Tug of War Page 12

  Joe clung precariously, balanced side-saddle on the flapper seat of one of the motor bikes. A second round of marc had melted away any residue of bad feeling and loosened tongues to the point where one of the young men had awkwardly offered to take him to the Tellancourt farm. The car was better left in safety in front of the town hall, was the unanimous opinion of the company, instead of scraping down narrow lanes for several kilometres. As they bounced over the rutted ground, Joe was glad he’d spared his undercarriage by agreeing to this offer of outlandish transport. And he was glad to arrive finally at his destination.

  Relieved and charmed. Some way distant from an already remote village in this chalky landscape, the farm buildings were grouped, he guessed, around a spring or water source of some description. It was at first glance impressive and extensive. They entered, throttling back, through a wide porte-cochère surmounted by a low-built wooden storey running the length of the transom, a useful construction which acted as a pigeonnier judging by the flocks of white doves perching there. The interior basse-cour was rectangular and spacious and lined on two sides by a barn and a stable block. Their arrival sent a guard dog into fits of rage and hens dashed to throw themselves under their wheels. Opposite stood the farmhouse, half timbered with walls of local limestone and dressed stone surrounds to the doors and windows. The roof was pitched at a low angle under a strong frame to bear the weight of heavy clay tiles. It was not lovely but it reflected the colours and fabric of the earth from which it sprang and it pleased Joe.

  The motor cycle puttered to a brief halt at the door to allow him time to dismount. He did this with as much dignity as he could muster, aware of scrutiny from all sides and very much wondering how securely the still-raging dog was confined. He waved goodbye to his chauffeur and, approaching the door, made use of the heavy knocker. While he waited, he stepped back a pace to take a glance at his surroundings. The second look was less reassuring. Tiles had slipped and fallen from the barns and not been replaced. One or two doors and windows were broken, cracked or missing altogether. No paintwork had been renovated for years. In an establishment which boasted so many vigorous young men, he found this hard to account for.

  The door creaked slowly open and he turned to smile a greeting but saw no one.

  ‘Are you the policeman?’

  The voice had come from low down and he watched in amusement as the child warily stuck a head around the door and surveyed him. He must have looked unthreatening as the boy came forward and opened the door wide. He was about six years old, Joe estimated, and was dressed neatly in baggy shirt with a white collar, knickerbockers and buckled shoes. Turned out to welcome and disarm the visiting policeman? Joe thought so.

  ‘Oh, hello, young man. Yes, I am the policeman. I’ve come to see Monsieur and Madame Tellancourt. Here’s my card.’

  He took the card and pretended to examine it. ‘Grandpa’s expecting you. He said to take you through to the back parlour. Uncle Victor and Aunt Isabelle are there as well. Come this way.’

  He hurried off down the tiled corridor and Joe followed until he reached a door at the end and pushed it open. ‘In there,’ said his guide and abandoned him.

  Joe’s first instinct was to tell the assembled company to, for God’s sake, run for a doctor. He stepped forward anxiously at the sight of the grey-faced old man, alarmed by his rasping efforts to breathe. In spite of the warm weather he was swathed in rugs and shawls and the remains of a meal in jugs and bowls stood on a table at his elbow.

  As the others, a man and two women, showed no immediate signs of panic, Joe calmed himself and addressed the old man. ‘Sir. Commander Sandilands of the London police and also with Interpol. How do you do?’

  The younger man answered and took the card from Joe’s outstretched hand. ‘I’m Victor, Monsieur Tellancourt’s son. This is my sister Isabelle and this is Clothilde, the wife of my older brother Thomas whom I understand you have seen in Reims. We’d be obliged if you could direct your questions through me. As you see, my father is in poor health and not able to sustain a conversation. Though he will understand all that you have to say, I’m sure.’ The tone was perfectly polite though there was no warmth.

  Joe wondered if he’d heard correctly. A wife? Clothilde? This was the first mention of a wife, surely? He remembered that the official claimants of the unknown soldier were named as Victor and Isabelle Tellancourt. Recognizably brother and sister and both in their mid-thirties they stood together, dark of hair and complexion like their father. The wife of Thomas – or Thibaud – was a brown-haired woman dressed in widow’s black, small and quenched. She did not attempt to return Joe’s greeting.

  For form’s sake, Joe went through his rehearsed questions receiving exactly the answers he anticipated from Victor with occasional interjections from Isabelle. They knew their father’s answers by heart but he confirmed each statement with a nod and followed the conversation with alert eyes. Their certainty that the patient was their brother was unshakable, their eagerness for a quick solution in their favour compelling. With slightly excessive nostalgia, they recounted stories of Thomas’s young days, they produced letters he had written from the front and the inevitable portrait photograph. Joe took the much-handled sepia study and said into the expectant silence: ‘Ah yes. A fantassin – would that be the word?’ Joe could conjure up the colourful figure from his memory. The handsome young man was wearing the high-collared tunic of an infantryman under the blue greatcoat, the capote with its two front hems buttoned back like a butterfly’s wings showing puttees and shining laced shoes. He was wearing the soldier’s round blue helmet, an unflattering piece of headgear which hid his hair, and the lower half of his face was almost swamped by a flamboyant moustache. A poilu. Impossible on this evidence, Joe thought, to rule the man in or out in the struggle for Thibaud.

  ‘An infantryman? Your son fought his war on foot, then, not on horseback?’

  His comment was received by puzzlement all round and the reply came from Victor: ‘Of course he did. The cavalry? Thomas? He was a farm boy like the rest of us. A peasant! From St Céré not St Cyr!’ Victor laughed at his joke. ‘Couldn’t stand horses. Had too much to do with them on the farm. He could handle them all right – rode like a Cossack but always said they were the stupidest animals ever invented. No, he was nothing special. A trench rat. Swept up for cannon fodder like the rest of us. Declared missing, presumed dead, at Verdun. They never sent us his name tag. But it seems they presumed wrong, doesn’t it? Taken prisoner and now returned to his home town.’

  Joe turned to the silent wife, standing apart from the rest and looking through the window. ‘An emotional moment for you, madame. To envisage the possibility of one’s husband being restored after so long and in such a battered condition . . .’ he murmured.

  ‘Well, of course it’s emotional,’ snapped Victor. ‘But she’ll cope. She was always a good wife to Thomas. Devoted. She’ll go on caring for him. What’s more natural?’

  It was becoming clear to Joe that the tension he felt in the room had its source in the woman whose voice he had not yet heard and he sensed a mystery. He nodded his agreement and turned his attention from the widow, taking the brother and sister down paths they were more keen to follow and noting down officiously points which they deemed important. Finally he snapped shut his notebook with a satisfied smile and began to thank the old man and his son and daughter warmly for their help and clarification.

  Relief swept through the room. Victor hurried to the door, finding the small boy playing skittles in the corridor, and sent him to whistle up the Commander’s transport back into the village.

  ‘One last thing,’ said Joe without emphasis, ‘and perhaps Madame could enlighten me . . .’ He bowed to the widow. ‘If you wouldn’t mind strolling back to the gate with me there’s a couple of questions better directed at a wife . . . I’m sure you understand, old chap,’ he finished with a conspiratorial glance at Victor who gaped and looked from one to the other with suspicion. Unexpecte
dly, the widow came at once to his aid, nodding and slipping out of the room ahead of him.

  He followed her swift steps down the corridor away from the front door and in some surprise turned at her beckoning finger and climbed a set of back stairs. Two flights of increasingly narrow treads and threadbare carpet took them to the attic floor of the house. The sun streamed through a side window glinting off dust motes and, distantly, a dove cooed and was answered. It was uncomfortably hot up here under the eaves and Joe was feeling more uneasy by the minute. She stopped in front of a door: a door of solid oak and, unusually for this neglected house, freshly installed. There was a bolt on the outside. The widow wrapped a fold of her skirt over it to muffle the sound and pulled it back. With a gesture she invited him to step inside, listening intently the while. For noises of pursuit, perhaps? Her nervousness was catching.

  His instinct for self-preservation made him insist that she enter the room first. He had no intention of being discovered, a mummified corpse locked in a French attic a hundred years from now. Standing in the open doorway, one hand on the latch, Joe looked inside and he understood.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bare, white-painted walls, a metal-framed bed with a thin mattress and one chair, it was more stark than the hospital room in Reims. Heavy bars fitted across the one small window.

  She began to speak hurriedly. A rehearsed speech. Not a word was wasted. ‘That man’s not Thomas! They’re claiming him for the money – heaven knows they need it! The state would pay it to me, I think, but . . . well, you’ve seen them! They’d take it all in payment for my board and lodging over the years. But look at this!’ She waved a hand around the room and her pretty face melted for a moment into pity. ‘They’ll keep him prisoner here.’ The expression changed to one of petulance as she rushed on: ‘And guess who’ll be expected to care for him? Me! I’ll be running up and down those stairs with slop bowls until one of us drops dead. I’ll be just as much a prisoner as he is. I’m no nurse, monsieur, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life cleaning up after some lunatic who’s not even my husband.’ She seized Joe’s hands, needing to make a physical link with him before she confided her next secret. The torrent continued: ‘I’m a widow. I have official confirmation. I can show you my papers. A widow. I may marry again.’

  ‘You have someone in mind?’ he asked with equal brevity.

  ‘There’s a man in the village. Not a Tellancourt!’ She almost smiled. ‘He’s elderly but kind. He owns the pharmacy. We could make each other happy. You must understand that this man in Reims is not my husband!’

  ‘You must try to give proof of that assertion, madame. It isn’t enough merely to express an opinion and keep repeating it. Listen! Tell me – you were married for how long before he disappeared?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘Did you have any children?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘A girl or a boy?’

  ‘A boy.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘He died before he was six months old.’

  The simple questions provoked swift answers and were followed seamlessly by Joe’s next: ‘What distinguishing marks did your husband have on his body?’

  She faltered. ‘What do you mean? That bayonet cut on his arm? Thomas never had a wound like that as far as I know.’

  Voices were heard shouting down below and somewhere distantly a motor cycle revved up. Joe eased his straining collar and took another lungful of warm air.

  ‘Did he or didn’t he have any special marks in, let’s say, an intimate area? In a place where only a wife would be aware, perhaps? If you could furnish details of . . . a wart . . . a mark on the skin that Thomas had in a particular spot and the patient in Reims does not have such a mark then your case is made.’

  In the dusty dimness of the room he noticed she was blushing. She looked away in embarrassment and withdrew her hands.

  ‘Inspector! My husband Thomas and I were modest people.’

  Joe pondered this for a moment and could think of no response. The shouting below increased. The dog joined in. Joe followed her back downstairs.

  Encountering a dangerously angry Victor by the front door, Joe faced him with the lazy confidence and clipped tones of a commanding officer. ‘Well, Tellancourt, that just about wraps it up. Madame was kind enough to indulge my whim to check the accommodation. The accomodation,’ he repeated meaningfully, tapping him on the shoulder. ‘Sensible precautions taken, I see. And there’s my transport in the lane . . . Goodbye then, and I’ll see you are the first to hear the outcome of this business.’

  He strode across the farm courtyard and the door banged shut behind him. As he passed under the dovecote he became aware on the far side of a dark figure seated on a bench. The old lady was staring down the lane, waiting and watching for her son to return, he remembered. He looked with curiosity at the black-clad widow sunk into her sorrow. Very likely ga-ga, he decided and prepared to pass by, quietly raising his cap. But as he approached she caught his attention. He wondered whether perhaps she had been expecting to see him. She glanced up at him, blue eyes unfaded, intelligent, even amused. A wisp of grey hair which might once have been blonde escaped from her bonnet. She had a book open in her lap and a bundle of knitting. So this was Armande, the stranger, the smart lady’s maid from Normandy. He stood to greet her and introduce himself.

  After his introductory comments had established that she knew exactly who he was and what he was doing there, he made a polite compliment to the mother whose devotion would keep her watching for her missing son. Her eyes twinkled. ‘It’s not such a penance, you know, Commander. It’s a madhouse in there! You’ve seen them! And the children were shut away for the duration of your visit . . . If I couldn’t look forward to my hour a day out here by myself in peace and quiet, I’d be as mad as they are. Now, what can I tell you about my son?’

  Dr Varimont’s words came back to him – ‘A mother would remember’ – and he decided to venture once more to pose his sensitive question.

  She listened to his convoluted phrasing with patience and replied at once. ‘Well, it’s about time someone asked a sensible question. Of course! Do you know, I’d nearly forgotten! Perhaps I’m not such a saintly mother after all. Yes, my Thomas did have marks . . . birthmarks . . . no, I don’t mean that exactly. Not the strawberry mark so many babies have . . . no. It was a difficult birth, Commander. My first child. The midwife knew her trade though and managed to save him – and me. But she had to use those – what do you call them? – forceps, that’s it.’ She put out her hand in a pincer shape. ‘Like this. It left one mark on his front and one mark on his bottom. Purplish they were. Round and smaller than a cherry. On the left-hand side. As you look at him, I mean, so that would be his right.’ The hand demonstrated again. ‘Is this of any help?’

  Joe was dropped off by the boy called Jules at the door of his motor car. After a silent acknowledgement of his passenger’s thanks and farewells, Jules stayed on, engine ticking over, one foot on the ground watching. Being seen off the premises? Joe was irritated. He banged shut the door, turned on the ignition and set about a three point turn to make his way out of the village square. With a nod in his direction the boy let in the clutch and roared off back the way he had come.

  Joe took a long while over his turn, listened to the disappearing rumble of the motor bike and changed his mind. He parked again, facing outwards this time in case he needed to make a swift exit, and sat thinking. The boy’s behaviour had been odd. Eager to be off and yet, he would have sworn, under orders to make certain the policeman had left. Joe glanced around the peaceful scene. What, hereabouts, or whom, did they want him not to see?

  The central square with its plane trees, skittle alley, duck pond, town hall and inn could have served as the illustration to any school textbook encouraging pupils to learn the French language. Combien de canards y a-t-il? Qui entre dans l’élpicerie? Quelle heure est-il à l’horloge de l’église? Où se trouve le monument aux
morts? The stock phrases rushed to mind, delivered in the sharp tones of his dominie as he surveyed the peaceful scene.

  The war memorial!

  His glance flashed back to the effigy carved in granite, a bluish stone almost, in this bright sunlight, the shade of bleu d’horizon of the living soldier’s uniform. A poilu, helmeted head bent, greatcoat pinned back, the bayonet of his rifle garlanded with wild flowers, he stood sorrowing for his fallen comrades. It was striking. Another memorial to add to Joe’s list.

  He turned off his engine and walked across to pay his respects. He took off his hat and bowed his head, always playing to the invisible crowd he assumed to be witnessing his actions. Under lowered lids he ran an eye down the list of the fallen. And there he was – the twentieth name down. Thomas Tellancourt. Put up very soon after the armistice, Joe guessed, so the family must at that time have accepted the death of their son readily enough to have agreed to his name featuring on the local memorial at any rate. Perhaps there was another long shot he could play?

  Glad that he’d established an interest in the architecture of the church on arrival at the café, he looked ostentatiously at his watch, took an indecisive step forward, stopped and then went on towards the porch. He spent a few minutes admiring the carvings, stepping back the better to get them in focus and then walking on around the exterior. He wandered into the surrounding graveyard to scan the roof line and shielded his eyes against the noonday sun to view the tower. None of the gravestones on the north and east sides of the church bore the name of the family Tellancourt but when he got to the south side they started to appear. Many of them. They marched shoulder to shoulder in rows, dark granite decorated with ornate carvings and mementoes. Some had several occupants. Hardly possible to examine each one. He reckoned he’d get about as far as the third before someone took a bead on him from the café. Rifles had been hanging on the walls, he remembered, and perhaps they were more than harmless mementoes. Hunting accidents all too common in the French countryside, he understood. Many scores settled by that means. The agonized fear of snipers’ bullets returned to strike him where he stood. His head went down, his spine bristled with a sudden chill and he had to clench his hands and breathe deeply to resist a forward plunge into the shelter of a gravestone. But here he was in full view of the village and, indeed, right by the town hall, that symbol of an ordered and lawful society. And then he remembered that la mairie was a forward listening post of the Clan Tellancourt, according to the doctor.