With all the detail she could muster, because she knew the inspector relished facts to bite on as much as a good piece of beef, Marguerite told him everything she had learned about Yvette, her employers and her sister. Then she launched into a rather grisly rendition, given the food in front of them, of the body on the tracks and what the doctor’s autopsy had laid bare. She told him, too, about her current hunch concerning the corpse’s identity. Then, skirting over Olivier’s presence in the woods, and her terror at the charging beast of a man, she unfurled the account of the woman in red she had found dead, how she had been knocked down and who the woman had turned out to be.
Durand asked pointed questions and savoured his food, mulled and considered. During the last part of her narrative, his eyes spoke his disapproval. He chastised her for her daring.
‘You really must take care, Madame. I implore you. Two deaths unaccounted for always makes me worry about a possible third. Murder grows easier, I’ve learned. For the murderer, at least.’
Marguerite nodded. ‘Yet you see, Inspector, the police here are ready to dismiss both possible murders, because the victims are simply not citizens they recognise as worthy of their time and attention. They see them as tramps and vagabonds. Expendable. That’s one of the reasons I so wanted you to use your influence.’
‘Tomorrow I shall pay a visit to the commissariat and have a word, if it’s possible with the magistrates as well.’
‘And there is another matter, Inspector.’
She told him about the foundling and how she had failed thus far in her attempts to uncover Gabriel’s origins.
The inspector didn’t fail to note that this matter lay particularly close to her heart.
‘So you see why I needed your help, Inspector. Help on several fronts.’
The inspector swirled the golden brandy round in his glass, sniffed with pleasure and nodded sagely. ‘And I need yours, Madame.’ He filled his pipe and Marguerite could see, in the deep breath he took, that he needed to unburden himself of his own worries. She encouraged him.
It seemed a Parisian scandal was brewing over a high-ranking politician from the Radical Party who had purportedly been selling state honours to the highest bidder and using the money to subsidise rather unsavoury activities, some of them with the children he met in the Palais Royale or around the boat lake in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Durand’s unhappy task was to ferret out the truth with the minimum publicity, and having done so to demonstrate to the politician in question – whose name he only mentioned once and then in a whisper – that instant resignation, followed by quick emigration, was the best possible solution for all concerned – unless he fancied years behind bars. What he wanted from Marguerite was advice on tactics, as well as on who might be connected to whom and know what, so that pressure could be applied in appropriate ways. And first of all, he had to ascertain that the politician hadn’t been set up by an envious rival, superior at the moment, but perhaps not for long.
Marguerite sharpened her wits on the intrigue. By the end of the evening, after they had debated the pros and cons of various approaches and gone into the secret lives of a number of influential parties, she had altogether forgotten that she was not in Paris and ready for an excursion to the Chat Noir where a panoply of her friends were certain to be gathered for an evening of scurrilous chansons and pungent wit. Tomorrow she would begin the business of making some discreet enquiries by post. Perhaps she would need to spend a few days in Paris, if Olivier didn’t kick up too much of a fuss. Though it might not be necessary. She knew the politician’s circle well and they would certainly respond to her in confidence. She had long suspected that the sexual tastes of Monsieur Norpois were far from conventional.
Yet it was the child and the murders in La Rochambert that concerned her most nearly now. When she went to bed and inadvertently leaned on her injured arm, she thought of Danuta the Dancer stretched out on the dark, cold ground. The wind at the shutters, the chilling hoot of a prophetic owl intensified her sense of impending disaster.
‘The snow’s coming,’ Madame Solange murmured at breakfast. She was hovering over them, as bleak as some Greek oracle.
On the horizon, the clouds were dark and heavy. The pale yellow of the room’s walls felt like an intrusion.
‘We’ll have to take the carriage, then,’ Marguerite said half to herself. She had hoped she and the inspector could ride cross-country or unnoticed in the old barouche, but snow would make that difficult.
‘I’ll alert Georges.’ Madame Solange took in everything.
Marguerite sensed she was uneasy about Durand’s presence, couldn’t work out whether he was a genuine guest or somehow a member of staff sent for to discover the babe’s parentage. She knew Durand would soon seduce her into goodwill, particularly if his compliments and murmurs of ‘delicious’ persisted. The inspector looked particularly bright this morning. The château evidently provided a brief holiday from the travails of Paris life.
Villemardi burst into the breakfast room, just as Marguerite was about to ask the inspector about his children.
‘Ah, Madame,’ he looked curiously at Durand and in afterthought straightened his tie and bowed to them both. ‘I’ve just heard that you’ll be driving into Montoire. If I might come along, I’d be grateful. I need to deliver a few sample drawings to the mayor’s office. I’m told he’s looking for something to grace the square in front of the mairie.’
‘How altogether citizenly of him.’ Marguerite had an image of the mayor’s rotund presence draped in the tricolor. ‘But perhaps we could drop the work for you. The inspector and I may be gone some time.’
The last thing she wanted was to have Villemardi trailing them from Montoire to the brothels of Blois and reporting on everything to Olivier.
The sculptor’s face radiated disappointment.
‘Excuse me, Madame, if Monsieur … is it…’
‘Villemardi,’ the sculptor filled in for Durand.
‘If Monsieur Villemardi wishes to accompany us with his packages, all he need do is let his horse follow on behind the carriage.’
‘Of course. A happy solution, Inspector.’ Marguerite smiled at Villemardi. The sculptor might wish to assuage his curiosity about the inspector, but Durand, she realised, had an equal wish to find out what the sculptor might know and she hadn’t yet managed to discover.
They were almost out of the door when Martine was upon them.
‘Madame, Madame.’ The girl was breathless, her hair bursting from its pins. ‘Look what blew in through the broken pane in the conservatory. I thought you might want to see it.’
She smoothed a bit of rumpled paper with long, trembling fingers. ‘It may be nothing, but…’
Marguerite examined the paper. There was writing on it, a childlike scrawl in large, ungainly printed letters. Full of misspellings. At first, she thought of schoolboy pranks, some game the young ones had indulged in on the day of the balloon flight.
‘Help me. Pleese. I am prisner. Aginst mi will. Pleese.’
‘What do you think, Madame?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She passed the paper to Durand, who was looking at Martine impassively.
He read the note quickly. ‘What does this message make you think of, Mademoiselle?’
Martine’s eyes grew wide.
‘Do you recognise the writing, my dear?’ Marguerite asked.
The girl shook her head. ‘No, it’s just I thought maybe it came with P’tit Ours. Maybe he wrote it.
It made me think of Yvette. Yvette locked up somewhere. I don’t know. I had a vision of an island. Yvette can’t swim.’
‘Devil’s Island, perhaps,’ the inspector said gently. ‘It’s been much in the papers.’
Marguerite doubted the inspector’s connection. She had yet to see Martine reading the papers. But there might be other prisoners in P’tit Ours’s vicinity. That link of Martine’s felt altogether appropriate. It would be worth investigating, particularly since she fe
lt another visit to Madame Tellier’s would soon be necessary.
Snow had started to fall. Thick wet drunken flakes of it blown by an ogre of a wind. The ploughed fields on the horizon turned white in a twist of the road. The dark steeple in the distance disappeared and refused to appear again. The sky was white. The air was white, too, where the flakes met to leap and dance. The rare coaches and wagons moved with a regal slowness, fading away then utterly swallowed into milky whiteness. Only the river remained dark with a kind of swirling anger.
No one but she noticed. Durand, wearing an expression of profound attentiveness, was busy drawing Villemardi out concerning the day on which little Gabriel had been found.
‘I trust artists’ perceptions, Monsieur. I have been led to trust them,’ Durand was saying. Like some telegraph operator, he tapped out his thoughts on his knee with his unlit pipe. ‘Artists are experts at observation, like detectives. Describe it to me, Monsieur. Describe Monsieur le Comte’s expression.’
‘Horror,’ Villemardi burst out, his face pale with his passion. ‘Utter horror. Both of us. We had been off for an innocent morning’s fishing. And we were convinced the child was dead.’
‘Did you have any immediate thoughts, wild leaps of the imagination, about whom it might belong to?’
‘Non, Monsieur. Certainly not. Though I think Monsieur le Comte might have imagined it was the offspring of one of the former maids. I wasn’t sure. The swaddling was good quality cloth. No holes. And the babe had been washed, at least once. Which meant that he hadn’t just popped into life behind a thicket near by.’ Villemardi lowered his eyes. The inspector refused Marguerite’s interrogative glance and, with a look, forbade her to speak. In any case, Villemardi was now rushing on. ‘There was no question of keeping it, once we found it was alive. None at all. Until the curé stepped in, that is.’
‘Père Benoit,’ Marguerite elaborated for the inspector’s benefit.
‘Père Benoit, once André Marchand.’
‘Marchand?’ Marguerite echoed.
He nodded, still without looking at her.
‘Go on,’ the inspector said.
‘Well, it was all his doing, really. Noblesse de la robe,’ Villemardi scoffed, venting his dislike of the curé as Marguerite had heard him do at every possible opportunity. ‘He convinced Monsieur le Comte that the child was a sign of grace or some such … that a true seigneur of the old school would always take a foundling in. And there we are.’
The inspector nodded sagely and glanced towards Marguerite for a moment. She had suddenly sat up very straight, as if someone had been tugging at her fur-trimmed hat.
‘It was nothing, Inspector. I just hadn’t heard the expression “noblesse de la robe” for a long time. It set me thinking.’
What she had been thinking was indeed about gowns, black cloth. A recollection came to her. That’s what she had found in the woods before that second, more terrible finding. A woman in red and a piece of black cloth.
‘By the way, Madame, I remember you asked me about this and I shall soon have the opportunity to find out. I need to make a trip to Blois and I shall see if I can locate Louise Bertin’s family there. Perhaps they’ve heard something from the girl.’
‘That would be extremely useful, Monsieur.’
But Marguerite wasn’t thinking about Louise Bertin. She was wondering whether, even though Marchand was a common enough name, there might be any link between the curé and the monstrous old Napoléon Marchand, Madame Tellier’s father.
When she focused in on the inspector’s veiled interrogation, it was to hear Villemardi describing his experience of seeing the corpse found on the tracks.
‘But you had never to your knowledge seen the man before?’ Durand double-checked. ‘Not even though your family firm’s card was found in his pocket.’
‘Non, Inspector. As I explained to the police here, my father – who runs the firm – leaves our cards everywhere that he can to drum up business, particularly with undertakers and notaries.’
‘So we can assume that, before he died, our unknown man made a visit to a local undertaker or notary. Château du Loir, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but the cards probably travel as far as Blois.’
‘I shall check this out with the local police,’ Durand nodded sagely.
The travellers’ encampment, as they approached, offered an odd spectacle. Clothes lines had been pulled up, fires quashed. The barrels that doubled as chairs or braziers were gone, together with the random assortment of cases and baskets and utensils that had previously marked the area. There was nothing left on the site except a line of colourful coaches, more garish than ever against the pallor of snow. They were moving slowly towards the road.
‘Oh no, Inspector. The travellers must be going. We must catch them before they do.’
‘I think they’ll be attending a funeral before they vanish.’
Only now did Marguerite see the wagon coming towards them. It was draped in black, its driver in tails and top hat. One after another, the bright coaches fell into line. There was a strange dignity to the procession – the hearse, sombre, onyx black against the snow; the carriages, their curlicues and animal pictures alight in brightest azure, red and gold; the drivers, their expressions solemn, their posture pulled stiff and upright by some inner injunction. Trailing behind on a rope tied to the last wagon came two beautiful horses, as white as the snow. Their pink nostrils quivered, their well-tended manes flowed in the wind. The children lined up by the side of the road and waved, calling out by name to their favourite performers.
Fifteen slow minutes through the town to its nether end, with a stop to drop Villemardi off near the mairie, brought them to a small walled cemetery. The gravediggers stood by the open pit. They clapped their hands together for warmth and stamped their feet. The grave was filling with snow, a lace coverlet dropped into the depths. A frail old priest or brother with a kind, wrinkled face and a potato of a nose greeted people as they gathered. It felt, at first, as if the inspector and she were the only ones present who didn’t belong. Their clothes were too good, their boots polished, their gloves and muffs intact. They elicited stares, both curious and hostile.
A clarinet began to wail its music to the open skies. It acted as a signal. Local children crowded in from all sides to this pied piper’s magical call. The piper wore a scarlet tunic and silver-threaded jodhpurs. A jewelled turban rested on his gleaming head. His silky moustache curled dramatically and his eyes shone, brighter than the jewels.
Around him, like a retinue for some regal maharajah, stood a strongman with a shaved head and vast biceps; an old crone whose bosom heaved as she cried copious tears; and various acrobats and jugglers and dark-eyed women clutching ragged children by the hand.
There was a hurdy-gurdy man with a tiny monkey on his shoulder and a saltimbanque in jester’s motley with a ruffled collar. His face beneath the close-fitting pointed hat had a heart-rending aquiline beauty, neither male, nor female, but somehow both. His hooded eyes stared into the pit with a sadness that tore at Marguerite. She wanted to go and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, tend to his wounds, but there was no comfort for that melancholy, not even the priest’s words, as Danuta the Dancer was slowly lowered into her last resting place.
Marguerite waited for the ceremony to be over, for the clarinettist to blow his final clear note. When he began to leave his spot by the graveside, she walked over to him. The inspector was right beside her. Behind him, standing next to the strongman, she glimpsed P’tit Ours. Madame Tellier’s housekeeper’s giant of a son was everywhere.
Tears were streaming down his face and the strongman had a comforting arm around him. She didn’t have time to ponder connections. Eyes were on her, narrowed, chary.
‘Monsieur,’ she addressed the Indian. ‘My condolences to you all.’
He turned towards her. Initial suspicion was converted into a bow.
‘I wonder, Monsieur. Do you speak English? If so, it might be bes
t.’ Marguerite made a small gesture at the crowd, smiled reassurance.
The man stared for a moment. His teeth gleamed.
‘If Madame so would prefer.’
‘I … I was the person who found your friend.’
‘You found the lady Danuta?’
Marguerite nodded, walked slowly with the two men towards the edge of the crowd. She didn’t dare introduce Durand yet. These people would be suspicious enough of her without the added burden of a policeman. She hoped Durand’s smattering of English would come in useful.
‘Yes. In the woods. It was not a happy finding.’
‘No. No. Most sad. Most terrible. Most unpropitious. Myself, I had warned her. Had warned her about that gentleman. She insisted. Insisted.’
‘A gentleman? So she wasn’t stolen away against her will.’
‘Will. What is this will? She could dance. She could twirl on the horses. But this Danuta could not think. She had a madness of an idea. A new life. To begin a new life. I ask you, how many times can a person begin anew? She left. She came back. She left again. Cats, they have nine lives. Danuta, she thought she had ninety-nine. One with every no-good man she met. Now she has a completely and utterly new one.’
With an air of utter despair, he looked back at the pit, half filled with earth now.
‘Meanwhile her dancing horses pine and weep. And my serpent, my precious cobra is gone. Gone for ever. Irreplaceable.’
‘Your serpent?’
‘Yes. My Nasa. My friend. My livelihood.’ He made a graceful spiralling motion in the air. It took Marguerite a moment to realise he was miming the upwards coiling of a snake. She hadn’t realised. He was the travellers’ snake charmer.
‘Your Danuta took him with her?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think she had some idea of doing magic with her lover. But I don’t know. I will never know. In any event, he must be returned to me immediately. Immediately. Or there will be more trouble. I told the old gentleman. This Monsieur Mirtout. I told him. I warned him. But the people here are so stubborn.’
He shook his head, let the smile flash across his face again. ‘Not the honourable Madame. No, no.’
Sacred Ends Page 14