months. I can remember the wails of the children and the groans of the dying. For me Drancy was as bad as Auschwitz. I went merely from one room in hell to another.
The second survivor from the same camp wrote of the same horrors, although more graphically, but had no memory of a young mother or her twins.
Daniel was turning the papers as if in a trance. He knew now where the journey was leading him and here at last was the proof: a letter written by a Marie-Louise Robert from Quebec. It was hand-written in French with a typed translation attached.
My name is Marie-Louise Robert and I am a Canadian citizen, the widow of Emile Edouard Robert, a French-Canadian. I met him and married him in Canada in 1958. He died two years ago. I was born in 1928 so was fourteen in 1942. I lived with my widowed mother and grandfather on his small farm on the Puy-de-Dôme area of France, outside Aubière which is just south-east of Clermont-Ferrand. Sophi
e and the twins came to us in April 1941. It is difficult now that I am old to remember how much I knew at the time and how much I learned afterwards. I was an inquisitive girl and resented being kept out of the adults’ concerns and treated as if I were a child, too immature to be trusted. I was not told at the time that Sophie and the children were Jews but I learned that later. There were many people and organizations in France at that time which helped Jews at great risk to themselves, and Sophie and the twins were sent to my parents by a Christian organization of this kind. I never knew its name. At the time I was told she was just a friend of the family who had come to us to be safe from bombing. My uncle Pascal worked for Monsieur Jean-Philippe Etienne at his publishing and printing firm in Clermont-Ferrand. I think I did know at the time that Pascal was part of the Resistance, but I’m not sure that I knew that Monsieur Etienne was head of the organization. It was in July 1942 that the police came to take Sophie and the twins away. As soon as they arrived my mother told me to get out of the house and stay in the barn till she called me. I went to the barn but I crept back and listened. I could hear screaming and the children crying. Then I heard a car and a van being driven away. When I went back into the house my mother was crying too, but wouldn’t tell me what had happened.
That night Pascal came to the house and I crept down the stairs to listen. My mother was angry with him, but he said he hadn’t betrayed Sophie or the twins, that he wouldn’t have put my mother and grandfather in danger, that it must have been Monsieur Etienne. I forgot to say that it was Pascal who forged the false papers for Sophie and the twins. That was his job in the Resistance, although I am not sure whether I knew this at the time. He told my mother to do nothing, to say nothing. There were reasons for these things. However, my mother did go to see Monsieur Etienne the next day, and when she came back she spoke to my grandfather. I don’t think that they cared then whether I heard or not. I was sitting quietly reading in the room when they spoke. She said to my grandfather that Monsieur Etienne had admitted that he had betrayed Sophie to the authorities, but that it had been necessary. It was because he was trusted and his friendship valued that she would not be punished for harbouring Jews. It was thanks to his relationship with the Germans that Pascal had not been deported as slave labour. He had asked my mother what was more important to her: the honour of France, the safety of her family or three Jews. Afterwards no one ever spoke about Sophie and the twins. It was as if they hadn’t existed. If I asked about them, my mother would just say, ‘It is finished. It is over.’ The money from the organization kept coming, although it was not very much, and my grandfather said that we should keep it. We were very poor at the time. I think someone did write to inquire about Sophie eighteen months after she and the children were taken away, but my mother wrote back that the authorities were becoming suspicious and that Sophie had left and gone to friends at Lyons and she didn’t know the address. Then the money stopped.