Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  ‘You said on the phone that there was no more to it than that,’ Flemyng said. ‘But there was something, wasn’t there?’

  Maria got up to get some water. ‘Let’s come back to that. I promise I will. But let me ask you something. Did she talk about what she was working on?’

  Flemyng said ‘Yes’ from the sofa where he lay.

  Maria was managing the conversation, step by step. ‘Thanks for that. You said when Kristof left both of us – the morning after – that she’d said something to you that took us on to his territory. What was her message?’

  ‘This is difficult. You know that.’

  Maria sighed. Like Flemyng’s, her face was serious, all the fun gone. ‘We’re working together. That’s the fact.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But we have loyalties that we mustn’t break.’

  She got up and walked across the room. ‘Will, we both want to know what happened, and that can’t be a secret between us. Agreed?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘When you say “Kristof’s territory” you mean East Germany?’

  His reluctance hadn’t disappeared. ‘You know that I’m constrained.’

  Maria ploughed on. ‘She told me she was working on a story that might change our lives. She was a bit embarrassed by that phrase, but meant it. And if she mentioned the East Germans to you, we’re both aware of where she was heading, and we have to do something about it. For God’s sake, she’s dead.’

  After a few moments’ pause, he said that it was time for them to visit the cemetery, and to find Kristof’s dead letter box. The police would be gone by now.

  ‘First thing tomorrow morning?’ she said.

  ‘And now you’ll tell me what else Quincy said about Freddy,’ he said.

  ‘Sure. I was intrigued, but it didn’t seem a big deal.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Maria said, ‘She asked me if I knew Craven’s wife. That’s all.’

  Flemyng turned on the sofa and jerked his head sideways towards her across the low table. His hand was ruffling his hair. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘Just say it again. Her exact words.’

  ‘She said, “Have you met his wife? Could I find a way to meet her?” That was all, because I said I knew nothing of her.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Flemyng said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Freddy’s never had a wife in his life,’ he said.

  TWENTY

  When the gates at Père Lachaise opened at eight o’clock, Flemyng and Maria were watching. Each carried a small bouquet, bought from the flower seller who had pulled her wooden cart into position in time for the early visitors and was dousing her blooms from a giant watering can. They had spent a few minutes in a café across the street, almost alone, to confirm their plan. Even before the high gates were firmly chained back for the day, they were inside and walking towards the place where Quincy had died.

  Every journalist in Paris knew the gravestone. Max Anderson had led a posse of Americans for a wreath-laying and a eulogy from him on the day after her body was found, and when Flemyng and Maria turned into the pathway leading to the stone they saw a collection of flowers that were still bright. Placing their bouquets at the side of the pile, they read some of the messages from her colleagues and the family. Many were anonymous, but there was a large wreath from the American embassy. They stood for a little while, in unfeigned sadness, until they saw a member of the cemetery staff moving along the adjoining row of graves.

  They had agreed that Flemyng would speak first, since in such a place it might be thought to be a man’s business.

  Explaining that he and his friend had known the late Miss Quincy, and they were greatly saddened by her death, he wondered if M. Lebosquet was at work and whether they might speak to him. They knew he had found her body, and it would be a comfort to see him. Flemyng’s French passed muster without comment from the official – maybe because he was not Américain – and he felt a gratifying tremor when the cemetery man said, after he had expressed his condolences, that it would be easy to meet Georges.

  ‘He will be here at nine, coming along that path. He begins each morning over there.’ He pointed over their heads.

  They thanked him, and each took his hand in turn. There would be no difficulty in recognizing Georges Lebosquet. His photograph had been on the front pages, and Flemyng had read every word written about him.

  ‘First,’ said Maria, ‘a treasure hunt.’

  Each of them remembered Kristof’s precise directions for the dead letter box he had revealed to them in their early-morning talk. They found the junction of the two walkways he had described, and counted the plots as they walked south towards the edge of the cemetery. Sheltered behind the yew tree and a high memorial, they found the section of wall that was hidden from passers-by, a gap in the curtain of ivy and the loose stone at head height. It came away easily.

  By way of preparation, they looked at each other with deliberation, and didn’t speak. Maria put her hand into the cavity.

  She took out a sealed envelope and turned it over. There was no inscription. Flemyng remained silent. Maria held it close to her face and, in the morning air, she said she imagined that she could pick up the odour of Quincy’s perfume.

  Flemyng’s eyes welled up and, breathing in, Maria turned away.

  As she did so, she heard footsteps on gravel, and leaning back to whisper to Flemyng, with one hand on the high memorial beside them, she pushed herself away and moved fast. The envelope disappeared into the bag over her shoulder and she walked briskly along the line of the wall. Without a word, Flemyng replaced the loose stone and set off in the opposite direction.

  They emerged on to the path about sixty yards apart, looking away from each other. The young couple whose footsteps had alarmed Maria had already turned right to join another path and were walking away with their backs towards the wall, hand in hand and taking their time. Their clothes gave nothing away. They could have been visitors touring some famous graves, or students in search of solitude. Caught up in themselves, they didn’t look back.

  With the interlopers gone, Flemyng and Maria found each other and she patted her bag. They would open it later, after they had seen M. Lebosquet. It was nearly nine o’clock.

  They walked together along the perimeter path, through a maze of obelisks, memorials and ruins, and ahead of them they saw the deputy keeper beginning his early rounds, which he would repeat at dusk. M. Lebosquet turned towards them and, keeping to the centre of the path, approached with a steady tread, obviously bent on an assignation. Flemyng said to Maria that he seemed so determined that he could be an ageing gunslinger on the dusty set of a western, ready for anything at high noon. But when they shook hands, he was practising propriety, not bravado, and gave an exhibition of politeness.

  ‘I am told you are looking for me,’ he said.

  Despite the season, he was in a dark blue woollen suit. It was worn away in patches but a working uniform that was also respectable enough for any conversation with a widow or a priest. He had springy grey hair, with tufts high on each cheekbone, and a natural expression that was heavy jowled and serious, turning avuncular when he smiled. Flemyng and Maria introduced themselves, and he dipped his head. They explained their friendship with Quincy – by their description it might have stretched back for years – and he said he understood perfectly why they might want to talk to him. Sometimes, he said, comfort was his business.

  They found a bench and sat side by side, M. Lebosquet between them. He gazed across his tombs.

  When he began to speak of the shock he felt at the event, they commiserated with him and encouraged him to give his feelings full rein. His relief at their gentleness, and their apparent lack of interest in gruesome detail, meant that when they began their questioning slowly he dealt with them as if they were sympathizers, with no interest in interrogation. They were so much easier than the journalists who had queued up for him
a few days before.

  M. Lebosquet was proud of the cemetery, and its place in the history of his city. He respected the graves of the famous and cherished their memorials, but most of all he treasured the family plots and mausoleums that held the story of Paris through the generations. Each time they opened one up for an urn or a new coffin he heard the turning of a page. This was the first time in his experience, he told them, that death had besmirched Père Lachaise in such a way. Even the loss of a child, heart-draining though it was, was part of the natural rhythm in the cemetery. The cry of murder – heard around the world! – disturbed everything. Revealing the romance that was part of his nature, he said that he felt as if a mirror had been smashed, breaking his own image into pieces and promising him seven years’ bad luck.

  ‘That is why I refuse to believe that she was killed here. I cannot.’

  For Flemyng, it was a moment to hold back. He didn’t ask why, nor push M. Lebosquet for a reason. There was time.

  After a few moments, he said that it was poignant for them to remember Quincy’s rucksack, because they had often seen her carrying it. Did he think it had been thrown aside, or placed carefully where it was found?

  Definitely not cast off, said M. Lebosquet, but laid deliberately against a neighbouring stone. He could show them where, if they wished. Clearly, she had put it there herself.

  Flemyng said, ‘The gravestone where she lay is quite high off the ground. We have been there. It would require effort to get up there. You know that the police – and the newspapers, of course – think she was lifted there. It’s part of their murder story. Is that how it seemed when you saw her – that she had been taken there when she was dead, and laid out?’

  They could see that it was still painful for him to remember the scene. He tossed his head as if trying to rid himself of a thought. ‘They like to think that, but that is not how it was. I told you.’

  Flemyng said that he knew it was difficult for him. They were thinking of Quincy, too. If he didn’t mind, it was important for them to know how she had looked at the end.

  ‘I don’t believe she was carried there as a corpse. Do you understand? This is why I am so angry at the suggestion of murder in this place. I felt very strongly at the moment I saw her that she had died there, sitting on the stone. Unaware of what was happening. I have no explanation for that feeling, but I know I am right.’

  ‘That comforts us,’ Maria said. ‘Thank you.’

  And Georges Lebosquet made his confession. ‘I have something I must tell you.’

  Terrified by the unexpected arrival of death, he had run to his office. In the nights afterwards he dreamed of what he had seen, unable to remove the image from his mind. ‘I am sorry to say this, but it was like a photograph in my head. The surprise on her face. That’s what it was – shock. As for pain at the end, I hope not.’ But long after his interview with the police – it had been straightforward and wrapped up in an hour – he remembered a detail in the scene that troubled him because it had slipped from his mind in the turmoil afterwards and, after deliberating with himself, he had said nothing about it to the officers.

  When he first saw her, a cigarette lighter was beside her body on the gravestone. It was silver. But when he returned with the police after the alarm call had been made, perhaps twenty minutes later, it had gone.

  ‘You mean that when you found her, although the cemetery was closed for the night, there must have been someone else nearby?’ Flemyng said gently.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Watching you, perhaps,’ Maria said.

  Flemyng said he assumed there were people who crept into Père Lachaise to sleep for the night. Tramps, street wanderers, maybe students with no home.

  ‘Indeed. We know this,’ M. Lebosquet said.

  To be frank, he went on, he was fearful of going to the police to change his story and tell them about the lighter. ‘It was stolen, that’s all. Am I right? She is dead. I cannot bring her back.’

  His refusal to believe in murder was absolute. He was sorry to remind them of how she had looked at the end, but he was certain that she had been taken by a seizure that came from nowhere. Un grand coup de sang. These things happened. He waved at the sky.

  Flemyng said mildly that he was surely right. Newspapers liked to make up stories, because it was always easier to write about a mystery than the truth. And everyone knew about the police – they ignored the obvious because their lives were governed by suspicion.

  He noticed that Maria was holding her breath.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Georges Lebosquet. ‘I will say nothing. May she rest in peace.’

  They spoke for a few minutes about Quincy. Maria told him that in her trade she was a person of unusual gifts. ‘A woman in a man’s world, an adventurer. She wrote like an angel.’

  They walked with him to the keepers’ lodge and enjoyed the sun. The cemetery was fresh, green and bursting with buds on the bushes and the horse chestnut trees. The May blossom was coming. They prepared to part, with thanks and in good humour.

  As they shook hands, M. Lebosquet said he was glad he had been able to help them deal with the sad event that had taken their friend away. Then he added, ‘There is something else I should say.’

  ‘Yes?’ Flemyng said.

  ‘I think she loved this place.’

  They waited, giving him time.

  ‘I have thought about her very often. Long after the police went on their way. And my memory is clear. I saw her before, when I was walking the paths. She came here – at least twice, maybe three times – in the days before she died.’ He put a hand across his chest, as if he was taking an oath. ‘I know this. You may think it odd, but I am comforted by that.’

  ‘So are we,’ said Flemyng. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It is the kind of information – so personal – that we must keep private,’ Maria said.

  ‘Certainly,’ M. Lebosquet replied. ‘I have told no one but you. Her friends.’

  They thanked him, shaking hands formally, and turned towards the gates. As they passed through, Maria unzipped the bag on her shoulder and pressed her hand on the envelope inside.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When they arrived at Flemyng’s apartment, they found a telegram from Sam Malachy that the concierge had slipped under the door.

  Sorry missing party. On night train.

  ‘In the old days it would have come yesterday, even before Sam got to Victoria,’ Flemyng said. ‘Never mind, we can all have lunch. I’m not expected at the office. You’ll like him.’ He watched her place the envelope from the cemetery on his square kitchen table, sliding a bowl of fruit to one side.

  Maria said they had a dilemma which at another time might amuse them. ‘Mine or yours?’

  ‘Washington’s or London’s?’ Flemyng said. ‘Sometimes the spoils of war have to be shared.’

  Maria opened it carefully, sliding her thumb under the gummed flap to ease it up slowly. There was no writing on the envelope but they could see that it was creased, scuffed with dirt, and had been resealed at least once. Flemyng deliberately put his head down, so that he was close to the table and sensing the perfume that Maria had imagined clinging to the envelope. Her fingers went into the envelope, and she slowly pulled out the wafer-thin package that was inside.

  A sheet of rough copy paper, the same kind as Maria used in her office, had been folded in four. Making the point that it was a joint enterprise, Flemyng took over. Unfolding it, he pressed it flat with his hand and they looked at it together.

  Before them lay a list of names. All appeared to be German.

  ‘Recognize any?’ Maria said, after she had read them twice.

  ‘Not one.’

  ‘Me neither,’ she said. He was watching her.

  There were nine of them, typed, arranged alphabetically and showing no other pattern. Three women were listed, and six men, but they weren’t grouped by sex and the names were written with surnames second, so that they didn’t seem to have been taken from
an official document.

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Maria. ‘This wasn’t typed by a German, or at least not on a German typewriter. Some of these names need an umlaut. Other accents for all I know. There’s nothing.’

  Flemyng was looking down at the paper, both his hands on the table.

  ‘And we still have to answer the big question.’

  She put it in words. ‘Whether Quincy was supposed to pick it up, or whether she put it there.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Maria added, ‘And there’s another decision we have to make.’

  Flemyng smiled at her.

  ‘Who gets it?’

  The doorbell rang, and a voice came through the letterbox. ‘Wakey, wakey, Will Flemyng. Still in bed?’

  The night train had delivered Sam.

  *

  Freddy Craven was very angry, and Sandy Bolder was curled up in his chair like a furry animal in retreat.

  ‘I wouldn’t be so unhappy if Bridger didn’t have a point.’ Craven’s voice was cracking.

  His grey hair was greasy and dishevelled, spiked and unruly, and the bloodshot eye more obvious than the day before. He hadn’t risen from his desk since Bolder had answered his summons, and his headmasterly dressing down was costing him energy he could hardly spare.

  ‘Have you any idea how embarrassing it is to hear that you’ve been parading up and down King Charles Street, bawling like a costermonger and stirring up the crowd, without telling me you were even in London? I think much the same of Patrick Ingleby as you do, but unfortunately for us he’s now in charge of Europe in the Foreign Office and his cables are read all over the place. In this case, by every ambassador on this whole bloody continent who’s up to it. Thank God ours is away, and Wemyss can lose the damned thing in one of his files.’

  Bolder, flirting with pathos, said he had no idea that anything he said could have been taken so seriously. ‘I promise you, Freddy, I was careful to avoid detail. I tried not to leave traces.’

  ‘You might as well have worn a sandwich board up Whitehall.’ Craven was shaking. ‘Spreading rumours like a fishwife, spraying hints and winks all over the place, in the bleeding cabinet office if you please, and then decamping to the Travellers to finish the job, making such a fool of yourself in the bar that you might as well have dumped a dog mess on the carpet.’