Murder at Malenfer

by Iain McChesney

  Then came the day when he couldn’t take it anymore, when he came to the edge and stepped off. Can the dead themselves actually die? There was only one way to find out.

  “The janitor was fixing shingles. I got up on the roof.”

  His guts felt tight and his heart beat faster, and then he took the step right off... There was a second, then another, and then: “God, man, how it hurt!” He lay for an hour on the pebbles and then crawled back up the front steps. Arthur lay on the couch feeling splintered inside, but the pain left him after a day.

  He thought perhaps the distance hadn’t been enough to do the job. It took more courage to put his head down under the ambulance wheel. But he did. He needed two days on the couch after that.

  The last go proved decisive; Arthur knew he should have thought of it first. Épernay was pleasantly rural, and the doctors would often go hunt. The land was well provided for in terms of rabbits and birds. In a canteen that had to scavenge supplies, game was never turned down.

  Arthur followed a shooting party out one early evening. He put his forehead to a barrel trained on an unsuspecting pheasant. He looked into the shooter’s eyes that looked straight back through his own, but seeing nothing but eternity he had to shut them tight.

  “The noise was immense. I awoke in the field. It was dark, wet, and cold. I felt very badly hung over. My sore ear hurt even worse. Everyone was gone, it was the middle of the night, and I didn’t even know which day. But I was still here, there was no denying it. I knew then that I could never leave that way. The whole thing was rather depressing.”

  Arthur’s pipe had gone out, and he lit it again from a box of matches he retrieved from his jacket pocket. A thought came to Dermot.

  “How is it you’re not wearing your hospital gown now?”

  Arthur puffed up a storm. “Turns out I can lay ahold of anything in the possession of a newly dead man.”

  Dermot looked again at the suit, the pipe, the watch chain, the suitcase, and the fine polished brogues of his friend. A ghoulish collection they made.

  “I’m not going to ask you how you found that out.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to tell.” He puffed for a while before resuming. “All of this went on much as I said until the last few weeks.”

  “And what changed then?”

  * * *

  Lieutenant Arthur Malenfer sat on the empty terrace, alone once again. The staff and patients were inside the hospital enjoying a heated lunch. The dawn that had emerged from the gardens that morning had lent him a sense of calm. The crocus sunrise felt like an omen for change, and all day long could not shake the feeling that he would not be immune.

  He could hear the wireless: Paris was in the news again, the treaty negotiations continuing at Versailles. Arthur liked to hear the news. He read the papers too. The hospital received the local, which carried notices of death, and it was from these that he got most of his information about the newly departed. Arthur read the obituaries in the national press as well; the hospital got Le Temps from Paris, which was particularly morbid and good. All sorts of people were dying in Le Temps every day, and Arthur followed their fortunes like a racetrack gambler studies the forms. Arthur had an unknowing accomplice that enabled his macabre habit – one of the Épernay doctors read the papers front to back with religious observation. He snuck them off to his private office after lunch each afternoon.

  The wireless in the day room had moved on to grain prices – Arthur didn’t call grain prices “news.” This, however, was his cue. Arthur rose, and made his way up the hospital stairs to the open door by the landing. This room had once been a child’s bedroom and was still painted in faded yellow, the color of baby chicks, or baby chicks that had been smoking. This was the doctor’s office. Arthur walked in without invitation and the man in the white coat shut the door. The doctor retreated to his desk, where he made a poor show of inspecting the thick files in front of him. He ignored the Lieutenant, who paced the room patiently, but Arthur took no offense; as usual, he was looking at the photographs that hung around the walls. They were familiar to him: sepia posed family groups, other people’s frozen lives that made him think back on his own.

  Whoever was in the medical files was never as important as the headlines, and before long the pair of them were peering over the broadsheets.

  On page twenty-three he saw it. It was there, and he saw it. He read it three times through until every word had sunk in.

  Michel Malenfer, son of the late Colonel and Madame Henri Joseph Malenfer, in Chevecheix, Haute-Marne, on Sunday, February 9th, 1919, of influenza, age 16. Service to take place this Wednesday, February 12th.

  “My little brother.”

  It was Monday’s paper he was reading, published yesterday, so the funeral was tomorrow. And there was a commentary, one of the rare editorial compliments that accompanied social worthies. Underneath the announcement, Le Temps explained that the Estate had suffered greatly in service to country and that the diminished, though not inconsiderable, fortune of the Malenfers would now likely fall on a lone grandchild, a certain Mademoiselle Simonne. A photograph went with the piece, but not of the dead Michel. Rather it showed an attractive young lady who had possibly come into a fortune. The editorial leered; there was not a journalist or reader in existence that didn’t approve of a beautiful heiress.

  There was a sharp knock at the door and Arthur looked up, recognizing the junior doctor.

  “We’ll soon be ready outside, sir.”

  “Thank you. Take at look at this, will you?” The senior doctor showed the junior man the picture.

  “Nice looking girl,” said the younger.

  “And loaded along with it!”

  The senior doctor removed his reading glasses before rising and leaving. Arthur didn’t follow him out, for the man had left his newspaper. It lay on the desk, still folded at the obituaries.

  Michel is dead? Simonne’s to inherit?

  They’d never been close, the age gap a moat, but still, Michel was his brother. Arthur was shaken – not for that, but rather for what the obituary omitted.

  “I have two sons, as I told you Dermot, and neither of them was mentioned.”

  That crocus dawn had prophesied a change and the budding of new purpose.

  The following morning, the hospital warden drove into town at such an hour that he went without breakfast. The route took him past the railway station. The warden was not aware of his passenger, but Arthur traveled with him. It was a cool dry Wednesday in Épernay, the morning of Michel’s funeral.

  Arthur had with him a leather suitcase into which he’d put a few books and small pieces, arranged the night before – the sum of his new existence. He had said his few farewells before he left, to the sofa, and the maple tree, and the nurses. There was no one there to wave him goodbye or shake his cold hand warmly, and in the end Arthur’s last few years were reduced to the car door closing. There was a sound of the tires spinning on gravel, and then the hospital was behind him. Arthur didn’t once look back; he only now looked forward.

  At the wicket in the railway station, a family was buying second-class tickets to Paris from an envelope heavy with inflation-touched banknotes. The father counted them out in a hurry, as if they lost value with every second. Arthur watched them go – the line moving up, the short man in the uniform who skillfully punched the tickets. He timed the gap and followed on and went through unobstructed.

  Arthur stood apart from the few dozen who waited on the platform. Épernay was not the first station on the line, but he didn’t have to wait long. Scores of pigeons rose aloft from their nests in steely branches; they flocked and turned beneath the sky of dirty glass-paned arches. Billowing white from its colic boilers, the train hove into sight.

  Arthur boarded where he could and settled in an empty carriage. He removed his raincoat and stored his case and waited for the whistle. At the last minute, he gave up his seat for a woman and her daughter. The train surged forward and pulled away
with Épernay behind them.

  The girl was excitable, as children of an age will be. She roamed the seats in the face of censure from her overbearing mother, and stopped in front of Arthur.

  “What are you staring at?” her mother admonished. “Stop staring like that!” she contradicted. The poor child couldn’t win.

  The little girl – she couldn’t have been more than five – looked him in the face.

  “It’s all right,” Arthur said, surprised and pleased, but not sure if she could hear him. The girl turned her ear as one might do when catching a distant sound.

  “It doesn’t hurt, not anymore,” he touched his cheek. “You don’t have to be frightened, you know.”

  “Come back here!” ordered her mother, and the child slowly complied. The woman took a sandwich from her basket and passed her daughter an apple. The girl did not offer to share, and Arthur returned to his reading.

  It was a little after one when the Épernay train arrived at the terminus, an hour later than expected and without thought of explanation. Arthur stepped down: a mistake. He scrambled for shelter behind a pillar as the swarm of humanity moved past him, a rock in the stream observing the current that churned as it parted around him.

  Being tall has its benefits, and Arthur took advantage. He looked over the cresting water of hats, beyond to the mouth of the river. There stood an amphitheater, the grand hall of the Gare d’Orsay, and filling it were carts and bags and flecks of colored dresses, and earthy suits and uniforms and barrows heaped with packages. It was a wall of sound. Here was the coming and going of the masses of the transient living, those moving with a purpose and those forced to linger a while at this terminus. Beneath a pendulous four-sided clock, spectators crooked their necks at departure boards. A chorus of bedlam echoed from the girders to the beat of marching legions, while a locomotive at a nearby platform erupted in a screech of wheel. Arthur watched, horrified, picturing himself beneath it. It jarred and shuddered then stuttered forward, coaxing its cars a few feet. Arthur fled it, spilling with passengers onto the concourse proper.

  He was drawn to a café with an open façade from which he could better view humanity. Here were people smoking, passengers filling time drinking coffee from tiny glasses. They have coffee! He was cheered, sharing in the small pleasures of the living. There was a free stool at the counter and Arthur took it.

  A scruffy looking boy was peddling Gitanes from a tray around his neck. He was doing the rounds of the outside customers, busking the café’s few tables. “One centime, monsieur. Ten for a pack. Do you need matches?” The boy moved on and Arthur’s attention turned instead to the women.

  Women everywhere. Épernay had been but a dripping tap, while this was an open faucet. Hats and gloves were obviously in fashion, coats and skirts falling more than often just below the knee line. When they walked, the ladies clicked along cheerily, their heels tapping on the marble floor. An occasional ankle caught his eye when the crowd contrived to spread. The army had been a man’s world, and despite the nurses, his hospital had been one too. Arthur looked at these women because he liked to, but also to avoid the men. These past five years had not been kind: amputations, scars, and burns. A clean shirt could disguise only so much – disfigurement was common.

  A shoddy fellow beside a ticket line caught Arthur’s attention. For a fleeting moment Arthur took him for another apparition. Then Arthur saw the truth of it. He stood apart, twitching, seemingly invisible to the queue. The tramp pawed his face repeatedly like a cat trying to clear a stain, and he talked and mumbled and pushed the sky and jerked around to look. No one in the ticket line paid him any attention; they all conspired to let him be, to leave him with his demons as they went about their day. Arthur studied him for another minute and then had to look away.

  There were old men in the station and there were boys, but where, he thought, were all the rest? There didn’t seem enough of them, a hole that wasn’t filled. Young men walked stiffly, leaning on canes that their fathers had no need of. There were uniforms, uniforms moving about, but not marching anywhere. No shouting orders. No swinging arms. No purpose to their bearing. Arthur lifted a hand to the scars that decaled his own face. His fingertips found the hard ridges that defiled his symmetry.

  From his stool at the café counter, Arthur could see clear to the north. Beyond the station gate he glimpsed horse-drawn carriages, and crowds, and passing cars. There was a scrolling metal sign – he knew it spanned the Métro hole that led the people down. Those steps, if he wanted, would carry him through Paris till he got to the Gare de l’Est, and from there a train could take him to Darmannes and the Malenfer estate.

  Arthur had made his mind up when he read the doctor’s paper: He was going to return to Malenfer Manor and set the record straight. But he had a problem too. How was he going to tell anybody? Who was there to help?

  The stories and the séance rooms agreed on a few things. If there was someone he could reach out to, that person might have a connection. It would be someone that carried a link with him that stretched beyond the grave. Arthur had had a lot of time in Épernay to think about whom that might be.

  His family? He thought of them affectionately, but none of them were close. Such moments of reflection made him feel a hollow man – an honest recounting of a life reveals the counterfeit within.

  He had one idea, however.

  Arthur picked up his case and, glancing at the Métro station, turned away from it. He exited the Gare d’Orsay and emerged into a Paris under sun. It was a sight to lift the heart of even the most miserable of the dead.

  A metropolis in which to find one man. It was not going to be easy. Suffering Jesus, you big French bastard, the answer’s out there somewhere. He knew the Irishman was here. Arthur remembered the first bullet and choking in despair. He remembered digging the hole. He remembered the stinging air. He knew that somebody had pulled him out and got him into that ambulance. If there was anyone in this world that Arthur owed, it was his old friend, the sergeant. And if Dermot Ward had survived his war, then he would surely be here in Paris. He hoisted his case and looked both ways. But where on earth to start?

  11

  Malenfer Manor

  It was the long side of three o’clock before they reached Darmannes. There were few people on the platform; a single track and solitary office were the station’s sum and total. Dermot looked up and down. A porter was not to be found. Dermot dragged his trunk, furrowing with an edge, until reaching the safety of the waiting room.

  “You told them we were coming?” Arthur inquired. There was no one there to greet them.

  “Just as you said.”

  MADAME. I KNEW YOUR SON ARTHUR IN THE WAR. I BRING NEWS. ARRIVE FROM PARIS TODAY.

  Dermot had attached his name to the telegram before boarding the train.

  “How far from here?”

  “Not much more than five kilometers. There’s a nice route over the hill.” Arthur was stretching his shoulders, rolling his arms behind his back one way and then the other. It was dry but cool, and the air was very still. At this time of year it would be dark after five, still plenty of time to get there.

  “So I follow my imagination off into the wilds?”

  “Not with that trunk, you don’t. We’ll have to sort that out.”

  Dermot rooted out the Station Master and asked for his luggage to be delivered. He repeated an address that Arthur provided and was surprised to find it accepted. The man was most helpful, effusively accommodating for a specimen of government employee. The trunk, he said, would be brought up that night or the following morning.

  “This is the nearest town of any size within distance of our estate.” It would be bright and cheerful come the summer, the window boxes full of flowers, but at this time of year the chapel’s double steeple looked across huddled masonry. Red tile roofs sloped sharply down over shuttered bone-gray buildings. They set off following Arthur’s instructions, and Dermot nodded greetings to curious residents as they wound
their way from town. “There’s only one place closer – Chevecheix is its name. Place is barely a village. Hasn’t changed in two hundred years. But you need to come here for all but the basics. After Paris it seems too small.”

  “Does this village of yours have a pub?” Dermot asked him.

  “Is France not the most refined of countries in all the civilized world?”

  “What’s its name, then?”

  “Another test? You doubt me still? It’s the Café du Viaduc! Its proprietress has inspired the cause of more than a couple of fights.”

  Dermot knew he had never been anywhere near this place, he knew it absolutely, and yet here he was. No one else could see Arthur – he was sure of that – and he was following him to God knows where.

  With Darmannes behind them, the land opened out to the broad fields of the Haute-Marne. The cart path they followed was straight and long, and he was happy to stretch his legs. Even after the rain came on, Dermot stayed warm from exertion.

  “We used to have cakes, with cream.” Arthur emphasized the latter, in answer to Dermot’s latest questioning. “And we bake our own bread down in the kitchen in an enormous cave of an oven.” Dermot’s mind was on his stomach. “And we eat it with soft cheeses that are churned and set from the milk of the cows on our farm.”

  “God, you’re killing me.”

  “And we grow our own grapes, too. My great-grandfather set down the vines. The best of the vintage we keep in the cellar for family and our guests. You won’t regret coming, I’m sure.”

  “Well, if it’s so nice, why didn’t you go back there straight away?”

  Arthur didn’t answer immediately. “I have happy memories of the place, and some I might wish to forget. But you will be well looked after, my friend. You can be sure of that.”