The Dark Side of the Sun

by IAIN WODEHOUSE-EASTON

  Antoine’s two mules passed, but not led by him. Four men I had never seen before walked alongside the mules, clad in black bomber jackets and dark trousers. They wore balaclavas. From their strong gait, it was clear that Antoine was not one of them. They carried automatic rifles over their shoulders. On the backs of the mules were panniers, about two metres long, wrapped and bound together, balanced on either side. They marched with purpose, and once past the house turned left along the path in the maquis that eventually leads to the Pisan church.

  I waited until they were long gone and then went outside to the wall at the back of the house and retrieved Giuseppe’s pistol and ammunition. I brought them in-house. ‘Just in case’.

  I didn’t know what time it was when the commotion brought me to my senses. It was pitch dark and a fusillade of shots rang through the air. Nearby. I staggered blearily to my feet to see what I could out of the front window.

  Nothing at present in sight in the gloom. The moon was almost entirely shadowed by cloud, though glimpses of the landscape came and went as the dark scudding clouds passed across the patches of white light.

  Then silence. Only to be broken again by more gunfire. Rapid, machine gun fire. Automatic rifles at least. Gradually I realised the action was all coming from the direction of the Pisan church. There was seemingly a gunfight, but between who I could not tell, nor was it wise to go and see. The ghosts of Corsica past seemed to be conducting some sort of venditta. Rival gangs? Fighting over what?

  I was still fully clothed, which suited me well in being prepared as possible against these people, should they come to the house. I thought I had little to defend myself, the old shotgun on the wall ineffective and a weapon that would not stand me in any good in the face of the arms being used outside. But I had Giuseppe’s pistol. It was better than nothing, and I loaded six bullets into the revolving cartridge drum. I had only fired it once when Giuseppe and I had been taking pot-shots at gulls down on the shore. My aim had not proved good then, and I had not recorded a single hit, even when the birds were sitting on the seawall close by. They had drifted off in a disdainful way, turning their heads as if to mock my feeble efforts. Whether I would do any better if confronted with an armed man, I doubted. I grasped it more in fear than courage.

  These thoughts were with me as I hovered behind the front door, until the silence was broken by the rushing of feet outside through the coarse maquis, the tearing of undergrowth as a number of men ran up to the house. I glimpsed them in the gloom lugging a large object between them. A man. Half-alive. They dumped him on the ground outside the door and one rushed the front door.

  As he crashed through its weak timbers and burst into the room I was caught like a rabbit in the headlights, uncertain whether to shoot and defend myself or run. I did neither.

  Before any sense came to me, I hesitated and only blinked as the blow to the head came straight down on me as everything went black.

  I didn’t know how long it was before I came to, though Inspector Girard said afterwards it was only minutes. I woke to find him with four gendarmes standing over me. On the end of a stick – in the barrel – in his right hand was Giuseppe’s pistol, that must have fallen from my paralysed hand as they burst in and struck me.

  I recognised one other of the team. He had been a gendarme on the patrol-boat that had delivered me originally to this haven.

  “D’accord. L’ homme anglais.”

  These two were joined by other gendarmes, all clad in black, dragging another criminal through the bushes.

  “Quelq’un d’autre ici?” One demanded of me.

  “No one else here. Only me.”

  Girard put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “You’re lucky. You were on their radar. They would have taken you out if they had realised you were here tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve been watching the mountain area.”

  “I didn’t see …”

  “You haven’t noticed anything, all this time you’ve been here?”

  “No.”

  “Guns have been turning up on the island. Automatic rifles, machine guns . We had all the obvious places covered, but the Nationalists – Indépendantistes – are cunning, and we couldn’t work out where the new weapons were being brought in. Or distributed.”

  “Accounting for a number of gang murders this year?” I said. “They were in the papers.”

  “So you are not completely out-of-touch!”

  The gendarmes outside handcuffed the second criminal and roped the two together, even though one was bleeding heavily.

  “We have been watching from up the mountain, observing the nearest road, and seen unusual movements, at night. But is very difficult to get down in time to catch them, find out who they were, what they were doing. Possibly locals out to steal. Then we came closer and one night saw men disappear down into the maquis, above the house. We thought that you could be involved.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, what are you doing here? That’s never been clear, never explained.”

  “But …”

  “You would be the contact, the connection between what has been brought in and the local ‘bandits‘. Think about it. Why else would you come to this isolated spot? What possible reason is there? We’re still waiting for your answer.”

  I had been living in a cocoon of my own making. For how could I offer up once more my writing work, or a strong passion for Nicole as reason enough? It had sounded ridiculous. It still did. He had a point.

  The gendarme twisted the second man around. There was a heavy gash on his head and blood flowed from his mouth. “This guy talked. He says that they collected the arms from the church, using the mules, twice in the last three months.”

  “I don’t …”

  “You must have heard something up here.”

  “I have not.”

  “But you have been staying with Mme Nicole since May.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then?”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “Nor the ‘accident’ to Nicole? The poisoning. You are accident-prone.”

  “Antoine and Angelique are at the taverne. They should know what was going on.”

  “We’ll check, of course. There are two mules at the church. But can you be so sure of your facts?”

  I couldn’t.

  “We have your passport, and gendarmes will be posted again to the cove. You’re not to leave here. Keep reporting to them twice a day.”

  Another group of heavily-armed gendarmes appeared at the house and quickly formed up to take the gang’s ‘soldiers’ away. Back through the maquis towards the Pisan church.

  “Is there a way through?” I found myself asking. “To the road?”

  “It’s no more than an ancient path, lost through time but usable. They managed to get the arms up through it with a struggle. The undergrowth is dense. Ideal for what they needed. No one else seems to have used it.”

  “I’ve never been beyond the church,” I said, as if under examination at court.

  Two gendarmes set off down the path to the beach to start sentry duties, and question Antoine and Angelique. A patrol-boat was to bring supplies and a rota of guards the next day.

  From the other direction another gendarme brought two mules. Antoine’s. One still had panniers on either side, both broken open. The grey steel of automatic rifles glimmered in the moonlight. The second animal had the bulk of a large man thrown over its back. I saw a black beard. I knew it was the Corsair. He had been shot in one side and incapacitated, but the face contorted in disgust at us as it passed. He would live to meet justice. Both mules brayed nervously.

  Other gendarmes pulled the two captives to their feet. The gangsters looked me in the face, bitterly. One spat out a phrase in Corse I did not understand: ‘Elle gêna le passage.’ The gendarmes tugged him and his fellow away, as a scuffle broke out, then lead them off back towards the church
and the path to the road.

  “The vans are waiting,” the gendarme’s parting word.

  Inspector Girard and I were alone. He was still holding Giuseppe’s pistol on the end of the stick. “This was in your hand, when we came in. Just as well you didn’t shoot.”

  “I blanked.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “You know whose gun this is?”

  I was caught.

  “Giuseppe’s.”

  “I thought so. It’s also the gun he was shot with.” Girard said, watching me closely.

  “His own gun?”

  I had a sudden surge of awareness of my predicament.

  “It’s an unusual calibre, it fits the analysis,” Girard continued, “a wartime relic, you might say. But still a murder weapon. It wasn’t found in the grotte when he was shot. And I find it in your hand.”

  “He kept it for protection.”

  “From whom? You?”

  “No.”

  “Then whom?”

  “He had enemies in the past. He wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “The bullet that killed him fits this gun. A shot concealed cleverly by the killer …”

  “Or killers?”

  “By the murderer after he, or they, had knocked him out first. Then shot him whilst he was unconscious. The autopsy proved that and the laboratory identified the type of gun. The type you were holding when we just arrived. This one.”

  “But …”

  “I have the culprit standing in front of me with the murder weapon.”

  “I wouldn’t, I, I … I couldn’t even pull the trigger just now, when it seemed the house was being attacked.”

  “Your fingerprints will be on it.”

  “Of course,” I lamely acknowledged.

  Girard took out a handkerchief and wrapped it around Giuseppe’s pistol and put it in a cellophane bag he had in his pocket. “There’s only one thing going for you, and that’s a doubt about your motive. So far.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Don’t think you’re safe. You had a quarrel with Giuseppe? He was in your way? The plan you and others had? Maybe you found he had something valuable you could steal?”

  “I haven’t left the cove since …”

  “We’re already checking things out. We’ll deal with these bastards first, get the whole picture, see if your name crops up. Talk to Antoine and Angelique.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “You hid his gun.”

  The more I said, the more I felt incriminated.

  “You’ll stay here under guard and then come to Calvi when we have made progress, checked other lines of enquiry. See what we can dig up.”

  “I didn’t kill Giuseppe.”

  “You’ll have to prove it.” He turned to the gendarme and prescribed the routine to be followed. I could stay at the house but was to report morning and evening at the taverne guard post.

  “And don’t think of looking for the way out up the mountain. We’ll be keeping a guard on the road there until this is all sorted. Another load of arms may be due.”

  Girard went outside and held an impromptu conference with the remaining gendarmes, whilst I was left to stew in my own juice. It was an hour before he came back with his deputy. They had something on their minds.

  “Don’t you think it odd,” Girard started, “that you are the only person who has been present at all the murders? You saw the man on the buoy remarkably quickly, before anyone else. Perhaps you already knew he would be there?”

  “Impossible.”

  “You found the dog, shot on the mountainside before the others did.”

  “Only Nicole and I went that way. She was working at the house, so it was going to be me who found it.”

  “You found Giuseppe.”

  “Everyone else was in Calvi.”

  “Yet you stayed behind. For what purpose?”

  “I didn’t need to go to the tax office.”

  “But you always seem to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “Wrong times.”

  “Exactement.”

  “It’s complete coincidence.”

  “So complete, one would see a pattern here. A set of incidents, made to order, at the command of someone. A person, a group, with a special interest in the cove, and its convenient isolation. That needs a representative on the spot. A co-ordinator, don’t you think?”

  “That’s not me.”

  “How convenient it would be if you were.”

  I had nothing to say.

  Girard’s deputy persisted with this line of argument, accusation. “Monsieur L’Anglais. Innocent. A bit stupid, bit of a front, acting naïve?”

  (He was right about my naivety).

  “Antoine says you came here before. To persuade Mme Nicole to let you stay. So you had a plan.”

  (He’s right).

  “Insinuating your way into her affections. Pressing her to let you remain all summer.”

  (Guilty as charged).

  “The pieces of the jigsaw fall into place.”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “You can’t explain anything. But we can. Simple logic. You’re their man on the spot.”

  I paused to collect my breath. Suddenly my heart was beating too fast.

  “I think,’ Girard said confidently, “we are making progress.”

  I didn’t know what to say. How do you persuade a policeman with the pressing need to solve a case, that a mere glance across a crowded room was the trigger for my presence, leading to the string of coincidences that had imposed themselves on us here? I waited in silence for his decision.

  “The logical thing to do,” Girard insisted, “is to cleanse this community of its problems. To remove the poison that is infecting it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You. Arrest you and take you to Calvi, lock you up until you fill in the blanks, make the connections, give us some names. It’s not all about coincidence.”

  It was then that I had to consider my only protection. I went to the cupboard in my room and withdrew Giuseppe’s notebooks. Turning to Girard, I said: “I think the answers to Giuseppe’s murder lie in these. You’d better have them. I leave my defence in your hands.”

  Girard took the notebooks and gave them a quick glance. It was time for them to have some supper and the team prepared to go down to the taverne. Girard turned to me and said, “Stay at the house tonight. Tomorrow report to as instructed.”

  I was glad to be see the back of them, and drank liberally from a jug of water with a determination to keep a clear head. Outside the moon was completely covered by cloud and the world took on a sinister air. It was suddenly cold. I watched the figures of the gendarmes fade down the rocky path, and was glad to be in the new safety of the house. I went inside and reached immediately for the whisky. I broke my promise to myself to keep a clear head and finished off what was left in the bottle with ease in twenty minutes. It was the only comfort I could seek at that moment. Though sleep looked unlikely.

  xvii

  I did not sleep at all and in the middle of the night got up in frustration. I made myself a coffee and sat down at Nicole’s work desk, surrounded by the miscellanea of her research. As the caffeine took hold, a new page floated in front of my fuddled mind. A different plant.

  Datura metel. Possibly a more sinister sub-species of the Thorn-Apple – Datura stramonium, which I had already come across in Nicole’s dabble with poisonous plants. The latter she had annotated as trés vénéneux and a narcotic containing the alkaloids hyoscyamine, hyoscine and scopolamine. A wrong dosage of which can kill.

  I realised, leafing through her notes again that I had not included it on the list I gave to the doctors. Could it have contributed to her downfall? The reckoning being that intruders forced on her a mix of poisons and narcotics that she would not have taken willingly he
rself. The discolouration or bruising on her neck supported this. Had she made herself vulnerable by dabbling at the time with this evil plant? Should I declare this omission to the doctors in case it helps?

  Datura metel – a native of the western Mediterranean, growing wild on rocky garrigues and at altitude. Large white or rose-coloured flowers. A greyish densely hairy plant. Tube of corolla purple; calyx hairy; fruit spiny, pendulous. (Were these the seeds of disaster hanging over the condition of Nicole?) The leaves secrete a milky juice in summer, when pinched and this alkaloid substance can be dangerous to animals and humans even in small quantities. Sheep and goats know to avoid grazing on it. Its dangers are overlooked as in the normal course of events, humans will not want to pick its prickly branches.

  Confined to the cove, I could not see an easy way to get this information quickly to the hospital. The Gendarmerie Maritime was occupied totally with the smuggling gang, and would be unwilling to run errands for me. It looked too late to effect the treatment she was receiving in the hands of the doctors.

  With doubt in my mind, I preferred to think anyway of the good plants that had held Nicole’s interest. The ones I knew she had in mind for her alternative remedies. In particular Leontice leontopetalum and Bongardia chrysogonum, to which she had dedicated a whole chapter as having tubers with efficacy against epilepsy. This side of her work would be her testimonial in the package of notes and materials which I felt should be sorted and catalogued to be ready for some fellow herbalist to advance, when she was gone.

  xviii

  I report at the taverne for interview at noon the next day as instructed. Girard’s deputy is leading the interrogation. The Inspector himself is over at Giuseppe’s grotte and walking on to the old Genoese fort.

  The man spins a coin in my face as soon as we are sat down. I miss the significance of his act. Acting. “Don’t you see, it depends which side of the coin comes down when we look at your story. The truth or the fabrication of your poor memory.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There is a chink in your armour. The weak defence around your answers. Which we keep coming back to. Whenever murder visits this scene, you are the only person around.”

  Inspector Girard’s deputy is tackling the gendarmes’ familiar technique. He is going over the same ground as his boss. That old trick of hoping a suspect will alter their evidence by mistake if they repeat the questions often enough.