"You can’t be serious. If you had a permanent free sleigh-ride, and never had to pay for the horse, you’d see to it that the horse was well treated and got plenty of oats. But I realise of course you were being sarcastic. In fact Thierry’s not an uncommon type, and I think quite often met with in families where the father was a self-made man of great energy and push."
"Also he’s a gentle and timid creature really," said Magali. "Highly sensitive, as you often find behind a pose of cynicism. He used to write a good deal, and could still I think make a career for himself in that. The hay-fever might have been psychosomatic, but was quite genuine: he couldn’t stand the pettiness and materialism of the Customs and Excise or whatever it was. Lots of people with high ideals pretend to have none."
"I’m idling here, and abusing your hospitality." Polite remarks were made, but no one stopped Castang going.
The technical squad had tidied up and gone. The secretary, with much ostentatious rattle of keys, was waiting impatiently to close the office. She started a tirade about not letting a perfectly good business collapse simply because ‘one of the principals’ had a tragic accident; Maryvonne, who had come in quietly, winked at him behind the woman’s back: a spare bony soul with an improbable bosom, much overdressed and wearing a lot of sexy perfume. Castang told her to sort out the business details with Bertrand, who would be ‘administering the estate’, got rid of her at last and went to look again round the flat next door. There was nothing much to see. The walls were hung with a lot of dimmish-looking landscapes in Victorian gilt frames. Didier seemed to have been an amateur of this sort of art. Done perhaps a bit of dealing in a small way; he had done doubtless a bit of dealing in anything that came under his hand. The flat was furnished with quite good semi-antique pieces, showed little individual taste, was tidy, neat, and on the whole clean. The technicians, said Maryvonne, had found no striking break in the pattern. She had been trying to find out about women: there were oldish prints of at least two women, and a woman had been on the phone, the secretary said, the day before ‘but it might have been a customer’. She kept her trap well shut, said Maryvonne. "Wants to try and carry on by herself, if she can find a ‘suitable partner’ – there are prints of hers in here; she says she tidied a bit from time to time out of kindness. She slept with him too of course, denies it but I wasn’t going to make a thing of it." Castang nodded.
"We’ll lock up. These keys can go back to Bertrand tomorrow, in all probability, if Madame Delavigne agrees. Buy you a drink in the pub?" looking at his watch.
"I don’t have anybody identified," said Maryvonne. "I think he might have been fooling round with some married woman. I got his ex-wife, I’ve spoken to several other people in the business, I think I’ve got a pretty fair pattern of his conduct and general movements, but I’ll put it all in the report shall I? – Anyhow, not to bore you with it now. This is nice, I could just about use it," taking a gulp. "It seems much like the father somehow; plenty of people with solid reasons for disliking him but no adequate motives for killing him that show. But we’ve no adequate grounds for a homicide, have we?"
"Don’t suppose so. Have to ring Deutz when we get back to the office. Just it doesn’t fit. The accident-prone thing would satisfy Delavigne, doubtless, if nothing else shows. Let’s try and make it an early evening if we can." Maryvonne took the hint and drained her glass.
"Phone IJ would you?" said Castang, sitting at his own desk and scribbling memos to himself. Colette Delavigne will want a long exhaustive written report, he thought gloomily. Have to do that on the typewriter at home, preferably after supper.
Identité Judiciaire had nothing to contribute. Yes, there were a lot of vague old prints everywhere, kitchen, bathroom, where you like, that hadn’t been wiped or polished recently, and the last good cleanup had been some days ago. Fresh ones of the fellow himself, meaning made that day – he didn’t wear gloves to make a cup of coffee. But if anybody else had been there, let alone an assassin, well, they’d kept their hands in their pockets. Sorry, Castang, no handy bottles wiped clean.
"God, I hope Deutz isn’t gone yet," in a panic hunting for the Pathology Department’s number among a lot of scribbles on calendars. "Would you put me through please – Castang, PJ." Professor Deutz was the medico-legal expert, referred to by Richard as ‘Our Spilsbury’. He was an eccentric and gifted teacher, and his personal interest in criminology, which was his hobby, made him a source of light a great deal brighter and richer than that of the average staff pathologist in a university faculty.
"Castang. Oh yes, finished ages ago. Not the report, have to wait for that. But you can tell the judge; who is it? Young Delavigne? I don’t know her. She can ring me if she’s not satisfied, or wait for my girl, who as usual has a mountain to type up. Perfectly straightforward. Cardiac, vertigo, brain arteries – all my eye, fellow absolutely healthy, youngish man. Didn’t fall down in a fit. Sober-living too, no heavy meal, no high alcohol level. Stomach wasn’t empty; he’d had a bite of bread and cheese to stay the pangs. So you’re left with did he slip on the soap. Maybe he did, I haven’t seen the bathtub."
"Old-fashioned, enamel worn and rubbed, nothing remarkable either way."
"Hm, makes no odds. If he fell and hit his head on the bath then the bath was upside down."
"Huh?"
"Don’t be ridiculous, Castang, of course I paid close attention to the bruise. Bruises are always interesting; come and see me next time you get a black eye."
"I’d be there daily."
"Quite, and your diary would make boring reading. A microscope on the tissue tells one all one wants. Now when you fall and crack your silly head on something lower than waist level you’ll find the bruise most pronounced on the lower peripheral area, I’m not going to bother blinding you in technical jargon. Glancing blow going upwards, and if I take a swing at you with a copper saucepan underarm your black eye will show heaviest on the lower edge. Whereas if I grip it like a club and bring it down overarm from above shoulder level – you follow. So if the bath hit him the bath was suspended upside down like it was there to keep the rain off."
"At head height there was a shelf. The electric fan was on the shelf and the shelf jarred loose from old plaster."
"Richard told me about this shelf. How thick is the shelf? Wood is it, or plasterboard?"
"Wood, the usual, two, two and a half centimetre. But I had thought there was a sharp edge but there’s not; bevelled round, so no profile. Old hard wood, covered in cracked old varnish; the tech. squad makes nothing much of it. I mean an impact enough to stun someone wouldn’t make an impact on the wood; was there any skin lost?"
"No no, it won’t do, Castang, your wood. Something slightly rounded yes, there was no sharp edge. But a lot wider in surface than your shelf. The bath would do nicely but sorry, I won’t accept that he fell on it. It reared up and downed him."
"Oh fuck."
"Yes quite, I agree completely. But I’d testify in that sense and I’d have slides, photos, the lot to bring into court. It’s serious, Castang, you’ve quite certainly a homicide there. He was honked, slid down in the water, and the electric shock thing flung in on top."
"And that caused his death, did it?"
"Adequately. The fire-brigade diagnosis is unimpeachable. Electricity deaths they see a lot of, naturally, and all the clinical signs are present. If it hadn’t been a PJ job to begin with it might well have passed unnoticed. So a clever homicide, Castang, intelligently carried out."
"Was the bonk hard enough to make him lose consciousness?"
"I wouldn’t risk an opinion on that. A solid dose of household voltage produces alterations enough to make much of what went before unreadable. Judging by what we have, it was a dint hard enough to make one see stars and sit down, no more: it didn’t come near fracturing the skull."
"Nothing to show he was transported to the bath?"
"The point occurred to me. He wasn’t manhandled in any way. It would depend more upon your scen
ario, whether he was bonked in the next room and hauled into the bathroom. I’d prefer it that there was someone in the bathroom with him but I’m not prepared to say he couldn’t have lost consciousness long enough to be hauled about and undressed. With your permission, I’ll be on my way home now."
"An ingenious idea," said Castang putting the phone down, "defeated by the perspicacity of Sherlock: a pathologist is about the only real one there is, and Deutz has always been a tremendous reader of detective stories; his office is full of them."
"Ingenious fellow too," said Maryvonne, "keeping as IJ assure us his hands in his pockets. That electric fan, smooth plastic surface, prints would have shown up nicely on that. So you push it off the shelf in a plausible, natural way, with your elbow maybe?"
"We aren’t going to get anywhere much along those lines. We’ll call it a day; it’s knocking-off time. If you want something to be going on with, stick to the classic approach. Once we accept this as homicide, what are the possibilities, I mean the number and likelihood of authors, the probability factor."
"I see, yes – you mean somebody in the bathroom is somebody he would have known, and well."
"And somebody familiar with the bathroom. It isn’t very likely somebody invented that gag with the fan on the spur of the moment."
He sat by himself a moment. This is the second full day Vera will have spent in hospital. And am I any further?
FIFTHTEEN
BOOTS, BOOTS…
He buzzed Richard’s line but there was no answer. He clicked the bar and got the switchboard.
"Raise the boss when you can and give him this message: I rang Deutz about the electricity death, and the medico-legal evidence says homicide. Got that?"
A sort of psychic chemistry took place with Vera. Her antennae were always sensitive, in these circumstances more so than usual. When you are in a maternity clinic, well protected from worrying or upsetting influences, and a cop of all people walks in, you sit up and take notice, because of all the sharp disquieting smells that come in with him. There are disturbing electric currents, to say the least. He did of course his best to be placid and emollient, and made things worse, because she knew at once that events judged unsuitable for the Nursing Mother were getting withheld. She became, quite naturally, cross, edgy and tired, with long jagged silences and sudden monosyllabic interjections. Brave flows of talk about flowers, weather or the book she was reading fell horribly flat. She summoned resources, to no avail.
"You’d better go home, darling. Whatever bothers you may have, they don’t have to include me. I hope that may be some small consolation. I am extremely peaceful and quiet, and concentrating on getting strong as soon as ever I can. I’m doing lots of leg exercises. They want as well to get me up on my feet. The old idea of lying like a log is greatly discouraged. I’ll be home very soon, and you can take your days off." He smiled, got up, kissed her, left. What was the use of making a fuss? He went to the supermarket on the way home, cooked himself some supper, watered the plants, went around solemnly with a duster, washed up the supper things, and that morning’s breakfast things, with plodding humourless exactitude. He took up the current book, with a ballpoint pen marking the place – he was a massacrer of books, one of those people who annotate in margins and leave lists of page references on the back endpaper – and fussed a good deal making himself comfortable. The television set, its face dusted but no further attention paid it, sneered at him silently from the corner with a hostile unwinking gaze. Stupid cop, it said; intellectual snob. Foolish little man.
There was a loud, peculiar, unusual ring at the front-door bell. He paid no attention to it. It was repeated, bossily. He sighed, got up, pressed the catch, stood waiting to hear whether the lift stopped at his floor. He stood staring vacantly at his door. Good solid door of an old house; thick old-fashioned hardwood. It wasn’t armour-plated or anything. Vera had a chain for it, for when she was alone.
The lift stopped; he opened the door. He was considerably taken aback. Of all people, Commissaire Richard had not been expected. Wreathed in a crooked social smile, looking – if it were possible – diffident.
"Hallo, Castang. I dropped in. My wife has gone out to some boring function." Richard never mentioned his wife. Come to that he never dropped in. This was all so wildly out of character as to be breathtaking, but he wasn’t going to be breathtaken. Richard, who had never been here before, looked about with approval at the high old room with vaguely Greek motives, acanthus leaves or something, in blackened stucco on the ceiling, at handmade rugs on the floor, at Vera’s drawing board and windowboxes, at pictures, most of them her drawings and some hung to hide bad bits in the tatty wallpaper. Finally he sat down and looked at Castang. "I got your message, incidentally." Yes, of course it was business that brought him here. He hadn’t brought any flowers…
He was dressed in his clerical dark grey suit, rather tight, a bit precious, generally a hint that he was in a fussy, niggly mood. The skin of his face was smooth and fine as usual, with a healthy colour and a slight tan on the bridge of the nose; his straight silvery hair, fine in texture, unruffled. Looked in fact much as usual. But the thin lines were sharper, deeper than ordinarily. And he had always an upright carriage: when he walked in had he been round-shouldered? Yes, undoubtedly. Richard was looking older than he did as a rule. In fact he looked like an old cop; to wit an old bastard. The word, certainly, was ‘unusual’. Monsieur le Commissaire Divisionnaire, who looked at all times like the brisk and mordant businessman of mature years and incisive judgement, was looking knocked about.
"You feel like a drink?"
"Yes. No. All right, yes." He was wearing his gold-wire reading glasses, over which the china-blue eyes stabbed shrewdly at Castang. He took them off and tucked them in his pocket: he’d done enough reading.
"Another day spent snuffling into municipal politics. I’ve done a lot of it. It doesn’t come new or anything. Mistake, to believe one might uncover complicated turpitudes. They exist, to be sure. Much like those you’ll find anywhere, but in no greater quantity or flagrancy.
"Corruption? It is now difficult to ascribe a precise meaning to this misused word. Marcel was no more corrupt than anybody else, on the whole.
"The stuff out of the code, corruptly inducing for gain or interest – knowingly uttering or accepting – uttering or altering the written word knowing it to be false – tja, what does everybody do, all the time? Little vanities or importances, that’s the fabric of municipal politics, the game of little clans and alliances, the preservation and promotion of self-interest. Just like everybody else…
"Well, we’ve uncovered nothing, Massip or I.
"Nonsense all this is. Obviously, the mayor didn’t have any choice. Neither did I. Fellow gets assassinated like that, you’re bound to look for scandals. Frightful big hole in the football club treasury; shameful feeling-up of choir-boys; illegal abortions of thirteen-year-old choirgirl, what. In short, something for the press.
"There isn’t, of course. Etienne Marcel was an astute and experienced official, who took pains not to get dipped in any scandals. And took pains that none of his associates should either.
"Of course there’s any amount of what makes the wheels go round. Semi-public or semi-private featherbedding and barrel-rolling. Incompetence winked at, nepotism indulged. A brisk trade in tiny items of knowledge. Pilferage of paperclips. I could go on for weeks tugging at who gave the order for sixteen hundred litres of paint flagrantly unsuitable for its designated use. Who altered the specification, who juggled procurement forms, how much paint was used, and where’s the rest?
"Petty dishonesty: but what we’re looking for is a man with a gun. Not a finger in a porkbarrel; a finger on a trigger. I couldn’t give a rap about the fellow having gold in a Swiss bank or shares in a holding company in Liechtenstein. Why the hell would there be any integrity in these ward-heeling affairs? Is there any integrity in national politics? No, of course there isn’t. Is there any difference between
the seven sisters flogging oil to Rhodesia and a procurement form for three hundred and fifty wastepaper baskets? Less interest involved, so if Mr Veesohn didn’t get shot why the hell should Marcel?"
Since this was roughly twenty times as long as any speech Richard had ever been known to make, Castang was puzzled. If he made tirades, they were at Fausta, about telephone calls or his tea being cold. They lasted fifteen seconds.
"I’ve gone back," said Richard in his normal voice, "to the essential physical facts in this killing, to the technical inquiry carried out. None of it tells me much, and nothing’s come of it."
"Didn’t Cantoni find any terrorists, then?" tactfully.
"Found far too many; the word’s a meaningless platitude. We could fill Fresnes prison with what we’ve got. Officially there aren’t any: Special Branch will tell you blandly there are a few loony lefties. Doesn’t want attention drawn to them, on the perfectly sound grounds there’s nothing they like better than free publicity. The Minister isn’t keen on terrorists at all, having declared openly that this is not a French form of amusement. It’s as though they got turned back by the Customs, at the Italian end of the Mont Blanc tunnel. You see the hole I’m in? What they’re really afraid of is that machine-gunning politicians might become a popular sport, something like skate-boarding. Little notices would be going up: Assassinations on the Public Footway will be punished with a fine of fifty francs. Exactly like rinsing out oil tankers."
"You mean otherwise one would have to build gigantic concentration camps?"
"That’s it: a use found at last for the abattoirs of La Villette, the Lorraine steelworks, the Château de Rambouillet and numerous other monuments to national prestige."
Richard frustrated, Richard in his nutmeg-grater mood, launching sarcasm to ‘ginger up the peasantry’ was quite a common occurrence. A safety valve for both boredom and hazard: as he had been heard to say, the Royal Navy grew great on rum, buggery and the lash. Scurrilous pamphleteering in no way endangered governments, nor relaxed the bonds of discipline. It was indeed a carefully controlled performance, and trodden-down underlings could relieve their feelings by saying ‘Have you heard Richard’s latest?’ In much the same fashion, the Canard Enchainé is read, and quoted, with the most fervour by the employees of government departments.
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