A Poisonous Journey

by Malia Zaidi

  "Just Listen. If we tell him we consider her to be guilty, perhaps he will be more forthcoming. He will not want her to be in trouble. Little does he know, in a manner of speaking she already is."

  "Hm … it’s rather deceptive, don’t you think? He may know nothing."

  "Maybe not. Should that be the case, I confess, I am running out of ideas. Niobe’s affair with Paul must be important in all of this."

  Before I can react, he points to a narrow lane, which barely holds the impressive mass of the Delage.

  "Don’t pull in," Daniel advises as I slow the car to make the precarious turn. "Park it here on the side of the road. The house is second on the left."

  I let my eyes wander to an elegant townhouse with a slightly faded ochre exterior and boxes of bright purple flowers gracing the shuttered windows.

  "Do you think they are out?"

  "No, I see Paul’s bicycle. They close the shutters on the lower levels in the evening to prevent crime."

  Turning the engine off, we spend the next few minutes sitting in silence. A growing sense of tension and dread is mounting inside of me. Is it right to do this, I wonder? Is it right to disrupt a man’s life by confronting him with his mistakes? He has been through so much, and now … What do we even expect will happen?

  I glance over at Daniel. He needs to do something. To keep moving, to remain involved. Caspar’s funeral is in two days.

  "Let’s do it." He offers me a weak smile.

  "Right." Climbing out of the car, we pull up the roof. Daniel’s mention of neighborhood crime makes me feel acutely responsible for the safety of this lovely gleaming block of metal.

  Walking to the ochre house, I can hear sounds of a phonogram from beyond the walls. A slow, sad melody fills the air with an atmospheric hum. A breeze whips around the corner, tugging at my skirt. It is cooler up here in the mountains, and I suddenly yearn to be back at the villa. This confrontation, peaceful as we want it to be, worries me and has my stomach in knots. Before I can say I’ve changed my mind, I’ll wait in the car, thank you very much, Daniel has clasped the brass knocker and rapped it against the solid wood of the door.

  The music continues humming beyond the walls. After a moment, we hear the faint tapping of nearing footsteps. Then the door swings open to reveal a stern-faced woman of about forty, wearing a plain gray cotton dress and flat shoes.

  "Yes?" She asks, not disguising her distaste at our disturbance.

  "Daniel Harper and Evelyn Carlisle. We are here to talk to Paul, Mr. Vanderheyden. Is he home?"

  She narrows her eyes and reluctantly opens the door to let us step in. Without another word she then leads us down the narrow corridor to the back of the house. Paul is sitting on the terrace, smoking a thick cigar and reading in the last of the evening light.

  "Mr. Vanderheyden," her tone is flat and sharp, and Paul immediately swivels around in his seat.

  "Yes, Miss—" his face tightens for an instant as he registers Daniel and me standing in the woman’s shadow. "Oh, Daniel, Miss Carlisle, what a surprise." He stands, unable to hide the fact that this suprise is not of the entirely welcome variety. I cannot blame him.

  "Paul, I am sorry to impose on you at your home," Daniel begins and is immediately interrupted by Paul, who has recovered and is friendly as ever.

  "Nonsense, I am always happy to receive guests. Please, sit down. Would you like anything to drink, to eat?"

  Daniel and I politely decline. Paul turns to the woman who is staring at us, framed in the light of the hallway behind her. "Miss Holm, thank you. You may go." She frowns, then follows his instruction and disappears.

  Paul takes his original seat beside Daniel and across from me. "Now, if you are not here to share a drink with me, tell me what is on your mind. Has anything happened? Are Jeffrey and Briony all right?"

  "They are well, thank you." I say, hoping Daniel will take the lead in this conversation and come to the point quickly. I cannot stand the thought of sitting here in Paul’s friendly presence when we have come to place another burden on his shoulders.

  "Paul," Daniel begins, "is Rosie at home?"

  "Rosie? Why yes, she is resting."

  "That is good. We must speak to you in private."

  Paul’s forehead creases in puzzlement, but his face still wears the amiable expression I have grown accustomed to. "You are worrying me, Daniel. Tell me, what is the matter?"

  "I," Daniel swallows, "we, I should say," nodding in my directon, "we have discovered something concerning you."

  "Me? Well, out with it." Paul’s tone is light-hearted, though his jaw is tightening.

  "All right. We know about your relationship with Niobe."

  For a moment, there is silence and I think Paul will deny it; he will laugh and say she lied. However, and to my dismay, his friendly face falls and turns pale.

  "Paul," I say gently, "we are not here to condemn you. We understand—"

  "No!" He shakes his head, and I observe his hands clenched in fists in his lap. "With all due respect, you do not understand, Miss Carlisle. And you should be glad you do not." He shudders and runs a shaky hand through his gleaming blond hair.

  "I am sorry."

  "No," his voice, when it returns, is thick and low. Tears are collecting in the corners of his eyes. "Don’t be sorry. Did she tell you? Yes, she must have. She is your maid, is she not?"

  "She is."

  "I thought so. She is so young. She should not have been expected to keep a secret like that. I confess, I hoped she would."

  "She only told me the truth, because I made a terrible accusation."

  "Accusation? What do you mean?"

  "I though Caspar had been her lover. I suspected her of having been guilty of his murder."

  "Proposterous!" Paul’s eyes grow wide and he looks genuinely stunned.

  "Is it?" Daniel probes.

  "Of course it is. She would never, could never …" Paul takes a deep breath to calm himself. I feel wretched for causing him more misery.

  "Anyone can be capable of anything," Daniel throws in speculatively. "Poison is said to be a woman’s weapon."

  "Nonsense. Complete nonsense. Caspar liked to flirt, but Niobe did not care about him, certainly not enough to harm him."

  "No?"

  "No, and she had an alibi, or did you forget that?"

  "Calm yourself, Paul, Niobe is an unlikely suspect. Although, we have discovered Caspar was blackmailing people. He might have blackmailed her. Niobe, as you know, is set to marry Yannick. If it became known she was—" Daniel breaks off, the truth now too clear to avoid. He turns pale and stares at Paul.

  "What?" Paul glares in confusion. "What is it?"

  I notice Daniel’s hands shaking ever so slightly when he clasps them firmly together in an attempt to steady himself. "Caspar might have blackmailed you." His voice is hoarse, almost a whisper.

  "Me?" Paul’s eyes grow large, two big blue orbs of sweet innocence. "Don’t be absurd! I did not like the man. We had little to do with one another. He most certainly was not blackmailing me."

  "But he was." I add, playing along, trying for confidence. "He kept a diary of his exploits, using abbreviations for his victim’s names. ‘PV’ was among them. Isn’t that right, Daniel?" I ask, hoping he will play along, and wondering whether we are completely wrong. PV was not noted in the journal, nor anything like Paul’s name.

  "I’m afraid it is."

  "So? There are many men with the letters ‘P’ and ‘V’ in their names. It proves nothing." He is still calm. Despite the chill in the air, I notice tiny beads of perspiration dotting his brow. What if Daniel is right? What if all this time …

  "Not men of Caspar’s aquaintance," counters Daniel, a vein pulsing in his neck. I can see more than hear anger beginning to boil inside him, though his tone is still even, the effort to remain calm now as agonizing for him as it is for me. I am itching to squirm in my seat and make a dash for the door, all the while obliquely grateful that we declined Paul’
s offer of food and drink.

  "Daniel, Miss Carlisle, I understand your frustration, but to come to my home and make these accusations, unfounded accusations …" Paul shakes his head.

  "Niobe knows, doesn’t she?" I say with a burst of clarity. "About the blackmail? She knew Caspar had threatened to expose you, both of you. Her alibi is solid but yours is not, is it Paul? You were in the museum. The museum is large. You could easily have snuck out for an hour, driven to the villa and returned."

  "Madness, this is madness! I want you to leave, both of you. Please, get out of my house." Paul jumps to his feet, his cheeks an angry shade of pink, and he is pointing a finger at the door.

  I look at Daniel for an indication of what he is thinking. He stays glued to his chair, staring at Paul with undisguised contempt.

  Emboldened I plough on. "Yes, it’s true, is it not? You slipped out of the museum, knowing from Niobe, the villa would be empty but for Caspar. You drove there with your bottle of wine, probably to convince him you would pay the blackmail money and to seal the transaction with a glass. Caspar thought he had won and didn’t notice when you did not drink." I do not pause to let him offer an explanation or defense. "Then he collapsed, and you left. You left him there to die. You murdered him and drove back to work as if nothing had happened!" I have grown loud, my voice carrying a hint of authority I did not know I possessed. My eyes are sharp and focused, probing his.

  He does not speak, but runs a trembling hand through his already tousled hair. A droplet of perspiration drips down the bridge of his nose. For a moment, the air is thick with silence, with the impact of the terrible words that have just been spoken ringing in our ears.

  "Paul?" Daniel sounds almost afraid. "It is true, isn’t it? All of it. You killed him?" I watch him as he inhales deeply, wide eyes fixed on the hulk of a man in shambles before us. Will he confess? Will he admit what is now obvious?

  "You wanted to protect Rosie and Niobe as well as yourself," I mutter quietly, hoping to coax an admission from him by disguising his deed with some veil of selfless valor.

  Another moment passes, his silent frozen expression a confession in itself. Finally, as I am about to speak again, his mouth opens and he licks his lower lip.

  "It was for Rosie. For Rosie, she has suffered, suffered so badly. I could not have her humiliated."

  I am eager to say that he, too, would have been humiliated, and so would poor Niobe, though I now wonder whether she is as innocent in all of this as she claims to be. Did she not perhaps alert Paul about Caspar being alone in the villa? Even if she did not know what Paul was planning, she would have understood that he was likely the last person to have been alone with Caspar. She told him he could be found at the villa that day, thus making him the likely suspect.

  "You admit it?" Daniel asks in a grim voice.

  Paul slumps down in his seat. His long, large frame suddenly collapses like a fallen soufflé. "I had no choice." He whispers.

  "You might have come to me!" Daniel shouts desperately. "You might have told me. I would have helped. I would have spoken to Caspar! You did not have to kill him! You never had to kill him." He shakes his head, his eyes swimming.

  "I could not come to you, Daniel, you know I could not. I would have had to betray Niobe. I would have paid, you know. I care little for money, but he asked so much. So much. I need to pay a nurse for Rosie. I need to provide for her. I could think of no way out. There was no reasoning with Caspar. I tried." Paul gestures, palms stretched outward like a helpless child, "I tried to plead with him, told him I could not pay what he demanded. He would not listen. He laughed at me. Threatened me. He would have taken what little I had and never stopped asking for more."

  He is pleading with us, and I am shocked how well he has hidden his desperation for so long. Shocked, too, by the stab of pity I feel for him as he crumbles apart in front of us; such a solid man reduced to teary-eyed pleas for understanding.

  Daniel is unaffected. "You expect compassion? You murdered my oldest friend."

  "He was a horrible man, Daniel. He was no friend to you, as you well know. Death makes us remember the departed through rosy glasses, but we cannot deny that he was a bad man."

  True as this may be, it is entirely the wrong line to take with Daniel, gripping the armrests of his chair with angry white knuckles, his jaw tight, his forehead set in deep lines.

  Worried he will either implode or explode, I say, "Paul, whatever type of person Caspar was, he was still a person. You took his life, Paul. It was not self-defense, it was calculated murder." There seems nothing more to say, so we sit together in miserable silence, watching each other’s shock-frozen faces.

  Finally, it is Paul who finds his voice again. "After the war, even before, but especially after, I loathed violence. My father had been a violent man until I grew too big to be bullied. I never fought back, never raised a hand to him in my defense. Then the war began. I read about the horrendous acts of violence men committed against other men, and I thought I could never be such a man. I could never betray my species so horribly, so permanently. I know you fought, Daniel, and I am not criticising you, truly, I didn’t see the front, so I cannot judge what one does as a soldier in the heat of battle, in a struggle to survive. I am sure you did what you had to do, and I can tell, it pains you to this day."

  I glance in Daniel’s direction. He will not meet my eye, staring instead at some place in the distance with a passive expression, hollowed out.

  Paul continues, "When I met Rosie, I knew almost instantly I had to marry her, and she felt the same." A soft smile appears and vanishes again in an instant. "Then the accident happened, yet I remained hopeful. Hopeful she would improve, and things could be as we always wished them to be. I took this position, thinking it would do her good. Nothing has changed. She nods and smiles, but there is nothing left of who she was.

  "Six months or so after we arrived here, I met Niobe. At first, well, at first I never imagined … never intended …" He rubs a tear from his eye with the side of his thumb. "We fell in love, or at least into a sort of passionate liking for one another. She was so alive and real and aware, so unlike Rosie. It went on for months. It was too easy, really. I was heavy with guilt. Every time we met, I said to myself it must end, nothing good will come of it. Then it did end. Niobe wanted me to leave Rosie, to marry her. Of course I couldn’t do that. I am married to Rosie and will remain so. I didn’t want to give Niobe false hope, or steal more of her affection when I knew I could not fully return it. She is so young and beautiful and kind, she deserves someone real, not a shadow like me."

  "You ended the affair." I comment, knowing the story and more.

  "Yes, but not before Caspar discovered it." He shakes his head wistfully. "I often think, ‘if only we had not met that day’, but we do that, don’t we? If only this, if only that. It doesn’t change a thing. Not a thing. It just made my guilt and fear grow. He waited another two weeks before coming to me for money. I was even more upset, because, by then, Niobe and I were no longer in a relationship. I tried to reason with him. I told him it was over, begged him to keep quiet. The humilation would have been terrible for all of us. I was afraid Rosie, if she understood somehow, would retreat further into herself, lost forever."

  His story truly does sounds very sad, although I fear Rosie has been gone too long for her to come back now. Each time I have met her, there has been little more than a faint glimmer of life. It must have driven Paul nearly to madness, watching her this way day in and day out. I cannot forget what he did, and I cannot justify it, though I confess, a part of me understands.

  "I did the only thing I could in my desperation. I went to the villa and told him I would give him the money. I brought the poison, not the wine, not truly trusting I would do anything, still hoping I could somehow convince him to change his mind. As you now know, I failed. It was he who suggested we seal the agreement with a toast. I was so repulsed by his glee at my expense that I agreed. I know where the kitchen is, si
nce I have been to the villa often. I fetched a bottle and two glasses. I had no intention of sharing even a drop of wine with this man. Instead I tipped the poison into the bottle. When I went outside he gloated and insulted me, saying he never understood what a pretty thing like Niobe would see in me, saying that he would have her next. I watched him as he drank the poisoned wine. I tipped my wine into the grass when he wasn’t looking, so he never even noticed I did not touch it. He did not offer me any more either. Then I left, though not before cleaning my own glass and replacing it in the kitchen.

  "I was in disbelief of what I had done. Halfway to Heraklion, I was almost convinced it had not happened, or that he hadn’t ingested enough, that he would survive. I felt relief, truly I did. But then …"

  "Then he died," Daniels says flatly.

  "He died." Paul concedes, pressing his lips together in a pale line before looking up and asking, "What will happen now?" His tone suggests he already knows, and from his slumped shoulders and weary expression I presume he has resigned himself to his fate.

  "You will be formally arrested and tried and …" even Daniel can hardly bring himself to speak the words aloud.

  "And hanged." Paul finishes the morbid thought.

  "It is a possibility," I somehow hope it will not come to this. Paul did something ghastly and irreperable, yet … Oh, I should not think it, but I am sad for him. Sad for what he has lost, what he has become. He is not a monster, though his action was monstrous indeed. I find myself wanting to separate the man from the deed, which cannot, of course, be done.

  "What will happen to Rosie?"

  Daniel and I look at one another, unease written across our features. Rosie. Rosie, who is at this moment so close at hand; Rosie, who will be parted from the person who most believes in her, who most loves her.

  "Is there family? Is there anybody who can take care of her?" I ask cautiously.

  "She has a brother. He lives in Amsterdam."

  "He will be contacted. For now, Rosie will have her nurse to take care of her needs."

  From the stricken expression on Paul’s face, I believe this gives him little comfort. Indeed, for the first time this evening, he looks consumed with pain, closing his eyes tightly as if a wave of agony is passing through him.