by Allan Massie
‘The concierge wasn’t much help either,’ Moncerre said. ‘Madame Peniel was “always correct”, but “not one to talk”. However, she is sure, insists really, that she didn’t open the door to any stranger over the weekend. Which must mean that the dead woman brought her murderer home with her. Assuming the concierge is speaking the truth, of course, which there’s no reason to suppose she isn’t.’
‘What about the pupils?’
‘Well-turned-out girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen, more or less. That’s what she says, anyway. Can’t see one of them wrapping a stocking round her neck.’
They had repaired, as so often, to Fernand’s brasserie, and as usual there were more German officers there than Bordelais. Their mood and demeanour had changed. They were still ‘correct’ as instructed, but there was a difference, an edge to them, and one sensed their awareness that they were fortunate to be stationed here in France, while their Sixth Army was engaged in Stalingrad, and were uncertain how long their luck would hold. Lannes knew little of how that battle was going, nothing indeed for certain, but, since he had started listening surreptitiously to the BBC, he had begun to hope that Hitler had, as Fernand said, ‘bitten off more than he can swallow’. Moncerre on the other hand was still sure that ‘the Russkies will crack’. It was in his nature to expect the worst. Not that they talked much about the war, or indulged in speculation. What was the point? It was out of their hands.
Fernand’s son Jacques brought them their dish of calf’s liver and pommes lyonnaises.
‘You’re fortunate,’ he said. ‘That’s the last of the liver.’
Even Fernand, who was on good terms with the men who ran the black market and had, moreover, farmer-friends who kept him supplied, was experiencing difficulties. Fortunately his cellar was still well-stocked and the St-Emilion he had recommended went happily with the liver.
Lannes could see that young René was eager to discuss the case, even though he had found nothing of interest among the dead woman’s papers, only a list of her piano pupils and a timetable of their lessons.
‘That helps us a lot,’ Moncerre said.
‘Their parents may be able to tell us something about the dead woman,’ Lannes said. ‘Anyway, that’s the first thing we have to find out. What sort of person she was.’
It was always the same. Except for a killing in the course of a botched robbery, it was more often than not what you learnt of the victim that opened up a case.
‘It’s odd, though,’ Moncerre said, ‘the concierge is sure she never had a lover. I asked about men visitors and she said “certainly not”; only an elderly man, might be an uncle, she said. It’s the sort of thing concierges usually know.’
‘Usually,’ Lannes said, ‘but we’ve known them to be mistaken – and to tell lies. All the same the little maid was clear on one point. I mean about the champagne and cigar.’
‘You get black market Havanas for the Alsatian, don’t you?’ Moncerre said. ‘So let’s put the boss in the frame.’
Lannes studied the list of pupils’ names René had passed him. He put his finger on one.
‘I’ll deal with this girl,’ he said. ‘Divide up the others between the two of you and make a start this afternoon.’
‘What about the uncle?’
‘We’ll have to find out who he was, if indeed he was her uncle. You got a description from the concierge?’
‘A description, for what it’s worth, but no name.’
‘I’ll have a word later with her myself.’
‘Do you think the technical boys can tell us what brand of cigar it was?’ René said.
‘They’ve got to be good for something,’ Moncerre said, ‘but we won’t solve the case by going round all the tabacs in the city. We should be so lucky.’
‘We’ve got to start somewhere,’ René said. ‘It was only a suggestion. If it’s an expensive cigar, that tells us something surely. And the champagne, Krug ’28. There’s not many people can afford to drink wine of that quality. What’s wrong, chief? You think I’m barking up the wrong tree?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lannes said. ‘It’s just that there’s something about it I don’t like. It was all a bit obvious, a stage set, pointing us in the direction the killer wants us to go in. And what the concierge said about the absence of men in the dead woman’s life and the maid’s evidence about the champagne and the cigar, it all worries me. That’s why I want you to start with the names on the list. Find out as much as you can about Madame Peniel.’
‘You do like to make things complicated,’ Moncerre said. ‘You always do, chief. It still looks simple to me, crime of passion, good old crime of passion. And what about the name you’ve reserved for yourself?’
‘That’s someone I know,’ Lannes said.
III
Nevertheless, Lannes went first to Henri’s bookshop in the rue des Remparts. The shop itself was closed, as it often was now, because since the boy Léon had left the previous summer with Alain and their friend Jérôme to try to join the Free French, Henri could rarely bring himself to attend to business. He was one of Lannes’ oldest and closest friends, and at least he was no longer drinking himself into a stupor almost every day as he had for the year after his twin brother Gaston’s murder.
They embraced – Henri was the only man Lannes greeted in this manner. The little French bulldog, Toto, sniffed his ankles, and then, satisfied, withdrew to curl up on a cushion.
‘Is there any news of the boys?’
‘None, I’m afraid.’
‘I suppose there can’t be. I miss Léon, you know. So of course does Miriam. I always deplored poor Gaston’s perversion, as I suppose it was, but I came to understand why he loved the boy. Would you like coffee? It’s not very good coffee, I’m afraid.’
‘One of the minor penalties of defeat,’ Lannes said. ‘All the same, I’ll say yes.’
‘I came to think of him almost as the son I’ve never had, you know. Do you think they’ve reached England?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve had no word.’
It was the answer he had given Henri every time he put the question as indeed he did every time Lannes called on him. It was almost a routine now, a barren one.
‘And Miriam?’ Lannes said.
Henri passed him the coffee cup.
‘I’ll tell her you’re here.’
It was six months since the publication of an order requiring all Jews to wear a yellow star, an order which followed other restrictions on Jewish businesses and on their free circulation in the city. Miriam had succeeded in transferring the licence for what had been her father’s tabac to Henri, but, since the first deportation of Jews from Bordeaux, at this time only those categorised as foreign ones, they had thought it better to put a manager in the tabac and for Miriam to take refuge in Henri’s attic. She had been unwilling to do so at first, but, after the death in September of her sister, Léon’s mother, from cancer, she had given way to Henri’s plea which Lannes had supported.
Now, entering the room, she looked like an old woman. Two years previously, when they had first met – at the time of Gaston’s murder when he was also investigating the anonymous letters sent to her husband, the old count, himself now dead, Lannes – had wanted to make love to her, and had been restrained only by his reluctance to deceive or cheat on Marguerite, and by Miriam’s own good sense. Today he felt only pity, and admiration for her refusal to submit to despair. She had lost at least a dozen kilos, her face was deeply lined, and she moved with none of her former confidence.
‘It’s because I can’t sleep,’ she said, extending her cheek to him as she had only recently started to do. ‘There’s no word, I suppose.’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘It’s terrible that Léon doesn’t even know that his mother is dead. And Alain? You must be as anxious as I am.’
‘I’m anxious, yes, but there’s nothing one can do.’
And really there was nothing to say. This was the terrible
thing, that conversations all over France went round in circles, and said nothing. Of course there were those on the other side, as he had come to think of it, for whom that wasn’t true, those who believed – who still believed – in Vichy and its National Revolution. But that ‘other side’ included Dominique and his friend Maurice who was, as it happened, Miriam’s step-grandson and whom she had described to him at their first meeting as ‘a sweet boy’, which indeed he was. Dominique and he were both sweet boys – Alain had once said, ‘Of course I realise that Dominique is nicer than I am which is why Maman loves him more.’ He had denied only the second part of the sentence, and hadn’t replied that it was Alain’s dark side and capacity for discontent and anger that made him his favourite son. This was anyway something no father should admit to.
‘And you, Jean?’ Miriam said.
‘And me? Crime goes on. And we have to solve crimes which seem petty, indeed unimportant, set against the criminal times we live in. I’d a murder this morning, a nasty murder, a woman, and nasty because she was humiliated in death’ – these knickers wrenched down to her knees, which he wouldn’t mention – ‘and I’ll work on it, of course I will, but … ’
‘But?’
‘I think of these Jewish women forced into cattle-trucks.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Miriam said, ‘and I feel guilty because I have a bed in Henri’s attic even if I can’t sleep.’
‘No,’ Lannes said, ‘it’s ridiculous for you to feel guilty because you haven’t been arrested or deported. We are all entitled to do what we can to survive. Sometimes we are required to do things of which we might in other circumstances have reason to feel ashamed. But the circumstances are as they are. We have to live with them as best we can. At least that’s how it seems to me.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Miriam said. ‘Nevertheless, that’s how I feel.’
Lannes took a sip of his coffee which was as bad as Henri had said it would be, and lit a cigarette.
‘The murdered woman, Gabrielle Peniel. The concierge called her “Madame”, but there’s apparently no sign of a husband. She gave piano lessons, but only to young girls. I don’t know why I don’t like the sound of that, because it doesn’t seem unreasonable, but I don’t. I suppose the name doesn’t mean anything to you?’
‘I knew a Peniel once, or rather knew of him,’ Henri said. ‘He was a friend of my father, an acquaintance anyway; they used to play bridge together at the club. There was some scandal, I can’t remember what. He was a doctor, I think. As I remember, Jewish perhaps. Then I don’t know, he dropped out, was required to resign from the club. Perhaps he had been cheating at cards. It’s a long time ago, a few years after the last war. He might be some connection, perhaps the dead woman’s father. Bordeaux, as we know, is a small town where there are so many connections, our Bordeaux, I mean … ’
By which Lannes understood the Bordeaux of respectable people, the professional classes and perhaps also the Bordeaux of the wine barons, the Chartrons. That was the milieu into which Henri had been born, one which Lannes himself rarely encountered except in the course of duty.
IV
The wet cold was sharper as Lannes limped across the public garden which was all but deserted. A few off-duty German soldiers were taking photographs of each other by the fountain. They would send them home and their parents or wives or girl-friends would be happy to think of them safe in France rather than serving on the Eastern Front. How long would they be here? For the first months of the Occupation, he had sometimes thought that there might be a settlement, that the Armistice might be replaced by a Treaty, the Occupation end, and the prisoners-of-war return. Perhaps it had never been likely. The English remained defiant. Nevertheless, it had seemed possible then that Hitler and Churchill might each conclude that victory was unattainable, and that it made sense to engage in negotiations. He didn’t know, couldn’t tell even if he had really hoped for this. Now since the invasion of the Soviet Union, it was impossible; war to the death, millions of deaths – and the tightening of the German grip on France. For Vichy, collaboration was ever closer, more dishonourable, inescapable. The deportation of foreign Jews was only a start, the application of the anti-Jewish laws ever stricter, and there was talk of raising a legion of French volunteers to serve in the war against Bolshevism on the Eastern Front, while there was also the demand for more French workers to be dispatched to work in Germany. At least Dominique’s post in Vichy meant he wouldn’t be called upon.
The maid, correct, as if there was no war, in black dress, apron and mob-cap, admitted him. On the hall-table the brass bowl for visiting cards was empty, as it had been on his previous visits and would surely remain for ever. Professor Lazaire, who still looked like a colonel, but now with his yellowing skin like a colonel of colonial infantry, was in the same high-winged chair, and the little fox-terrier at his feet again jumped up, barking, before lying down satisfied that Lannes posed no threat. And again the maid offered him tea, and, without waiting for a reply, disappeared to make it. Lannes apologised for troubling him. The professor waved a deprecating hand, and for a couple of minutes neither spoke.
Then the professor said, ‘It’s not about Michel, I hope, and your daughter. He brought her to see me, or, more precisely, to show her off to me. I found her charming.’
‘Thank you,’ Lannes said. ‘No, it’s not about Michel. She’s very fond of him and my wife thinks the boy equally charming.’
‘And you?’
‘I like him. I’m afraid for him. I don’t like what I hear of his politics, but I’m afraid for all the young people. Even if we come through this, the divisions will survive. There will be recriminations, acts of revenge. It doesn’t bear thinking on. But it’s another matter altogether that brings me here.’
The maid returned with the tea and a plate of little cakes.
‘My own baking,’ she said.
‘Gabrielle Peniel,’ Lannes said. ‘Your granddaughter, Anne-Marie, is a pupil of hers, isn’t she?’
The professor took a cigar from a box on the little table beside his chair, sniffed it, rolled it in his fingers, clipped the end, lit it with a long match, and blew out smoke.
‘A curious question for a policeman to ask, but I suppose you have your reasons.’
Lannes sipped his tea which was scented with bergamot, and laid the cup down.
‘The worst of reasons,’ he said. ‘She was found dead this morning. Murdered, there’s no doubt about that. Your granddaughter’s name was on a list of her music pupils. I hope you may be able to tell me something about her.’
The professor drew on his cigar again. Lannes lit a cigarette and waited.
‘She was a pupil, for a time. Then I withdrew her – at Anne-Marie’s request, I should say, for I have never met the lady, the unfortunate lady, I suppose I should now call her.’
‘At your granddaughter’s request? Did she want to stop learning the piano or was there some other reason?’
A long silence, like the hush that comes over a theatre audience before the curtain goes up.
‘No, she loves music and now has another teacher.’
‘So?’
The fox-terrier put his paws on the professor’s knees and was rewarded with a scratch behind the ear and one of the maid’s little biscuits.
‘I realise this may be difficult,’ Lannes said, ‘and you don’t want to involve Anne-Marie in what is a nasty business or expose her to questioning. I fully understand that. But in a case like this it’s only by understanding the victim and learning all that I can about her that I have any chance of finding her killer.’
‘I’m seventy-five,’ the professor said, ‘and sometimes my memory plays tricks on me. Anne-Marie and Michel are all I have now, all I care for. I don’t want any harm to come to them. It’s dangerous loving someone, giving your heart to them, when you’re my age. Does that sound feeble?’
‘Not at all.’
You don’t, he didn’t add, have to be seventy-five to
have learnt that.
‘She said she was creepy. Madame Peniel. Just that, creepy. I didn’t enquire further. The word was enough. She’s an honest child and an intelligent one. She was – what shall I say? – uncomfortable with her. As I say, I didn’t press her. That word and the look on her face were enough.’
‘Yes,’ Lannes said, ‘I see.’
If it had been Clothilde, wouldn’t he have behaved in the same way?
‘You’ll want to speak with her,’ the professor said. ‘I realise that. I’m sure I can trust you to be gentle. She’ll be home within the hour. Meanwhile, would you like a game of chess?’
‘I doubt if I can give you a match.’
‘I’m sure you can. So much of your life must be like the game.’
‘In life,’ Lannes said, ‘I try to avoid sacrificing a pawn.’
* * *
The girl was slightly-built, blonde like her brother, but with pale skin and milky-soft blue eyes. Lannes remembered that when they first met the professor had said that his dead wife had had German cousins, and indeed Anne-Marie looked like an illustration from the fairy-tales of the Brothers Grimm, Gretel perhaps. He had forgotten the young people’s German ancestry, and it now occurred to him for the first time that Michel looked like the perfect Aryan poster boy for the Hitler Youth.
‘This is Clothilde’s father, darling,’ the professor said. ‘He is, as you may know, a policeman, and he has some questions to ask you.’
‘Questions for me? What fun!’
‘You won’t mind if I remain, superintendent?’
‘Not at all. I want to ask you about Madame Peniel, Anne-Marie.’
‘Is she dead?’
‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because I can’t think of any other reason why you should ask me about her. Unless, of course, she’s been caught out.’
‘Caught out? In what? You told your grandfather she was creepy. In what way?’
She crossed to the professor’s chair and perched on its arm. She smoothed her skirt, and said, ‘You didn’t ask me, grandpa, did you? I was glad at the time, but now … is she dead?’