The Dark Side of the Sun

by IAIN WODEHOUSE-EASTON

“One of Marianne’s brothers.”

  “Exactly. It kept the death alive, the debt brought up-to-date, as it were. It altered the time scale, the potential for reconciliation.”

  “What did the family admit?

  “It’s not easy to get anyone to talk.” Girard was only reporting the truth.

  “So?”

  “You read between the lines. Hints, suggestions, theories, a few names.”

  “Which should make it easier?”

  “No. The names are usually those of enemies, other families that person wants to get into trouble.”

  “You have to rely on a nod and a wink?”

  “No. But after a long investigation, the facts begin to fall into place. In that tight community you can identify culprits by deduction, by counting the family members; who is missing, who they will not talk about. Dates when someone left the village for a while. In particular Marianne’s family. The look on their faces, their pride in someone’s actions – even if it is a murder, they feel is justified.”

  “Any hard evidence, clues?” I wanted to find the solid facts that would free me from suspicion.

  “The boat which you said came into the cove that night. In the storm that raged when Giuseppe was killed. Marianne’s family have a boat like that, with a blue stripe down the hull. We found it in Propriano. They could have used it to come and go.”

  “Can you be sure?”

  “Of course not. But it is another possible piece of evidence. So we checked it over.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing that can be used. Fingerprints only of those that use it from time to time to go fishing.”

  “Which could be matched with those in the cove?”

  “You forget there were no marks, no evidence. More of your marks everywhere than anyone else’s.”

  It was true. I remained the only person that could be framed for Giuseppe’s death. Girard had made no mention of the Corsair and his gang of thugs, now detained. Their boat was different. There seemed no connection. In his mind. The look on my face must have said it all, that I remained under scrutiny despite the new clues. This intangible evidence. Girard turned down to glance through his notes, and raised a weary eyebrow.

  “We can’t prove you had any involvement in it. We can’t see you had a motive. In the short time you knew Giuseppe, there’s no evidence you had a quarrel or fought over something that important. Antoine and Angelique satisfy us on that score. Anyway you don’t look the murderous sort. Too naïve for that.”

  I began to be relieved that there was a chance to remove this accusation from the charge-sheet. I was being put to one side. If not the one bordering the attack on Nicole.

  “Thank you.”

  “There’s next to no chance of finding out who killed him. Who is going to talk, to admit anything? The family will be satisfied they have settled the debt. Giuseppe paid the price. That’s an end to it.”

  “You’ll keep the file open?”

  “Of course,” Girard paused for effect, “it doesn’t mean you might have ordered someone else to do the dirty deed.”

  The impact of his words hit me hard. There seemed no escape from suspicion, after all. I thought of Giuseppe’s loss, and the life he had been forced to lead, fleeing in stages to end up at the cove. In a grotte. It seemed a heavy price he had paid for love.

  Girard dismissed me. For the moment. The gendarmes are keeping Giuseppe’s note and pocket-books and the few possessions he had in the shoreline home. I have decided to burn his clothes - the ones that carried the bullet-hole … and the murderer’s message on a scrap of paper. As for the tin trunk, carbide lamps and trinkets, these I will leave in his caverne together with the little sculpture of Marianne. I think it is what he would have wanted. To keep her memory ‘sacred’ in the inner sanctum of his secret refuge. I doubt anyone will ever come across it. She will be safe from the modern world. The orchard at Canari will bear fruit on the trees, but the soil will lie untroubled.

  iv

  It was two days before I was allowed back into the hospital to see Nicole. Robert had visited her bedside, but she had been back into her semi-comatose state, slipping in and out of consciousness. I hadn’t seen him and it was only the doctors’ words that told me he had hovered in hope of a clear-cut recovery, so he could plan his actions, but that certainty had not happened. Robert was to wait, like me, for progress.

  The doctors were controlling her recovery with drugs and trying to bring her back into full consciousness steadily, without shock and so as to restore her memory of events without alarm. If that was to be either possible or advisable. The gendarmes were waiting in the wings, but Robert, as her brother-in-law, had taken priority. He was family. He thought of me as of no consequence to her future, a passing passenger on the liner of her life. I had to understand. The gendarmes had not yet removed their view of me as a ‘person of interest’, given my extraordinary capacity to be the only witness to every murder that had imposed itself on the tiny community.

  In fact I did not see Nicole until the evening, when Robert had left reassured that all, which could be done, was being done. She was in good hands and the doctors were satisfied my presence should not alarm their patient. Robert had a lot to attend to, which ever way fate chose.

  Nicole was sedated and looked very fatigued. Understandably. Fragments of her memory were returning and she had asked about me, but I was warned not to raise the events that had taken place in the house, my discovery of her body wracked with toxins, the question of her poisoning, the whys and wherefores of her distress. But I need not have worried, as I sat beside her bed for an hour. For there came a moment when she slowly awoke and recognised me through a moist pair of eyes. Though wired to a drip and other contacts monitoring her condition on the screens behind her, she moved a hand gently and gave me a glimmer of a smile. I felt part of her recovery.

  Her first shaky words took me immediately back to events in the cove.

  “They want the house.”

  I did not know what to say, or whether the cautions under which I had been allowed in applied. I remained silent. “They want the house.” The words sank into my heart. Whoever they were, they had struck at the very core of her virtuous work here in Corsica, in the idyllic corner of the island she had found by design. For three summers she had attended to the medicinal potential of alternative medicines, had tramped the maquis and with dedication ground and pestled blends that might cure or at least improve the lot of many ill people. Now ‘they’ had poisoned her for their own - material - ends. To get her off the scene, out of the way. Why such an extreme action?

  Nicole, watched me with a weak smile, “They tell me you saved my life.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but limply answered, “The doctors here did that.”

  “They say you helped.”

  I felt I was likely to break the agreement I had made with the doctors.

  “Tell me how you feel.”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m glad.” It seemed an inconsequential conversation.

  “Your passion was so gentle.”

  I was shocked that such a thought should be at the forefront of her memory.

  “We had good times?” Nicole was being generous.

  “We did.” I realised we were talking already in a past tense. Had the door been closed? Was that to be the consequence of the attempt on her life?

  Nicole closed her eyes for a moment or two, as if gathering her strength.

  “Is Robert here?”

  “Not at the moment. He’s at his hotel.” I waited for a further question from her lifeless form, but there was none.

  “He told me about your son,” I said into the silence, “I had no idea.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  “He’s why you work …?”

  “Yes. I try.”

  “He is your world.”

  “Raison d’être.”

  “
And me?” The self-interest passed my lips before I could stop it.

  “Don’t blame yourself.”

  I hadn’t thought to do so, but there was a hint of criticism in her voice. I chose to think she was saying I was an innocent. After all, how many clues lying around me had I missed?

  “Talk to Antoine.” Nicole looked tired and I wondered whether I should push her further, but a doctor came in and checked the monitors. Turning to me he looked at his watch, and indicated I should leave. He was keen to take the chance of her wakefulness to continue treatment.

  I leant down and kissed those soft lips once more, lingering until the restraining hand of the doctor lifted me up. As I gave Nicole one last glance she simply said, “Don’t forget me.”

  “I won’t.” In every detail.

  The doctor took me to one side in the corridor. “It is good she is coming back from the brink and said a few words. But we have to remain cautious. Don’t take upon yourself to say anything to Robert, or anyone else. Things can turn round at any time. We hoped she might give us some clues as to what happened, but it was only because she knew you that she talked at all. You are a trigger. Hopefully Robert will cause the same reaction too. But I repeat – I have to warn you not to be optimistic. She comes and goes, as it were. Without the medication, and our ability to monitor and modify it as circumstances permit, she will not survive. It will take time. If we are lucky.”

  “But she was awake, said a few words.”

  “But most of the time she is sleeping. We have to be careful she does not slip away.”

  I did not know what to say. Immediately after the glimmer of hope I had shared with her, the doctor was putting my optimism down. Did they see defeat in the poisons? They shared the recovery and her intermittent awareness, but were they privately concerned the poisons had done irreparable damage?

  The doctor wasn’t saying more, and guided me out of the ward and to the front door.

  “Hope,” was all he said as I numbly walked down the steps and into the bustle of Calvi town.

  v

  Sitting in a quayside restaurant that evening for a much needed whisky and soda, I ordered moules frites and a demi-de-rosé. I needed some sustenance to fill my empty heart and mind. There would not be a fishing-boat passing the cove for a day or two. I would have to be patient.

  It was the shot of whisky which alerted me again to the reality that in Calvi I was back in the modern world. I could call my editor in England. I was in touch with the shadow of my past – a world I would have to face up to returning to soon. I had become detached from it during the three months of this idyll. And murders. I would have to pull myself together and finish up my critiques. Somehow they didn’t seem important any more.

  In the middle of my meal, for some unknown reason I had a terrible thought.

  Had Nicole in some way poisoned her child? I don’t know what drew this fateful image into my brain. Was it le crépuscule, the descending evening darkness, as the sun disappeared behind the dramatic citadel, which echoed her position, lying there in hospital, in the shadow of life?

  It didn’t fit with the whole nature of her endeavours, her pursuit of remedies, cures and alternative medicines. Was there some concealed irony in all this of which neither she nor Robert spoke? Maybe he didn’t know after all every detail of Harry’s condition or the treatments he had been receiving at every stage of his childhood. As this possibility raced through my mind, I felt ashamed of even thinking this way. I could not see her other than the dedicated mother dealing with a condition that in its extreme form dominated her life in England.

  Yet there always had been risks, all too evident now, with the experimentation she conducted with plants and shrubs, which held both cures and poisons in their discreet bodies. I did not know to what extent she worked on these lotions and potions back at home, or whether in some controlled environment in conjunction with a health provider. Did she have qualified scientists helping her, or was she a lone experimenter? Had she in desperation tried something on Harry at some point that had aggravated his epilepsy and made it more severe? A narcotic in an attempt to reduce the bursts of electrical brain activity that prompted his convulsions?

  I knew at once that I could never bring myself to ask these questions of her. I doubted anyway I would be given the chance. Robert was increasingly assertive about his responsibilities for Nicole, and I was being pushed down the ladder of importance.

  The next morning Girard had a look of satisfaction on his face. “We’re making progress.”

  “What have you found out? Are the gunmen talking?”

  “We’ve confirmed a lot about their gun-running. The connections with one of the nationalist groups. Bringing in arms through the cove was the missing link. Our watch around the coast had focused on the east side, as it is nearest to Italy and that seemed to be the most likely access, but the gang were French not Italian, and from Marseille.”

  “Where you were posted before.”

  “Yes. It gives me great satisfaction.” I saw in his eyes a reputation being restored.

  “How many times had they landed arms at the cove?”

  “Twice this summer. Then again last week, when you got involved.”

  “I was not involved!”

  “You were in the way. Lucky to not get shot in the process.”

  “I didn’t know anything.”

  “So you keep saying. Vous êtes niais, n’est-ce pas.”

  Again I could not challenge the accusation.

  “What will happen to them?”

  “They’ll get long sentences, depending upon how much information they provide.”

  “The Corsair? Was he the ring-leader?”

  “Ugly customer, well-known in Marseille, but not the mastermind. That person has not surfaced yet. But the foot-soldiers we hold may give up a lead to him. Unless you can help us on that score?”

  “I can’t.” I didn’t like the inference. Did he still think somehow I was in control of events?

  I realised now that Girard was not here by chance. If he had ‘failed’ in some way in Marseille and been demoted to Corsica, it had galvanised him into determined action to expose the gun-runners. Success was going to be his passport back to the mainland and a top job again. But I had a different question for him.

  “What do we know about their attack on Nicole?”

  “We need to get a lead on the gang’s associates, the ones who paid that unwelcome call on Nicole the week before. What they used, so the doctors can find the best antidote to whatever poison was administered. If we can track them down.”

  “So, the proof as to what happened?”

  “We can draw conclusions from the position Nicole was in when you returned that day to the house, and the fact that she had poisons inside her. There must have been at least two men, who came down from the road and surprised her. Caught her off-guard.”

  “She never was on guard. That was the whole point of this isolated place.”

  “You may have been at ease, but no one else was.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You, Englishman, live in your bubble, with a romantic halo, by the sound of it, but everyone else was on edge.”

  I nodded agreement. He was right of course, but I didn’t want my illusions shattered.

  “The bruising on her neck. The doctors thought it might have been caused by the gendarme shouldering her down to the cove. But those intruders must have held her down and administered the potion under duress. Held her mouth shut and pinched her nose, so she had to swallow whatever it was.”

  “It could have killed her there and then.”

  “It was planned as murder, but to make it look an accident, which nevertheless took her out of the equation. They must have learnt about her work, her obsession with plants and medicinal remedies. Why else would she spend summers up there, cut off from everything?”

  “Would they have known about it from Anto
ine and Angelique?’

  “Possibly, but unlikely, as those two wanted to protect the place as much as anybody. They would not invite trouble, they had enough already. We’re looking into the possibility the gang had an informer in the Capitanerie in Calvi. Someone who reported the patrol-boats’ movements and, more significantly, those of you living there; when you were around and what you were up to. All information that helped them plan their runs.”

  “There were some strange visitors at times, off the yachts.”

  “Taking a look at close hand?”

  “Some oddballs came up to the house once and tried to buy it off Nicole.”

  “You didn’t think that strange?”

  “Yes. No. I mean we thought they were interested in starting a holiday camp or something.”

  “You see, you prove you are naïve again.”

  Touché.

  “Nicole’s work provided the opportunity,” Girard continued, “the chance to make her ill enough for her death to be explained by her experiments. Death by unnatural causes, but well within the bounds of self-inflicted possibility. Her own fault.”

  I thought of all the good Nicole had sought to create for suffering people for whom standard medicine had failed. Her vocation to save a few from the pain and anguish of seemingly incurable conditions. A call to arms for Harry. Driven with a passion that was quite separate from the desire that she had shared with me.

  “What have the doctors told you?”

  “They can’t identify the third substance in the mix she was administered.”

  “I know about Papaver somniferum and Urginea maritima rosa. They were similar to two plants I gave them on my list.”

  “Similar bit fatally different, as they told you.”

  “The third?”

  “They can’t say. They must treat her as best they can based on what they do know.”

  Turning to face me Girard paused, then told me direct : “You realise that there is still every chance Nicole will die? Brief awakenings are good, of course. A few words give encouragement. But the doctors say we should not presume too much. Her body is still fighting the drugs, the poisons and it is too early to presume she will fully recover. You must keep the worst result in the front of your mind. You understand?”