by Serena Kent
“I’m sure he was drunk at around quarter past six when I saw him,” said Penelope. “How dreadful.”
Other people were gathering on the track from the road now. As an introduction to the locals, it wasn’t ideal. Penelope hoped they didn’t think it was a bad omen—or that she had anything to do with her neighbour’s watery end.
* * *
THE MEN in white manoeuvred the cadaver into a body bag. Penelope managed to get a closer look. A loose arm flopped out, and she gave an involuntary shudder. The pale limp hand, gashed and still dripping, trailed along the grass. The back of her neck prickled and she gagged.
She felt a hand on her arm. It was Clémence Valencourt.
“Would you like to come to my house, stay the night there? I would not blame you for not wanting to be here.”
Perhaps the estate agent was feeling guilty that she had sold her client a house with a sitting tenant—or rather, a floating tenant. Penelope was fully aware that it wouldn’t take much to become hysterical.
The mayor echoed Mme Valencourt. “I think that would be a good idea. The police have much to do here, and it will take many hours for them to finish.”
Penelope let herself be guided into the house, where the mayor and Mme Valencourt poured her a glass of cognac from a bottle that appeared from nowhere, and suggested she pack an overnight bag. As she threw items into the case, shivering occasionally when the image of the body came back to her, she wondered again what she had got herself into.
4
“IT WAS HORRIBLE—POOR MAN!” cried Penelope. “What a thing to happen! I feel quite discombobulated.”
Her oldest friend Frankie was on the receiving end of the phone rant. Penelope had to talk to someone, and she wasn’t about to admit weakness to her children. Not after they had been so disparaging.
“And I know I shouldn’t be thinking of myself at a time like this—and I really am trying not to—but honestly, Frank, I haven’t even unpacked and now it seems I’ve never left work. And did he drown, or—well, we just can’t know straightaway, can we?”
“How awful,” said Frankie.
Penelope put her toothbrush into the open suitcase on her camp bed. “One night! I spend one night here, and this happens. I keep thinking I could have done something to prevent it happening, as it was in my pool—but what could I have done? I’d only just got here.”
“Nothing. Of course you couldn’t. How awful.”
“They won’t let me stay here. It’s a potential crime scene. My dream house! Well, you know, not perfect as it is, but it was going to be.”
“I know.”
A pause.
“They don’t think you did it, do they?”
Penelope gasped. “Of course not! Why would they? The mayor says it was probably an accidental death, but the police have to check, don’t they. So it could be a crime scene.”
“Awful.”
“And they fished him out of the pool, and he was all . . . squelchy and—”
“Do you want me to come out?”
“—and this really strange colour because the water . . . What?”
“Do you want me to come out to France, to be with you?”
Penelope pulled up sharply. “What, now?”
“Well, I thought you might need someone.”
The thought of Frankie arriving—her oldest and most indiscreet friend—shook some sense into her. “I’m fine. I just wanted to tell someone what was happening, just in case, you know . . .”
In case I get thrown into a police cell in the South of France for weeks without bail, she thought but didn’t say. Under suspicion of goodness knows what. Murder while under the influence of irritation with a drunk Frenchman and a reckless amount of rosé on the first night of my new life?
“In that case,” said Frankie, “you call me as soon as you know what’s happening and where you are. And don’t admit anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Joke! Sorry, not appropriate.”
“Not funny, Frankie.”
“No.”
“They think it was an accident, but—isn’t that a bit odd? In all the weeks, months, and years that this place has been empty, nothing happened. But then I come along and move in—”
“You just have to calm down, Pen.”
“But, you know, working for Camrose all those years—it’s given me a suspicious mind. Who knows where this could lead?”
* * *
PENELOPE LOOKED over her shoulder at Le Chant d’Eau as she left in Mme Valencourt’s red Mini Cooper. She wondered when she would see her new home again.
The mayor had offered soothing platitudes, but the taciturn Inspector Paul Gamelin merely nodded at her with no attempt at sympathy. That was worrying enough in itself. He was obviously keen to keep her out of the way while he got down to a proper investigation. No doubt he would find all sorts of things that had been missed.
Penelope braced herself as the Mini hurtled downhill in the middle of the road, round a blind bend. Down one steep hill and up another.
The police were probably going through her personal possessions right at this moment. Her heart sank as she pictured the French officers seizing upon her bedside reading. Detective novels, mainly. What impression was that going to give? The stockpile of Boots special offer Menopace vitamins. Not to mention the collection of stomach-minimising foundation garments. She could just imagine them being held up to snorts of ridicule. “Qu’est-ce que c’est ‘Spanx,’ Mme Kite?”
Mme Valencourt swerved round one cyclist, sent another skidding into a ditch, and put her tiny foot down. She too seemed deep in thought. Perhaps it was just as well the estate agent did not live far away.
* * *
THE VILLAGE of Viens was set on a rocky promontory. A tall, forbidding clock tower was built into what looked like medieval ramparts, with a gate leading to the mysteries of an old quarter. Adjacent stood a building with a stone loggia that looked like a set for a tragic opera. Mme Valencourt blasted past this and up the hill for a few seconds before swooping through a narrow stone arch marked with an escutcheon. They pulled up with a lurch in a cobbled courtyard. The estate agent’s own very charming property was a magnificent edifice in the heart of the village.
Penelope got out of the car and looked up at a weathered stone loggia and the graceful staircase up to the front door, above which another carved coat of arms reinforced the impression that the Valencourt residence had noble origins.
They hefted her suitcase out of the car and hauled it into the house. The hall was cavernous, with plain walls and a high ceiling. A stylish console table and ornate mirror were the only items of furniture.
“This way,” said the estate agent as she turned left into a wide corridor. “Would you like anything to eat?”
“No, thank you.”
“I will ask my housekeeper to bring you some water and fruit. Now, here is the guest suite. You don’t look very well. Perhaps you should get some rest.”
Her room would not have been out of place in an expensive boutique hotel. Penelope couldn’t help but be impressed by the combination of austere medieval character and luxurious modern fittings, all with a perfect finish. It was exactly the kind of house in which a woman like Mme Valencourt would live. Was there a M. Valencourt, and if so, what was he like? She inferred there was a M. Valencourt from the two rings—a large square-cut diamond and a gold band—on Madame’s wedding finger, and the magnificence of the house, the upkeep of which would surely take more than a single estate agent’s income. No doubt she would find out soon enough.
As soon as she was alone, Penelope flopped down on the wide, feather-soft bed. She closed her eyes and dozed for a couple of hours, trying and failing to blot out what she had witnessed.
The bathroom provided a pleasurably ruthless power shower that pummelled the breath out of her, gorgeous soaps, gels, and lotions, and fluffy soft towels. Penelope felt herself revive. For a few indulgent moments she allowed hersel
f to forget her predicament.
* * *
AT SIX thirty she went downstairs to find an elderly woman in black busy in the kitchen. A muffled conversation came from another room. Penelope stood awkwardly in the hall for long enough to work out that her hostess was on the phone, then wandered through an open salon to a vine-covered terrace. The view was breathtaking. She went to the balustrade and took in a sweeping vista of hills and a gorge, beyond which mountains rose in the distance.
When Mme Valencourt joined her twenty minutes later, Penelope felt calm enough to face the crisis.
“Any news?”
The Frenchwoman shook her head.
Despite her good intentions, Penelope decided it would be rude not to accept a small glass of rosé. She had had a nasty shock, after all. Then she had another with the delightfully light dinner of fish and braised vegetables, followed by a doll-sized portion of airy lemon mousse. It was all served at a table on the terrace by the diminutive elderly lady, who had apparently cooked it.
Penelope waited for an opening to inquire about her hostess’s husband. But Mme Valencourt kept the conversation focused relentlessly on Penelope and what had brought her to the Luberon. Penelope found herself babbling away about her own ex-husband and his shortcomings. Her children and their scornful certainty that she wouldn’t be able to make a success of her move. She didn’t seem to be able to stop talking. It was as if the shock had unleashed her tongue and removed all sense of restraint. It was quite horrifying. Even Penelope began to wonder what she was going to say next.
Having refused a cognac—she was relieved to find that she still possessed a shred of common sense—she addressed the elephant lurking on the terrace. “Do you think it was an accident?” she asked.
The Frenchwoman hesitated.
“Mme Valencourt?”
“Please call me Clémence.”
That was a small step forward. Penelope wondered who she had been speaking to on the telephone. A terrible thought struck her. Would anything she said to Clémence be reported to the authorities? Could she, even now, be recording their conversation, to be picked over by police detectives?
“The police will not say,” said Clémence Valencourt. “I called Laurent to see if he knew—”
“Who’s Laurent?”
“Laurent Millais. The mayor.”
Penelope shook her head. All that business about having to be introduced to the mayor, and she hadn’t actually registered his name.
“But he said the police had told him nothing more either,” said Mme Valencourt.
“So you don’t know any more than I do?”
“Of course not. Why would I?”
“I don’t know. I just wondered. Oh, God, I don’t think I’m thinking straight at the moment,” burbled Penelope. “They don’t think I could have done it, do they?” She suddenly felt exhausted and disconnected.
“I don’t think you would be here if they thought that.”
Penelope relaxed slightly. But there was another thing. The something that had been nagging at her ever since they left Le Chant d’Eau, making her uneasy. It had taken her a while to work out the logic behind her instinct. Now she couldn’t stop herself from blurting it out.
“There was something wrong with that body, Clémence.”
“Yes, Penny, it was dead.”
Allowing a smile at this attempt at humour—Gallic gallows humour, peut-être—Penelope carried on against her better judgement. “The body. It wasn’t . . . there is something that I can’t help thinking is not quite right.”
Clémence Valencourt leant forward, her chin cupped in one hand. Her grey-green eyes fixed on Penelope. For the first time there seemed a glimmer of a real connection between them.
“I thought so too, Penny. Did you not see the terrible bruises on his face?”
“Of course, but my concern was a different one. The problem is . . . the problem is, I just can’t quite put my finger on it.”
The Frenchwoman waited patiently. Night had fallen, soft as silk, as they ate. Collections of lights sparkled like handfuls of diamonds on the dark hills opposite.
Penelope stared into the distance. “A thought came to me like a jolt, but then it disappeared. It has been bothering me ever since we found him, but it’s just out of reach.”
They both took a sip of water.
“A blow to the front of the head could have killed him,” said Penelope. “Although it looks like death by drowning, we don’t know that for certain yet.”
“I thought his head was covered with dead leaves, at first. But as he was being moved, some of them fell away, and I saw the dark marks on the side and the front of his head where the hair was thin.”
“He could have hit his head as he fell,” countered Penelope. “If it happened at the side of the pool, he could easily have clonked his head on the stone surround, knocked himself out so badly he didn’t come round in time to stop himself drowning. The water was deep enough to drown in.”
“I suppose that could be correct. But what if he had been hit by a person? That is also possible.”
Penelope’s heart sank again, along with the dreadful picture in her mind’s eye of the unfortunate Avore dropping down through the murky water. “It has to be possible,” she said. “But all we can do is wait for the police investigation to determine the exact cause of death. There’s no point in trying to guess what the sequence of events was. I’m sure they will tell us soon enough.”
Clémence Valencourt gave a little pout that seemed to imply that that remained to be seen. “Now, I will ask the housekeeper for some mint tea, and you will try to remember your escaped thought.” She rose from the table. “Allow your mind to go back without force.”
Alone on the terrace, Penelope closed her eyes. She thought back to the scene at the swimming pool. The still water and the rotting leaves. The dark bulk of the deceased and the billow of his jacket on his back. Then her mind slunk back to the dingy offices of the Home Office Department of Forensic Pathology and Professor Camrose Fletcher’s own book-lined study. The detailed reports and lectures she had helped compile. Photographs and reconstructions. Penelope considered other documented deaths, picking carefully through her memories. She replayed Manuel Avore’s removal from the pool, his limp body hanging over the arms of the policeman, the hand falling out of the body bag.
That was it.
She jumped up with a little cry of surprise, as her host returned.
“Penny? Are you all right?”
“Clémence, I know what the problem was now. The thought I couldn’t pin down!”
They faced each other.
“It was the limp arm.”
Mme Valencourt’s arched eyebrows indicated some scepticism.
“No, this is important. The body was limp.”
“Is that not normal with dead people, Penny?”
“No, it isn’t. For approximately twenty-four hours after death, the body is set hard. That’s rigor mortis. The body stiffens two to six hours after death, but nearer two in warm temperatures. It only loosens up at least a full day later.”
“So?”
“M. Avore was alive less than twenty-four hours before his body was found in the pool. He came into my garden and started shouting at me. I know almost exactly what the time was when I stopped work. It was past six o’clock, and I had to decide whether to have a cup of tea or if it was too close to wine o’clock.”
Clémence Valencourt frowned.
“It’s an English thing. Look, the point is, I stopped cleaning, looked at my watch, and decided to go out into the garden for some fresh air. I didn’t get to the pool to look at it because M. Avore arrived. He was there in the flesh. We talked for a while—well, it wasn’t quite the social call that sounds—and then he stomped off up the track towards the main road. I saw him go. So at half past six yesterday he was alive. His body was found today at about midday. That’s not long enough for rigor mortis to have passed.”
Clémence was be
ginning to understand. “And if the death was earlier than that . . .”
“Then M. Avore cannot have been the man I saw.” Penelope dropped back into her seat.
The two women fell silent.
Penelope was the first to speak. “When I described the man in my garden, the mayor said immediately, ‘Oh, that must have been Manuel Avore”—and then, when the body came out, he was equally sure that it was Manuel Avore. But one of those identifications must be wrong, don’t you see?”
She tried to think as clearly and logically as she used to at work, when the dead bodies were not on her doorstep.
“And that also means . . . that either this man was already dead and in the pool when I arrived at Le Chant d’Eau yesterday—or he was killed somewhere else before midday yesterday and placed in the pool later. Which might even have been while I was asleep last night . . . Clémence?”
“Oui, Penny.”
“I think I will have that cognac, please.”
5
PENELOPE PASSED A LUXURIOUSLY COMFORTABLE but nevertheless disrupted night. Each time she managed to drop off, the memory of the macabre discovery prodded her awake.
In the darkness, her thoughts turned to Professor Camrose Fletcher—her work for him and the chain of events that had led to her unlikely employment. Penelope’s father had been a GP and police surgeon in South London; a pathologist friend of his had offered her some secretarial work when her confidence was at an all-time low. Lena was at university, and Justin was soon to follow. Penelope had discovered evidence of David’s second affair, and was blaming herself for being dull and too dependent, still stupidly imagining they could save the marriage.
The pathologist was based at the Home Office in London. After a long career, his role was then mainly administrative, overseeing structural changes to the forensic services. A year later, he retired—but not before recommending Penelope to a maverick colleague, a forensic pathologist who needed a personal assistant to type autopsy reports and expert witness statements, and also to help with his university lecturing commitments at UCL.