The Case of the Fallen Hero (An Inspector David Graham Cozy Mystery Book 3)

by Alison Golden

  Without a word, Marie gathered some things – her red leather purse, a light jacket, and the bottle of pills Graham had been holding – and followed him from the apartment. He ushered Marie into the car, and then, having closed the door, called Harding.

  “Janice? Do me a favor and bring the Joubert parents down to the station, would you? Yes, right away, if you can. We’ll meet you there.” Then, he thought it best to prepare her. “Something bloody funny is going on.”

  The Jouberts stood stoically in the lobby of Gorey’s tiny police station. Antoine was almost a foot taller than his wife, strong and wiry. They both walked toward the doors, ready to welcome their daughter, as Graham approached with Marie in tow.

  “Chérie,” they said in unison, but Marie simply stared at them. There were twin streams of French, incomprehensible to both Graham and Harding, who was watching this strange reunion from the door to her office.

  Marie said nothing, but she then turned to Graham. “I don’t know these people,” she said. “I’ve never seen them before.”

  Horrified beyond measure, the Jouberts looked at each other, then back to Marie, then to Inspector Graham. They did not speak. Harding assumed that they could not.

  “Monsieur Joubert, Madame Joubert, are you prepared to swear that this is your daughter? Beyond any doubt whatsoever?” Graham said, hoping the formality of the request would jog some sense into the errant Marie.

  “Bien sur! Of course!” they answered together. Then Antoine rounded on Graham. “How could you suspect that we might not know our own daughter, Monsieur? What ridiculous parents we would be!”

  Marie stood silently amid this confusion. She looked at one and then the other of this middle-aged French couple, without even the slightest recognition, as if they were two strangers, brought in from the street. Harding looked on, completely baffled.

  “Okay,” Graham said. “Let’s all take a seat and sort this out.” He sounded more optimistic than he felt. This was more than something bloody funny. The investigation had taken a turn for the truly bizarre. “Marie, I’d like you to go with Sergeant Harding. She’ll get you some coffee and maybe chat a bit. Monsieur and Madame Joubert, I’d like you to sit with me for a few minutes. I’m sure we’ll straighten this out.”

  Harding took Marie away to the furthest most interview room, while Graham took the one closest. As he was settling them in and trying to remember where the coffee was kept, the constabulary phone rang.

  “Inspector Graham, Gorey police,” he said, hardly thrilled at the interruption and praying that it might shed some light on the conundrums he faced.

  “Afternoon, sir,” the young police officer said at the other end, stuttering slightly. He was always a little on edge when addressing his boss. “It’s Constable Roach. We’re at the castle.”

  Graham grabbed a notepad. “What’s the latest, Constable?” And try to keep it brief, for heaven’s sake. Roach had the habit of both repeating himself and wandering off topic when relaying information. Graham was training him to provide “just the facts.”

  Roach hoped to sound competent and efficient. “Well, we’ve just now finished interviewing the staff, like you asked, and I’m afraid there isn’t much to report. Nobody seems to have seen anything amiss. Typical wedding, all the usual stuff. No one saw the fall.”

  “Makes sense,” Graham said, half to himself.

  “There’s something else, sir.”

  “Oh?” Graham said, pencil at the ready.

  “The castle management asked us to stay around for a while, sir, and help with a separate matter.”

  Oh, hell’s teeth. What now?

  “Seems they managed to let in a group of visitors before the place was sealed off as a potential crime scene,” Roach explained.

  “So, have you escorted them out?” Graham asked pointedly, unsure as to why this trivial detail was suddenly important.

  Roach cleared his throat. “They can’t find them, sir. Looked everywhere.”

  Graham sighed. “People don’t just vanish, Constable,” he reminded his younger colleague. “How many are we talking?”

  “A group of four. The receptionist says she recognized them as the musicians who played at the wedding yesterday. Came back for a look around the castle.”

  Graham silently shook his head. “Missing musicians. Just what we need. Look, get along and find them, will you? Let’s just hope they’ve found the wine cellar and are having a fantastic time down there. And if they’ve buggered up my crime scene, we’ll have words, Constable, you can be sure of that.”

  “Righto, sir. Over and out.” The line clicked off and Graham took three slow, deliberate breaths before heading to the interview room.

  Deeply upset, muttering together in French, the Jouberts held hands and wished away this mysterious calamity. “We cannot understand,” Antoine said, again and again. “Our daughter doesn’t even recognize us.”

  His wife continued, “She has not been well. She has many problems. But her doctor is the best, and he insisted that she was… ‘ow do you say… stable. Not a danger. Getting better, maybe.”

  “Yes, getting better,” Antoine assured Graham.

  There was little to be gained, Graham could plainly see, from speculating upon how it was that Marie was suddenly a stranger to her own family. “I’d like to talk about George,” Graham said. “Once my colleague, Sergeant Harding, has interviewed Marie, perhaps we’ll learn more about her state of mind. But for now, tell me about the man who was your son-in-law.” Twice, Graham didn’t add.

  The couple conferred for a moment in French. Graham didn’t care for this one bit. He felt they might be colluding, or hiding something, or preparing to deliver some previously-concocted story. He cleared his throat.

  Antoine took the lead. “He was… a very limited man,” Antoine said. “Almost simple. Not sophisticated, not especially cultured in the ways of the world.”

  Graham made notes, including one that Antoine was entirely unafraid, it seemed, to speak ill of the dead, even less than half a day after George’s demise.

  “He was a teacher, you know. Not the best,” Antoine said. “He was very quiet. Spent too much time with his nose in a book, eh?”

  Mathilde shrank a little more at each new insult, but she remained silent.

  “He didn’t know how to have fun. Was too … stiff, n’est que ce pas? Like you British often are.” Antoine made a brief and absurd parody of some kind of wooden man, lumbering along a street. “No joi de vivre. No, not even a little. Just… sad,” Antoine concluded.

  Graham ignored the affront to his fellow countrymen and waited for more, but Antoine had run dry. “C’est ças,” he concluded. That’s that. “But my wife thinks very differently.”

  “Oh?” Graham said, turning to Mathilde. “Please…”

  Tired, overwrought by the day’s extraordinary events, and visibly unwilling to disagree with her husband but doing so anyway, Mathilde’s delivery was halting, and not simply because she was struggling to express herself in a second language.

  “George Ross was the best thing that ever happened to our family,” she explained. “The best. He was kind and gentle. He read big books, la littérature, and he knew much about the world. He was a good husband to Juliette, but she rejected him. She preferred,” Mathilde recalled, “the parties and the good times and… you know…” she screwed up her face in disgust and almost spat the word, “drugs.”

  Graham’s pencil never stopped moving. “I see.”

  “When she tired of him, she left to marry a nobody who simply had enough money to support her… excesses… I looked after George. Made sure he was alright. He was broken-hearted by Juliette. Very … how can I say…?”

  “I think I understand,” Graham offered.

  “Bien. And so, Marie and I took care of him, helped him to find some work, new friends, places to go out. He was obsessed with the other man after Juliette's decision to leave him. You know, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. We h
elped him focus on something else, something good.”

  Antoine chipped in, “This was when Marie and George became close.” His fingertips drummed the tabletop. “Too close, for my preference.”

  Mathilde had enough confidence to continue now. “George was not the perfect man. But, neither is my husband. Neither are you, Monsieur L’Inspecteur.” Both men took the comment with good grace. Antoine gave a classically Gallic shrug. “He was le héros, too. We were proud of him.” She looked pointedly at her husband, “But you know this already, of course.”

  Turning a page in his notebook, Graham confessed that he did not.

  “Oh, it was in all the newspapers! It was a few years ago, his little moment of fame. When he was living in France with Juliette.” Mathilde launched into the story while Antoine sat passively, apparently entirely unimpressed. “He taught the young kids, you know, at his school, but he also led some of those weekend aventures. When the children learn to camp and make fires and such. Yes?”

  Graham nodded, writing constantly. “The Scouts?” he wondered aloud.

  “Something like this. So, they were in the little boats… how do you say?” She mimed a paddling motion.

  “Canoes?”

  “Ah, oui. They were in the harbor, not far from the sea. Well, it should have been a safe place, but there was a sudden storm. Rain and wind and lightning. The children were all terrified. They were not experienced, you see.”

  “Sounds like a difficult situation,” Graham said, inscribing reams of what looked like hieroglyphs, but which comprised a highly efficient, personalized, note-taking system.

  “Three of the… little boats? The canoes?” Mathilde said, finding the word again. “Yes, three of them went over,” she said, miming throughout. “The children were in the water. George tied the others together and then jumped into the water to save them. Six young lives, Monsieur L’Inspecteur. They would have died without him, for sure.”

  “Extraordinary,” Graham agreed.

  “Mais oui. He was very quiet about it. Didn’t give any interviews or make a big noise. George knew family tragédie too well. Perhaps this was what made him so certain to save all their lives. Even risking his own.”

  “Tragedy?” Graham prompted.

  “Yes, of course! George’s parents,” Mathilde began. “They…”

  “Mathilde, ce ne pas important,” Antoine instructed his wife.

  Graham’s French was, by his own admission, quite terrible, but this snippet was one he could fully understand. “Monsieur Joubert, I’d be glad if you’d allow me to decide the importance of these details.”

  The surly restaurateur scowled briefly but made no argument.

  “Carry on, please, Madame Joubert.”

  “George’s parents died when he was thirteen. Maybe you know this,” Mathilde said. “Terrible. The most ’orrible accident.”

  Graham flicked back to his notes on the incident at the farmhouse. “I understand the police eventually ruled it to be a murder-suicide.”

  Antoine failed to, or chose not to, censor the thought before it reached his mouth. “Maybe suicide runs in the family. Who knows?”

  Mathilde turned to him, indomitable now, and gave him a vicious blast of rapid, furious French. Then she turned back to Graham with as much color in her face as he’d seen all day. “I’m sorry, Monsieur L’Inspecteur,” she offered. “My husband sometimes does not think before he speaks.”

  Mathilde completed her statement, mostly a reiteration of just how tragic the timing of this incident had been, and how George was a decent and loving man who would have made an excellent husband for Marie. Her own husband remained in stony silence, the occasional twitch of his moustache being the only sign of his vociferous objection.

  “Where were you both when George fell to his death?”

  “In bed, of course. It had been a long day and late night,” Antoine replied.

  “Very well. I think that will do for now.”

  As he stood to show them out, Graham thanked them both.

  “Ce n'est rien,” Mathilde assured him. “But I hope that you will also speak to George’s sister. She was the one who understood George’s… state of mind… from back then, no?”

  “What about Marie?” Antoine inquired. “What will you do with her? I don’t like leaving her here.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her. You go back to the White House Inn and we’ll be in touch,” Graham said. He was keen to see the back of these complicated people. He could only imagine the fiery bickering that would probably dominate the rest of the couple’s day.

  There were two phone messages; one from Marcus Tomlinson, the other from Constable Roach. He called the pathologist first.

  “Marcus? What’s new over there? We’re having the strangest of days, I can tell you, and I’d love some nice, simple, concrete evidence.”

  Tomlinson made an apologetic noise. “Sorry, old boy. I’ve done an advanced tox screen and a few other tests at my own discretion. George wasn’t drugged or poisoned. His hands hadn’t been tied, and he wasn’t gagged. No signs of struggle or a fight.”

  Graham closed his eyes and considered a more colorful oath before uttering simply, “Bugger.”

  “I don’t make it up, I just report it,” Tomlinson said apologetically.

  “It’s alright. Just need a break, in every sense of the word,” Graham confessed. “Say, while we’re talking, do you know of a local headshrinker named Bélanger?”

  Tomlinson thought for two seconds. “Ah, yes. Has an office in St. Helier.”

  “You rate him?”

  “I do. A good egg, by all accounts. Thorough. Completely bilingual. Why?”

  “He’s been prescribing Marie Ross the full works for a few months now.” Graham read a list of six medications from his notebook.

  “Right, well, you’ll want to have a word. A patient would have to be damned near cuckoo to require all that lot.”

  “You think so?” Graham pressed.

  “Well… Doctors overprescribe these days. Lots of reasons why. But he must have thought there was good justification. I’d recommend having a discreet word. Mind, he’ll be bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, so it’s rather up to him how much he chooses to divulge.”

  “Well, let’s hope he’s feeling generous today, eh? Thanks, Marcus. “

  Graham called Dr. Bélanger’s emergency number and left a request for his immediate presence at the station. If anyone could shed some light on Marie’s inexplicable behavior, it was her psychiatrist.

  Graham used the radio for the next call. “Five-one-nine, come in?”

  “Roach here, sir,” the constable replied promptly.

  “You called, young man?”

  “Still at the castle, sir. Still looking for the musicians. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of them since they arrived. We’ve been down in the jail cells and everything, but there’s nothing. We’ll keep trying, sir.”

  “Good lad. Let me know if anything happens.”

  “Righto, sir. And… sir? Don’t you think it’s a bit odd?”

  “What’s that, Constable?” Graham asked casting a glance up at the ceiling momentarily. He would have physically mud-wrestled someone for a decent cup of tea.

  “We get this odd incident with Mr. Ross, sir, and then four people go missing within hours of each other? Doesn’t that feel a bit… well… weird? Sir?”

  Graham took another set of deep breaths. “Son, this whole day has been bloody weird. And if you set off onto some paranormal train of thinking and decide the castle’s got a ghost or some other ludicrous…”

  “Oh, no, sir,” Roach insisted. “Nothing like that. It’s just a hell of a coincidence, that’s all. And I thought we didn’t believe in those.”

  Graham smiled. He’s learning. Ever so slowly, but still.“Keep at it, constable. Let me know the minute you find any sign of them, alright?”

  CHAPTER 8

  AM I SEEING things?” Harry kept saying. �
�Shine it over there again. I swear I’m not seeing things.”

  “The battery’s at twenty-five percent, Harry,” Marina reminded him. “Make this your last one, okay?”

  Their scramble over the mound of rubble and masonry that had blocked the tunnel had been difficult, but all four were now over the obstacle and into the much larger chamber beyond. There was no light from the single bulb in the ceiling. Using their phones, they discovered that the chamber, perhaps twelve feet by fifteen but less than eight feet in height, was itself badly damaged by whatever calamity had befallen the smaller tunnel behind them. One wall had crumbled, leaving a gap at its very top that was around two feet high.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Harry said, nodding to Marina to turn off the phone once more. “It looks as though the room’s been divided into smaller chambers, but that those walls are just piles of bricks up to the ceiling and not connected to the ceiling itself.”

  “Maybe that’s why they toppled during the ‘earthquake?’” Emily speculated.

  “I guess so,” Harry agreed.

  “Looks like an opportunity to me,” Leo offered. “If we can climb the wall, we should be able to get into the next chamber. Doesn’t it seem lighter in there to you than it does in here?”

  The four stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the gloom, peering at the new fissure in the far wall. “Can’t tell,” Harry admitted.

  “Maybe,” Marina said.

  “It might just be that the room’s got different contents or that the walls are a different color. Impossible to say.”

  They began making plans to build a “staircase,” as Harry named their nascent structure. It would allow them to get a handhold on the cleft at the top of the wall and pull themselves over. Working almost entirely in the dark and by memory, they located the larger blocks that had been displaced by the “earthquake” and placed them around the foot of the wall.