The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘I’ve just driven down,’ he called.

  ‘In the middle of the night?’

  ‘It’s too hot in the afternoon. Come downstairs. I’ve got some news. And some fresh evidence.’

  André Schweigen kept the Faith alive. The case mattered more to him than any other because it opened the doors to the Judge.

  * * *

  Her house lurked breathless and shut up on a little hill, north-east of the city, surrounded by a blank stone wall and a discreet curtain of pinède. She irrigated her garden via a computer-controlled system of pipes, which hissed and spat in the dark. They heard the spray and smelt the water as they climbed out of their cars. Schweigen hesitated before removing his small case from the boot. She had not invited him to stay with her. A warm wind stirred the stunted pines; Schweigen began to justify himself, standing there on the gravel in the perfumed dark.

  ‘I did try to tell you I was coming. I left three messages on your answerphone here,’ he announced. ‘The switchboard had closed at your office and you usually turn off your mobile at work.’

  ‘It’s all right, André. You can stay the night. I was feeling a little dispirited. I’m glad you’re here.’

  She fiddled with her keys. The terrace lights all came on in a burst and immediately fizzled with insects. Her mother’s clafoutis lay prostrate in the fridge, untouched. Had the fruit congealed into rubber? She prodded the flan in hope.

  ‘She only made it for me on Sunday morning. It’ll be delicious. Here, have a fork.’

  They wolfed the poached apricots, then slopped down a carton of iced tea, sitting side by side at the kitchen table, like naughty children, staying up late without permission.

  ‘Where does your wife think you are?’ asked the Judge, pushing her plate away. Her house remained cool, even in summer, behind the blue shutters and the deep stone walls. Schweigen shrugged, irritated and a little desperate.

  ‘I told her I was bringing the evidence to you. So she thinks I’m here. With you.’ The Judge raised one eyebrow and delivered her ironic smile, then she took off her glasses and rubbed her forehead. He looked carefully at her tired eyes.

  ‘I see. Well? What have you come all this way to show me, André? Where’s the evidence?’

  Schweigen retrieved a self-sealing plastic sack from his briefcase, which contained a small blue box and a folded square of Christmas paper.

  ‘Look.’

  He rewrapped the box in shining decorated foil. The Judge watched intent as the paper fitted perfectly, each crease tense and exact around the gift. She had no need to read the card, still swinging from a shining silver thread, for she knew the words by heart: To my darling Marie-T, Je t’aime, ma petite chérie, Bisous, Maman – in the elegant careful hand of Madame Marie-Cécile Laval.

  ‘We bagged up all the waste-paper baskets and anything of interest in the dustbins. Remember? This box was concealed under the lower bunk in the children’s bedrooms and only discovered when we released the chalet back to the owners. They’re going to sell the house. Even though I told them nobody actually died there. The woman kept the box, just in case. You found the paper downstairs. It was the address on the box which made me put them together. Look.’

  He held the cover up to the light suspended above her kitchen table; the engraved letters gleamed gold against the blue:

  GOLDENBERG’S

  Montpellier

  ‘You know them?’ He looked at her, smug and expectant.

  ‘Of course. I bought my bracelet there.’ Schweigen glowered at the bracelet, jealous of its constant presence upon her arm.

  ‘I thought I’d find out what Cécile Laval gave to her daughter. She had already planned her own death. It was her last gift. It must be significant.’

  The Judge stretched and yawned. It was half past one in the middle of the night. André had devised yet another implausible and extravagant excuse to spend taxpayers’ money and come in search of her. His love rendered him unreliable and unprofessional.

  ‘André! What if it’s not significant at all? What if it’s a harmless golden necklace or a charm bracelet? What if Monsieur Goldenberg doesn’t even remember what he sold to whom in the Christmas rush? Anyway, I thought Marie-T wasn’t even at the chalet when they all went up the mountain.’

  ‘I must try.’

  The Judge stood up and stacked their plates in her tiny dishwasher. Schweigen faced her out, dogged and obstinate. She watched him, inscrutable; but as she studied his grey eyes, measured each deepening line on either side of his mouth, she began, despite her irritation, to comprehend his sincerity. She realised that he loved her with a violence that she could neither control nor return; but that his hunt for the remaining members of the Faith was just as genuine, and as relentless. Both passions were entwined in the fibre of the man. His obsession with his work matched her own; but his search was not impersonal, detached; the blue box from Goldenberg’s was not a slight excuse. His love was written across his face, his shoulders, his clenched hands, and so was his resolve.

  ‘Come to bed,’ said the Judge.

  Schweigen breathed out, a long sigh of tiredness and release, and reached for her hand. She closed her fingers tight within his palm and he felt her short nails sharpen against the skin.

  * * *

  ‘Schweigen’s here, isn’t he?’

  Gaëlle’s mouth clenched, sullen with resentment. Here they were, June almost over, the beaches swollen with early tourists and holiday-makers, the Faith shelved, the Lübeck trip fading, all the interviews and reports analysed, typed up, filed and recorded on disc, hard copy in the dossiers and the information downloaded on to the office M-Drive. The trail had gone dead, and yet, behold the apparition of André Schweigen, confident, aggressive, spotted swaggering across the car park. The Judge got up, stretched and walked to the window. She looked down into the street, fixing the spot where he had stood. She emerged from the short night of five hours’ sleep limber and subtle as a cat. Gaëlle glared at her loveliness, the sleek black wedge of hair, her olive legs and flat, black classic shoes.

  ‘So? What’s he doing here?’

  This time the rebellion escaped from Gaëlle’s carefully policed intonation, and the Judge swivelled round, ready to cuff her Greffière’s multi-pierced ears.

  ‘He has fresh evidence on the case, Gaëlle. I know you don’t like him, but watch your tongue.’

  The affair between Schweigen and the Judge was never mentioned or acknowledged, and this silence rebounded like an echo between the two of them, as if they were two stone cliffs with an abyss below.

  ‘Oui, Madame le Juge. We are the servants of Isis, sworn to obey Her commands.’

  The Judge laughed out loud at this demure, but calculated piece of insolence, and tapped the top of Gaëlle’s vast and yellowing computer.

  ‘To work, my girl. Anything on the pseudo-Greek guru’s personal accounts?’

  ‘Not yet. Interpol are sending me a complete printout.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Shall I disinter the Faith?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ll wait for Schweigen’s call.’

  This came soon enough. Just before ten o’clock Schweigen rang direct from the counter at Goldenberg’s.

  ‘Dominique? Would you reassure Monsieur Goldenberg that he is not breaching any sort of confidentiality if he tells me exactly what he engraved on the golden locket the late Madame Laval presented to her daughter, before she arranged her departure to the stars? I don’t want to bother with a warrant for a bon de commande.’

  A voluble protest from the besieged jeweller could be heard in the background.

  À ma fille bien-aimée

  (To my beloved daughter)

  Marie-Thérèse

  Suis-moi

  (Follow me)

  The oval locket had contained a recent laughing photograph of Madame Laval, digitally enhanced and then cut down to size. The loving message whose meanings spread outwards in ripples of possibility had been carefully engraved
on the secret cavity inside. The Judge smoothed out the bon de commande and gazed at the handwritten words. Then she looked up, scowling at Schweigen’s triumphant defiance.

  ‘André, this proves nothing whatever.’

  He ignored her. ‘Will you summon the girl for an interview or shall we go up to see her?’

  These were his alternatives. The Judge hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Gaëlle? Can you raise the Domaine Laval on the telephone. I’ll arrange a brief meeting this morning if possible.’ She rounded on Schweigen. ‘I imagine that you are driving back to Strasbourg tonight? Yes? Good. Then we’ll take both cars. The Domaine is on your way.’

  ‘I’m coming too,’ snapped Gaëlle, who had felt excluded long enough.

  8

  PERSEPHONE’S DOUBLE

  They skimmed the suburban villas spouting from the red earth and rose up towards the vineyards that pulled away from the city in precise and everlasting green rows. Some fresh souches, strung along wires, gleamed thin and green, their roots clear of weeds, with a young rose planted at the end of every row. The roses functioned as the early-warning system against odium, mildew and black rot. The Judge loved the rhythm of the year in the vineyards; the pruning in January, spraying the plants with sulphur in the early spring, when the narrow roads became downright dangerous as the great green machines, like elongated moving croquet hoops, trundled along between the flowering ditches. The early-summer landscape threw all its remaining moisture into a sea of white flowers and clouds of red roses, trumpeting the rich time of ripening green before the coming of the great heat and sagging leaves. The weather counted for everything. Pray for rain in May and June, then a boiling summer with the odd mild thunderstorm, no hail, please God, no hail, and a warm September right up to the vendanges, and the jubilant arrival of the seasonal workers; they were Spanish when she was a girl, now Poles and Romanians trudged down the steep rows, gathering in the harvest. Here they come, sometimes entire families, all ages, shouldering the great red plastic buckets and refusing to slacken their pace on the stony red earth of her father’s land, and his father’s before him. Her childhood had followed this rhythm, and she would never have left the family estate had she been born the eldest son.

  They paused in the olive groves to make sure that Schweigen was still behind them.

  ‘Your parents grow olives, don’t they, Gaëlle?’ The Greffière was sitting beside her, mute and truculent, rattling her jewellery like a gladiator’s weapons.

  ‘Yes. Et alors?’

  ‘Did you help with the ramassage when you were little?’

  ‘I had to. We all bloody well had to. They made me work in the olive groves and I hated it. I hated being stuck in that tiny village, where everybody knows everything about you. I shall never live in the country again. Ever.’ Gaëlle gazed at the vines and groaned.

  The Judge stifled her laughter and concentrated hard on Schweigen’s blue Clio speeding behind them beside a line of swaying cypress trees; these looked rickety and overweight, bulged into one another and loomed over the road. She glanced at Gaëlle, and amusement transformed into affection; the Judge hoped that she had never worn her heart upon her sleeve with such obvious and unselfconscious charm. Gaëlle would be no good as a judge; when she was angry she glowered, when she hated people she told them so, and then proclaimed all her reasons, while her death’s head symbols glittered with aggression.

  The Domaine Laval swept upwards across the glossy slopes, long shimmering rows of vines glistening in the windy sun. The house faced south-west; they caught sight of the façade for a moment as the Judge pulled up the narrow road towards the iron gates. The buildings gathered together, unpretentious, but massive, great walls of fortress stone and glowing red tiles, the windows often narrow, shuttered. The roofs, recently repaired using a mixture of old and new tiles, tricked the eye, so that it was difficult to guess which slope had been entirely resurfaced. Cypress trees nuzzled the walls, dark against the glowing stone. The wealth of the Lavals lay before her, in the long red slopes of their terroir, and the stony red earth that had been cultivated, tended and loved for thousands of years.

  DOMAINE LAVAL

  VIGNOBLES DU LANGUEDOC

  VENTE DIRECTE

  VIN EN VRAC

  The symmetrical cross of Languedoc at the heart of the family crest completed the sign and appeared as the label on their bottles. The red wines won prizes, but connoisseurs bought the rarer sweet white wines from the higher slopes. The gates stood open and the roar of agricultural motors thumped towards them, then sputtered and receded. Two Dutch cars, the sun roofs half open and buzzing with trapped insects, occupied the yard. The dogs, laid out on the concrete, raised their heads, then slumped back twitching beneath the soft ministering hum of fattened flies.

  The arched stone entrance to the vast caveau rose up directly before Gaëlle and the Judge, and on the right stood the smoky glass doors to the offices; this was the yard, upon which the house turned its back. The immense walls of the cellars were two metres thick, the roof constructed of domed stone like a cathedral. The Domaine’s working buildings crouched against the hill and a large part of the deep storage cellars tunnelled underground, so that the temperature within remained at 18ºC, winter and summer. Every known form of credit card, spattered like bunting down the frame, decorated the main office doors and inside lurked the various millésimes, displayed in gift boxes upon a row of barrels. Someone was in the barn, hosing down a trailer, singing.

  The Judge parked next to the Dutch, peered into the office and waved at the woman tempting her tourists with tiny gulps of wine in smart glasses, also available in gift boxes, engraved with the family crest.

  ‘Myriam!’ she mouthed.

  ‘Excusez-moi!’ The other woman bounded through the glass door and hugged Dominique.

  ‘Madame le petit Juge! Are you here to see Marie-T?’ She stared at Gaëlle, whose murderous expression intensified when Schweigen appeared in the yard. ‘Mon Dieu, le Commissaire. That won’t go down well. I ought to tell you, not after what happened in February. He hasn’t been back since.’

  Schweigen was climbing out of his car. The Judge raised her voice. She knew perfectly well what had happened in February, but decided to make use of the debacle.

  ‘What went wrong before? No one’s told me in any detail.’

  ‘Tell you later,’ hissed Myriam, looking anxiously first at Schweigen and then at the Dutch, who were helping themselves to another swig from a bottle worth over three hundred francs. ‘But Marie-T was expecting to see you, only you. And she wants to talk. Only to you. But – ’ Schweigen loitered on the edge of their conversation. Myriam shrugged, gave up and raised her voice. ‘Go round to the front. You know the way. Give them a call when you get to the steps.’

  The Judge nodded and marched off with her Greffière clamped to her heels like a bloodhound.

  ‘Gaëlle? Do you know exactly what happened?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m sure I told you. Schweigen came here with his thugs. There was probably a punch-up. And they got thrown out. He made the Composer sound like the aggressor in his report. But I bet it was fifty/fifty.’ Gaëlle managed an evil smirk. She got out her notebook, ready to record the next ugly scene. ‘How do you know Myriam? Is she your spy in the house?’

  ‘Not exactly. We went to school together.’ Schweigen joined them, took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The Judge turned on him, fur bristling. ‘André, keep this civil and courteous. Let me do the talking. Marie-T is only seventeen and we’ll get more information out of her by being kind and listening.’

  Myriam hovered, gesticulating, just inside the office door. The Judge smiled back as they turned the corner.

  * * *

  She had danced with Myriam at the New Year’s Ball, here in the Great Hall at the Domaine Laval, twenty-five years ago. Those were the rich days when the old man, Bernard Laval, her father’s friend and hunting companion, still ruled as master of the Domaine. Mademoiselle M
arie-Cécile Laval blossomed, playing her part as the elegant older daughter, recently married, inheritor of the greater part of her father’s wealth; her beauty ogled, envied, admired, the woman every young girl at that New Year’s dance had wanted to become. She was the first to take the floor after dinner when the musicians struck up, nestled in her father’s arms. But no one else stood up to dance, despite the voluble encouragement of everyone over fifty still installed at the tables or standing smoking in the bar. The boys, all wearing white ironed shirts, proved too shy to stand up with any of the younger girls, and so Dominique Carpentier bowed to her friend, serious as a chevalier come a-courting, and Myriam, resplendent in a flowered dress sewn up at home, for no money ever ran spare for impractical clothes, tucked her hair behind her ears, blushed, and then offered up her slender waist to her partner’s nervous grasp. They whirled away across the old stone floors, intoxicated with champagne, woodsmoke, the smell of pine cones blazing in the grates, breathless, giddy, delighted. When the boys plucked up courage and sauntered towards them the girls were off, laughing, spinning, taunting, teasing, their skirts flared and their faces glamorous in the firelight. And the old men and women clustered on the benches clapped and shouted at their audacity – Dominique Carpentier, the boyish clever one in spectacles, and Myriam, just sixteen, whose full lips and breasts pleased the old ones. Here was a girl full of promise and sensual opulence, a foreshadowed future overflowing with love and children. The Carpentier girl will never marry. She has some other work to do in this world. And now the two gazed at one another through glass, one woman cheerfully wed these past ten years and mother of three, working for the Domaine where she once danced, and the other, solitary, inflexible, stalking her quarry through the vineyards of her childhood.