“I liked the part about saving us versus him.” Daniel Vallotton was waiting for her outside the door, hunched over on a crutch.
“Quick recovery,” she said, eyeing his leg. It still looked terrible, with thin steel rods emerging from all sides.
“Julien says I’ve had my fun with you. I didn’t mean to disrupt your investigation, and I do use the wheelchair. I can only use one crutch because of my arm, so I can’t go too far easily. I hobble up and down stairs then sit in the chair to rest my arm. Can’t talk big brother into putting in an elevator.” They turned down the long corridor. Daniel hopped on one leg, balanced on a single crutch under his one good arm. Agnes doubted he could have managed a knife out in a storm. She glanced at the leg and shuddered.
“To make a clean slate I also wanted to talk to you about the painkillers. I haven’t taken one in a few weeks.” He stopped. Agnes was uncomfortable. Why had he stopped here, in the deepest shadows?
“I was hiding, and didn’t want to admit it in front of my entire family. I knew Julien had arrived so I faked being asleep when MC came into our room.”
Agnes moved closer to a window, away from the shadows. “I’m glad you sought me out. I’ve wanted to ask if you chanced to meet Felicity Cowell in London. Your wife says that you spend more time there than she does.”
“What else did she say? Did she tell you how we married?”
“I’m more interested in your relationship with Felicity Cowell.”
“Is that what Julien suggested? Well, there wasn’t a relationship. No matter what they tell you, there wasn’t one.” Daniel leaned heavily on one crutch. “Marie-Chantal almost married him, you know, Julien I mean. The morning of the murder I didn’t want to see her reaction when he arrived and wonder if she regretted her decision to marry the second son.”
Agnes didn’t reply.
“She doesn’t paint anymore.” He shrugged. “I think we’ve made a big mistake.”
He limped away and Agnes felt oddly sorry for him. She would need to talk to him again, and press him on any previous relationship with Felicity or Courtney Cowell. He struck her as a man of the world and it was possible he met Courtney in a circumstance where he either wouldn’t want to remember her or actually didn’t. Thinking about Felicity/Courtney, Agnes felt slightly ill. She collapsed onto a cushioned bench. Staring at an unfamiliar stone wall, thinking about a young woman selling her body when she had a first-class mind, she felt a cold hollow inside. One that no fire would warm.
Thirteen
It was late afternoon and the sun was setting when Agnes joined Carnet on the ground floor of the château in a small room that had been set aside for their use. Not luxurious, it was comfortably furnished with two deep sofas and a large table where they could lay out their notes. The slit windows let in strips of cold north light, however several old-fashioned oil lamps were lit and the room was reasonably bright despite the lack of electricity. Agnes started to remove her outdoor coat, but changed her mind. Despite the blazing fire in every fireplace it seemed that each room was colder than the last.
“One last thing from me,” Carnet said after hearing her account of the day. “You were right about the coat. She was wearing one of Mulholland’s when she died. He confirmed it.”
“And others have confirmed that it always hung there. Looks like she pulled it on in haste. Grabbed the first one, not caring if it fit.”
“Points to panic.”
“Panic or fear. Either way she didn’t plan to go outside until she was by the door.”
They sat in contemplative silence for a few minutes.
“Not much different from financial crimes,” Carnet said.
Agnes nearly missed the irony but caught his smile in time. “Thank goodness I had a chance to tell Sybille I made it here, or my kids would be frantic with worry. Now they probably can’t wait to hear all about the place. They’ve seen it from the lake often enough to be curious. Of course, that will only make Sybille more irritated.” She smiled. “But not with them. She takes good care of them. We’re lucky that way, I suppose.”
“I’m only inside to pretend to warm up,” Carnet said, pulling on a second scarf. “I’m going to do another walk along the perimeter of the property. Haven’t found a weapon, and between the two of us, Petit and I have searched every inch of the lawn and the outbuildings.”
“Won’t the plants in the Orangerie die in the cold?” Agnes asked.
“A solar-charged system keeps it above freezing. We’d probably do well to sleep there tonight.” He held his hands to the blaze.
“Robert, I doubt you’ll find anything more outside. Of course we aren’t finding anything inside either. It’s frustrating, all of these little lies. Nick Graves is only the most obvious. Reminds me of my oldest. He can look you right in the eye and lie, but you know it’s a lie because when he’s telling the truth he glances around, interested in everything else that’s happening. The lie makes him think about how his actions are perceived. Wish they’d tell the truth and let us ignore the lies we don’t care about.”
“Which are those?” Carnet turned to warm his backside.
“Right now, I suppose all the ones that don’t lead me to find who killed Felicity Cowell. I really don’t care if they are trafficking heroin, I just want to bring the victim’s murderer to justice.”
“Actually, I think you would care if they were trafficking heroin.”
Agnes rubbed her face and started to laugh. “Okay, so heroin or child pornography, arms trafficking maybe, but nothing else. I have the feeling that everyone tells these small lies, protecting things that aren’t important given what we are trying to do, and if they told the truth we would make some progress. It’s like my kids. The little lies take up so much energy that when they tell the truth it doesn’t seem so important anymore, all those days of concealing and fretting.”
“Keep whittling away. We’ve not found evidence of an outsider. Not that there was much chance of finding that after the storm.”
“That’s the trouble, it will be very easy to have to write this off as the work of a mysterious outsider, particularly now that Felicity Cowell’s background may be a bit unsavory. Part of the time I know that’s what they want. Who wouldn’t?”
“Most people want a crime solved. Otherwise it leaves a long shadow,” said Carnet.
“Julien Vallotton told me he doubted it was the first time someone had been killed here. He’s right, of course, given the long history of the place, but they’re not afraid of gossip. They don’t care what outsiders think, ever. Why should this be any different? They aren’t doing anything to pretend it has to be an outsider. They tell lies that keep the story close.” Agnes looked at Carnet. “Marie-Chantal Vallotton can’t decide whether to punish her husband by pretending he might be the killer or protect him in case … oh, I don’t know from what. I don’t think she really suspects him, but she’s angry.”
“You said you wondered if Daniel Vallotton knew the victim before, from a club in London. A place he wouldn’t want his wife to know he visits.”
“She might be angry at him, but it takes more than anger to kill someone.”
“If Felicity Cowell surprised Daniel, showing up here with a different name from what she uses for her other work, it might be a trigger. She sees an opportunity. Maybe this was her chance to use that job for real money.”
“Blackmail?” Agnes asked, hating the idea.
“She had a chance to talk to his wife, maybe to judge Marie-Chantal’s reaction.”
“That would be easy enough,” said Agnes. “Woman-to-woman chat about an imaginary friend whose husband goes to strip clubs. It could be worse than a club. There is latitude with her doing ‘whatever it took’ to survive. Outright prostitution? She could tailor the story to fit hers perfectly.”
“If Felicity Cowell gets the right answer—an incensed wife—then she threatens Daniel Vallotton. Blackmail is a powerful force. He strikes. You’ve seen him walk with crutche
s and he’s in incredible physical shape apart from his broken arm and leg.” Carnet turned to warm his front again. “Strong emotion can give people the strength they need to push through pain.”
“Daniel Vallotton definitely could have met Felicity as Courtney. He impresses me as someone who probably frequents clubs. However, he wouldn’t care who knows. If they met at a club I guarantee he’s a card-carrying founding member.”
“Maybe his wife doesn’t like it. Maybe he promised to stop when they married. What a man does when he’s single is not the same when he’s got a wife. Plus he’s a second son, and you’ve gathered that they live a very expensive lifestyle. Possibly more expensive than his older brother’s. Yachts and race cars aren’t cheap. Maybe she’s the real money and he can’t risk her leaving him.”
Agnes ran a hand through her hair, ignoring Carnet’s reaction to the result. “Marie-Chantal Vallotton is unhappy. How can anyone be unhappy when they look like her? She is beautiful, married to a handsome man, living in this incredible place, and she’s unhappy. She wants to work, of all things.”
“Do you need to work?”
“I don’t see how that matters.”
“When George died, did your family want you to return to work?”
“Of course not, they wanted me to stay home with the boys. They still want me to stay home.”
“And you didn’t. You love those boys and I know you miss them, so why did you return?”
Agnes rubbed her face and frowned. “I like my work.”
“Why? It’s not that pleasant. In financial crimes you often worked in drafty storage rooms with files, the office was always noisy and now, here, it’s cold and we don’t know if we’ll be successful. All very unsatisfactory. Why do it? Why not go home once and for all?”
Agnes frowned. “My mother-in-law and I don’t cohabit so well. And, it’s not much of a comparison. Look at Marie-Chantal and then look at me. Not exactly a parallel.”
Carnet smiled.
“If we were a parallel George would still be alive.”
“You can’t say that.”
“It’s true. Something with me, something with us, made him take his life. It wasn’t the boys or work. If I were Marie-Chantal Vallotton he wouldn’t have ended his life. Trust a woman’s judgment on this.”
“You’re wrong.”
“When he died they went through all of his work, reviewed all of his accounts for years in the past. Nothing was out of order, not one thing. He was the perfect employee with no mysteries lurking, ready to ruin him. He was healthy. His parents and I imagined he had a terminal cancer and didn’t want to tell us or endure treatment. Can you believe we actually hoped that? Before they completed the autopsy, we actually prayed that he had a nasty terminal disease because we could understand fear of a lingering death. We speculated through the night, settling on pancreatic cancer as our choice.”
“Normal responses. Of course you look for a reason, but think how irrational most were, and the rest were disproved. He didn’t have a terminal disease, so you are left with an equally irrational one that can’t be disproved now that he is dead.”
“No, it was not normal. Sybille knows it, George’s father knows it, and I know it. He didn’t love me anymore and took … took that horrible way out. I will always wonder if it was because I don’t quite fit in.”
“That’s absurd, as absurd as anything we’ve heard during this investigation.”
“You should spend time with my mother-in-law. She’ll give you plenty of details. I try, but I’m always just a little bit wrong. I still don’t like to eat rabbit and every Easter she acts like I’ve committed sacrilege.”
“Not everyone has rabbit at Easter.”
“In our village they do.” Agnes smiled. “When I think about the expense my parents went to arranging for a turkey to be delivered for our holidays. And yams and marshmallows and cranberry sauce. My mother did it because she had her own childhood memories from America and wanted to share them, but it didn’t help. I was always pretending at school. Pretending I did what everyone else did. Not wanting anyone to know we celebrated the American Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November.”
“George didn’t die because you don’t like rabbit.”
“That’s only a tiny example. He wouldn’t want to admit his mistake to anyone. He wouldn’t want to divorce me and upset the boys. Or hurt his parents.”
“Divorce is hardly the end of the world.”
“To my in-laws it is. Laws may change and times march on but they live in a small village and hold to the old ways. They’d prefer I came from a family who had lived in a neighboring village for the last thousand years. George loved them and knew this. He wouldn’t have wanted to embarrass them with a divorce. Standards have to be upheld. The illusion maintained.”
“Agnes, listen to yourself. His death upset the boys and brought more negative attention than a divorce would have. He had to have known that.”
“Everyone has an opinion but no one, definitely not you, knows why.”
She lifted her hands to cover her face and smelled the tang of hand lotion. George’s lotion.
Fourteen
Agnes started at the sound of footsteps approaching Felicity Cowell’s workroom. She dropped her hand from Winston’s muzzle, embarrassed to be caught talking to him.
“My father’s dog,” Julien Vallotton said from the doorway, “has probably heard more confessions than some priests.”
Winston shifted away from Agnes and looked from one human to the other. This section of the château was so isolated she hadn’t expected anyone to join her. Perhaps that was because she had taken care to follow the route Felicity Cowell favored. That meant exiting through a heavy paneled door directly to the outside. From there, under the covered passageway between the menacing iron portcullis and the courtyard, she had taken a narrow door leading to an equally narrow stairway. It led up to Felicity Cowell’s workroom. Winston had followed her. At first his size was intimidating, but he looked well fed and she decided it wasn’t on guests. After that she appreciated his presence.
Similarly, Vallotton’s appearance wasn’t exactly unwelcome but he had startled her. In fact, more than startled her. She was starting to see menace around every corner. There were too many dark and unexplored places.
“What is it you do exactly?” she asked to cover her discomfiture.
“I’m a collector.”
“Art? Antiques?”
“Buildings. Houses mainly. They’re an art form of sorts.”
She sighed. Most people she knew collected hotel soaps or postcards.
The workroom was nearly dark and Vallotton stepped into the hall and returned with a bundle of candles. He stuck them in a brass candelabra and lit them. Shadows sprang onto the walls, illuminating corners not visible with Agnes’s flashlight beam. She was reminded of her initial impression: this room was not large or attractive when compared to the others in the château. In the center was a plain wooden desk and on it were stacks of unbound pages from the working auction catalogue. A digital camera, notebook, row of neatly aligned pencils, and a teacup—used and not empty—were arranged beside a small stack of books. The ceiling was high enough to give a sense of scale not seen in modern life, and normally the room would be illuminated from a bank of clerestory windows. Today ice blocked most of the light, and the sun was already low. The only heat source was a small fireplace. It was unlit and the room was bitterly cold.
“What were these rooms originally? They’re isolated,” said Agnes.
“Originally? Sleeping quarters for the guards,” said Vallotton. “Easy access to the main gate and to a stair leading to the battlements.”
“How did Felicity end up here?” Agnes asked.
“My story won’t change, you know. That’s the best part about telling the truth, it’s consistent.” When she didn’t respond he continued, “I probably see or speak with Evelyn Leigh every month or so. He calls about something coming up for a
uction that we might want, or sometimes I ask him to keep an eye out for a particular item, a gift for my aunt, or my brother. I mentioned that we would have a formal sale to honor Father’s wishes.” He paused. “You might argue that Evelyn was able to use his very substantial powers of persuasion to convince me to stage a more public sale of many items. I think this was good business sense for him, and not part of a murder plot, but I will leave that to you. Evelyn suggested Mademoiselle Cowell should handle the preliminary onsite details. I looked at their website while we were on the telephone and glanced at her photograph—more out of idle curiosity than anything—but that was all I knew of her. I didn’t have a reason to care, it was the firm we were hiring, not this one employee.”
“Was she what you expected?”
Vallotton walked around the workroom. There were a dozen or so paintings leaning up against the walls and he surveyed them casually before turning to face Agnes. She felt it again, the subtle power he had over the space around him despite his reserve. By either his glance or his presence he defined the room as his, all of the possessions as his, and she nearly apologized for the question.
“I expected someone professional who would guide us to a successful conclusion. The rough catalogue you see here appears satisfactory. We had two phone conversations and she was articulate and knowledgeable. I did not expect her to end up dead on my lawn, so in that way she has defied expectations.”
“What if I told you that she might not be as she appeared? What if I suspect she didn’t have a university degree or a well-connected family or anything really?”
Swiss Vendetta--A Mystery Page 13