The Shattered Tree

by Charles Todd

  “You’re the woman who was in the fräulein’s house. With an officer,” he went on, not offering us a seat. “What is it you want now?”

  “I am so sorry, Captain—”

  “No, you aren’t, or you wouldn’t be here,” he threw back at me.

  “You’re wrong. I have come to your door twice, and you refused to speak to me. I think you know why.”

  “The affairs of my family are no concern of yours.”

  “That’s true, in other circumstances. But there have been several recent attempts at murder now. Sister Marie-Luc, and Captain Barkley, the man you saw with me at Fräulein Theissen’s cottage. By the grace of God, I escaped serious injury. That makes your family’s concerns my own. If you like, we’ll leave. And I will speak to the police. Let them sort out what’s been happening.”

  I turned to go, and I’d almost reached the door when he relented. I’d thought he might, but as my hand reached for the knob, I was afraid I’d guessed wrong.

  “Yes, all right. You’re here. We might as well get it over with. What do you want?”

  “To clear up a mystery,” I said. “The police sought a man in Paris, for the attack on the nun. But Marie-Luc stubbornly insists that it was the wrong man. She glimpsed your brother in Paris, and she’s convinced that he has found her and tried to kill her.”

  I could see that he hadn’t known that Philippe Moreau was in Paris. Recovering quickly, he said, “Why should he wish to harm her? And he is not my brother. He never was.”

  “I don’t know whether that’s true or not. Legally he must still be. As to any blood ties, certainly Fräulein Theissen knew what the truth was. She brought him to France. I have no idea what your mother was told. Or even how she felt about it when your father insisted on adopting Philippe.” I walked back into the room and took one of the dustcovers off the nearest chair to the hearth, sitting down in it and holding out my hands to warm them. Simon remained standing by the door.

  “I didn’t know he was adopted. For years, I believed it was true that he was my elder brother. And my mother dared not say anything while my father was alive. She was a bitter woman by the time he died. She told me later that the child was his bastard, foisted on us. I didn’t want to believe it then. Philippe was barely two when he came to Petite-Beauvais. He couldn’t remember any home but ours. She made his life wretched, all the same. I’ve always thought that’s why he—” He broke off, turning to pour himself a little more wine, but then he set the glass down without tasting it.

  “Why he murdered the Lavaud family? Because they were making their own son unhappy?”

  He spun around. “How did you know about that?”

  “There was a cutting in the fräulein’s possession. It was the first newspaper account of the murders. I think Marie-Luc knows how that ended, but I’ve not been able to find out for myself whether Philippe was charged or not. Still—something was wrong that afternoon. You went off riding. The Lavauds’ son was in the kennels. Philippe was found dazed and wandering.”

  “My mother sent her that cutting. With a note that informed her it was her son they were taking into custody. She told me years later.”

  It was the ultimate cruelty. The woman who had taken in the boy, however reluctantly, abandoning him now.

  “And did they arrest him?”

  “He was charged. My mother refused to go back to Paris for the trial and fight for him. I didn’t understand why at the time. She said only that he was guilty and there was nothing she could do. I don’t know that she ever saw him again.” He sat down heavily in the chair by the table. “You can’t imagine my shock. When I returned to school at the beginning of the next term—it was just a few weeks later—I was taunted unmercifully. By the end of term, I was convinced I hated Philippe. That he was the monster my mother assured me he was.” He twisted the stem of the wineglass in his fingers, watching the contents swirl around.

  “What became of him?” It was Simon who asked that question.

  “The newspapers claimed that on the first day of his trial, he took violently ill. It was thought that he might have taken some poison. It only added to the perception that he was guilty. They rushed him to hospital, and on the second night that he was there, he escaped. There was another boy in the ward. Philippe simply took his clothes and walked out.”

  “Where did he go? Did anyone help him?” I tried to picture a twelve-year-old child, forsaken by his mother, his brother, and everyone else, walking out into the dark streets of Paris, with nowhere to go, no money, nowhere to turn. How on earth had he survived?

  “I don’t know. I wondered, years later, if Fräulein Theissen had come for him and helped him to escape. Although how she would have managed it, I don’t know. He was not allowed visitors, he saw no one but the staff. I did ask my mother, once, if she had spirited him away to save us all the nightmare of a trial. It might have occurred to her that the endless news coverage would stop if he vanished. It was difficult for all of us.”

  “How did she answer you?” I asked.

  “She laughed in my face. Victor Lavaud, the murder victims’ son, never believed it was Philippe. He told the police it couldn’t have been. But there was some sort of evidence. He found the bodies, you know. The police thought that very clever of him. It accounted for the blood on the soles of his shoes and on his clothes.”

  He took a deep breath. “After that, it was as if he had disappeared into thin air. There was a search, of course, but with no leads, the police gave up. They felt he’d died on the streets.”

  “Do you think he went back to Alsace?”

  Paul Moreau took a deep breath. “It had occurred to me. Not in the beginning. Fräulein might have helped him. She must have had a few family members left in the province. I don’t know that the police ever looked for him there, if it even occurred to them. At any rate, interest in the murders soon waned, and I could get on with my life.”

  “You never heard from him again?”

  “Not from him. I did hear of him.”

  I waited, almost holding my breath. Fearing what he might have to tell me.

  “The war. He must have enlisted under Theissen. I remember someone asking me if he was any relation to my old governess. I had no idea if it was true or not, I just denied it vehemently. In late 1915, no one wanted to be related to anyone who was German. And then Karl Theissen was taken up on a charge of treason. I didn’t want to know if that was Philippe. I didn’t want anything to do with him, or this man Thiessen. I told myself the fact that this was also the name of our governess was no more than an unfortunate coincidence.”

  “And he was court-martialed,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  He looked up at me in surprise. “Yes. But he escaped again. It was thought that he fled to the German lines and gave himself up. Where else could he have gone?”

  “When was this?”

  “In early 1916? Yes, I believe that’s right.”

  “But I thought—there was someone from this village who was court-martialed in the spring of this year.”

  “That wasn’t anything to do with me. The man came home to help his pregnant wife plant a crop on their farm.”

  I’d been told he’d escaped. Someone must have felt sympathetic toward him and turned a blind eye.

  Hurriedly collecting my thoughts, I could see that the time difference helped explain how Sister Marie-Luc had seen Philippe Moreau in Belgium in a German uniform.

  And here, at the end of the war, Philippe—no longer Karl Theissen—was back in Paris. I’d seen him, and so had the nun. Small wonder he had tried to kill us. Not because of the murders a long time ago, but because he was wanted by the French Army.

  It was finally making sense. A terrible kind of sense, if he had spied for the Germans in Paris, and when we found him, he was trying to reach his own lines before the war ended.

  “You can see why I wanted no part of his resurrection,” Paul Moreau was saying. “It will all be raked up again. The mur
ders, the trial, the court martial, his escape to Germany. I’ll be dragged into it, sooner or later. The newspapers will find me. They have before.” He picked up the glass and emptied it, swallowing hard, as if he didn’t care for the taste. His gaze swept us, me sitting by the fire, Simon still standing by the door. “Do you see why I didn’t want any part of you?”

  I did. All too well.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, for the second time that evening. “But you must see as well that we can’t simply let him go on killing.”

  “He hasn’t killed,” Paul Moreau retorted harshly. “You and the Captain and the nun are still alive.”

  “Not for want of trying,” I responded, cold in my turn. “Do we just wait, and hope that once his feet are healed, he’s finished with us and intent on whatever new life he hopes is waiting for him?”

  It was Simon who spoke then. “Conditions are very bad in Germany. He speaks French. Now that he’s in Paris he could go anywhere in France, claim to be anyone. He could emigrate to Quebec. Or Martinique.”

  “I have no idea where he is or where he will go. I don’t care. You must ask this nun, since she seems to know more about him than I do.”

  “She believes he killed the Lavaud family. I don’t think she is aware of the court martial. Did he kill them? You were there. You must remember something about that day, and what happened to him.”

  He’d been flushed, whether with anger or wine or both, I couldn’t tell. Now he shrugged. “God knows. He was accused. They took him away, and that was the last time I saw him.”

  “What was the evidence against him?”

  “I don’t have any idea. The police wouldn’t tell me what was happening. Why should they? I was nine—almost ten at the time. Someone sent for my mother, and she came at once. When she took me home, she told me never to mention Philippe or the Lavaud family ever again—to anyone. Nor was I to acknowledge that Fräulein Theissen had ever been our governess. When the fräulein bought the cottage here in Petite-Beauvais, my mother was furious. She always believed Father Robert was somehow responsible. She never went to services at the church again.”

  “Did you think your brother was guilty?” I asked.

  “After a while, when everyone else believed it, I accepted it as well.”

  “Who else could have killed them?”

  “I have no idea. I understood later that the police had spoken to the groom, and to the man who was courting one of the maids. I’d quarreled with Victor Lavaud, the son of the house. He was Philippe’s friend, but I’d been invited to stay as well. And so that afternoon I took out one of the horses. I’d been told I could. Victor was sulking, sitting in the kennel playing with the new puppies. Philippe was upstairs in his room. When I got back from my ride, there were police everywhere. I was taken to the gardener’s cottage and left there for hours—they fed me my dinner, and I asked where Philippe was, or Victor. I asked why they couldn’t serve me dinner in the house, as they had before. The gardener’s wife kept weeping. I was asleep on their daughter’s bed when my mother came and took me home. She told me the Lavaud family had taken seriously ill, and I had to stay away or I’d be ill too.”

  His face was drained, reliving that moment. “When the new term began, Philippe was not in school. Nor was Victor. We were informed that he was an orphan now, and he’d been taken to Nice to live with his aunt. I hadn’t particularly liked him, but I felt sad that his parents had died of their illness. I’d lost my own father just three months earlier. And then one of the lads in the upper school laughed at me and showed me a newspaper with my brother’s photograph on the front page, and he told me that Philippe was on trial for murdering Victor’s parents. That he was going to the guillotine where they would chop off his head, just as he’d chopped off the heads of the Lavaud family. I couldn’t sleep for a fortnight.”

  The cruelty of children.

  “They were stabbed,” I said gently. “Along with two maids in the kitchen.”

  “Yes, as I learned.” After a moment he added, “Will you go to the police, now?”

  “I don’t know. Not tonight.” I found the photograph I had been given in Rouen and held it out to him. I had brought it with me on purpose.

  Paul Moreau took it reluctantly, as if afraid to look at it. Then, with a shrug, he turned it so that he could see it clearly.

  “I wouldn’t have known him,” he said slowly. “I wouldn’t have recognized him if he spoke to me on the street. You are certain this is Philippe?” He peered at it. “It’s been, what, eighteen years? Still. And why is he wearing an American uniform?”

  “There wasn’t a French uniform that fit him. He’d been wounded, you see.”

  Puzzled, he stared at the photograph a little longer, then passed it back to me.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “His was in a very sad state.” I told him what I knew.

  “It wasn’t life threatening? His wounds? Ironic.” He grimaced as he looked down at his leg. “They’ve set it twice, you know. The bone refuses to knit.”

  I rose from my chair by the fire, thinking about the long drive back to Paris in the cold. “Are you managing? They should have sent you to a clinic that deals with such things.”

  “I wanted to come home. My war is finished. I might as well begin to think about myself as an ex-soldier. God knows, there’s enough to do around here. It will keep the demons at bay.” He got to his feet.

  It wasn’t a grand house by any means, just what one might call in England a manor house. But if the rest of it was as well proportioned as this room, with its blue-and-silver wallpaper and elegant molding, including a white plaster circlet of roses in the center of the ceiling, matching the garlands that ran out from it, it had been handsome in its day and might be again. But where would come the staff that had once kept it polished, and comfortable, and well maintained?

  What I’d heard this night was what I’d feared since I witnessed that outburst of German there in Base Hospital Three, where all this began. It was why I couldn’t let the matter go. But now that I had all the answers, what was I to do about it?

  I was very glad that it was Simon here with me, and not Captain Barkley or Major Vernon. I could depend on Simon not to act rashly and report what he’d heard as soon as we reached Paris. Despite what I’d said about a murderer going free, I needed a night to think, to take in what I’d been told here and decide what to do.

  Captain Moreau seemed to draw himself up, as if expecting a blow and preparing himself to deal with it. “Is that why you have come, with British officers? Is it the court martial charges, rather than the murders, that will take precedence if he is caught? I need to know. I’m the one who will bear the brunt of whatever he’s done. I need to be ready to face what is coming. I don’t know how much more I can deal with.”

  I didn’t like what I saw in his face. I was glad Simon was here with me.

  “Swear to me! I told you in good faith what I knew. Swear to me that you won’t turn him in.”

  “I don’t know,” I said again, my uncertainty in my voice.

  And then I realized what he was saying, what was behind his words. Wounded and in pain, coming home to an empty house with nothing but memories haunting its shadows, he was telling me that he would rather end his life than lose this last refuge.

  We stood there, his gaze holding mine, his own will there in his eyes. Without warning, the expression changed, as if he was weighing up his chances.

  What worried me then was what I could see very clearly in his face. That Paul Moreau could kill too.

  The moment passed. Perhaps he realized that he was no match for Simon, not with that leg. Perhaps when it came right down to it, he couldn’t bring himself to stop us from leaving with what we knew.

  The danger passed. He stepped back, nearly stumbling on his bad foot, catching himself just in time with a hand on the back of his chair. He swore under his breath, his expression one of defeat and shame at his own weakness.

 
“Look at me. I could barely kill a spider crawling up the wall.” And he turned toward the fire to hide what he was really thinking. That he wouldn’t always be a cripple.

  I walked out of the room. He didn’t follow us as we went down the passage and closed the door to the house behind us.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What did you think of Paul Moreau?” I asked Simon when we were well away, past the first of the villages between Petite-Beauvais and the main road into the city.

  Simon was silent for a time. “I’m not sure,” he said finally. “He’s paid for Philippe’s crimes ever since he was ten. Now that he knows Philippe is in Paris, he might well decide it’s time for a reckoning.”

  “I shouldn’t have told him. But then how else could I make him understand why we had come to speak to him? Jerome Karadeg would mean nothing to him. Nor would what happened to Marie-Luc. Or even to Captain Barkley.”

  “Now that you know what Philippe’s capable of, what will you do? Go to the Army?”

  “Or the police.” I gave it some thought. “Even Paul didn’t know who the murderer was, in that house. Why were the police so certain it was Philippe?”

  I was about to find out.

  We arrived at the clinic to find Inspector Duplessis impatiently waiting in the library, late as it was. He was not in a very good humor. Simon had walked with me to the door, given what had happened in the courtyard the night before.

  Our only warning came as we stepped into Reception. The orderly, greeting me, jerked his head in the direction of the rooms behind him, and said, “Someone called. He insisted on waiting.”

  “Who is he?” I asked, but with a sinking feeling, I thought I knew.

  He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper. “If I were in London, now, I’d say he was a copper.”

  Turning to Simon, I said, “The motorcar. You need to take it back.”