TimeLocke

by Jack Barnao

  “Okay, whatever you say.” I wondered what he was doing but guessed that Armand’s heart was in bad shape and that he wouldn’t be able to take the news that his daughter was running the risk of being locked up for manslaughter.

  No one was downstairs, and we let ourselves in and went up to the second floor and along the corridor to Armand’s bedroom. Labrosse tapped on the door, and Wainwright opened it. He looked surprised to see us but invited us in, speaking in a low voice. “He’s awake, the doctor’s been.”

  “Good. We have good news for him.” Labrosse took off his kepi as he entered the room. His hair was thin and cut very short. He clicked his heels as he reached Armand’s bedside.

  “I have good news,” he said. “Mr. Locke will tell you.”

  Feeling a touch foolish but having the training to carry it through, I came to attention beside the bed and spoke clearly, as if this were a military court. “After I left your garage with Orsini, we found your daughter in the driveway with her car. Orsini asked to be driven to the cave of a M’sieur Jean Dupuis. There we met Miss Roger. Orsini asked Jean if he could go into the cave. There he took a gun from a store he had hidden. He shot Jean and threatened Hélène. I hit him on the head, and as he lay on the floor, Miss Roger shot him three times in the chest. He is dead.”

  Armand’s face was gray, and he did not move on his pillow as I spoke, but at the end he gave a grim little smile. “Good. Thank you for telling me this.”

  I nodded, then glanced at Labrosse, a reaction, I guess, to see how pleased he had been with my lie. Only he was not looking at me; he was looking at Wainwright.

  I followed his glance and saw that the old man was in shock. His mouth had opened in horror. He spoke to me, coaching me, appealing for me to change my story. “You mean she fired as you were attacking Orsini, don’t you? That she saved Hélène’s life?”

  “Mr. Locke has already made his statement,” Labrosse said. “I am sorry, Mr. Wainwright. I realize Miss Roger is a friend, but there is no choice for me. She must be arrested.”

  Wainwright was struggling to control himself. “But she will be acquitted, surely? This Orsini man had killed Pierre. He had broken the neck of poor little Constance at La Fongeline.”

  His words hit me like a blow. My hair prickled, and my ears roared momentarily, as if I were about to pass out. “How did you know how Constance died?” I asked. “I never told anybody.”

  He recovered immediately. “Of course you did. How else do you think I would have known?”

  “I think you knew because you killed her,” Labrosse said.

  Armand’s voice was weak, and he spoke in French, asking for clemency for Wainwright, I guessed, because Labrosse said in English, “No, M’sieur Armand. I cannot overlook this. It is beyond my powers. Wliat I can do is to perhaps influence my superiors to drop the charges against Miss Roger if I get the truth from Mr. Wainwright.” He was polite but firm. “We do not wish to cause you distress. We will go somewhere else and talk. Mr. Locke will come with me, as my witness.”

  He bowed formally and turned to take Wainwright by the arm. “If you will come with me. You also, John, if you please.”

  Wainwright did not try to break away. He was acting his age now, a frail old man in his seventies, tall still but no longer straight-backed. He was weak and ill looking.

  Labrosse led us down to the living room below and poured a stiff brandy. He handed it to Wainwright, who took it, nodding gratefully, and sat in a deep armchair, his body seeming to collapse to follow its contours.

  “Now. The truth, please,” Labrosse said.

  “And if I cooperate, what then?” Wainwright asked. The cognac had given him a little color, bright dabs of red on his cheekbones, contrasting with the paleness that made his tan look sallow, liverish.

  Labrosse was careful in his phrasing. “Tell the truth and I will see that no charges are laid against the young woman. She will go free. It is also possible that I can arrange for what you tell me to be charged against Orsini. He was bad. He is dead. A murder more or less does not matter.”

  “He is bad,” Wainwright said. His voice had gained a little strength now. “Was bad, I should say. I knew that from the first time I met him.”

  “And when was that?” Labrosse was not taking notes, and I felt certain he was going to release Wainwright, after all.

  “March 15, 1944,” Wainwright said softly. “I was parachuted into the area to organize the local branch of the Resistance for an attack on the hospital.”

  “You were the British officer?” I couldn’t help breaking in. Labrosse flicked an angry glance my way. He said nothing, but I knew I had better not speak again until his interrogation was over.

  “Yes. I was dropped here to kill an RAF man who had been shot down and injured. He was a radar boffin, and the Germans had him in hospital.” Wainwright sipped his cognac and paused, putting himself back forty-five years, back into his twenties, when heroism had seemed possible, even necessary.

  “They caught me,” he said flatly. “We found out after the war that the Germans had penetrated our organization. They picked up one after another of the people we parachuted in. Me they picked up as I landed. The Resistance hadn’t got the message at all. It was the German double agent who had it. I fell into the arms of a platoon of the Wehrmacht.”

  “And where did they take you?” Labrosse was speaking softly. I had the impression he had waited all his life to hear this story.

  “To the Gendarmerie. That’s where I met your father, the man who helped me escape.”

  “For which he was shot,” Labrosse said in the same dead tone of voice.

  Wainwright had not heard him; he was reliving his own experiences. “I was tortured, of course.” His hand moved instinctively to his groin, the classic starting point for humiliation and torture.

  “And it was more than any man could bear and you talked.” Labrosse sounded soothing.

  “I still wake up terrified, sweating, even now.” Wainwright gulped the last of the cognac and sat back, exhausted, dangling the glass limply. Labrosse got up and took it off him, putting it back on the table.

  “And the raid proceeded as planned, only the Germans were waiting.”

  “It was terrible.” Wainwright cleared his throat. “The Gestapo let me out for the raid. They told me to bring out all the men I could gather. It was their chance to wipe out the whole local Maquis at one swoop.”

  “And you did this?” Labrosse kept his voice conversational, but his eyes were burning. “You led your own men into a trap?”

  “They told me they would eliminate an entire village if I did not.” Wainwright had tears in his eyes. “They did it before. They did it in Lidice in Czechoslovakia, and at Oradour-sur-Glane in France, shooting all the men, burning the women and children alive in the church.”

  “I understand,” Labrosse said. “An impossible choice. But they spared you?”

  “They wanted me alive so they could bring in more people from Britain, carry out the same exercise over and over.” Wainwright’s voice gained strength as he spoke. I had the feeling he had lived this story in his head every day of his life, seeking to see how he could have done anything different.

  “And one other man escaped. A new recruit who was so poorly trained that he didn’t get into position in time and missed the trap,” Labrosse said. “Our friend Orsini.”

  “Exactly.” Wainwright had stiffened now; he was erect again. “I didn’t know what had happened. I’d been told to wear a green scarf around my head, and I did so.”

  I looked at him pityingly. An officer, sworn to do his duty, to fight, to escape and fight again, and yet he had willingly led his men into a trap and saved his own life by surrendering again to the Germans. A brave man would have fought to the death. I felt sorry for him and the years of self-torment he had suffered since.

  Wainwright went on in a soft voice. “The Germans took me alive. But they shot everyone else except Orsini. He was able to escape and h
ide.”

  “And when you were in the cells, my father let you escape also. And told you where you would be safe.”

  “Exactly.” Wainwright pressed both hands over his mouth for long moments. At last he took them down and said, “He was a brave man, a generous man, Captain.”

  Labrosse ignored the comment. “The Boche shot him. Where did you go?”

  “I came here, to this house.”

  “And who did you find here?”

  “Madame Armand was alive then. She was here. So were a lot of Germans. They had taken over the château as an officers’ mess. But they were behaving well; they had not harassed her. They let her live in the rooms above the stables. She hid me in the stables under the straw.”

  “But you did not spend all your time under the straw, did you?” I had the impression that Labrosse already knew all the answers, that he wanted only to hear them spoken out loud to silence his own midnight conversations with himself.

  “No. I went out at night and killed Germans.” Wainwright was proud now. “I used a knife. I killed seventeen of them in all. That was three more than the number of Frenchmen killed on the raid.”

  “And when you were not killing Germans, you did not stay in the straw then, either, did you?” Labrosse made his tone almost jocular. We might have been junior officers in some sociable officers’ mess, kidding one of our members about his fondness for the ladies.

  But Wainwright had been raised in a gentlemanly school. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “I think you do,” Labrosse snapped. “You and Madame Armand became lovers, did you not?”

  “That’s not something I want to discuss,” Wainwright said stiffly. “It has no bearing on why we’re having this discussion.”

  “Oh, but it does,” Labrosse said. “I think that Pierre Armand was your son. N’est-ce pas?”

  Wainwright didn’t answer for a while. He glanced at me, then away, then said, “Yes. He was.”

  “But M’sieur Armand never knew this?”

  “Marie told him she had been raped,” Wainwright said, and his eyes filled with tears. “I have been ashamed of that for forty-five years, Captain. Bitterly ashamed.”

  “It was the kind thing to do,” Labrosse said briskly. “It was better for the man to think she had no chance than to think she had conducted a love affair. You were kind, M’sieur Wainwright.”

  Wainwright wiped his eyes and said nothing.

  Labrosse sat up. “And now we come to the events that interest me most. The events of the last few days.” He paused and then wagged his finger at Wainwright warningly. “What you have told me so far means nothing. I want to know what has been happening between you and Orsini.” He paused and then went on again in the same tone. “And do not lie as Miss Roger lied to you. I know the truth. There was no fight in the restaurant. Miss Roger and Orsini did not fight. They spent the night together.”

  Wainwright collapsed again, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He did not answer for a while, and then he spoke softly. “That meeting was the start of all of this. Amy must have told Orsini about me. He already knew my name because of my connections with the wine industry here. When she told him I had been here during the war, he remembered who I was, and the blackmail began.”

  “What did he want?” Labrosse was brisk now, conducting the interrogation as if it had no bearing on his own personal past.

  “He wanted half of everything I make. Otherwise he was going to let Armand know that Pierre was my son. That would have ruined me. Not just with him but with all my suppliers. I would have been a figure of scorn.”

  Labrosse rolled his eyes. “You believe that Frenchmen would have been something other than amused at une affaire de coeur of forty years ago?”

  “It wasn’t just that I had cuckolded Armand. Even he might have forgiven that, but not the fact that I had not acknowledged the boy. It was as if I were ashamed of him. That dishonored the memory of his wife.”

  Labrosse didn’t let him slide away from the point. “So Orsini threatened you. And you had the idea that perhaps you could get someone to kill Orsini and end your problems. So you hired Mr. Locke, telling him the old story about the fight in the restaurant.”

  “Yes.” Wainwright got to his feet miserably, picked up his glass, and took it over to the cognac bottle, but instead of refilling it, he set it down and walked on to look out the window down the long, hot driveway.

  “And did you also arrange for those men to try to abduct Miss Roger the day they arrived?”

  Wainwright’s voice was a whisper. “I thought it would make John angry enough to do what I wanted done.”

  “And you were wrong,” Labrosse said. “Instead, it made Orsini angry enough to send someone to talk to Pierre to find out what was happening, to find who Mr. Locke was working for. Am I right?”

  “You must be,” Wainwright said, turning now to look at Labrosse angrily. “I don’t know what happened after that. I don’t know why Pierre was killed.”

  “But you do know why Constance was killed. You killed her. Tell us about that.” Labrosse almost shouted it.

  “It was an accident,” Wainwright said, wearily sitting in the armchair once more. “I went to see her, to try and find out what was happening. I had arrived in France only the day before. She told me, and when I questioned her, she turned on me, accusing me of using Amy to get at Orsini.”

  “And how did this cause her accidental death?” Labrosse leaned on “accidental,” and Wainwright jerked his shoulder impatiently.

  “I became angry. I realized that it was her interfering, her backing up of Amy’s alibi for what happened last year, that had blinded me to what had happened. I shook her as one shakes a child.”

  “One does not shake children that way,” Labrosse exploded. “Not at all if I can prevent it, but never so hard that their neck is broken.”

  Wainwright raised his voice to shout down Labrosse’s anger. “All right. I killed her. And then I killed her dog so the police would think some stranger had been to the house. Dammit. I’ve confessed! Now keep your end of the bargain. Release Amy.”

  I wondered what Labrosse would do. There was no likelihood that he would let Wainwright go. Too much had happened. Wainwright had caused the death of his own father and now had killed Constance. But I expected him to be honest, to level with Wainwright about Amy. He didn’t. “We made no bargain,” he said coldly. “My investigation continues.”

  “And what about me?” Wainwright asked bitterly. “You arrest me now, do you?”

  “Wait here,” Labrosse said coldly, and to me, “Come, we have things to do.”

  I got out of my chair and followed him, glancing back at Wainwright, who had risen to his feet. But Labrosse did not look back. He walked down the hallway to the stairs and back up toward Armand’s room. I wanted to shout, “You’re crazy. He’s going to bolt,” but I didn’t. He knew that; I was sure of it. So I followed without a word.

  By the time we reached the second-floor landing, I heard a car in the driveway, the exhaust note receding down the scale as someone accelerated away, too fast for the length of the drive.

  Labrosse paused at the note, looking around, his eyes not focused on anything in the house. “He’s gone,” I said. “He’s gotten away.”

  Labrosse’s expression did not change. “He is a gentleman. He will do what is right,” he said. Then he nodded and went on toward the bedroom.

  I stood there, weighing his words. He expected Wainwright to punish himself, to take a gun to his own head. That would be the gentlemanly thing to do in Labrosse’s unforgiving terms. An eye for an eye, even if you have to do the dirty work yourself. I ran downstairs and into the sitting room. The French window was open, and Wainwright was gone. Labrosse’s plan, whatever it was, had worked.

  The phone rang, and nobody answered for three rings, so I picked it up. “Bonjour, c’est la maison de M’sieur Armand.” I figured my accent would deter any French person from attemptin
g to sell me aluminum storm windows or insurance policies for my children.

  It was Amy’s voice. “Is that you, John?”

  “Yes. What’s happening there?”

  “The doctor says Jean’s going to make it. He’s a tough old man. What’s going on there?”

  “Nothing much at the moment. Labrosse and Eric had a talk. Now Eric’s gone somewhere in the car. I guess he’s coming over to see you.”

  Her voice became hesitant. “Does he know about last summer? About what really happened?”

  “I don’t think so,” I lied. Why get her into a fresh uproar? “What are your plans now? I’m finished here. You don’t need a bodyguard anymore.”

  Another long pause, and then she said, “I guess not, but I’d like to see you.”

  “Okay, where?”

  “My stuff’s all at La Fongeline. I’ll ask Hélène to drop me off there. Would that be all right by you?”

  “Sure. The car’s out back. I’ll drive over, and we can take it from there.”

  There was writing paper and a pen in one of the bureau drawers, so I knocked out a note to Labrosse, telling him where I’d gone. Then I went up to the third floor and collected my bag and went around to the garage. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the first thing that came into sight when I raised the door was a fire extinguisher lying on its side. I stepped over it, looking at the rental car. It was blackened on the side nearest the pit but otherwise seemed all right. I got in and backed out of the garage—and out of the Armand family’s life, I hoped.

  Wainwright had left tracks in the gravel of the driveway, but I saw nothing of his car as I drove out and headed for Faucon. There, at the top of the slope leading down toward La Fongeline, I encountered a cop directing traffic, a local policeman, not a gendarme.

  He waved me back, I could not pass. I tried to explain that I was staying at La Fongeline, but he told me to go around another way. Ahead of him, rising from the vineyards below the cliff, I could see a column of dense black smoke. I didn’t need anybody to draw me a picture. Wainwright had driven off the road, over the cliff.