Night Train to Paris

by Fliss Chester

  ‘Mademoiselle Churche, please explain yourself to me!’ Henri, having fetched a chair for Magda, was now looking more and more put out. ‘What are you all doing here?’

  Fen looked him in the eye and said, ‘They’re all here, Henri, to uncover the truth.’

  ‘Safety in numbers, eh, Fen?’ James whispered as he moved behind her. With all eight of them now squeezed into the relatively small space, it wasn’t claustrophobic as such, but there was a frisson in the air. Henri was sitting now behind his desk and Michel Lazard had moved his chair around so that he was sitting at more of an angle. Magda was seated too, opposite Lazard, and Joseph was standing behind her, his hands gently laid on her shoulders.

  Fen stood close to Michel Lazard and could now take in at close quarters his slicked-back hair, very much like that of a matinee idol, and his thin moustache, which was neatly twizzled into pointed ends. He could definitely pass as a young man in a certain light… Next to Fen stood James, who had moved in protectively from the corner of the gallery, with Simone hovering behind him, looking every inch the naïve innocent. Antoine Arnault was the final player in the tableau, his bald head illuminated by the gallery lighting, and he completed the semicircle around the desk by standing between Simone and the Bernheims.

  ‘Will you explain yourself now, Fenella?’ Henri asked, taking his glasses off and giving them a long and drawn-out wipe with his handkerchief.

  ‘Yes. Bear with me, as there’s a bit to get through, but I’m pretty sure that one of us here in this room murdered my dear friend Rose and Antoine’s brother, Gervais.’

  ‘Gervais Arnault was caught up in all sort of underground dealings,’ protested Henri. ‘He was nicknamed “The Wrench”, for heaven’s sake. How can you link the two murders?’

  Fen noticed Antoine shifting his weight from foot to foot. Perhaps he didn’t like hearing his brother slandered, or perhaps the allegation stung as it was all too true. ‘They were linked. Rose was being blackmailed by Gervais.’ As Fen spoke, there was a murmur through the room.

  ‘Why was this Gervais fellow blackmailing Rose?’ Joseph Bernheim asked, while Fen fished around in her pocket and retrieved the now very scruffy napkin on which she’d been writing out her crossword-style grid.

  ‘Henri might want to answer that,’ Fen replied, ‘as Gervais was blackmailing him too.’

  Henri replaced his glasses and then opened his desk drawer. ‘It’s true, I was being blackmailed. But there was nothing in it. Here, the note is the same as the one you said Rose received.’

  Henri passed it to Fen, who quickly scanned it, noting that it was written on the same blue writing paper as they found in the garage.

  Henri continued, ‘You see, Gervais, was after a quick buck or two, I should imagine. He was speculating. Who knows how many other dignitaries he was sending these notes to? One in ten might yield him a franc or so to cover a guilty conscience, but not me. And I told Rose to ignore it too.’

  Fen nodded, then turned to the other art dealer in the room. ‘Someone does have a guilty conscience, though, isn’t that right, Monsieur Lazard?’

  Michel Lazard looked up at Fen as if she’d just struck him. ‘Me? I didn’t kill Rose! And I barely knew Gervais. I wasn’t being blackmailed!’

  ‘No, but you were getting Rose into considerable trouble, selling her beautiful homages as forgeries. I saw you both arguing on the Pont des Arts the day before she was murdered. Did she threaten to turn you in to the authorities?’

  ‘On the Ponts des Arts? Ah, no, no, no. Arguing? No, you see, Rose and I had a wonderful business relationship and what you saw would have just been a healthy debate.’

  ‘A healthy debate?’ Fen couldn’t help but dislike the man, cause as he was of most of Rose’s troubles before she died.

  ‘Yes…’ he drew the word out and then licked his lips as he was thinking. ‘It’s true that she was cross with me for perhaps over-marketing her paintings, but we reached an agreement. And, mademoiselle, I can assure you, I would not kill her!’ Lazard had started to sweat a little and he quickly wiped his forehead with a spotted handkerchief.

  ‘I know,’ Fen grudgingly had to agree with him. ‘To you, she was the goose that laid the golden eggs. Killing her would be the death of your own very lucrative business.’

  Lazard looked relieved and slumped back in his chair.

  ‘Mademoiselle Churche,’ Antoine interrupted. ‘Why have you dragged me here? I had no motive either! One of the dead was my own brother!’

  ‘And don’t you want to know who killed him?’

  ‘Of course, I—’

  ‘Unless the method, a single gunshot wound, at night in his dark garage, rings any bells with you?’

  ‘The potshots in the warehouse…’ James chimed in.

  ‘Exactly. We know you have your own weapon and we know you can shoot a target in the dark, and we also know that you and your brother were involved with Rose’s scheme during the war.’

  ‘Why would I kill my own brother?’ Antoine was getting quite irate and the words were all but spat out at Fen and the gathered suspects. ‘We worked as a team, we risked our lives storing those paintings in Henri’s warehouse, we risked them even more chalking up Rose’s code on the back of them. You’ve got a screw loose, you have. Hey, and don’t forget, I have an alibi for Rose’s murder, you know that. I was in the warehouse on the other side of town when she was killed.’

  ‘Antoine, you’re right,’ Fen said, noticing that James had already clasped a hand on the warehouse manager’s shoulder, whether to stop him from fleeing or to calm him down she didn’t know.

  ‘I’m just a warehouse manager, I’ve got nothing to do with these murders.’ Antoine shrugged his shoulders and James let go of his grasp on him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Antoine,’ Fen said, as calmly and in as measured a way as possible, ‘but what happened in that warehouse during the war has everything to do with Rose’s murder, and your brother’s, and here’s why…’

  Forty-Three

  ‘Before I came here, before I collected Joseph and Magda from the Marais, I visited Valentine Valreas at his auction house to the north of the city.’

  There was an audible groan from Lazard.

  ‘Yes, you’re not his favourite person, Monsieur Lazard, but that’s not why I went or what I need to tell you all. When I met him at the party you very kindly invited me to, Henri, he was as cross as two sticks when I mentioned Rose’s name. But he did say something that occurred to me later. He mentioned that he had “sent her packing, never to darken his door again with her fakes”, but also that she had come on some sort of errand, an “excuse” he called it. I went to visit him to ask what that excuse was, and he told me.’

  ‘Are we nearly done with this, Fenella?’ Henri asked, shuffling some of the papers on his desk. ‘I really would like you all to leave now.’

  ‘In some ways, I’m only just getting started – sorry, Henri. But you might like to take a look at this.’ Fen reached into her pocket and pulled out the signed testimony from Valreas. ‘He is willing to testify that you, Henri Renaud, came to him to ask a favour.’

  ‘And what was that?’ James asked, trying to peer over Fen’s shoulder and read the statement.

  ‘Apparently, Henri here asked Valentine to “sell” at auction several paintings for him, paintings that had been stolen from the Jewish families.’

  Henri sighed and gave Fen a withering look. ‘As I have explained before, the Germans weren’t interested in what they called the degenerate art, so they wanted many of the paintings sold and the funds sent back to Berlin for their war effort. I was merely carrying out orders, despicable as they were. You think Rose would have got away with her coded list if I hadn’t been so good at seemingly going along with Herr Müller and his team?’

  ‘I know all of that. Except that paintings by Degas, Cezanne and Gainsborough certainly weren’t classed as “degenerate”, were they? They should have gone straight to Berlin or the new Führermuseu
m that was being talked of, or dare I say it, to the Eagle’s Nest itself.’

  ‘Gainsborough…’ Joseph said and whispered something to Magda. Fen caught his eye and nodded to him.

  ‘Well, perhaps I made the odd mistake…’ Henri stared at Fen.

  ‘There was no mistake.’ Fen fixed Henri with a steely glare. ‘Valentine Valreas is willing to go on record to say that not only did you ask him to consign those paintings to auction, but you asked him to rig the sale so that you bought them back at far below their market rate. To all intents and purposes, they were fake lots. Once you had bought them back, for peanuts, you could sell them, or keep them. Your theft had been legitimised, without anyone knowing and certainly without incurring the wrath of the Germans.’

  ‘You mean our paintings were never sent to Germany?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘I think some of them were, I’m sorry to say. But Henri traded on the fact that the overseeing Nazi officers here in Paris couldn’t tell a Cezanne from a Christmas card and would do no more than glance at a list of paintings, bowing down to Henri’s superior knowledge, and rubber-stamp the list. Rose herself said they were remarkably trusting at times.’

  ‘This is preposterous!’ Henri stood up and thumped his fist on the desk.

  ‘Sadly, it’s not. Valentine Valreas also put a call into Claude Leflavre for me.’ Fen took her eyes off Henri and explained to the rest of the room, ‘He’s one of the patrons of the Louvre who Henri introduced me to.’ She looked back at Henri, who was looking exceedingly uncomfortable. ‘He confirmed that he was very happy with the Degas you sold him. “You’ve brought me another dancer”, do you remember Claude saying that to me when I met him at the Louvre? He was alluding, of course, to Degas’s favourite subject matter of ballerinas, and one of the paintings you’d stolen and then sold to him, no doubt for a small fortune.’

  ‘Where’s the proof, eh? He said this, they said that… you could be spinning lies!’ Henri looked agitated.

  ‘Henri, the game is up,’ Fen said, as gently as she could, aware Henri could make another, more deadly, sudden move. ‘Rose discovered that you had stolen paintings from your own warehouse and, under the noses of the Nazis as well as her and the Arnault brothers, sold them. But she only guessed at it once she’d received the list back from you and started decoding it. She had stopped at the Bernheim Cezanne and it must have looked very strange to her, someone who did know her artists, to see written in German next to it “for auction”. She knew full well that that sort of painting would have been on the next train out of town.’

  Fen glanced down at her grid and then continued, ‘When she told you about the blackmail letter and you showed her you had one too, far from reassuring her that it was just a speculative shot in the dark, she realised the blackmailer was only speculating between you two. They had narrowed it down to Henri or Rose as the only two who would have been able to manipulate the list like that, and were just trying to flush out the right person. And she sure as hell knew that she wasn’t responsible for stealing from the Jewish families. I think she confronted you with all of this, and you killed her.’

  ‘What rot! I told you that on the day of the murder I was here, on the telephone, negotiating with a dealer in London about some watercolours.’

  ‘Impossible to check…’ James whispered to Fen, ‘unless you did?’

  ‘I haven’t checked up on your alibi, no. But I don’t buy it. And here’s why. You also claimed never to have heard of The Chameleon, even though you were in the Resistance. Plus, as a trusted friend of Rose’s, Tipper wouldn’t bark at you coming to the door, and we know Tipper only barked once that afternoon.’

  ‘At me.’ Joseph nodded.

  ‘The evidence of Tsarina…’ James concurred.

  ‘Exactly. The countess’s Persian cat only noticed Tipper barking when Joseph came to visit, and that was after Rose was murdered. You’ve told me before that you knew that she never locked her front door and you also knew that someone as principled as Rose would never let you get away with the thefts of those artworks.’

  ‘As I said,’ Henri tried to look nonplussed as he shuffled more papers around his desk, ‘I was on the telephone at two o’clock.’

  ‘How did you know she was killed at two o’clock?’ Fen asked Henri, and every other pair of eyes in the room followed her gaze as she looked at the accused. ‘Henri…’ Fen held his gaze. ‘Are you The Chameleon?’

  In an instant, Henri was standing. ‘I have alibis, I made sure of it…’

  ‘You’ve made sure of it?’ Then Fen followed up more gently, aware that Henri was unravelling in front of them, ‘You killed them, didn’t you, Henri? Rose and Gervais?’

  ‘For the paintings, do you see? The paintings…’ Henri looked crazed all of a sudden ‘I had to have them. They couldn’t go to Germany, to those philistines. Gainsborough and Cezanne, Degas and Matisse! Masterpieces! Do you know what Müller said, the imbecile? “Pretty little things, aren’t they?” Pretty? How could we let them have them? They’d treat them like wallpaper! But Rose would never understand, oh she would want those paintings back for the Jews, but they’re mine now, you see… and she was so close to finding out… she had to die…’

  He turned to look at Fen and suddenly she realised. ‘Henri—’

  ‘I didn’t kill them, not by my own hand, but—’

  All of a sudden, darkness enveloped them, the bright, picture-illuminating lights had been turned off and barely any daylight could make it through the blackout blinds. There were shocked gasps and then Fen saw Henri’s face illuminated by a single, bright torch beam. Then darkness again and the room reverberated with a volley of gunshots.

  Forty-Four

  Pandemonium reigned for what seemed like minutes, though it must have only been a second or so. Fen tried to get her bearings in the dark, while nursing her eardrum that must have been only inches away from the crack of the pistol shots that had rung out among them. Trust Henri to have drawn his blackout blinds before his meeting with Lazard – the privacy they had afforded them then was now cloaking the gallery in darkness.

  Ears ringing, but eyes growing more accustomed to the dark, she felt her way along the wall, feeling the cool of the painted plaster under her fingers until she found a light switch. Click. The room was illuminated again and the scene that met her was one of utter horror. Henri had been gunned down where he had stood, his blood, and who knew what else, spread across the pristine white of the gallery wall behind him.

  Lazard was on his knees, collapsed to the floor from his chair, but alive and unhurt, while Antoine was clutching his ears. He must have been inches from the shooter too. James was on the floor, but gradually coming up to standing. Fen offered him her hand and he was just about upright, shaking his head as if to dislodge something from his ears too, when Fen heard Joseph Bernheim shout out.

  ‘Magda! Where is she?’

  ‘Simone…’ James looked around. Both of the women were gone and Fen realised that the chill breeze that was blowing a few damp autumn leaves into the gallery came from the open doorway.

  ‘Quick, James!’ Fen pulled him along with her and they left the gallery behind them, running down the colonnade.

  ‘Look, there!’ James had spotted two bodies lying on the ground at the end of the passage. In a few seconds, they were there with them, James strides ahead of Fen by now. She slowed as she saw him pull Simone off Magda, loosening the young model’s grip from around the older woman’s throat.

  ‘I’d have been paid more if you’d died with your parents,’ Simone was hissing at Magda.

  ‘Simone!’ James pulled her fully off Magda and held her against one of the columns.

  ‘Magda, oh Magda, are you all right?’ Fen fell to her knees beside her friend and, seconds later, Joseph was there too, comforting his wife. ‘What happened?’

  Through gasps of breath, Magda explained that she’d seen Simone fire the gun, her face lit briefly by the torch, and had run out of the gallery afte
r her. By dashing after her into the late-afternoon drizzle and tripping Simone up, Magda had thwarted the killer.

  Thoughts started falling into place and Fen spoke them out loud, as much to get it clear in her own head as to help the others piece it together. ‘Simone, I was wrong, you’re the murderer, aren’t you? And The Chameleon!’

  Simone struggled against James’s arm, which was still holding her securely against the pillar. ‘James, why won’t you defend me? Why are you letting her accuse me like this?’

  James just shook his head. ‘Fen,’ he said, his voice a little croaky. ‘Carry on.’

  Fen nodded, stood up and then looked back at Simone. ‘I wasn’t wrong about Henri though, was I? Except he wasn’t actually the murderer. You are. You were his weapon.’

  Simone rolled her eyes and then raised her eyebrows, inviting Fen to continue, if she dared. She did.

  ‘You’ve told me enough times that you would do anything not to be poor again. How much was he paying you?’ Fen’s question was met with silence. ‘I see,’ she realised. ‘It wasn’t money. Ah… the apartment. You hardly seemed shocked at all when I said he’d agreed that we could stay on. You knew all the time that the apartment, and everything in it, would be your pay cheque.’

  Simone struggled against James, but it was him, rather than Fen this time, who told her to stay still.

  Fen continued to join the clues she’d noticed over the last few days together. ‘Tipper doesn’t bark at you. And Henri knew you had the stomach to kill, you were in the Resistance after all and had led many a Nazi officer to their death.’

  ‘But Rose wasn’t killed with a gun,’ James took over, adding in his own thoughts to Fen’s deductions.

  ‘No…’ Fen agreed. ‘Mid-afternoon in a residential area… the weapon had to be quieter than that. Or more improvised perhaps. The countess’s cat, Tsarina, got in a pickle over Tipper’s barking at exactly the time we know that Joseph was calling to see Rose. You were already back in the apartment with her, though. And as soon as you heard him yapping, you knew you had to kill Rose quickly and quietly as whoever was approaching would more than likely let themselves in.’