by Ian G Moore
Lombard was silent again, wary of voicing his thoughts. He decided he would do so anyway, especially as Aubret seemed in such a good mood. ‘This gives us something else to work on then. Something that isn’t Joan-related.’
‘I thought you’d say that.’ Aubret sighed.
Lombard decided to push the theory. ‘Let’s check on the contracts for public work handed out by the Mairie. Are they all legitimate or does Marquand get more than he should? Singleterry, backed by Marquand for Mayor, would get Madame Battiston’s back up. Especially if she hasn’t been entirely above board. Or, Singleterry suspected corruption and was prepared to do something about it? That would implicate all three of them. Maybe the mayor and Marquand are closer than they let on.’
‘Ok. I get it. How does Lagasse fit into that theory then?’
‘A weak man, who probably knew more than he wanted to. In other words, as dangerous as Singleterry in his own way.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Well, look it’s a theory and as Juge d’Instruction I could give you the legal permission to investigate the accounts, but that would make everything public and I don’t really want to do that.’ He looked Aubret squarely in the eye.
‘You mean, find another way?’
‘Lemery.’
‘Ok. I’ll get her on to it this afternoon.’ Aubret said reluctantly and stood up too, though more slowly than the wiry Lombard. ‘If it turns out that all the Joan stuff was a smokescreen, that’s a very elaborate smokescreen.’
‘That’s the point. The big diversion.’ He went quiet again. It might not only be a diversion either, but designed to put people completely off going any further, more a barrier. Nobody wants the symbolism and the division of Joan of Arc in the murder of an Englishman in France. It needed someone as toxic as Lombard to take that on. People would run a mile from it in fact; Llhermanault certainly had. If it turns out to be as workaday as local government corruption, Llhermanault would come storming back for the glory. And Lombard couldn’t help wondering what would happen to him then. Swept out with the rest of the corrupt, probably. ‘A new start for the Touraine,’ he could see Llhermanault announcing at the launch of his political career.
‘I’m going back to the office then. Can I give you a lift?’ Aubret was playing with the keys in his pocket. Lombard, mulling over the offer, spotted a florist just packing up the last of her flowers.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes.’
Chapter 19
The tuneless, comfortingly old-fashioned bell from a passing tram jolted Lombard from…well, from what? He’d be hard-pressed to know what himself really, a daydream? A mental blackout? It happened sometimes. He just kind of blanked out, like a screensaver on a computer monitor, not completely off but not really on either. It happened when he was nervous, or stressed, or bored, or tired. It happened more often than he cared to admit probably. Madeleine described it as one of his armadillo moments. He sighed heavily. He really must stop looking at every situation or emotion through the prism of what Madeleine would have thought. Then immediately he cursed himself for searching how she might have described exactly that thought.
He was standing at an upstairs window in the Palais de Justice looking across the fountains outside. It was a view he liked. It was the same one as that from his old office. His current office, he corrected himself. An office that was less than a metre away on the other side of the wall he was now leaning against. Just half a metre, though the distance felt much, much greater than that. He turned to knock at the door, something he’d been toying with doing for the last fifteen minutes. He shook his head again, put the regrettably blousy, over-the-top bunch of flowers he’d bought back on the windowsill and resumed his scrutiny of the centre of Tours once again.
It calmed him immensely. Its sturdiness, its grandeur. Parts of it, parts he sought out when the mood took him, were for darker moods but this view offered solidity and a safe haven. There were no shifting sands here, no instability, that’s why the Palais de Justice is where it is, he’d always believed. It was Tours’ very own rock. Nothing changed here. Even the tram system, of which he approved, though only a few years old, was really nothing more than retro modernisation.
This isn’t getting you anywhere, he said to himself, and snatched up the flowers in his right hand. He turned and with the same hand banged over-aggressively on the door, scattering petals on to the floor.
‘Entréz,’ answered a calm female voice from within. It was a confident, soothing voice, practised at coping with sudden outbursts and not be in the least bit derailed by them. He opened the door but stayed standing in its frame.
‘Hello Muriel,’ he said, in a voice he hoped was riddled with apology.
Muriel Fauvion, one of the clerks of the magistrature, looked up from her computer screen. If she was surprised to see him it didn’t show, and she raised an eyebrow.
‘I would say, Monsieur le juge, that you are at least, at least, a day late.’ Her manner was cool, to the point of being offhand. Then she smiled warmly, the frostiness an act.
‘Yes. I’m sorry about yesterday.’ Still holding the flowers, he scratched his head with the same hand, showering even more petals on the floor.
‘And lilies. How nice.’ She was still smiling. ‘I still have the last bunch you bought me.’ She pointed to a pot plant on her desk, a pot containing obviously synthetic lilies. ‘So much more practical, don’t you think?’
‘Lilium candidum,’ Lombard said weakly, once again allowing trivia to replace proper conversation. ‘It’s so very good to see you again Muriel,’ he added hurriedly.
‘Well I haven’t been anywhere!’ She stood up quickly, walked around her desk and hugged him. Then she stood back – did he see a tear? – and thrust her cheek forward for the more formal greeting. Lombard obliged.
‘You look well,’ he said awkwardly. He knew full well that Muriel had always had a crush on him, although it had taken Madeleine to point this out in either his innocence or ignorance. But ever since, he’d been almost formally awkward around her. Something which had amused both Madeleine and Muriel in a way that it could only amuse assured, attractive French women.
She was tall, which gave her a natural confidence to go with her elegance, and quite beautiful too. She still wore a wedding ring despite the fact her husband had left her after a few years because he felt out of his depth. Some men would have thrived on having a stunning wife but he couldn’t, so he left her with a young son, Léo, and moved north where, for some reason, he felt more comfortable. Now in her mid-30s, men were still intimidated by her stature and so she remained single, hoping one day that that would change.
‘How’s Léo?’ He and Madeleine had sometimes taken Léo out on day trips. In particular he’d loved Futuroscope, which Madeleine had said would be good for him, having vetoed on principle a visit to Euro Disney.
‘He’s well. He misses you.’ In her own way, she was telling him off. He’d never even seen her raise her voice, but there was an edge to this that he wasn’t going to be allowed to ignore.
‘I’m sorry. I haven’t been very sociable I know, but… it was probably for the best.’
‘No. No I don’t think so.’ Muriel said, tying her long blond hair up in a bun behind her head. There was a difficult silence. ‘Still, you’re back now.’ She smiled warmly, breaking the tension, and moved back behind her desk. ‘Unsurprisingly, there’s a mountain of paperwork for you.’
An inner door opened loudly, interrupting them, and an older man stood holding on to the handle, looking as though he would keel over if he let it go.
‘Ah, Juge Lombard.’ The old man tried to stand tall to add to his presence but his shoulders were hunched over with age. ‘Presumably you had to ask directions to your office did you?’ The old man spat the word ‘your’ as he’d spat the word ‘juge’ and was clearly unhappy to see Lombard’s return. He walked into the office and threw some files onto Muriel’s desk without acknowledging her.
‘Juge D
ampierre.’ Lombard offered a respectful tone. He had known Dampierre all his professional life and the respect was genuine. Though, in this case, one-sided. He stepped forward to shake the old man’s hand and was greeted with a cold, clammy and limp response. It was like holding a fillet of fish.
‘Come in, Lombard. I’ve a few things to say.’ The old man turned and shuffled back into the inner office with Lombard following, and rolling his eyes at Muriel as he went to shut the door behind him.
‘That’s fine juge Lombard,’ she said loudly, ‘I’ll let you know when the call comes through.’ She winked at him and he smiled a discreet half smile.
The blinds were down in the inner office, which surprised Lombard. It was ostensibly his office of course, and he didn’t even know it had blinds. Why would you shut out the light? Another tram clanged its bell as it passed below, causing Dampierre to tut at its interruption. If he does that every time, thought Lombard, he must spend most of the day tutting.
‘You don’t like trams?’ Again, showing respect for his senior, he took the chair on the guest’s side of the large desk. His desk. And which he now realised he felt strangely territorial towards. He looked around. The place felt oddly familiar and strange at the same time. Nothing had changed. He’d never been one for office decorations anyway. There were a few generic pictures on the wall, typical local scenes like the Fûtreau boats on the river or vines, but nothing that could be attributed to him. There was nothing of his personality here, unless you counted that diffidence a perfect example of his personality.
‘Trams.’ Dampierre had a way of elongating words so he could get maximum dislike into the one syllable. Hunched as he was, and almost coughing out words, he resembled a hermit who’d been interrupted by a world he had long ago forsaken. ‘They’re just more unnecessary distractions,’ he added gruffly without looking up as he put some books in a box. ‘There are too many distractions.’ He said like it was a summing up of life itself. Too many distractions, your honour, your witness.
There was a time Lombard would have just let the old man carry on. Let him blow himself out like a storm. But he wasn’t interested in that anymore. Having no-one to share the day’s events with any longer, he had no outlet for frustration, so he felt more inclined to nip things in the bud instead. ‘We can’t be totally isolated, Juge,’ he sighed, not bothering to hide how wrong he thought the old man was.
‘Can’t we?’ Dampierre seemed almost to pounce on the words. ‘Can’t we really? I disagree actually.’
Lombard crossed his legs and brushed off some imaginary dust from his lap. He’d been expecting this of course. He hadn’t actually given any thought at all as to who would step into his shoes during his absence, but as it was old man Dampierre he was waiting for the lecture. He still vainly tried to head it off though.
‘We are very different creatures, Dampierre.’ Lombard adopted a tone of formal informality and letting the old judge know they were actually equals. ‘Our goal is the same, we just take a different route that’s all.’
‘Our goal?’ Again Dampierre left the word spattered on the floor. ‘What do you mean our goal? The truth is our goal. Our only goal. No Lombard! No I don’t think so! Not at all. My goal is justice by the rule of law, written constitutional law. Yours is vanity, Monsieur, pure vanity. Running around with the police, like a sidekick.’ He slammed an antiquated, red-leather bound Code Pénal book onto the desk and dust flew up from the green-shaded banker’s desk light as he did so.
Lombard felt like pointing out the reason Dampierre was probably so hunched was a lifetime of being bent over a desk. He should have got out more. It would have changed his posture in all senses of the word. He didn’t though, he just sighed again.
‘I like to…’ He began.
‘You like yourself! That’s my opinion and I’m entitled to it. And where has it got you? A suspension of sorts. Well you were lucky. It should have been total disgrace. It may yet be.’
‘Monsieur, there are…’
“You threw away evidence, damn you! That’s what I’m told anyway. Evidence!’ He repeated. ‘Why? What right have you to do so? We interpret the law, not make our own, not bend it to suit.’ He’d clearly been working up to this exchange for a year. ‘You have discredited our profession, disgraced it, disgraced the law itself…’ He sat down, suddenly exhausted. ‘That the man was eventually convicted anyway despite you. A thug, a violent brute of a man, an animal, a murderer, might have gone free. You should both have been locked up.’
Lombard thought back to that day. He and Aubret had stood over the body of a young woman, raped and beaten. The most likely suspect at that stage had been her boyfriend, Gustav, who had a violent past. It just seemed a matter of gathering all the evidence from the scene and locking the case down. Lombard need not have been there, should not have been there. Madeleine was seriously ill by this time and he now suspected her affair also. Inside he was a broken man. He was losing his beloved wife, his dearest friend, the other half of him, to cancer. But also, he had lost her to someone else in the meantime. And like a fool, he’d had no idea.
She’d asked him to get something from her bag, and he’d found an engraved Zippo lighter. He’d asked innocently about it, but her defensiveness bordered on angry. Telling him to put it back. It wasn’t hers. Later, as she slept, he went back to her bag. The lighter, engraved with an ornate G, shone in the kitchen light. The same G, entered on multiple occasions in her diary, equally fussily to match the engraving. A high, anticipatory swirl, swooping down to start the G with a relish. He felt like he’d been hit by a train.
While the dead woman lay there, Aubret had been talking, running through the murder scene out loud, and with his back to a non-listening Lombard who was staring out of her apartment window. Lombard was playing with the lighter he had taken from Madeleine’s bag.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Aubret had shouted. ‘Is that Gustav’s lighter? Did you find that here? That’s fucking evidence.’
Lombard had ignored him. Put the lighter in his pocket and walked out.
An argument ensued in the street, out on to the south bank of the Loire. All Lombard had to do was calmly explain what the lighter was, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t admit it to himself even, let alone to Aubret. He didn’t realise it then, but he was looking for a way out. The utter desolation of watching his wife die, the pressures of the job, now this…
As Aubret stood in the street and demanded the evidence, Lombard had reached into his pocket and made a big play of throwing the thing into the river. Despite searches it was never found. In the end there was more than enough evidence to convict the man, but Aubret had reported him, Lhermanault had suspended him, now Dampierre cursed him.
‘I don’t know why I’m even packing my things away, Lombard. You’ll fuck up again soon.’ His ardour surprised even himself and he looked at the door hoping that his cursing hadn’t fallen on female ears. An old-fashioned man whose manners and sensibilities were all for show, thought Lombard with sudden distaste, a dinosaur.
The desk phone rang and Dampierre picked it up irritably. For a moment Lombard imagined it was Muriel ringing to admonish the old judge for his language.
‘Yes…what? Oh. It’s for you.’
Lombard took the phone with a forced gravity.
‘Ready to get out yet?’ Muriel said jauntily on the other end.
‘I’ll be there immediately.’ He put the phone down. ‘I have to go.’
‘Off to play cops and robbers again are we? Pah! The next talk we have, Lombard,’ Dampierre leaned forward menacingly, looking like a scavenging crow sniffing roadkill, ‘will, I hope, be on the record.’
‘Then I hope you’ll mind your language Monsieur,’ Lombard said flatly and walked out.
He closed the door behind him and Muriel smiled at him as he did so.
‘You should have rung ahead. I could have warned you he was here.’
‘It’s all bluster.’ He stayed leaning against the
door.
‘It’s not and you know it. He wants you out and he’s not going to let it go.’
Lombard approached the desk and started playing with the synthetic lily. ‘Well he may find he’s in a queue.’ He was trying to sound cheery, but Muriel wasn’t buying it. ‘He has nothing and there is nothing. Don’t worry.’
‘As long as you’re not worried.’ She was like a mother hen, protective and rebuking all at the same time.
He avoided eye contact and started playing with the plastic plant on her desk, ‘It’s amazing you still have this.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘Which is a good thing. I’m useless with plants and I haven’t had to do anything with this since you were last here.’
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly and walked out.
Chapter 20
Clotilde Battiston closed the glass door of the brasserie, turned the hanging, gold embossed door sign from ‘OUVERT’ to ‘FERMÉ’ and let go a huge sigh of relief. She stood for a few moments looking out at the now empty terrasse and the market beyond, where the last few vans were packing up. You’d never have known it, she thought proudly, reflecting on a seamless morning. Three deaths and her town still ran like clockwork, and she could take great credit for that. Three deaths, though. She included Allardyce in the numbers. The ‘Saint’ had been her guilty pleasure in the absence of others, despite the language barrier, though they hadn’t done much talking anyway. She sighed again, this one softer, a lament. ‘I realise it’s probably not the right thing to say,’ she said without turning round, ‘but I rather enjoyed that.’
‘Drink?’ asked Nicolas Marquand, standing behind the bar and already pouring himself a Muscat into a small fluted glass.
‘I’d love one.’ She turned and sat on a bench seat near the front tables. ‘But I have to go and open up the surgery in half an hour.’ She took off her shoes, revealing surprisingly delicate feet, and began rubbing one of them.
‘Madame?’ A very thin girl with long dark curly hair emerged from the back room, untying her short, stained apron.