by Allan Massie
‘And this girl, was she one of those.’
‘Why are you looking for her, superintendent?’
‘As a witness. To help with our inquiries. Nothing more. As it happens, I don’t even know her name. Doubtless you have records?’
‘Oh records, certainly, but I doubt if they will help you. She was called Amélie, Amélie Hire. Her mother was a fallen woman, a prostitute. She disappeared and the child was brought to us. We were pleased to receive her as an act of charity which is of course our work. She seemed a bright pretty child, I thought we might make something of her. But, as I say, she was already corrupt, and then she absconded.’
‘Is that easy, to run away?’
‘Our girls are not prisoners.’
‘Did you report her disappearance?’
‘Naturally. But she was fifteen. Your colleagues in the police weren’t interested. They shrugged their shoulders. So you see why I say we can be of no help. Your colleagues in that branch of the police which concerns itself with morality, or rather acts of immorality, are more likely to have information about her. We live in a sinful world, superintendent.’
She spoke with self-assurance, but also, it seemed, indifference.
‘If a person refuses God’s Grace … ’ she said and held up her long-fingered hands towards, he supposed, her idea of heaven.
‘So you have no idea where she might be, what may have become of her?’
‘It’s impossible that I should have. We live withdrawn from the world.’
‘And yet,’ Lannes said, ‘didn’t some priest say that no man is an island? There’s another girl in that photograph, the one with fair hair. I believe she hanged herself while she was in your care.’
The Mother Superior glanced again at the photograph and then laid it on the table between them. Neither spoke. The door opened and a young nun entered with a tray on which there was a carafe of yellowish wine, two very small glasses and a plate of biscuits. She poured the wine, set a glass before each of them and, passing the plate to Lannes, said, ‘The biscuits are of our own baking.’ It was sweet wine which Lannes disliked. He replaced his glass.
‘You can’t have forgotten.’
The Mother Superior made no reply, but sipped her wine.
At last she said, ‘It is inexpressibly painful to discover that a child in our charge is guilty of a mortal sin.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Life is a sacred trust, superintendent. To take your life is to deny God. I pray for that poor child’s soul every day.’
‘And you have nothing to reproach yourself with? A failure of care, perhaps?’
‘You have no right to presume so. We cared for the poor child devotedly, as for all those entrusted to us, but the Devil entered into her, and she surrendered to him. Do you know the greatest of his temptations? It is not, as some believe, wealth or power; it is despair. That is the ultimate sin, and the poor child was guilty of it.’
Something in what she said hit home. Lannes had never sought wealth and distrusted rather than envying the rich. He was wary of power as he believed any good policeman should be, for he had known some corrupted by it. But he knew the temptation of despair. The difference was that he didn’t believe in any Devil. The temptation for him was innate, temperamental. But for the ‘poor child’, Kiki’s sister, it was self-disgust, horror at the abuse inflicted on her, that drove her to put a noose round her neck. He was sure of that. It was madness to think that the Devil entered into it, even if you thought of what had been done to her as devilish. It was doubtless futile to argue the question here. Nevertheless, he said, ‘As a policeman I deal with crime, not sin, which isn’t indeed a word in our vocabulary. The poor child you speak of was the victim of a crime, abused by an adult man. And I suspect that the girl I am seeking – the girl of whom you say you know nothing – was another victim of the same crime, committed in both cases while they were in the care of this orphanage.’
‘That is a terrible allegation. It is slander. I think I must ask you to leave, superintendent.’
Lannes looked the Mother Superior in the eye. Her gaze was steady, unwavering.
‘Unpleasant facts may often seem slanderous,’ he said. ‘Truth is unwelcome. I understand that you live out of the world, Mother, but the world may invade even the most closed of convents. Seclusion can’t shut out the law, and isn’t entitled to do so. Moreover the police don’t leave merely because they are asked to do so.’ He took the other photograph, of the advocate Labiche sitting with the little girl naked but for the mask concealing her face, and said, ‘This is the girl you say “absconded”, the girl I am searching for. Do you recognise the man?’
The photograph fell from her long shapely fingers and fluttered to the floor.
‘Yes?’ Lannes said.
‘There must be some mistake.’
‘There’s no mistake.’
‘There must be.’
‘You recognise him?’
‘It looks like the advocate, Monsieur Labiche, which is why I say there must be some mistake, or deception. As you say we live out of the world, but I believe it is possible to do remarkable things with photography, perhaps to superimpose one face on another or to splice two unrelated photographs together. Monsieur Labiche is one of our benefactors, I know him for a man of deep religious feeling, scrupulous in his observances. Which is why I cannot believe what you have shown me and why I say there is deception and trickery here.’
‘It is indeed the advocate,’ Lannes said, ‘and the photograph does not lie. Monsieur Labiche is a hypocrite and a pervert. Now will you help me find the girl?’
‘It is impossible,’ she said.
Her voice was firm but her hands were trembling.
‘It is evidence,’ Lannes said.
‘I cannot believe it. I will not believe it. Monsieur Labiche is a distinguished citizen, a patriotic Frenchmen and a devout Christian. This is some plot, a conspiracy, concocted by the enemies of the Church, the Jews or the Communists I suppose.’
‘It is no plot, no conspiracy, the Jews have been deported by order of the Germans and with the collaboration of the agency of which Monsieur Labiche is the head here in Bordeaux; and I am not a Communist.’
‘Then perhaps it is you who are deceived. Yes, that is quite probable. I assure you, superintendent, I know Monsieur Labiche to be a man of honour.’
‘And I know him, Mother, to be a scoundrel, and I intend to destroy him.’
IX
It had been easy to say that, satisfying also to think that his words might have pricked her self-assurance, but he had achieved nothing. He heard the door of the convent close behind him with a note of finality which suggested he would be refused admission if he ever called there again without a warrant; and there was no reason to ask for one. It was probable that the Mother Superior had been telling the truth; that she did indeed know nothing about the girl in the photographs beyond what she had said. The girl had gone out into the world, years ago; and who could guess what had become of her? It was probable that she had left Bordeaux – he could imagine her eager to do so, to shake, as the saying went, the city’s dust from her feet. Why wouldn’t she have done so? What could there have been to keep her there in the place where she had been so monstrously abused? But, without her testimony he had no case against Labiche. As the advocate himself had said when shown that first photograph, it was evidence of nothing. The Mother Superior had been right in saying that photographs could be falsified. And even if this wasn’t the case and it was proved genuine as he had no doubt it was, no examining magistrate, not even one as well disposed as Bracal, would order the arrest of a distinguished citizen on such flimsy evidence. Not in ordinary times anyway, but then the times today weren’t that. Even so he hesitated to approach Bracal, who would surely hesitate to commit himself.
He had allies of course. The spook Fabien, for whatever undivulged reason he might have, had directed him against Labiche – but given no hint as to how he shoul
d proceed. And Fabien too might soon find himself in trouble, an object of suspicion to whatever regime succeeded Vichy, while the same was true of Edmond de Grimaud and that wretched priest.
Moreover time was short. If d’Herblay – Captain Fracasse, ridiculous nom de guerre – was to be believed, Labiche was already preparing to head for Spain. It was quite likely; he was no fool, could read the writing on the wall, must know that Vichy was finished and that his own role in the deportation of the Jews would at the very least compromise him; he was after all an arch-collaborator. The moment the Boches moved out, he was finished, no matter how many fellow Cagoulards might be willing to offer him protection. And once beyond the Pyrenees he would again be untouchable. No doubt fat-arsed Franco would offer him sanctuary.
Lannes banged his stick against a lamp-post. It wasn’t, he recognised, only a zeal for justice that drove him on. He was engaged in a personal vendetta. Labiche had tried to destroy him with his malicious accusations. He might have destroyed what was left of his marriage; it was unlikely that Marguerite would ever trust him again, for he sensed that she didn’t believe him when he denied having had an affair with Yvette. He couldn’t blame her for that. He had indeed destroyed her trust when he omitted to tell her of Alain’s plans, and she had said, roundly and more than once, that for this reason she could never trust him again. Moreover, wasn’t it likely that there had been something in his voice when he spoke of Yvette that had betrayed him? He had committed adultery so often in his imagination that he might as well, he thought now as before, have yielded to temptation, acted on his desire for the girl. If he went to her now in the Pension Bernadotte, wouldn’t he say ‘yes’ and eagerly accept what she so willingly offered? Perhaps he was going mad. But at least his steps weren’t leading him to Mériadeck …
Labiche? There were two possible courses of action.
The shutters of the house in the rue d’Aviau were closed; there would be many, especially perhaps in the city’s ‘upper crust’, who would be anxious and eager to shut the world out now. He pulled the bell-rope and lifted the door-knocker and banged it hard, remembering how he had been kept waiting there on his first visit more than four years ago when it was still the drôle de guerre, the phoney war which so many of the French – and not only those on the Right – hoped would never come to action but would be resolved by men of good sense. Who wanted, as the question had been, to die for Danzig, or to defend the integrity of Poland? So many deaths since; so many, he feared, still to come. The old count, who had requested the visit of a senior policeman on a confidential matter, was one of the dead, murdered, Lannes believed, by his illegitimate son, the Fascist and criminal Sigi. How long ago it seemed! The Count had been a wicked old man. Lannes had rather liked him. He banged the knocker again, and waited, the sun hot and high in a cloudless sky.
At last he heard bolts being withdrawn and old Marthe stood before him.
‘So it’s you again,’ she said, ‘like the bad penny.’
‘How are you, Marthe?’
‘How should I be? Is it the Count you want to see, or Monsieur Edmond? You’ll get no sense from the one and no truth from the other.’
‘I’ve come to speak with the Count, but I’ll happily see Monsieur Edmond too.’
She sniffed loudly and turned away, moving slowly on account of her arthritis, and showed him into the salon.
‘It’s that policeman again,’ she said. ‘Tell him whatever he wants to know, and don’t be daft. Then he’ll maybe stop disturbing the house.’
Jean-Christophe, the present Comte de Grimaud, was sitting where Lannes had last seen him, in his father’s chair, with the canaries flitting about in the cage which stood on a pedestal behind it. He wore a silk dressing-gown over an unbuttoned shirt, and, though the room was cool, even chilly, behind the closed shutters, sweat stood out on his forehead. There was a decanter of wine on the occasional table to the right of the chair, as there had been every time Lannes had seen him sitting there, and he was holding a glass which he emptied and then refilled, knocking the decanter against the rim and spilling a little, as soon as he recognised the superintendent.
‘I’ve done nothing. You’ve no reason to be here,’ he said.
Lannes sat down and lit a cigarette.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve done anything,’ he said, ‘nothing, that is, that might concern me. You’ve got a record of course, of interfering – to put it mildly – with little girls. We’ve talked about that before, when the woman who used to procure them for you was murdered, and you assured me then that all that was behind you. I believed what you said, and I still do. So you have no cause to be alarmed.’
Jean-Christophe mopped his brow with a handkerchief which he then replaced inside the sleeve of his dressing-gown.
‘You despise me,’ he said. ‘I know that, so it’s natural that I should be disturbed to see you.’
‘Despise you?’ Lannes said. ‘People are always telling me I despise them, and they’re always wrong. I deplore, even detest, what you have done in the past, that’s true, but to my mind you are weak, not wicked, which is why you can’t live with yourself without the support of alcohol, and why I feel sympathy for you, and not contempt. However … ’
He took the photograph of Labiche and the naked girl from his pocket and handed it to the Count.
‘I showed you this photograph two years ago and you told me you knew nothing of the girl.’
‘And I didn’t, I don’t.’
‘But you know the man of course. The advocate Labiche was your lawyer, he defended you, and perhaps you are grateful to him. But you are also afraid of him, aren’t you? And that’s natural enough. A lot of people are afraid of Labiche, and with good reason. He collects information, he’s a blackmailer, though it’s power, power over others, that he desires, cherishes indeed, rather than money, isn’t it? I can guess the hold he has over you, but what I’ve come to say is that Labiche is on the way out. His time’s up. He’s backed the losing side and is preparing to escape, to flee France and get to Spain. I want to stop him. So, again, I ask: do you recognise the little girl?’
Jean-Christophe glanced at the photograph and looked quickly away. He handed it back to Lannes and poured himself another glass of wine.
‘I know nothing,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen the girl or, if I have, which I won’t say is impossible, I don’t recognise her and certainly couldn’t put a name to her. It was all years ago. In any case it would be better if Labiche gets to Spain and has to live with himself there. That’s my opinion.’
‘It’s not mine,’ Lannes said. ‘I want him to have to live with himself in prison, with other men who have no time for someone with his proclivities which are, after all, yours too … ’
‘I can’t help you.’
‘Can’t or won’t?’
‘Can’t … won’t … what does it matter?’
The door opened. Edmond de Grimaud entered.
‘Marthe told me you were here. Bullying my poor brother, superintendent? You won’t get anything from him. But we should talk. So leave him alone and come with me.’
He turned away and led Lannes to the little salon with the case of stuffed birds where they had talked several times before.
‘This is the only room in the house,’ Edmond said, ‘where I feel comfortable and at ease. I think of it as my den, even my sanctuary.’
‘And you are in need of a sanctuary?’
‘Aren’t we all? Aren’t we all, Jean? You don’t mind that I call you Jean now. We have – haven’t we – much in common.’
‘Do we?’
‘Oh yes, undoubtedly.’
‘If you are referring to your half-brother Sigi’s suggestion that I too am one of your father’s bastards, let me say it means nothing to me.’
‘But it should, Jean, it should. Blood, as they say, is thicker than water.’
‘That didn’t count for much when you arranged to have me shot outside the Hotel Splendide. Even if I am wha
t you say I am.’
‘Yes,’ Edmond said. ‘Like the shooting of the Duc d’Enghien, that was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. You remember Talleyrand’s judgement? Or was it Fouché’s? I was, quite soon, very glad you survived. Now sit down, please, and have a cigar. We have much to talk about.’
‘I prefer cigarettes.’
Edmond clipped the end off a Havana and rotated the other end in the flame of a match, before putting the cigar in his mouth and drawing on it.
‘And besides,’ he said, ‘our sons have become great friends, “bosom pals”, as the English say. It has pleased me greatly, helped Maurice to grow up. And their work was much praised in Vichy, which may not, I fear, stand to their credit now. Of course I’m in the same position myself as you are well aware. You were surprised, weren’t you, when Monsieur Fabien, as he chooses to call himself, brought me to see you, in the company of that deplorable priest.’
‘Surprised?’ Lannes said. ‘I don’t know. Curious certainly. But then I know very little about him. It has occurred to me that he may be an old friend of yours.’
‘Friend is putting it too strongly, but we have done business together.’
‘In Vichy, I assume.’
‘In Vichy, and before Vichy. Why do you suppose he directed your attention to the advocate Labiche.’
‘There was no need to do so. He was already in my sights.’
‘Good, good.’
Edmond got up, crossed the room, opened the door, then shut it again.
‘Fabien and Labiche,’ he said. ‘They’re two of a kind, you know.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Two of a kind and now they’ve fallen out. I don’t know why, and when I don’t know something like that, I feel a shiver on the back of my neck. Why did you come to question my wretched brother?’