Death at the Château Bremont

by ML Longworth

  “The library, and a first-floor bedroom that has an adjoining bath. That’s about it. The library is through the salon, in the rear of the château.”

  “Let’s have a look. The reporters can bloody well wait.” The salon’s furniture was covered, not with fresh white sheets like those that now protected Verlaque’s grandmother’s furniture, but with psychedelic flowered sheets—no doubt itchy polyester, thought Verlaque—that were the rage in France in the 1970s. Verlaque winced when he realized why he hated those sheets—he hadn’t thought of Aude in months—and his mood turned sour.

  Double doors opened into the library, its shelves covering two walls. The books were a mixture of leather-bound editions of classics, in French, English, Russian, and German, and thousands of paperbacks, in English and French, most of them murder mysteries and westerns.

  “What’s in the desk?” Verlaque asked.

  “Almost nothing, sir. Some paper and pencils, tape, a stapler. No documents.”

  “A safe?”

  “No, sir.”

  Verlaque approached the desk. A small collection of silver-framed photographs sat on its polished wooden surface. “This room is spotless, and the silver frames shine. Who cleans this room?”

  “The caretaker, sir. I noticed the lack of dust and asked him about it. He told me that he insists on cleaning the library himself, while a young girl from the village comes in to clean the rest of the rooms whenever François de Bremont is in residence, which is only a few times a year and at Christmas.”

  Verlaque leaned down and put his reading glasses on. “The old couple in this picture taken in front of the house, they must be the grandparents?”

  “Yes, Philippe and Clothilde de Bremont. In the next photo, taken in the 1970s judging by the guy’s wide tie and her hair, are the parents of Étienne and François de Bremont, both dead now as well.”

  “And the third photo, the brothers in their teens, perhaps fifteen and seventeen it looks like,” Verlaque stated. “I recognize Étienne de Bremont as the skinny guy on the left. The handsome one with the big shoulders and wide toothy grin looks like a Kennedy. That must be François. And who is the girl in the middle? I thought there were only the two sons.”

  “You’re right. There was no mention of a daughter in the report. It must be a cousin or a girlfriend.”

  Verlaque leaned in closer to look at the laughing girl, her thick auburn hair a mess, her green eyes sparkling, and a slender freckled arm around each of the boy’s shoulders. Verlaque began to smile, despite himself. “Take a closer look at the girl,” he said to Paulik. “I think we both know her.”

  Verlaque looked away from the photograph and walked over to a shelf that held a collection of leather-bound editions of French classics. His eyes glazed over as he scanned the titles, and he realized that he would call her as soon as he could, in fact as soon as he stepped out of this cold old house. She had made him smile and laugh—not many women could do that. He had been comfortable with her. A few nights ago a mutual friend had told him that she was now seeing an overly handsome young doctor, and he felt a pain in his stomach that he had never had in connection with a woman before. At first it had been easy, with work and travel, and his nose buried in law books in Paris for four months, to ignore her absence, and he knew from experience that the desire would, with time, disappear. But instead of forgetting about her, as he had so easily done with other lovers, he found himself thinking of her more and more. The poetry didn’t help, nor did the whiskey. One evening, late, he had walked across town to her apartment and rung the bell, but there was no answer.

  “Ah bon?” Paulik too leaned in and looked. “Since you say we both know her, she must still live in Aix,” Paulik said as he looked at the girl. She was laughing despite her picture being taken—and he could almost hear her infectious laugh. Then it clicked. “It’s Professor Bonnet, non?” Marine Bonnet, always one to shake up the conservative law faculty at Aix’s university, loved to invite guest speakers into her classroom, and Verlaque remembered that one of her most well-received guests had been the commissioner. Paulik had enjoyed speaking to her class and thought it hilarious that the law students had gathered around him afterward as if he were a rock star. Verlaque and Marine had also been invited to a dinner hosted by Hélène Paulik’s vintner-boss, and the Pauliks had been briefly present. They left early, Hélène feigning an oncoming flu, though the real reason was Bruno Paulik’s uneasiness about being at a social event with his boss, the examining magistrate.

  “Yes, I think it’s Marine. I’m going to phone her and tell her to come up here tomorrow morning. She obviously knows—or knew—the family intimately.”

  Paulik raised an eyebrow at the suggestion that a layperson, even a law professor, would be invited to the scene of the accident, but he said nothing. Verlaque noticed his expression and shot the commissaire a look over his reading glasses. “I’m the examining magistrate and can invite whoever the bloody hell I want up here. Now,” he said, changing the conversation, since he realized that he was in a foul mood for other reasons—the flowered sheets. “Let’s deal with the reporters out there. The poor sods have been pulled away from their pastis-filled Sunday barbeques.”

  “Yes, sir.” Paulik respected Verlaque and pretended not to hear when other policemen in Aix called him as a snob and an elitist. The judge was thorough and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the law, and although Paulik was very confident in his own knowledge, after each case with Verlaque he came away with new insights. They worked well together, and he knew that the judge felt the same way: Verlaque wasn’t afraid of criminals or of sitting up for hours questioning them, nor was Paulik, whose intimidating physical appearance usually got him respect from the accused. Verlaque didn’t waste time with Paulik, making off-color jokes or referring the women as poulettes. So what if Verlaque drove an expensive car and drank fine wines? But his comment about barbeques was a slight directed at another man’s enjoyment, and Paulik didn’t like it—for he too had been called away from a family lunch in the Luberon, complete with pastis and a barbeque.

  Chapter Two

  The bells at Saint-Jean-de-Malte had already started ringing, as they did each morning at 7:50. In the past the bells served as a warning to churchgoers that they had ten minutes to get to mass. Marine now used them as an alarm to help get herself out of the apartment on time—off to the university or, if she had a late class, to her favorite café.

  When the bells had finally stopped their pealing and she was dressed, Marine opened her bedroom windows and a gust of wind blew in, whipping around the room the pages of the newspaper she had been reading. She leaned out and fastened the shutters against the outer stone wall. The wind temporarily died down, and she looked up at the four stone creatures that jutted out from the corners of Saint-Jean-de-Malte’s medieval tower. They hung on to the church by their rear claws, the rest of their bodies reaching out into the sky, poised to spring away from their foundations at any moment. Marine worried about them sometimes—especially during the mistral, which had started blowing in the middle of the night. Eight hundred years of hanging on—and in an instant the gargoyles could be gone, shattered in a heap on the cobbled square below. Satisfied that the stone creatures were safe, Marine noticed that her neighbor across the courtyard had just opened her shutters and windows too. And before Marine could duck out of the way, Philomène Joubert yelled, across the fifty meters that separated them, and through the blowing wind, “Coucou, Mlle Bonnet!” Not waiting for an answer from Marine, Mme Joubert—or Mme Saint-Jean-de-Malte, as Marine secretly called her, for she’d been a member of the church’s choir since Marine was a little girl—continued to yell as she quickly hung her laundry from wires suspended below her apartment windows.

  “This wind would blow the hair off a bald man!” Mme Joubert shouted, and then laughed heartily. Marine smiled and waited for the line she knew would come next. “Althoug
h it doesn’t blow as much as it used to when I was a girl! I can remember having to be pushed up rue de l’Opéra by my mother—the wind was that strong! But the weather is changing, you know. It’s that climate change they’re calling it! But it will dry our laundry quickly all the same, won’t it, Mademoiselle?” Marine nodded furiously this time and got in an “Ah oui!” But before she could add anything else the old woman had finished her hanging, said good-bye, and popped her head back inside, closing her windows with a well-practiced bang. Mme Joubert had obviously never noticed that Marine seldom hung laundry outside—she had cheated and installed a clothes dryer when she renovated the apartment. She used the excuse that she didn’t have time to hang her laundry, but she hated housework and was too embarrassed to hire a maid. Mme Joubert, on the other hand, was so organized that she did her washing by category. Today was nightgown and pajama day, and there they were: six pairs of men’s cotton pajamas and three or four almost-transparent white nighties, hanging in a row. Tomorrow was what? Maybe tea towel day. Marine had never really been taught how to keep house and believed that while other women all knew the secrets of laundry, wood polishing, and ironing, she was the only one left in the dark. Mme Joubert’s system seemed like an organizational nightmare to Marine. Did she have seven or eight laundry baskets, one for each type of garment?

  Marine looked down at the almond tree, which was beginning to flower, and breathed a sigh of relief that she bought the apartment when prices were still reasonable and Aix-en-Provence wasn’t yet known as “the twenty-first arrondissement of Paris.” She had lived here for over ten years. Still, somehow she couldn’t help but associate Antoine Verlaque with the apartment, as if he had been here for ten years as well, and not just one. He’d enjoyed the time he’d spent here, of that she was fairly certain. After six months of dating, he had moved most of his clothes over, although he’d kept his loft on the other side of Aix. And so if the two hadn’t officially lived together, they had shared some wonderful moments in this apartment: the long summer dinners on the terrace, mesmerized by the church’s illuminated steeple, and sitting in front of winter fires in the living room, while Antoine smoked a cigar and they drank Armagnac and argued law—or anything. He used to rub my tummy, she thought, even when we argued.

  Marine cursed to herself, out loud this time. She had spent too long looking out onto the courtyard and would now have less time for coffee with Sylvie and other friends at Le Mazarin, their preferred café, named for the elegant eighteenth-century neighborhood she lived in. She grabbed her purse, keys, and briefcase and made for the front door, only to turn around, unplug her cell phone from its charger, and throw it into her purse. Locking the door behind her, she skipped down the three flights of steps to the street below, saying good morning to the street cleaner, Sami, who washed her street every morning at eight fifteen. Sami said hello and then pretended to chase her heels with the water hose, and she ran away giggling. It was their morning routine, and it made both of them laugh every time, and for that she was grateful.

  She walked quickly up the rue Frédéric Mistral and paused, as she always did, when she got to the cours Mirabeau, Aix’s celebrated main street. One hundred years ago double rows of plane trees had been planted on both sides of the street, and by summer they would shade the sidewalks and the street itself. But the cours had been in a state of construction, or “deconstruction,” as Sylvie, Marine’s best friend, a photographer and art historian, liked to say. No sooner was the top of the street completed than the workmen would start jackhammering the bottom, and then someone at city hall would change his or her mind and the bottom would be hurriedly finished so the construction team could tear up the newly finished work at the top. This had been going on for four years, and Marine had overheard one American tourist say to her husband, “I just can’t get a good picture of the street from any angle!” Marine wanted to tell the woman that it was a good thing she hadn’t seen the cours this past Christmas, when the city’s new mayor, Yvette Tamain, had allowed a private company—owned by her brother-in-law—to line one side of it with Alsatian-style wooden chalets. It might have been a good idea if the chalets had sold handmade Christmas objects, like at the winter festival in Strasbourg. But instead each chalet was tackier than the next, full of mass-produced objects that could’ve been found at any carnival. Sylvie had been furious, and Marine had had to walk a bit ahead of her, embarrassed at her friend’s loud string of profanities, mostly aimed at the mayor. The showstopper, and where Marine had stopped, openmouthed, and begun to swear as well—although not as loudly or as profanely as Sylvie—was a large, orange, plastic kiddie slide that had been parked at the top of the cours. It completely blocked the view of the fabulous sixteenth-century golden-stone mansion, the Hôtel du Poët. While Sylvie marched off to yell at the proprietors of the plastic slide, Marine walked over and looked up at the statue of King René, Aix’s beloved medieval ruler, smiling and holding a cluster of grapes in his hand, thankfully unaware of the changes the good mayor Tamain was making to his fine city.

  This morning the cours seemed strangely quiet: the construction workers had not yet begun their noisy work, and there were fewer cars on the road than usual. Marine ran across the wide avenue, holding down her skirt in the wind, and happy to see her favorite café. Cafés lined the west side of the street, where they received the morning sun, and banks and estate agents occupied the east side—one side gave you pleasure, the other side was interested only in your money. She walked across Le Mazarin’s terrace, pulled open the heavy wooden door, and was greeted by the café’s interior—its burnt ocher walls, the black-and-white tiled floor covered with a light carpet of sawdust, the long wooden bar with its dented copper countertop. Le Mazarin was her morning’s delight, and it had been even when she was with Antoine. She loved the smoky, noisy room that smelled of espresso and was filled with people who wanted to be in the company of others before their day began. To start the day there was, she knew, a pleasure and a privilege, one that could be enjoyed by only those who had flexible schedules or were lucky enough to work in downtown Aix. But today there was something wrong, and she noticed it instantly. Inside, the café was unusually hushed, just as it had been out on the street—the waiters whispered to clients, instead of barking at them, and her friends, already seated at their corner table, weren’t noisily arguing about European politics or the Marseille soccer team.

  “What’s going on?” asked Marine, when she got to the table scattered with croissant crumbs, thick porcelain coffee cups, cigarette packages, cell phones, and newspapers. Marine glanced at the table and at her two best friends and smiled. I am lucky, she thought.

  “You haven’t heard, then?” replied Jean-Marc, a fellow lawyer. He took Marine’s arm, guiding her to a chair beside his own.

  “Heard what?” Marine repeated.

  “About Étienne de Bremont,” answered Sylvie, taking a huge drag on her cigarette and looking smug. “Nice hair, by the way.” Marine looked at herself in the mirror on the opposite wall and saw that the mistral had given her hair a vertical touch. She flattened it with her hands, put down her purse, and looked at Sylvie and then at Jean-Marc. “No, I haven’t heard. What is it?” she asked, despite the answer that she feared was coming.

  “He’s dead,” whispered Jean-Marc, who seemed to have been chosen as the spokesperson for the morning’s bad news. Sylvie raised her eyebrows to an impossible height, expertly flicked her ash into the ashtray, and crossed her well-toned arms across her breasts.

  Jean-Marc continued, leaning even closer to Marine. “He fell from one of Château Bremont’s windows, sometime late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. His body was only found yesterday, when the caretaker came home from a weekend visiting his sister, Colette, Cosette, Yvette—something like that.”

  Marine looked toward the large oil painting on the wall, a nineteenth-century portrait of an unknown male sitter. “How horrible, horrible,” were the only w
ords that managed to get out of her mouth. “Cosette,” she suddenly said. “Cosette is the sister’s name.” She hadn’t thought of Étienne in a long time and couldn’t believe that he was dead. She stared down at the grain of the wooden table.

  “Had you seen him recently?” asked Sylvie, who hadn’t grown up in Aix but had met Étienne. She loved gossip of this sort, especially bad news.

  Marine thought of the young Étienne de Bremont—the Bremont family was one of Aix’s oldest noble families. Étienne and Marine used to play for hours in the château while their mothers worked together on church projects. And then later, in high school, Marine and Étienne had labored over the small newspaper that served their two respective schools—the sexes were still separated in those days. Sincere, dedicated, careful Étienne—he had driven Marine nuts over fussy details. But she had enjoyed his quiet enthusiasm, and they had made a good team that spring: he the writer and she the researcher. Étienne’s older brother was always around as well, but Marine had always thought François a bully, and she tried to avoid him when she could.

  Étienne had moved away for university. He had become a filmmaker and now lived—no, he’s dead—had lived with his wife and small children in a faded but very elegant mansion, un hôtel particulier, on the cours Mirabeau. The family also owned the crumbling château in the hamlet of Saint-Antonin, just east of Aix. Poor Étienne, she thought. His poor children.

  She looked up from her coffee and realized that Jean-Marc and Sylvie were staring at her, waiting for her to respond. “No, I haven’t seen him for ages. What happened?” Marine asked.

  “Antoine was out there yesterday, and he’s there again this morning. He called me to cancel a meeting we had planned. All he told me was that it appears to have been an accident—nothing was disturbed in the attic where he fell from or in the rest of the château.”