by Ruth Brandon
‘Poor old Reg. The only comfort I can offer is, it won’t last. Eventually they’ll move on to the next story. Seriously, though. What’s all this about Rigaut? You aren’t seriously implying he murdered his old ma? On account of a picture?’
‘I’m not implying anything. All I told anyone is what happened. And you’ll never guess what happened after that.’
‘No, I won’t, so why don’t you just go ahead and tell me.’
‘They’re charging me with the murder.’
‘They’ve actually charged you?’
‘Not yet, but they’ve confiscated my passport.’
‘Fantastic. You’ve got to hand it to him.’ He sounded almost admiring. ‘This is his moment, and he isn’t going to let someone like you mess it up. If you want my professional advice I think you should get away somewhere till it’s all blown over. Go and see Caroline or something. And then when you come back we should meet up and discuss it, OK?’
OK for whom, exactly? But despite my jaunty assumption that I’d got over him I found I terribly wanted to see him. Olivier had helped me over the obsessive stage. But as soon as we actually spoke, the pull returned. ‘OK,’ But as soon as I said meekly.
‘And Reggie.’
‘Yes?’
‘Take care, all right?’
The television romance must be over, if it had ever existed. More likely it was just journalism – while a story’s in progress, everyone associated with it at once becomes interesting. Still, what he’d said made sense. No one would find me at Caroline’s.
True friend that she was, she urged me to drop every-thing and come at once. ‘Take a couple of days off,’ she advised. ‘Tell them you’re ill. Anyway, it’s true – you’ll have a nervous breakdown otherwise. It’s a shame David won’t be here – he’s had to get back to town. But perhaps it’s just as well. You need to take your mind off things.’
I agreed. All I wanted at that moment was never to think about Caravaggio or the Rigauts again. I put my head round Alice’s door, told her I thought I was in for a bout of flu and was going to take a couple of days off. By eleven o’clock I was on the road.
Even the Forest of Dean couldn’t entirely block out unwelcome snippets. The story didn’t make the English front pages – other countries’ political scandals rarely do – but it was there in the international news sections: Mystery Death of Minister’s Mother.
‘What I can’t understand,’ Caroline said, as we sat sipping coffee in the silent house (the girls at school, David in London), ‘is why you told Olivier about it in the first place. You might have known something like this would happen.’
I tried to explain – how shocked I’d been to hear of Juliette’s death, how filled with pure rage at Rigaut – how I’d longed to bring it home to him, to make sure that this time at least, he wouldn’t get away with it.
She shook her head in disbelief – whether at my foolishness or the improbability of it all. ‘This time? What else is he supposed to have done?’
‘Any number of things. He’s quite ruthless. It’s obvious when you meet him.’
‘Of course he is. He’s a politician. Sounds just your type,’ Caroline observed, and I felt myself blush.
I’d been there two days, and was reluctantly thinking it was time to take a deep breath and plunge back into the hot water, when my mobile rang. We were about four miles from the house at the time, making the most of a sunny day. I’d forgotten I’d even left it on, and for a moment didn’t register the sudden bleating. Then Caroline said, ‘Is that your phone?’
The caller’s number wasn’t one I recognized. I stared at it for a moment, then pressed the green button and held it to my ear. Olivier’s voice said, ‘Régine?’
I let out my breath, not having realized I’d been holding it. ‘I thought you’d never get back to me.’
‘Sorry, things have been hectic . . . So what did you think?’ He sounded jubilant, on top of the world.
‘Of the story? I –’
But he was rushing on. ‘It’s fantastic. You’ll never guess – they’re giving me a tryout at Le Figaro. I’m covering the exhumation . . .’
‘They’re exhuming her?’ Despite myself it was impossible not to get drawn back into it all.
‘Yes – next week.’
‘And what does Rigaut say?’
‘Oh, all for it – insists he’s got nothing to hide.’
‘Olivier. Listen. They’re investigating me, as well.’
‘You? What – they don’t seriously think –?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t have an alibi, it’s my word against Rigaut’s.’
‘Merde, Régine, it never crossed my mind.’
‘Nor mine.’
There didn’t seem anything more to say on that subject, so I wished him good luck in his new job and rang off. At least somebody was happy.
When we got back to the house, David was waiting for us. Caroline had told him I was there, and he’d come back early so that we could talk before I left. I was touched: he was a busy man, and I was Caroline’s friend, not his. As we spoke I kept remembering that every minute of his time ought to be costing me several hundred pounds. Still, he could afford it.
I told him more than I’d told Caroline. It seemed import-ant that he should know everything, including my lapse with Olivier, which I hadn’t confessed to her, not feeling strong enough, at that point, for more barbed remarks about my taste in men. David, by contrast, was every middle-class mother’s dream, diligent, responsible, successful, not bad-looking behind his rimless specs, but not too devastatingly good-looking either. Altogether, a middle-of-the-road man. And middle-aged, ever since I’d known him. Now, well into the real thing, his mousy hair beginning to grey, the gravitas that had always seemed faintly absurd had begun to trans-mute into something approaching distinction. I even felt it myself, though I knew he wasn’t any wiser, just older.
He remained professionally impassive throughout, taking notes now and then. When I finished my recital he said, ‘Timing may be important. I wonder if there’s any way we can prove Madame Rigaut rang you that morning?’
I explained, as I’d explained to Lebrun, that no one had been with me when the call came. And no one had been in the house with her except Jean-Jacques: not exactly a helpful witness. He seemed abstracted, then suddenly clicked his fingers. ‘Of course, stupid of me – there’ll be a record of the call. It’ll show on her phone bill. So that’s OK. Can’t prove it was her, of course, but it’ll show someone spoke to you from that number.’ He looked at his notes. ‘Sure you’ve told me everything?’
‘Absolutely everything.’
‘Then with any luck you’ve nothing to worry about. My guess is the exhumation won’t find anything, otherwise Rigaut wouldn’t allow it. He could stop it if he wanted to. Of course he knows you didn’t do anything. If you ask me he just decided to give you a bad time. Serve you right for being so bloody stupid,’ he added feelingly. ‘What on earth did you think you were going to achieve? Honestly, Reggie, I do sometimes wonder.’
He told me to get in touch should there be any trouble retrieving my passport, and we left it at that.
I stayed on at Caroline’s till Sunday morning. When I got back to Kentish Town my voicemail, which I’d emptied, had filled up again with eager reptilian inquiries, but most of them dated from the day I’d left London, and the phone had stopped ringing. There was also an email from Lindsay Hillier saying she’d finished her analysis. If I wanted to come round she’d give me the report.
As always, I found her at her bench. Maybe she’d been there all the time since our last meeting – it seemed not impossible. She turned and greeted me with her charming, unexpected half-moon smile. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Your mystery package.’ If she’d seen my name in the papers she gave no sign of it. Perhaps she never read them. That, too, seemed not impossible.
‘Did you find anything?’ Over-eager as always.
‘All sorts of things,’ she replied r
eprovingly. ‘Whether they’re what you wanted or expected I’ve no idea. Generally speaking I’d hope to actually see the painting I’m working on. I warn you, all I can tell you from isolated samples like this is the most general kind of stuff.’
‘I do see that. But I really didn’t have any choice.’
‘All right, then.’ She turned back to her bench, pulled a folder from a pile, and extracted some papers from it. ‘The canvas. Linen fibres, but that’s what everyone used, so it doesn’t help with the date. But it would suggest Italian, if it’s early – they were using canvas in Venice much more commonly than north of the Alps – from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Now the paint . . .’ She glanced through the pages, stopping at a photograph of what looked like a slice of multilayered cake. She pointed at the lower edge. ‘It’s got a brown ground, d’you see – that’s the sort of preparation they were using in Rome around the end of the seicento. And the pigments, look at this green. Some nice size particles here, not the sort of machine-ground pigment you find in the nineteenth century. Quite a subdued palette, but generally the sort of quality you’d expect in the late sixteenth century. Together with the ground, I might tentatively put it there. But the paint layers are extraordinarily complex. Can you see that this green doesn’t relate to the top layers at all? Of course, it could simply be that the painter changed his mind.’ She pulled out a graph from the file. ‘This is the most puzzling find though. It seems as if the painter has used some sort of protein for the final high-lights, though the rest is in oil as you’d expect.’
I felt as though I was back in one of Lindsay’s Materials Science classes, and failing to come up with the answers. ‘Does that mean egg tempera?’
‘Yes, that’s just what it may mean,’ she agreed approvingly, and I felt a warm flush of triumph. ‘And if it does it’s rather interesting. You thought your painting might be by Caravaggio – well, as far as I know only Caravaggio uses egg tempera in that way. For instance the white high-lights in the Boy Bitten by a Lizard – it’s in your Gallery, you should go and have a look next time you have a moment . . . Anyhow, you read it. My bill’s enclosed.’ She handed me the folder. ‘Is this some find you’re authenticating, or aren’t you at liberty to say?’
‘There’s no particular mystery. It’s to do with an exhibition I’m trying to get together.’ I explained about the different versions of the picture and how there seemed to be one too many.
‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘D’you have some photos?’
‘As it happens, I do. Of two of them, anyway.’ I pulled my laptop out of its case and called up pictures of the Louvre version and the ones I’d taken at La Jaubertie. We put them up side by side.
‘It’s a very exact copy, isn’t it,’ said Lindsay. ‘The only real difference is that little flower on the floor by the music – if you look, it’s a bit further over in the Louvre picture, in the other one it’s actually near the middle of the music book. Otherwise they’re pretty much identical.’
‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘But there’s something about them I don’t quite understand. I don’t suppose you know any-one in the Louvre’s technical department, do you?’
Lindsay said, as I’d hoped she would, ‘As a matter of fact I do, yes.’
‘I don’t want to be seen to be asking for a technical examination – I’m still hoping we may be able to borrow this, and it might give exactly the wrong idea. But it would be really interesting if they could do a few tests, and perhaps an X-ray. D’you think it might be possible to ask your friend just to take a discreet look?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Lindsay said thoughtfully. ‘Leave it to me – I’ll tell you what she says. I’ll say it’s for a friend of mine at the National Gallery, shall I?’
‘I’d much rather you didn’t. Could you possibly pretend you’re interested in it yourself?’
‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘It wouldn’t be altogether pretence, either. I agree, there is something . . . It’s nice to see all our careful training being put to some use for once.’
We copied the photos to disk so that Lindsay could refer to them. When I got back to the office, I looked through her report. Of course I already knew its broad outlines, but that didn’t make it any less interesting. As she had been at such pains to emphasize, tests like these couldn’t tell you whether a picture was by one artist rather than another. But if her findings were correct – and that they were correct, I had no doubt – then despite its dodgy provenance, the Jaubertie picture definitely was not a nineteenth-century fake. In which case it seemed likely to be the genuine Caravaggio I’d thought it from the start.
But although that was gratifying, it was also puzzling. If, as seemed almost certain, one of the pictures was ‘wrong’, that had to be the most likely candidate. That or Freddie Angelo’s – but his proof seemed incontrovertible. Which left the Louvre and the Getty – both equally unimaginable.
Perhaps there really were four versions. But that, too, seemed unlikely. Caravaggio had often made more than one version of a picture, but four? He was a painter, not a factory.
Meanwhile, I had other things to worry about.
19
London, October
The body was exhumed the day after my meeting with Lindsay. Juliette had been buried in the little cemetery at St Front, with its cypress trees and glass-roofed tombs. She’d have been stored in one of those stone drawers – did they cement you in? Would she have had to be chipped out? Not that anything would have set very hard quite yet . . . Figaro, which I now checked daily, carried a picture of gaping onlookers gathered around the police tent that had been erected over the Beaupré family vault. None of the faces meant anything to me. Oddly, the accompanying piece wasn’t by Olivier. It wasn’t anything very significant – merely a résumé of the proceedings to date – but even so, surely (if the Fig really was giving him a trial) this was his story?
As always seemed to happen these days, Olivier’s cell-phone switched me straight to voicemail. So I called Figaro. The switchboard seemed to recognize his name, and put me through, but the phone at the other end rang and rang. No one answered.
I rang off and dialled Figaro again. This time I asked the switchboard to put me through to the news editor. When he answered, I said I was trying to contact Olivier Peytoureau.
‘Ah, Olivier. He had some bad news – had to go back home.’
My mouth felt suddenly dry. ‘Bad news? Not too serious, I hope?’
‘His wife died,’ the news editor said shortly.
‘Delphine? Died?’ I thought of cutting up melons together, and nearly wept into the phone. However would he cope? And his children, poor things. ‘What happened? She wasn’t ill.’
‘No, it was a car accident, I believe. They called yesterday afternoon . . . Poor fellow’s stunned, you can imagine. Are you a friend of his?’
‘Sort of. Thanks, I’ll try and get in touch with him.’
No. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Retching my breakfast into the lavatory bowl, I wondered how many people could say they literally turned their own stomach. I should never have touched Olivier. I’d known it from the first guilty moment: rule number one. When he phoned that morning I should have told him, no. Or met him in a restaurant. I didn’t have to invite him round. And now Delphine had died. All because of me.
I rinsed out my mouth and held my face under the cold tap, and promised her ghost that I’d get the bastard.
My friend Alice, coming into the Ladies just then, looked startled. ‘Did you say something, Reg?’
‘No, no. Sorry. Talking to myself.’
‘You look awful. Are you all right?’
‘Had a bit of a shock. I’ll be OK.’
A car accident. Well, it could happen to anyone. But the roads round St Front were as unthreatening as roads could well be in the twenty-first century – hardly any traffic, and none of it fast. Your most dangerous moment, generally speaking, would be trying to pass a combine harvester.
No wonder Olivier wasn’t answering his phone. I ought to leave him alone. I must be the last person he’d want to speak to. But somehow, I had to find out more.
I pulled out my Meyrignac folder, flipped through it to see if anyone possible might suggest themselves – and came across the note Olivier’s uncle Francis had slipped in with his package. It was scribbled on his builder’s headed paper, and it gave his number. I looked at my watch – eleven o’clock: but of course France was an hour ahead. If I tried in half an hour, he’d be home for lunch.
He was. ‘Laronze.’
‘Monsieur Laronze, it’s Régine Lee from London. I heard that Delphine Peytoureau was in a car accident. Is it true?’
‘I’m afraid so. God knows how they’ll manage, poor things. The funeral’s the day after tomorrow.’
‘What happened, do you know?’
‘Hit and run,’ said Francis laconically. ‘He forced her off the road and she ran into a tree. Died instantly . . . They haven’t caught him, the salaud. There’s a red mark on the car, that’s all they know. But there are a lot of red cars in France.’
I had a vision of Rigaut’s red BMW. You wouldn’t want a scratch on that expensive bodywork. If one appeared, you’d get it fixed. At once. I wondered if the same thought had occurred to Olivier.
I thanked Francis, then took a deep breath and tried the Les Pruniers number. Magali answered. I said, ‘Hello, is your papa there?’
She yelled, ‘Papa, it’s for you.’
Olivier said, ‘Oui?’ He sounded grave, distracted.
‘Olivier, it’s Régine. I heard . . .’
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I just can’t believe it. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
‘They haven’t found who did it?’
‘No. I don’t get the impression they’re looking very hard,’ he said bitterly.
‘Your uncle said there was a red mark on the car. I was thinking of that red BMW.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think –?’