‘This is her bag. I recognise it.’ Madame Tellier’s voice was sharper than a knife through her sobs.
‘You mean the sweet little Creole tart went off without it?’ Napoléon taunted her. ‘I’ll have to find her. Where could she have gone? Maybe she’s learnt to fly now. All those magic tricks they have.’
The man was brutal, savage. Marguerite judged he would commit a murder as easily and with as little conscience as a child might crush a beetle. Anyone could be his beetle.
‘I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of you.’
‘Quiet. If you want to scream like a fishwife, go and do it at that good for-nothing-husband I bought for you. And behave yourself, or I won’t buy any for your daughters.’
The howl that came from Madame Tellier was followed by another object hurled across the room.
‘How dare you insult me like that!’ Marguerite raced softly for the front door. It still stood half open and in a moment she was outside, outside where the sun was swathed in pink mists on the horizon. She felt utterly exhausted.
She breathed deeply, hoping the crisp air would wipe out what she had seen. Wipe out the perversions of love she had witnessed in these last hours. They made her want to shut herself up in a cloister or ride eternally over some unpeopled desert, free of families.
Yet there was something pitiful in the woman’s jealousy, in this childhood enactment of a love that should never have been. She loved the monster, despite everything. Despite the wrongness, despite the humiliation.
Perversions of love. They were everywhere.
Marguerite shivered. She started to run, run wildly through the copse, down the hill and away.
She had almost reached the orchard where she hoped her horse was still tethered when she saw a wagon winding up the road towards her. She was surprised to recognise Dr Labrousse and next to him Chief Inspector Durand, bundled up as if for an expedition to the Arctic. Following on behind them was a constable on horseback.
Worried that they wouldn’t recognise her, Marguerite waved them down.
‘Ah Madame, I’ve been anxious about you. You mustn’t undertake these escapades alone. Your messenger didn’t find me until late. I was buried in the post office, waiting for that telegram about Xavier Marchand. It came finally. It gives us everything we need … And then, as I was setting out, I met Dr Labrousse.’
The doctor interrupted him. ‘Yes. Madame Tellier sent her man for me. It seems her father has had a fall.’
‘I’ll tell you everything I’ve discovered while we drive, Messieurs. Perhaps the constable can fetch my horse for me and bring it to the Marchand house.’
‘No, we’ll need him.’
The inspector helped her up into the wagon. She squeezed gratefully into the seat next to him and quickly began to tell the men what she had witnessed. She left out the prurient detail, only emphasising the depths of Marchand’s cruel amorality and the grip he had on P’tit Ours, as well as his daughter. She could gauge Durand’s response from his clenched fists.
‘A degenerate monster,’ he muttered.
The doctor was more difficult to judge. She had a passing sense that he already knew something of the family’s corruption.
Marguerite told them she was certain they would find P’tit Ours and Amandine Septembre at the other end of the tunnel in the house bordering the Tellier property. Their more urgent business, however, was with that depraved old murderer, Napoléon Marchand, the mastermind of the valleys’ ills.
‘We have everything we need to take him in,’ Durand grunted. ‘And if I have anything to do with it, he won’t ride across these hills again, Madame. The Martinique lot have confirmed that Xavier Port-Royal Marchand, partner to Napoléon in the firm of Marchand et Marchand, sailed to France on the cargo ship of the same name, which belongs to the French part of the firm. He sailed with one Amandine Septembre, who is a Creole and his housekeeper, though rumour widely has it in Fort de France that she’s either his niece or daughter, her mother, Joséphine, having been employed in the same house for many years before Amandine’s birth.’
‘And they came here to extract funds owed to them by the old man. So he decided to get rid of his brother and keep Amandine as his mistress.’
Her stomach heaved. Only after a pause could she go on to mutter, ‘I’ll show you the notebook listing figures when we get home, Inspector.’
The forced grandeur of the rundown house now looked doubly unwelcoming. The door was closed, and as Dr Labrousse pulled the bell, Marguerite heard a slithering sound from the side of the porch. She took a step backwards. Somewhere a magpie set up a terrible screech. She had forgotten about Mr Rama’s box. His snake was evidently still in it, somnolent in the cold, but still active.
As the door opened to them, a red-faced Madame Tellier appeared. With her came a whiff of what suddenly struck Marguerite as the house’s abiding odour, an undertow of sewage. Father and daughter, in their moral corruption, were like an emanation of the house’s physical decay.
‘Doctor. At last. It’s my father. He’s delirious. He’s suffered a fall, I believe. Or someone has knocked him over. Perhaps with a poker. I think I know who it might be.’
She stopped as she noticed the inspector and, with something of a double take, Marguerite, who had removed her cap so that at least her hair might make her recognisable to the woman.
The inspector didn’t give her time to query their presence. ‘Madame, we were with the doctor when your message came. We thought he might need help. Your father is a large man. There are also some questions I and the constable must put to him.’
‘This is not a time for questions, Inspector,’ the woman said crossly.
Marguerite could hardly bring herself to meet her eyes after all she had witnessed. She focused instead on her dress, a brown-red, the colour of dried blood.
Napoléon Marchand, a vast, less than clean, wool dressing-gown draped over his shoulders, was half reclining in an armchair, his legs stretched in front of him and propped on a footstool. Behind him was a rich peacock tapestry that looked decidedly Persian. She hadn’t spotted that before. Nor had she noticed the hanging that had been violently torn from the wall and lay spread across the floor. Could that have happened since she had left?
‘This is your doctor, is it?’ the voice the old man propelled at his daughter was like a fist. He was staring at Marguerite from canny eyes, licking his full lips slowly with an animal tongue. His teeth emerged as large tobacco stained stumps. ‘More fit for the bedchamber than the hospital ward, by my reckoning. I’ve seen her before, haven’t I? The Comtesse of something or other. These countesses are always playing at being boys. I have nothing against boys. What bit of me does she want to see?’ His hand was already on his trousers.
Dr Labrousse and Durand stepped in front of her more swiftly than a military escort.
‘You’ve had a fall, Monsieur Marchand. Or so your daughter tells me.’
‘Don’t believe a word she says. I’ve been assaulted.’
‘Assaulted by whom?’
‘And who are you?’
‘Chief Inspector Durand of the Paris police.’
Marchand’s eyes narrowed and for a moment Marguerite had a clear sense of the malign intelligence that lived within the man’s drunken excesses.
‘You’ve come for her, have you?’
‘For whom?’
The man’s mad laugh wheezed. ‘For my torturer, who else?’ He turned his vast head towards Marguerite. ‘When I was young, women were saints. Soft, beautiful. Now! Now you’re all potential poisoners! Hurlers of vitriol! Each and every one of you. Oh yes, Madame de … Old Napoléon reads the newspapers. Burning out the eyes of the lords of creation. That’s what you’re best at. One-time sweethearts, wives, ungrateful daughters, all attacking their masters. Isn’t that so, Chief Inspector? Isn’t that what the vixens do best now! Snakes, they are…’
‘Quiet, Papa,’ Madame Tellier growled. Not the little girl any more, but like the inca
rnation of everything he evoked.
‘I noticed you have an interest in snakes, Monsieur Marchand,’ Marguerite said innocently.
‘Let me feel your pulse, Monsieur.’ Dr Labrousse had approached Napoléon.
‘Snakes!’ The man shook him off as if he were one. ‘Hate the creatures. Devils. Satan’s offspring. Every one of them.’
‘But surely there’s one in the box on your porch.’
‘Not mine,’ he growled. ‘Belongs to the fairground folk.’
‘Can we have a tisane for him, Madame? He needs liquid. Lots of it. Water as well, first of all. And then something warm. He’s burning.’
Madame Tellier threw a suspicious look round the room, then at an authoritative gesture from the doctor, hurried down to the kitchen, her untied hair swinging behind her like a shroud.
‘Fairground folk?’ Marguerite brought his attention back to her. ‘You mean poor Danuta the Dancer!’
‘Poor!’ Napoléon’s guffaw filled the room. ‘Poor? After everything she’s blackmailed me for. All of them blackmailers these days. The women, the men. The men in skirts.’
He roared at his own joke.
‘Come on, Marchand,’ the inspector intervened with none of his customary civility. ‘I’ve had enough of this. You know you had her killed.’
The man sprang out of his chair and lunged towards the inspector, who stepped deftly backwards so that Marchand would have fallen had Labrousse not seized him and, with a heave, shoved him back into his chair.
‘Killed. What are you talking about?’
‘Murdered.’ Durand elaborated. He looked towards the door of the room, where the constable now stood, as if to imply that the evidence lay with the uniformed man.
Old Napoléon’s face had grown blotched with purple. He lashed the table with the stick at his side, a riding crop to spur a horse on. ‘Oh no. You can’t pin that on Napoléon Marchand. Cheeky strumpet may deserve to be dead. Nothing better than a whore. But that’s nothing to do with me. Nothing. Now get out of here. All of you. Leave me alone.’
His eyes bore down on Marguerite as he tapped his stick on the floor, each tap a threat. ‘Your idea, is it. Madame de…? Well, you’re wrong. So get your ass out of here. Out of my house. If you think old Napoléon has respect for your kind, you’re wrong. Remember…’ he narrowed his eyes, watched her leap of fear, then guffawed again, ‘death is a democrat. Takes your brothers and your masters.’ He raised his stick in the air, held it like a scythe.
For a moment, Marguerite felt the man’s hypnotic power. He had been handsome in his youth, Madame Germaine had told her. A Heathcliff of the tender river valleys. He had made the young women swoon and had his pick of them. It was those dark, glowering eyes. She couldn’t shake them off now. She felt she had met a latter-day Caligula, or an incarnation of the grim reaper, and her end was at hand. She couldn’t move.
In one swift movement, the inspector broke the spell. The stick was propelled from the man’s hand and he and the constable were at old Napoléon’s side.
‘Here’s the tisane, Doctor. And a pitcher of water.’ Madame Tellier had come into the room. Her full skirts brushed past the inspector, forcing him away from her father. She looked down at Durand from her impressive height, as if he were some unwanted worm who had stupidly dared to crawl into her orchard.
‘Have you not noticed, Inspector, that my father is ill? Delirious with fever?’
‘Your father is under arrest, Madame. We are taking him in for questioning.’
Marguerite was keenly aware of the woman’s resemblance to her father, which the difference in age and sex so often masked. The same long face, the same protruding features, that sallow drinker’s skin with its ruptured veins, the sheer size of hands and feet and face.
‘You must be mad, Inspector. What can a sick old man do?’
‘This particular sick old man is responsible for the death of one Xavier Port-Royal Marchand, who sailed here to lay claim to the debts his partner and brother, your father, had thus far refused to repay. The sum is sizeable. The motive in place.’
‘Stupid fool fell down the stairs, didn’t he?’
Marguerite and the inspector glanced at each other.
‘Not before he’d managed to take in a great deal of poison, not to mention opium. I notice you have a plentiful supply of pipes here. I imagine those and a little push had something to do with it all. Otherwise, why dump his body on the tracks?’
‘This is madness, Inspector. You have proof of nothing. This is pure conjecture.’
‘Don’t you worry, Madame. We have sufficient proof.’
Old Napoléon had leant back in his chair and was staring off into space. For a moment, Marguerite thought the man might faint again.
‘Who would have thought, eh? Who would have thought?’ Tears gathered in his eyes and started to pour down his face. ‘Everyone taking advantage of old Napoléon. Everyone. Danuta, the beautiful dancer, that arrogant shit of a curé, even Yvette. And I thought she was a saint. Nothing more than a blackmailer. All of them. Money, money. Napoléon’s treasure. Because I’m old. Spent. Even that dumb Xavier. After everything I did for him. All those years. Everything…’
‘Napoléon Grandcourt Marchand, I’m arresting you for the murder of your brother, Xavier Port-Royal Marchand.’ The constable stepped forward and spoke at a nod from Durand who was right at his side.
‘Murder? Murder? There was no murder. The stupid oaf fell down the stairs. That’s what stupid drunken oafs do. And if someone brushed past him and helped him on his way, that’s certainly not murder. Not murder, I tell you. If you want murder you’ll have to go elsewhere.’ He shook his large head, then glowered at his daughter. ‘After all those favours.’
‘Drink this, Monsieur. You’re dehydrated.’ Labrousse forced liquid down the man’s throat. After a moment, Napoléon took the glass in his own hand and drank thirstily. The sound of his swallowing filled the room.
‘You did things for your daughter, Amandine, too, did you? Favours. Like keeping her locked up.’ The inspector wasn’t sparing his punches.
Madame Tellier walked up to him and seemed about to grab him by the scruff of the neck and eject him. She placed herself between her father and Durand. Shadows from the flames leapt across her face giving her a warrior’s ferocity.
‘My father only has one daughter, Inspector. I don’t know who’s been carrying tales to you. By all the laws of France I am that daughter.’
‘Some 50 per cent of births, Madame, fall outside of the law. Being outside the law doesn’t make your father’s progeny any the less flesh and blood.’
‘Plenty of flesh,’ the old mammoth growled.
A look of such venom passed over Madame Tellier’s features that Marguerite found herself taking refuge behind the sofa.
‘He’s delirious, Inspector. I told you. You must go now. And take that constable with you. You can come back in the morning when his temperature has abated. He can’t be moved, can he, Doctor?’ she challenged Labrousse.
‘Aren’t you afraid to be left here alone with this violent murderer, Madame?’ The inspector was on a new tack, his voice low, confidential. ‘I know your father spends much of his time away from here. Perhaps you’re not aware just how dangerous he is. Quite depraved and deranged, Madame. I wouldn’t wish myself alone next to him.’
‘Dangerous! Violent!’ Marchand’s ears seemed to be as acute as a young man’s. ‘Is that what the she-devil has been saying about me? Ugly bitch. Keep your eye on her and you’ll see who’s violent. Should have sent her to her aunt right from the start. That would have cleaned her up. She could have prayed for my sins. Prayed for my sins.’
The thought brought forth laughter like a clap of thunder. It provoked wheezing. He started to cough, spat a gob at a bronze spittoon and missed.
‘He’s raving, Doctor. Give him something,’ Madame Tellier muttered.
Labrousse was already stirring a powder into the tisane, which he now hande
d to his patient. Napoléon Marchand took it from him. While he sniffed it, he tilted his head towards Marguerite in the manner of a large, shaggy dog. Again she had a sense of a malign intelligence lurking beneath the strutting surface of the man’s behaviour. The oafish clown and the raging tyrant were real enough, but they were also poses. ‘Pay no attention to her, Comtesse. She’s mad.’
‘Drink up now, Monsieur. It will help calm you.’ The doctor gave the inspector a meaningful look. ‘You’ll feel much better. Much better in the morning.’
‘Do you know where we can find your one-time servant Yvette, Monsieur? Yvette and her sister? They’re both missing.’ Marguerite pricked up her courage to ask.
‘Yes, speak up, Marchand. If you tell us where you’ve put them, I’ll put in a word with the investigating magistrate.’
Dark eyes rolled over the inspector. ‘Ask the bitch, why don’t you? Ask her. Old Napoléon knows nothing. Old Napoléon just wants to rest.’ He drank noisily.
A look passed between Labrousse and Madame Tellier. Marguerite intercepted it. She didn’t know what it meant.
‘I think he’ll sleep now,’ the doctor said. ‘He’ll sleep until morning, Inspector. Why not leave the constable here to watch over him and you can have him brought in the morning. A little less alcohol in his system will make him far more amenable to questioning. And to looking at photographs of the body. He’d be a bit heavy to move, if he weren’t willing.’
‘That’s right, Inspector.’ Madame Tellier was suddenly all complaisance. ‘I’ll come in with him if you like. I only knew Xavier from his portrait, but I’m sure if the body is his, I might recognise it too. I had no idea he was in the country. Papa never said anything. He always keeps things close to his chest.’
‘Does he now?’ The inspector cracked his knuckles as if he wanted to hit somebody. ‘All right, Madame. As a favour to you. But I want him in Montoire before lunch. I shall come personally to fetch him.’
Marguerite felt a great wave of tiredness swirl over her. She swayed a little, clutched the back of a chair.
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