‘Ridiculous!’ Raf grunted.
James read the typescript quickly.
You may not remember me, since you did no more than solicit my favours at the Hotel D last night, but you will believe me when I say that I know the full gamut of your foul practices. I also know your true identity, as this letter proves. I have already exposed you to your nearest. If you fail to follow the enclosed instructions to the letter, I shall be forced to take the exposure further. A great many journalists would be eager to hear the story. Do not try to find me again. It is pointless.
‘Where did you find this?’ James addressed Durand.
The Chief Inspector turned to Chardon, who shook his head.
‘A sample of your writing, please.’
‘Go ahead, Raf. They’ll prove nothing.’
Raf scrawled a version of the words and handed the sheet to Chardon with aplomb. ‘Do your worst, Maître.’
Chardon stared at the handwriting. ‘By the way, Monsieur Norton, was the child Mlle Fabre was bearing yours?’
‘What?’ Raf looked like a man who had just been punched hard.
‘I think you heard me.’
‘What child?’
‘Mlle Fabre was with child.’ Chardon spelled out in the tone of an impatient schoolmaster. ‘Were you the child’s father?’
‘I didn’t know …’
‘Come now, Monsieur Norton. You expect us to believe that your beloved mistress failed to announce her pregnancy to you. That it wasn’t a precipitating cause in your wish to be rid of her? Really, Monsieur, you take us for complete fools.’
Raf was incapable of speech.
‘Did you suspect the child wasn’t yours?’
‘That is enough, Maître.’ James stepped in. ‘My brother had no knowledge of Mlle Fabre’s pregnancy. This is the first either of us has heard of it.’
Durand was smiling.
Chardon shrugged. ‘Very well, Messieurs. We will stop this interview for now.’ He turned his pointed face to Raf. ‘Though I must ask for your identification papers or rather your travel document, Monsieur.’
Raf found his voice. It was hot with rage. ‘Oh no, Chardon. Oh no. You can’t have it. You’ve done enough mischief. Before I know it, I’ll be picked up by one of your henchmen and imprisoned for vagrancy.’
‘You will have a letter saying the passport is in my care. It will serve as an identity card within Paris. No further, of course.’ Chardon opened his desk drawer, passed a form letter to his clerk, who quickly filled it out. He gave Raf a clipped smile as he handed it to him and rose. ‘We will see each other again soon, Messieurs. Very soon. I have no doubt that your recollection of matters pertaining to Mlle Fabre’s death will have become clearer by then.’
‘Wait a minute,’ James called Chardon back from the door. ‘I didn’t get an answer to my question. Where did that letter you showed me come from?’
‘Why from Olympe Fabre’s apartment, Monsieur. Au revoir.’
The clerk took Raf’s passport and scurried after Chardon. Chief Inspector Durand stayed behind to turn a beatific grin on them.
‘I don’t know what you’re so pleased about, Durand,’ Raf growled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before that you’d learned Olympe was pregnant. I take it you discovered it in the autopsy?’
Durand nodded.
‘You’ll have wasted everyone’s time, most of all your own. Madame de Landois will hardly extend any more generous invitations to her parties.’
Durand stiffened. He thrust his chin forward, an instrument of blunt arrogance. ‘We shall see, Monsieur Norton. We shall see. Meanwhile you’ll accompany me to my office. I need to take your fingerprints.’
‘What?’ Raf stopped in the corridor, so that James all but bumped into him.
‘Yes. It will only take a few minutes.’ Durand stroked his moustache in evident satisfaction. ‘And then I’ll accompany you out. The fresh air will undoubtedly feel very welcome to you. You must inhale it while you can.’
FIFTEEN
‘Bastards.’ Raf kicked a piece of paper from the pavement into the gutter, narrowly missing the legs of a passing woman. He was fuming, walking so quickly that James had begun to breathe hard in order to keep pace. ‘Those two are so trapped in their ideas of heredity and predispositions that they’re halfway up the arsehole of the doctors. They’re going to drown in shit. It gives them an excuse to lock everyone up and forget about them. Forget about the real reasons for crime. Forget about poverty and squalor.’
James said nothing and Raf went on, his speech as rapid as his gait. ‘And they really do think men can have this hypnotic power over women. That all I had to do was look deeply into Olympe’s eyes and she’d be hypnotised, act out whatever I tell her, throw herself into the river, under a train, murder her best friend. As if she had no capacity to think for herself.’
They had reached the Pont Neuf and to James’s relief, Raf paused to lean against the balustrade and look down at the flow of the river. ‘You know what it’s all about, don’t you? It’s all because of the Bompard trial where that madwoman claimed she’d been hypnotised into murder by her lover. So now they’re convinced no woman can think. If they’d met Olympe for two minutes, they’d know they were the ones who were barking.’
‘But hypnotism does work,’ James said softly, thinking of Ellie. He was about to tell Raf what he had witnessed, when his brother turned on him.
‘What do you know about it, Jim? You’re not suddenly on their side, are you?’ He met James’s eyes, his own startling in their black fury. ‘No, of course you’re not. Okay, I’ll give you that it sometimes works, on men as well as women, but it’s got nothing at all to do with Olympe’s death. Nothing.’
He stared into the waters again, as dark and turbulent with the day’s rain as his own face, then veered round to look over his shoulder. ‘We’d better keep moving, Jim. Durand’s probably got somebody on our tail again. I wish I’d never got Marguerite mixed up in all this. It’s made him stupidly diligent. I’d better stay away from her, too, or he’ll decide she’s implicated in some way.’ He shivered suddenly, like a dog shaking water off its back. ‘Come on. We can’t go there now. Or you can. Without me.’
‘No, no. I’ll come with you.’
They walked towards the right bank, Raf glancing behind him every few minutes.
‘Did you really not know Olympe was pregnant?’ James asked at last. He realised a great proportion of Raf’s present anger must have come from the revelation of that fact.
‘I didn’t. Which means that Olympe didn’t either. I’m certain of it.’
‘Unless the baby really wasn’t yours?’
‘I can’t believe that, Jim. I really can’t believe it.’ He threw James an agonised look and rushed on. ‘I need to hold on to something, hold on to my sense of her. Olympe was utterly honest. Honest because she was unafraid. So she couldn’t have known or she would have told me at the nearest opportunity. It didn’t show. It must have been very early. Maybe she wasn’t sure.’ He raced on, stopping abruptly when they had reached the stony formality of the Cour Carrée. ‘What was on that piece of paper those fools showed you?’
James told him the contents of the letter. ‘It definitely had the tone of a blackmailing document,’ he finished.
Raf didn’t say anything.
‘Do you have any idea if Olympe was ever involved in blackmail?’
Raf suddenly darted across the current of strollers into a side passage. When James caught up with him, he was running his hand through his hair. ‘Tell me all that again, Jim. Slowly. See if you can remember the exact phrases.’
James did as he asked.
‘The Hotel D. That means something to me, but I can’t place it.’ Raf spoke with an effort.
With a quick glance round him, James impulsively took the erotic postcard he was certain was a photo of Olympe from his jacket pocket. ‘What I can’t get out of my mind, Raf, is this.’ He flashed the picture in front of his brother. �
�You see, someone could easily have spotted this, even someone like Bernfeld, and threatened to expose Olympe.’
‘Let me see that.’
James held the picture in front of him, refusing to place it in his hand. He was afraid Raf would destroy it.
‘That’s not Olympe,’ Raf’s expression was grim. He started to walk again. ‘You took that from my desk, didn’t you? And I told you before. That’s not Olympe.’
‘But you admit that there’s a striking resemblance. That someone who didn’t know her as well as you did might be fooled.’
Raf nodded once, abruptly. He didn’t speak again until they had reached the noisy clatter of the Rue de Rivoli. ‘No. It doesn’t make sense. If someone was blackmailing Olympe, threatening to expose her old sins, Durand and Chardon’s little handwriting number back there doesn’t make sense. I wouldn’t be the one to blackmail her. So no need for my handwriting sample. No, if they’d got hold of that picture and mistaken her for that woman, they’d think that in some fit of jealousy, I did her in. Wait a minute, I see what you’re suggesting. You’re very devious, Jim.’ He gave James a startled look. ‘You’re supposing that Durand thinks that in order to exonerate Olympe from past crimes I didn’t believe she was involved in, I suggested a reverse blackmail ploy to her. A threat. Hence the line they had me write out, “This is what you need to copy and send.”’
‘I hadn’t actually got that far in my thinking.’
Raf wasn’t listening. ‘And then when she refused, or whatever, I decided she was guilty after all, guilty of a double sin, posing for pornography and conceiving another man’s child. And in a fit of passion … No, that’s ridiculous. You should burn that picture, Jim. Get rid of it.’
James was following another thread. ‘Forget about the picture. The thing to concentrate on is the hard evidence. That was definitely a blackmailing letter. It was found in Olympe’s apartment. You didn’t ask her to send it. But someone might have. We have to find out who.’
‘We don’t know that. Olympe never mentioned anything of the kind. The dear Chief Inspector could just as easily have planted the thing there himself. To stitch up a case.’
James was about to say that Raf was too quick to exonerate Olympe of everything, to surmise that she had no other life than the one she had shown him. But he sealed his lips. His brother had enough on his plate. He looked utterly despondent now, so dejected that James insisted that they stop in one of the cafés of the Palais Royal for a quick drink.
It had been a long day. It was to prove even longer.
*
When they returned to the Boulevard Malesherbes, Ellie’s maid, Violette, rushed out to them before Raf had even put his key into the lock. She had obviously been looking out the window or waiting for their footsteps.
‘Quickly, Messieurs. Come quickly.’ She gestured them into Ellie’s apartment and James had a sudden flash of panic. He charged into the living room.
Ellie lay prone amidst her bolsters. Harriet was applying a compress to her forehead.
‘What’s happened, Harriet?’ he whispered. Raf was right behind him.
Ellie’s eyes fluttered open. ‘Raf?’ Her face looked ghastly, as if she had suffered some kind of seizure and the pain had etched itself in blue ridges beneath her eyes.
‘I’m right here, Ellie.’ Raf perched on the side of the divan and took her hand. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course I am, Ellie.’
‘That’s a relief.’ Ellie’s voice was a whimper. ‘I thought something terrible had happened to you. I couldn’t bear it, if it did, Raf. I couldn’t bear it.’ Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
‘Now, now, Ellie. What’s provoked all this?’ Raf stroked her hair and she snuggled into him.
James found himself looking away, the scene somehow too intimate for him. He met Harriet’s eyes, felt that she shared his embarrassment, but there was a tinge of something else, too. Disapproval, he judged from the stiff set of her shoulders. She beckoned him wordlessly towards the dining room and shut the door behind them. She stood there, wringing her hands, her eyes lowered.
‘Tell me what’s happened, Harriet.’ His voice was encouraging.
‘I admit, it is pretty grisly. I wish that silly girl hadn’t brought it here.’ She seemed to be talking to herself, exonerating Ellie as she went.
‘Brought what?’ James asked when she fell into abrupt silence. ‘What girl?’
‘Arlette. Silly woman. The concierge brought this package up to her, addressed to your brother of course. It smelled foul. Really bad. So she came running in here, shrieking, and dumped it on us. Ellie said we had to open it. So I did. I cut the string.’ Her lips trembled. ‘I don’t know what kind of evil mind is capable of such things.’
‘What things?’
‘Go and see for yourself.’ She averted her eyes. ‘In the … in the water closet. I threw the worst away. But your brother needs to see the rest.’
James made for the toilet. The stench, as he opened the door, was overpowering. His stomach heaved. On the floor lay a large, crumpled sheet of brown paper smeared with excrement, to its side some rough cord and what looked like a letter. The words were printed in crayon by some semi-literate hand.
‘Jew-lover!’ The first line blared. ‘Scumbag. Pimp. Jew-trash fucker. This is what your kind deserve. But this is only a first instalment. Watch out for the second. You’ll be lying in it. We’ll send all the traitorous pieces of you home wrapped in your stinking shit.’
James leaned against the wall for a moment, then holding his breath crunched the brown paper into a tight ball. The top of it, he noted, bore Raf’s name and address. Putting the letter to one side, he rushed downstairs and deposited the putrid mass in the nearest bin. When he came back, Raf was holding the letter.
‘Well, Jim. Another great turn in our affairs.’ He laughed. It was a sound like a nail scraping over sandpaper. ‘Still, it’s rather less serious than what Ellie led me to think. I was pretty sure there was a body neatly cut up in the cistern. Harriet’s explained in her wonderfully sober way.’
‘Do you know who might have sent it?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest. But I’m going to find out.’
‘I think you should take the letter to Durand.’
‘What! And have him lock me up for my own protection. You have to be kidding. In any case, he probably agrees with the content. Maybe he’s even trying to scare me into a confession.’
‘That doesn’t sound probable.’
‘No, but it’s possible. Just possible. You don’t know the wheels within wheels that make this society tick these days, Jim. The government’s enlightened enough. But you can bet Durand’s got not a few friends amongst those scurrilous patriots who blackened my eye yesterday. And it would suit him to have me out of the way. Then he can pin everything on the foreigners, even if they happen to be merely American foreigners.’
‘You’re beginning to sound like Arnhem, Raf. Durand may have some theories buzzing around in his head, but he’s not stupid. All that hereditary stuff seems to be as common as garbage around here. For the rest, I don’t think you should underestimate him.’
‘Have it your way.’ Raf didn’t seem to be listening. ‘Look, Jim. I’m gonna go across the landing and change and then I’m going to disappear. For a day or two or three.’ He put out a hand to still James’s protests. ‘No. You can’t come with me. I don’t want you mixed up in this. And I’ve got to clear it up. I need to know how these thugs found out about Olympe and me. I don’t know if it’s to do with the questions I’ve been asking about her death …’
He paused for a moment as if some stray thought had leapt into his mind to obliterate all others. ‘Or just scattergun vituperation. But I’m going to find out. And it’ll keep me out of Durand’s way. No, I don’t want you mixed up in it.’ He repeated again. ‘See to Ellie, she’s got herself in a state. And then if you can manage it, drop in on Marguerite. Tel
l her what’s going on. If you need me urgently, leave a message with Touquet at his paper.’
Before James could say anything, he was out the door.
Ellie was sitting up now, propped on her cushions like an odalisque. She held a cup tightly clasped in her two hands, as if for warmth, or as if the delicate china was too great a weight for a single one.
‘You let him go,’ she said, her face fraught, her tone accusing. ‘How could you? If I had legs, I wouldn’t have let him go.’
‘A cup of tea for you, Mr Norton? And some cake.’ Harriet interrupted. ‘For you too, Elinor. You must eat something.’
‘It makes me retch.’ Ellie didn’t look at her.
‘You’ll be up and about soon, Ellie. Only a few more days until we see Dr Ponsard again.’ James hoped the note in his voice was sufficiently soothing. ‘Raf had business to attend to.’
‘Business. You call that business. I call it sheer folly. I don’t know why you can’t exert your authority, Jim. That’s what you came here to do, isn’t it? You came here to take us home. Not to let him run off again, run off into the sewers of the city.’
It struck James, for one tingling moment, that she sounded exactly like their mother. He attempted to come to terms with that and the unseemly emotions it suddenly aroused in him, when she added:
‘I had a letter from Mother this morning. She’s desperate to have us back.’
‘I’d already told you that, Ellie. Tomorrow I shall arrange for you to sail with Harriet. Raf can’t leave now for more reasons than you need to know about.’
‘What reasons?’ She shook her head savagely, the hair tumbling from its pins. Harriet took the cup from her hand. She paid no attention.
‘There are no reasons left. Olympe is buried now. He won’t accept it. He just won’t accept that it’s over. Won’t accept that she might have preferred it this way. That she didn’t want to go on.’
‘These things take time, Ellie. It takes time to get over the death of a loved one.’
‘He can get over it at home.’
‘It’s not that easy. The Inspector suspects Raf of being implicated in Olympe’s death.’
Paris Requiem Page 24