The Splendour Falls

by Susanna Kearsley

  I looked round wildly, and then, to Thierry’s sheer astonishment, I dropped the photograph and ran. I ran like a rabbit pursued by a hawk, up the curving stairway to the first floor landing, and out onto the empty terrace through the door that still stood open, as it had been open on the afternoon that Paul had died. I ran across the terrace and down the narrow stairs and out of the little door into the crowded square. No one paid me any attention. They kept on sipping wine and drinking coffee at their tables round the fountain while I turned and bolted up the breakneck steps to the château.

  I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the top, and I only stopped then because I thought my lungs would burst if I went one step further. With my back to the low wall I slumped forward, hands on my knees, drawing in deep, sobbing, painful breaths of air.

  The sudden scraping of a match in front of me brought my head up with a jerk, in time to see the gypsy’s black eyes smiling at me as, against the cliff face opposite, he touched the brief flame to his yellow-filtered cigarette.

  Chapter 28

  “Would rather we had never come! I dread

  His wildness, and the chances of the dark.”

  The match flared in the breeze and died abruptly.

  “It is not safe, Mademoiselle,” he told me, in coarsened English, “to stand so near the edge.”

  I was gathering breath to cry blue murder when he moved. But he didn’t move toward me. Instead he turned and started slowly up the road, toward the château, with the little mongrel dog trotting on ahead of him.

  I hadn’t expected that.

  Stunned, I let my breath escape without a sound and felt my fear flip over into fascination. By the time he’d gone ten paces from me I had found my voice again. “Wait!” I called after him. “Please wait!”

  He stopped walking, looked back. The dog stopped too, impatiently, close by his master’s feet. I cleared my throat and asked the question.

  “You know what happened to him, don’t you? You were here.”

  It was a rather ambiguous question, but he didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. He met my eyes and nodded slowly. “But I,” he said, “was not the one who pushed him, Mademoiselle.”

  At that he turned away again and walked on a few steps to where a wooden door hung scarred and derelict in the face of the yellow cliff. Through that door both dog and gypsy went without a backward glance. “Wait!” I cried again, but it was too late. They were gone. A swiftly moving cloud passed over the sinking sun and in its shadow the breeze struck chill upon my face. “Follow,” the wind whispered, swirling against the ancient stone. “Follow…”

  My brain resisted. Don’t be an idiot, it told me. Go right back down those stairs, my girl, and straight to the police… But the unseen forces calling me, compelling me, did not respond to rationality. They pulled me numbly to that door and sent me through it like Alice on the trail of the White Rabbit. The door swung wide, and in a slanting triangle of light showed me a shallow flight of steps descending into darkness, a darkness that grew palpable as the door creaked gently to behind me.

  Oh, hell, I thought. Why did it have to be a cellar? I held my breath, and swallowed down the cowardly swell of panic. Think of Paul, I told myself. The gypsy knows what happened…

  There were only six steps in all. I counted them as I went down, with a hand braced on the cool stone wall to guide me—six steps and then a level stretch. The wall at my hand fell away, and I moved onward cautiously, only to be brought up short by another wall directly to the front.

  Confused, I took a small step backwards, reaching out my hands to feel the inky blackness that surrounded me. Deprived of sight, my other senses rose to fill the void. The lingering smell of the gypsy’s cigarette bit sharply at my nostrils, as did the dank sweet smell of stone that never sees the sun. Above the rasp of my own breathing my straining ears picked out the faintest clicking of the little dog’s toenails on the stone floor, a sound that echoed and receded steadily along the passage to my right.

  My groping hands touched chiseled stone above my head, as dry as parchment, brushed with dirt, a ceiling arched and rounded like the one I’d seen in Armand’s cellars. And then I knew, with a strange instinctive certainty, where I was. Not a cellar, I corrected myself. This was no ordinary cliff house. I was in the tunnels.

  My first thought was to turn back while the door was still just steps behind me. A labyrinth, that’s what everyone I’d met had called the tunnels of Chinon. A labyrinth of twisting passageways that burrowed through the hills, unsafe, uncharted, half of them forgotten and collapsed through lack of use. You’ll get lost, warned the nagging little voice inside my head. You’ll get lost down here and no one will ever find you. The wave of panic swelled again and I hesitated, heart pounding.

  Some distance off, the clicking footsteps of the dog paused in their progress, as if the beast had sensed my indecision. The gypsy whistled softly and that echoed, too, along the stone walls back to me. “Allez!” he ordered. Come along! He was speaking to the dog, I knew, but nonetheless the single command shifted me. I set my face in that direction, squared my shoulders, and plunged on into the darkness.

  I didn’t stumble, which surprised me, since the floor was anything but even. I slid one hand along the wall, to keep my bearings as best I could, and strained my ears to hear the gypsy’s steps in front of me. He knew I was following. I fancied that he kept his pace deliberately slow to aid me, and just before I reached a turning in the tunnel where I might have lost my way, the gypsy started whistling in the darkness up ahead, drawing me onward as a beacon draws a ship.

  For the most part, though, the tunnel ran straight on with neither bend nor break, and only the straining muscles of my legs to tell me when we sank deeper into the rock or rose again toward the surface.

  We were rising now. Ahead of me the little dog’s staccato rhythm altered to a sort of surging scrabble and the gypsy’s boots fell heavily with measured sureness on the stone. My brain, attuned to darkness, told me: Stairs, they’re climbing stairs. I slowed my pace expectantly. My searching hand trailed off the wall and into emptiness, and a sudden spear of light came hurtling down to trap me where I stood.

  My ears had not deceived me. I had reached the bottom of a long and narrow flight of stairs, like cellar stairs, that stretched invitingly toward the world above. Someone was standing on the upper landing, poised against the open door—the gypsy, I presumed, although he was at best a silhouette. I couldn’t see his face. He pushed the door wide and left it open, passing through into whatever lay beyond.

  It had seemed a good idea at the time, I reminded myself as I climbed the stairs—now, I wasn’t so sure. God knows where I would find myself when I emerged, and what would happen to me there. My feet dragged just a little up the final few steps. And then I thought again of Paul, and why I’d followed in the first place, and squaring my shoulders I stepped across the threshold.

  I was completely unprepared, coming from the cold and ancient darkness of the tunnels, to find myself standing in a one-roomed house with fridge and cook-stove and a cheery fire burning in the fireplace. I’d expected a cave, I think, some sort of wild dungeon of a place, with sullen eyes that peered at me from the corners. But this was no cave, and the only eyes I saw belonged to the gypsy, the dog, and the young man lying on a bed in the far corner. A pale and rumpled young man who smiled and sent the gypsy a look of congratulation.

  “Oh, well done, Jean,” my cousin said. “You found her.”

  ***

  “Feel better now?”

  I pressed my fingers to my forehead and nodded, refusing the gypsy’s offer of a stout brandy and water. Harry settled back against his pillows with the air of a penitent. “I didn’t think…”

  “You never do.”

  “Well, how was I to know you’d go all weak-kneed on me? You’re not the swooning type, my love.”

  “Yes,
well,” I pushed my hand through my hair with a tired sigh. No point in telling Harry I’d been fasting, either, I decided. He’d only try to feed me something. Instead I opted for a general explanation. “It’s been a devil of a week.”

  “My fault, I expect.”

  “Mostly.” I looked at him. “Harry, what on earth—”

  “I can explain,” he promised, cutting me off with an upraised hand. “I suppose it’s easiest to start at the beginning, when I arrived in Chinon.”

  “Last Wednesday morning, was it?”

  He gave me a curious look. “Yes. I drove up overnight from Bordeaux, and got here shortly after breakfast. Rather proud of myself, I was, arriving two whole days before you.”

  “But you didn’t go to the hotel.”

  “Well, no.” His tone implied it was an odd suggestion. “It’s not as if I was expected, after all. Our reservations didn’t start till Friday. And one doesn’t usually check into hotels at breakfast time, Emily love. Not when the tourist season’s over with, and rooms are easy to come by. I figured there was no real hurry, so I parked the car and went to find this chap who’d written to me.”

  “Didier Muret.”

  “That’s right. How did you…?”

  “Just go on. I presume you found him?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t at home, but his neighbor said I should look down by the river. Said he’d gone out with his niece to—”

  “Feed the ducks,” I finished calmly.

  “Yes.” He sent me a faintly irritated, sideways glance before continuing. “Anyhow, I found him, but it didn’t take me long to figure out he’d got it all wrong, somehow. He didn’t read English, you see, he’d only seen the journal article in someone else’s house, and read the title: Isabelle’s Lost Treasure—I guess one could translate that easily enough—and so he’d written to me. Only it wasn’t Isabelle of Angoulême he was interested in, it was—”

  “—another Isabelle. I know.”

  Harry’s eyes narrowed on my face. “Perhaps you’d like to tell the story.”

  The gypsy laughed, a soft laugh, at my shoulder, and hitched a second chair up to the bedside next to mine. “I told you,” he said, “she has been well occupied, this past week. She might have found you on her own, without my help.”

  “No doubt.” My cousin’s voice was dry.

  “I only know,” I said in self-defense, “that Didier Muret was after diamonds. A stash of diamonds, hidden at the end of the last war by a girl named Isabelle. I’d assumed he found what he was looking for, only…” I paused, frowning. “Only if he had, he wouldn’t have needed you.”

  “Well, I can’t have been much use to him, as it was,” Harry confessed. “He kept asking me about the tunnels under the Clos des Cloches, and I hadn’t a clue. He’d said, in his letter, that he had information to give to me, but it certainly felt the other way around. Still, I felt bad about it—not being able to help him, I mean. I even rang your father, from a public call box.”

  “But he wasn’t home.”

  “How the devil do you know that?”

  “He rang back, wanting to know why you called. I confess, I was rather curious myself.”

  “Well, no great mystery. Your father’s got a network strung through Europe that would put our Secret Service men to shame, you know. I thought he might know someone who knew someone who could be of some assistance to this Didier fellow.”

  “But you left the hotel’s number on Daddy’s answering machine.”

  “I thought I’d be in the hotel by lunchtime, didn’t I?” he told me, patiently. “Only Didier Muret insisted that I lunch with him, and he seemed so damned disappointed by the treasure mix-up that I couldn’t very well refuse. So I went back to his house, had a drink.” He flashed his old familiar smile. “A few drinks, actually. I tried to cheer him up. And then, before I knew it, there it was suppertime, and I offered to go and get a take-away for the two of us. And on the way back, with my pizza,” he told me, “I got this.”

  He tilted his head to one side, showing me a patch of bruising that spread darkly underneath the fair hair just behind his ear.

  I stared. “He hit you?”

  “No.” My cousin smiled. “It’s rather complicated, actually, I’d better let Jean tell it.”

  The gypsy leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. It was odd, I thought, to be sitting here so calmly with a man that I’d been trying to avoid these past few days. A man I’d suspected of murder. His voice, when he spoke, was coarse but musical, his English remarkably good. “That night,” he said, “the night Monsieur Muret was killed, I am walking with Bruno,” his dark eyes glanced downwards, at the little dog, “and I see that the door to Muret’s garden, it is open. This is luck, I think. Muret, he keeps much whisky in the house, and the street is very dark there.” His shrug was casual, as though thieving were a wholly respectable pastime. “So Bruno and I, we go into the yard, but before we are in the house we hear voices. Loud voices. I look in the window, and I see the two of them arguing. So I wait. I watch. Muret and the other, they go upstairs. Muret is very angry. Then…” He made a violent gesture with a hand across his throat. It was quite ugly. “Muret he falls, and I see that he is dead. The other man, he sees this too. He comes out of the house, out the back door, into the garden where it is very dark. He does not see Bruno and me—we hide up by the wall—but your cousin,” he paused, and smiled at Harry. “Your cousin, he comes at that moment through the garden door, with his pizza.”

  “Bad timing,” Harry admitted.

  “There is a little light from the house. And so the killer, he looks at your cousin. Your cousin, he looks at the killer. And—” Again a telling movement of the hand. “He is badly hurt, your cousin. He says to me: ‘Hotel de France,’ and so I try to help him there, but when we turn the corner I see the car, the killer’s car, and so I bring your cousin to my family, where he will be safe.”

  I looked at Harry. “So you saw him, then. The man who murdered Didier Muret.”

  “That’s just it—I didn’t. It was too bloody dark, and the lights of the house were behind him. I couldn’t see a thing. He knocked me on the head for nothing.” Harry rubbed his bruises ruefully.

  My gaze swung back to the gypsy. “But you saw him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the man who murdered Paul.”

  “Yes.”

  I had to ask the question, even though I knew the answer. “The same man?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t go to the police?”

  He looked at me as though I had two heads. “The police? This is not England, Mademoiselle. The police, they will not listen to a man like me. They think I tell the lies. And your cousin, he did not see the man who hit him. So…” He shrugged, and blew a puff of smoke. “We talk, we think, we wait.”

  “You might have come to me,” I said, a shade reproachfully. I would have known then not to get involved with Neil. I wouldn’t feel this aching emptiness inside me, as though my heart had shriveled to a useless lump of ice. And Paul… Paul might yet be alive.

  “I tried this,” was the gypsy’s calm response. “Your cousin, he is not so good the first few days—he cannot keep awake. But he keeps saying ‘the Hotel de France,’ and ‘Emily,’ and in his wallet I find this picture.” He showed me a less-than-flattering snapshot of myself, a few years out of date. “And so I go to the Hotel de France. I look for you. On Friday, finally, you arrive, but it is not possible to speak to you. And so I wait until you go to dinner, I telephone to the hotel, I pretend to be your cousin.”

  “Why?”

  My cousin answered that. “Jean had to think rather fast that day, I’m afraid. He had to come up with a story that would keep you from worrying, without tipping off the murderer. So he left a message that I’d been delayed—brilliant, really, considering he hardly knew me—and t
hen he kept an eye on you, to see that you weren’t harmed.”

  The gypsy smiled. “We frighten you, Bruno and I, I see this. But it is difficult, you understand. Always the killer he is very close to you.”

  “Yes, I know.” I looked away more sharply than I meant to. A log fell into the fire with a hiss, and it was an ugly mocking sound, like an old woman’s wheezing laugh in that stale room. My eyes stung and I blinked the wetness back.

  “I see the way you smile at him,” the gypsy said, “and I think no, she will not believe me.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.” I felt the stubborn lifting of my jaw. “And you could have warned me when I first arrived, you know. I hadn’t met him, then.”

  The gypsy frowned. “But…”

  Behind us, on the bed, my cousin shifted. “My dear girl,” he said, quite clearly, “of course you’d met him. The bastard dropped you off at your hotel.”

  Chapter 29

  …the gates were closed

  At sunset,

  “It didn’t half give me a shock, I can tell you,” my cousin went on, shaking his head. “I mean, of all the bloody people for you to meet, your first day out!”

  I slowly turned to stare at him, feeling rather stunned, like a racing driver who’d gone almost round the course at top speed only to slam into a brick wall at the final bend. “But it can’t be Armand.”

  The two men shared a knowing look. “Look, love,” said Harry, “I know you like the man, but—”

  “No, it isn’t that.” I shook my head, impatient to make him understand. “It’s just that I know who killed Paul, you see, and it wasn’t Armand Valcourt. It was Neil.” There, I thought, I’d said it; I’d finally put a voice to the painful thought. I stilled the treacherous quivering of my mouth, aware both men were staring at me. Couldn’t they see, I thought, how much I wanted to believe…?

  My cousin frowned. “Who the devil is Neil?”

  “Neil Grantham. He’s a violinist, staying at my hotel.”