His daughter opened the door, my glass-blowing friend, Marianne.
‘Eloïse, this is a surprise.’
She smiled with her usual warmth and I felt sick at the thought of hurting her family.
‘I’ve come to see your father, actually. Is he around? I know it’s Sunday but this is kind of urgent.’
‘Your poor face.’ She leaned close and kissed me delicately on one cheek. ‘I heard you’d been at the air base. What a hideous tragedy. I never did like that vile headmistress but I’d never have expected her to do such a thing.’
‘Is your father home?’ I interrupted. Marianne could talk for five minutes without drawing breath.
She laughed. ‘Yes, he’s in the garden at the back. I’m in the middle of baking,’ she wiggled floury fingers at me,’ so just go round the house and you’ll find him there.’
I kissed her. ‘Thanks, Marianne.’
How did a man like Charles Durand produce a gem like Marianne?
*
‘Good afternoon, Monsieur le Maire.’
Charles Durand leaped out of his skin. He hadn’t heard me approaching across the grass and I was now standing right behind him. He’d been bent over his roses, deadheading them with a pair of secateurs, humming quietly to himself, and a thorn tore a trail across his thumb when he jumped.
‘Eloïse, for God’s sake, girl, that’s no way to . . .’ He stopped as he took in my face. ‘Well, you certainly look a mess, don’t you?’
I ignored that. ‘We didn’t finish our conversation at the air base yesterday, did we?’
All pretence of politeness dropped from his face and he threw an uncomfortable glance towards the house to ensure no one else was within earshot. Almost touching the roof, the clouds looked bruised and blackened. I could feel the first spit of rain.
‘I don’t want you here at my house,’ he hissed at me. ‘I don’t want you anywhere near my office either. So say what you’ve come to say and then get out of my garden.’
I didn’t blame him for being protective of it. The garden was extensive and well stocked, the kind of sweet-scented haven that could lull you into thinking all was well in the world, as bees murmured among the heavy blossoms that lined the gravel paths and yellow-plumed serins dropped in for a drink at the Roman stone fountain.
‘I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to throw me out, if I were you, monsieur.’ I omitted his title.
‘You have nothing to say that I want to hear. You Caussades have always been difficult.’
I could hear an undercurrent in his voice and I realised this man was afraid of me. Of what I knew. ‘Let’s talk about blackmail,’ I said coldly. ‘About you and blackmail. And then we can get round to you and treason.’
He was a tall man and he used his height well. He stood too close, an intimidating presence, and looked down his handsome nose at me. I was forced to look up.
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,’ he said. But he didn’t walk away.
‘Your blackmailing of my father is finished.’
His eyes donned a mask of innocence. ‘What lies has the old fool been telling you?’
‘My father is not old. And he is certainly no fool. He has the newspaper article in his possession now and intends to burn it, so you will get no more money out of him. The chances of an obscure local newspaper in northern France being still in possession of a copy of an edition printed thirty-five years ago are nil. Especially after being caught in the middle of two world wars. I doubt that the newspaper even exists anymore. This is the end of it for you.’
He wanted to hit me. I could see it in his face, the flicker of physical rage, but I was accustomed to bulls. I stood my ground. In one hand he still held the dead head of a coral-pink rose, its petals soft and defenceless, and slowly his fist tightened on them.
‘You are talking nonsense, girl. I know nothing about any blackmail.’
He was cool. I had to give him that. Anyone else would have believed him. I could see how this corrupt man so easily manoeuvred himself into the role of mayor, but his coolness drove me to strike harder, to light a fire under him.
The rain started to fall more heavily.
‘Monsieur Durand, you are a traitor and the punishment for treason in this country is execution by guillotine.’
This time he raised the secateurs to within a hand’s breadth of my scar. I felt my gut lurch but I didn’t drop my gaze from his.
‘Get off my land,’ he said in no more than a whisper.
‘I photographed them all,’ I told him, matching my tone to his. ‘Each one of them. All those documents in your secret drawer.’
This time I had him. His pupils narrowed to pinpoints and he glanced again for a split second over to the house. Was his wife there? Or Marianne at a window? Watching us in the rain.
‘You have no proof they were mine,’ he said.
‘I took pictures of them next to your desk diary, your name embossed on it in full view. So don’t let’s play games, monsieur.’
‘In which case you must have brought the documents into my office yourself to incriminate me. Illegal entry as well. No one is going to believe you, not even your tame policeman. They’ll take my word over yours.’
He was right. Of course he was right.
‘Are you prepared to risk it?’ I asked. ‘To have the stink of a scandal before your next election? Do you want to take that chance? We both know the truth – that you are a lying treacherous bastard.’
‘Merde, you’re even more trouble than your brother.’
‘I know you are gathering top-secret information and selling it at a high price to Russia. That is treason. That’s why the Soviets are building their own nuclear bombs far faster than expected. They’re using stolen American technology passed on by people like you.’
‘Don’t lecture me, girl.’ He uttered a short sharp laugh like the bark of a dog. ‘I am not a Communist. I am not a capitalist. I am an opportunist. I support both, so that whether it’s the Russkies or the Yanks who win this Cold War eventually, I will come out on top.’ He smiled a thin smile. ‘Whereas you will be thrown in prison by both sides.’
The rain was soaking us now, blurring our outlines. I had no wish to talk with a man who had sold his soul for American dollars.
‘A name,’ I demanded. ‘Give me a name.’
‘What name?’
‘The name of your source of information at Dumoulin Air Base, the person passing you documents.’
‘Or what?’
‘Or I will go to the police. Your Smith & Wesson gun has just been found beside the dead body of Gilles Bertin in Arles, so they will be interested in talking to you anyway. Even though you reported your gun stolen, they will be aware that it could be a set-up for using it in a crime. The police and the voters of Serriac are going to be crawling all over everything you’ve ever done. I hope your tracks are well covered.’
Rain ran in rivulets down his cheeks, his carefully groomed hair flattened to his head, but he made no attempt to move away. His lips were bone white. I wanted to hate this man who had put my father through such hell but all I felt was disgust. I felt dirty just sharing the same sodden air with him.
‘A name?’ I repeated.
But I’d underestimated this man. A crack of thunder rolled above our heads and though I saw his lips move, I heard nothing. I thought he was about to take his secateurs to me, then bury me in his sodden rose bed.
‘Do you know, Eloïse, what I did a few years ago to teach your father a lesson when he refused to pay up any more?’
I wouldn’t play his game. I said nothing. But I felt the cold rain seeping much deeper than my bones.
‘When he refused to pay,’ the mayor continued, slowly lowering the secateurs and dropping the crushed petals on the wet grass, ‘I told your brother André about what your father did. He refused to believe me at first, so I showed him the newspaper cutting.’ Durand’s lips pulled into a thin smile. ‘It seems he went home, had
a blazing row with your father and left immediately for Paris.’
That is when the hate came. A cold wave of it crashed down on me. ‘I will make you regret that,’ I spat at him through the rain.
I spun away and hurried back to the pathway. He let me get almost as far as the house, my skirts plastered to my legs, the raindrops landing like small bullets on my broken nose.
‘Wait,’ he called.
I waited, but looked over my shoulder, eyes screwed up against the rain.
He hadn’t moved. ‘Mickey Ashton,’ he shouted. ‘He was my source.’ Another crack of thunder almost drowned out his next words. ‘Now it’s your friend, Major Dirke.’
A chasm seemed to open up inside me. Was Durand telling the truth? Or was this another lie to add to the pile in my pocket?
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
LÉON ROUSSEL
Léon wrapped Eloïse’s wet figure in a rug from the boot of his car and bundled her into her 2CV with instructions to drive slowly. Her windscreen wipers in a storm like this would be of little use, so he stuck close to her bumper all the way from Serriac to Mas Caussade. He wanted her to leave her car behind and travel in his black Citroën but she insisted on driving herself. She drove slowly, especially when they came to the tight bend where tyres had dug deep into the dirt and gouged a crater that stretched right across the road and which was now filling up with muddy rainwater. Her car limped through it until another thunderclap made her jump, her foot plunging down on the accelerator so that she kangaroo-hopped forward.
What the hell had gone on with the mayor? She’d shot out of his gate, a low moan coming from her, but his first concern had been to get her home and dry until she was ready to talk. He planned to do his own kind of talking with Monsieur le Maire tomorrow at the gendarmerie.
The sky was almost dark, so he switched his lights on, though it wasn’t yet evening, and the rain was lashing down. It was time to have a talk with André too, but not the gendarmerie kind. Not yet. A bottle of wine and a handful of fat olives might oil the wheels, but he was well aware that his boyhood friend knew how to hold his tongue when he chose.
Whatever it was that André had said to his sister up in that room of his had damaged her. She’d come out and kissed him in front of André to prove a point, but what that point was, he could only guess at. Léon flexed his shoulder blades to try to unstick the dressings on his back that chafed from too much driving, but he was still upright and still moving from A to B, which was about as much as he could hope for right now. The Arles police were dealing with the body in Bertin’s rented house in the old town, but there was still the matter of the mayor’s gun. And why the hell it was left lying there.
*
The wind was fierce when they reached the farm, tearing the blossom off the tamarisk tree and shifting some of the timbers of the half-constructed roof on the new stables. Yet a dozen gardians were milling around in the yard in the rain, crouched inside their rainproofs and soothing their horses as they prepared to ride out.
What was going on?
Before he and Eloïse had even shut off their engines Aristide Caussade came barrelling out of the house in a sou’wester and shiny cape of olive green. He wrenched open Eloïse’s door and almost lifted her out of her seat.
‘Thank God, you’re back.’
‘What is it, Papa?’
‘André has gone missing.’
*
Léon could feel a pressure the moment he stepped inside the house. As though something was ready to blow. Years ago, under a willow tree on a river bank, he and André had heated up an unopened can of beans over a campfire to see what would happen. They’d watched transfixed as the metal sides bulged and then the whole thing exploded with a thrump, beans ripping high up into the foliage. That’s what it felt like in the Caussade house. That kind of pressure.
Eloïse shot up the stairs in front of him two at a time and he followed, his back protesting, but she halted in the doorway of André’s room with a cry. The room was in chaos. Only the bed and wardrobe stood in place. Everything else had been thrown or smashed or trampled and the smell of violence was overwhelming.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ Léon said. ‘This looks like a crime scene.’
But Eloïse didn’t enter. She pinned herself to the doorframe and watched him pick his way carefully around the debris on the floor. The chair and cabinet lay on their sides, broken, books strewn, lamp in pieces, and even the mattress was on end on the floor, resting against the wardrobe.
Had André used it as a shield? A battering ram? How many had come for him? It sickened Léon to his core to imagine what had gone on here but he did a rapid check for weapons or blood. He found neither. Outside, the high wind was rattling the window and the rain battered at the glass, but the catch was firmly locked, so no forced entry that way.
He looked up and saw Aristide Caussade standing behind his daughter. He looked stricken, his shoulders were hunched under the oilskin, head low and thrust forward.
‘What happened?’ Léon asked.
‘I came back from the fields,’ Caussade rumbled, his mind on the devastation of the room rather than on his words. ‘The front door was banging open in the wind and Louis lay unconscious at the bottom of the stairs.’
‘No rifle?’ Eloïse asked. Her voice was stiff and awkward. ‘How is he?’
‘No, no rifle. Louis will survive. His head is made of solid bull hide, he says.’
‘How many men?’ Léon asked.
‘Three.’
‘Did they come in a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he see them leave with André?’
‘No. He saw and heard nothing. He was out cold.’
Aristide Caussade shook himself, spraying water from his oilskin like a dog. He was a man of action, not words. ‘Enough questions. We have to search. The men have scoured the outbuildings and the nearby area, but this fucking rain is washing away all tracks.’
He gripped his daughter’s shoulder, knuckles white with the force of it, as if to ensure this child was not snatched away from him.
‘You’re the policeman,’ he said. ‘Where do we start?’
‘We start by asking Louis for a description of the attackers.’
‘Big hard-fisted thugs, he says.’ Caussade looked down at his daughter and his dark eyes, so like hers, were fierce with hatred. ‘The bastards were speaking Russian, he says.’
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
They shut the front door of the farmhouse when they left and told me to bolt it on the inside. They told me to stay here in case André turned up. They told me to wait. Because that’s what they expected women to do. Wait.
‘I’ll get my men out searching, despite the filthy night,’ Léon said. ‘Louis remembers that the three Russians drove up in a black Peugeot 203. We’ll put out an immediate search for any in the area.’ He paused and chafed my hand between his, the conviction in his eyes giving me a thin thread of hope when he added, ‘We’ll find André, I promise.’ He pressed his lips to my forehead. ‘Stay safe.’ He set two of Papa’s gardians to sit in the kitchen with me.
But the moment I heard their cars drive off into the wet evening, I picked up the telephone in the hall. The receiver shook in my hand and only then did I realise that I was still in wet clothes, cold and shivering. But I barely noticed. Like I barely noticed the darkness creeping across the hallway tiles as night started to settle on the farm.
Guilt was eating into me. I had broken my promise. I had not kept my brother safe. I put down the receiver, walked into the living room and opened Papa’s wine cupboard. I poured myself a shot of brandy and knocked it straight back, feeling it kick some warmth into my veins. I returned to the telephone, dialled a number and did not let the images of André fighting for his life in that stifling room upstairs rob me of words.
‘Hello.’ My voice came out rough. ‘May I speak to Major Dirke, please?’
*
I sat in my car outside the gates
, engine rattling like a wheezy lawnmower, while I waited for the guards on duty to decide to open them. The wind had dropped as the worst of the storm passed out to sea, but the rain was still coming down in sheets, trickles of it sneaking under my canvas roof and dripping on to my shoulder.
‘Come on,’ I muttered. I was frightened they wouldn’t let me in again.
But Major Joel Dirke was as good as his word. He was waiting beside the guard-kiosk, raised a hand in greeting and jumped into my passenger seat. The gates swung open and the guard waved us through as I peered through my drenched windscreen into the black night. The streetlights on the air base blurred and starred as if they were swimming underwater, but I followed Joel Dirke’s instruction and pulled up outside a building that was marked ‘Recreation Hall’. I wasn’t here for recreation.
‘We’ll make a run for it through the rain,’ he laughed. ‘Ready?’ He had his fingers on the door handle.
‘Joel, will you sit here a moment first, please?’ I rested my hand lightly on the arm of his wet raincoat and swivelled to face him. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’
He looked at me, surprised.
Say yes, Joel, say yes. I am staking everything on you.
I smiled at him encouragingly. The outside lights from the building shone into the interior of my car, turning us both an odd shade of green.
‘Well now,’ he said, his Southern drawl more pronounced, ‘what’s this all about? No more thatched-roof arson, I hope, or hand-grenade attacks. It’s getting increasingly dangerous around here.’ He laughed again and I thought how easily it came from him.
‘Joel, my brother has been taken.’
‘Taken? What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean he was abducted this afternoon.’
He was a military man, so his jaw didn’t drop open, but it came close. ‘You’re talking about André Caussade?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hell, Eloïse, that’s terrible, what happened? Have you informed the police?’
The Guardian of Lies Page 26