Strange Images of Death Page 7

  The furrows on the brow deepened, the dark eyes were earnest, conveying more than he had articulated. He waited again, taking the measure of Joe’s silent indecision, then, finally: ‘I’m not a man to run about squawking with panic, Sandilands. I do not easily ask for help. You hear me asking now. Will you stay on?’

  ‘Of course, Monsieur de Pacy. I’d be delighted,’ Joe heard himself saying.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Now. Before this crowd trails off back to its various occupations, would you like me to detain any of them for you? Any individual you’d like to speak to before I show you to your quarters?’ de Pacy offered.

  ‘And instantly light the fuse of suspicion under some poor bloke? No, thank you. Let them go about their business. I’d like two things from you, Monsieur de Pacy. The first, a list of everyone living or working in the building over the past season, the second, blanket permission to go wherever I need to go about the building and speak to guests or staff at will. I cannot function in any other way.’

  ‘But of course!’ De Pacy spread his hands in an expansive gesture.

  ‘And I thought I’d start in the kitchens. No. No need to escort me! I’m sure I can pick out the cook.’

  ‘The cook?’ De Pacy swallowed his surprise to mutter: ‘You want to start with the cook? Not as straightforward as you might imagine. Our chef de cuisine does not welcome incursions by the guests. In fact they are expressly for-bidden from passing through the red baize door.’

  ‘Then you must introduce me as an employee. I have just undertaken a commission for you, I think? With permission to rove about, did we agree?’

  ‘Ah! A test! And I’ve stumbled at the first fence! At least let me take you in … the staff, after all, stand on some ceremony … even though Scotland Yard may have abandoned all decorum.’

  He smiled as he got to his feet.

  Followed by the mystified eyes of the gathering, they made their way through the swinging door covered in red baize and studded with brass-headed nails, along a short stone corridor and round a corner into a cavernous and apparently deserted kitchen. Joe passed a range the size of a Rolls-Royce rusting in neglect under a stone arch. He noted a row of brass taps dripping into a mottled sink which would have been quite large enough to wash a medium-sized corpse in. A dresser which had once been of the finest oak leaned goutily to one side, its matchboard backing seamed with the vertical cracking associated with wet rot.

  ‘This is the old kitchen,’ said Guy de Pacy. ‘We don’t use it any more.’

  ‘I’m quite seriously glad of that,’ said Joe and followed him into the further depths.

  They passed below an archway into a stone-flagged, large, square space full of activity, the clashing of copper pans, laughter, exclamations and light.

  ‘This is the new kitchen,’ Guy announced unnecessarily. ‘Our chef de cuisine moved in two years ago and insisted on dismantling the—er, Victorian, would you say?—facilities you have just passed and restoring the original and larger medieval space to its former grandeur. With certain modern additions, of course.’

  ‘The refrigerator?’ Joe asked, all admiration for the gleaming monster at the far end of the room. ‘You’re wired for …?’

  ‘Yes. The lord installed a generator some years ago and we enjoy a reasonably effective electrical system. Our cook spent some time in the kitchens of the Splendide in Paris during the war years when it was easier for women to take up employment and she came away with notions of grandeur. And some fabulous receipts for iced-cream desserts. I must order up one of Madame Dalbert’s soufflés glacés aux framboises as your reward before you leave! You’ll be impressed. And there she is.’

  A small dark woman, well rounded and much girt about with grey pinnies and the black skirts of a widow, was shrieking in what to Joe was a foreign language at a youth struggling to roll out a sheet of pastry. He watched as she snatched the rolling pin from the boy’s hands, gave him a playful crack over the knuckles and demonstrated a lighter touch, wiry brown hands and wrists moving in practised gestures. The boy began again and she cooed and patted his head.

  She came over to greet them and Joe realized that she had been aware of their intrusion from the moment they set foot in the room. She had chosen her own time to acknowledge their presence, marking out her territory and standing confidently within it. He would be respectful of the borders.

  He reached for her floury hand and held it for a moment, smiling and listening to de Pacy’s introduction.

  ‘Well, there you are. Madame Dalbert, Commander Sandilands of Scotland Yard who has asked to speak to you, I’ll leave you to … er … get acquainted.’ De Pacy bowed and made for the door.

  The woman took a step backwards, snatching away her hand on learning who he was, and Joe knew he’d made a clumsy mistake in coming here. There was no retreating so he advanced.

  ‘First things first, madame,’ said Joe briskly in French, eyeing the hostile face in front of him, ‘in fact: two things. The compliments of an ignorant Englishman on French cooking. The main dish at luncheon was a countryman’s dream! Honest meat from the terroir, simply cooked to perfection with local herbs. I so enjoyed it!’

  ‘Faites simple! Faites toujours simple, monsieur,’ she said. Her voice was low and strongly accented with the rugged Languedoc accent. ‘Escoffier knew what he was talking about. And your second comment?’ She was uneasy in his presence, already glancing sideways at the young pastry chef, eager to be released to her duties.

  ‘The tarte Tatin. There was something besides apples in there … a trace of something red … it enlivened the blandness of the apples and spiked the flavour of what can be a rather dull dish …?’

  She smiled and looked at him directly for the first time, her interest caught at last. ‘I wondered whether anyone would notice. It’s hard to tell sometimes. You have a spark of inspiration, try out a dish and your only clue that it’s a success is the clean plates at the end of the meal. And that’s not always a good indicator …’ Her sombre features lit up with a sudden flare of humour—or scorn. ‘You English are taught from the nursery always to clear up your plates. Whatever the slop they contain. Rice pudding! Oat por-ridge! Pouah! … Figs. It was figs. The first ones are just ready. They go well with the apples and a drop or two of fig liqueur helps.’

  ‘It certainly did.’ Joe began to make distancing movements and they parted company. Before he turned the corner, he caught her voice calling after him with a certain bold sarcasm: ‘Let me know when you’re leaving us and I’ll prepare a soufflé glacé, monsieur!’

  He bowed. ‘It will sweeten a bitter moment, madame.’

  He enjoyed the gust of girlish laughter that followed him down the dank corridor back to the hall.

  De Pacy had waited for him by the baize door. ‘How did you get on with the dragon of the castle?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Dragon? I thought Madame Dalbert was perfectly charming. We exchanged recipes and planned menus. That sort of thing.’

  De Pacy gave him a sideways look and changed the subject. ‘And next? Let me guess. You’d like me to look the other way while you sneak into the chapel to have a good poke about in the debris?’

  ‘If that’s an offer—how could I resist?’ said Joe.

  He walked off shoulder to shoulder with the steward back across the hall, amused to find they were unconsciously keeping step. They were followed by the speculative eyes and approving smiles of the guests who’d stayed behind to lounge at ease and chatter. Here were two decisive men in their prime, striding out together smiling and clearly already doing a lot of agreeing. The frisson which had interrupted their country idyll would soon be soothed away. This pair would stand no nonsense.

  ‘Young Padraic gave a stirring account of the unpleasantness but he was assessing the scene with the eyes, ears and nose of a Celtic troubadour rather than a London policeman,’ Joe commented.

  De Pacy nodded. ‘Whereas you’ll sniff the air, not so much to detect the decaying
glamour of centuries, as to pick out the … um …’

  ‘… sweat, blood and hair oil of the last over-excited individual present at the scene,’ Joe finished for him. ‘At the Yard, they call me The Nose,’ he joked. ‘But however keen the old hooter, I’m afraid it’s too late by days to detect anything so ephemeral as scent. But there may be other clues. People sometimes leave behind the strangest things in the heat of the moment. False teeth—still clamped around a beef sandwich … a whalebone corset redolent of Nuit d’Amour perfume … I’ve even had a hotel door key with its name and number on it … They leave traces of their presence quite unwittingly.’

  ‘Wittingly too—if that’s a word,’ said de Pacy, suddenly serious. ‘I don’t want to anticipate your enquiry, Sandilands, but when I visited the scene I became aware of something that had clearly escaped the attention of the young Irish Romantic. Left behind intentionally, I do believe, by our hammer-wielding iconoclast.’ He gave Joe a sharp look. ‘You may find that nose of yours a mixed blessing!’ he said with a bark of laughter. ‘But I’m sure you’ll see it and interpret the message. Well-travelled and well-educated man of the world that you are. And the Latin should be no problem.’

  Joe recognized a manly challenge when it was thrown at his feet. Intrigued, he raised his brows and smiled his acceptance but didn’t pursue the matter. In any case, he preferred to come at a crime scene with a mind uncluttered by other people’s views.

  He nodded goodbye to Guy de Pacy and stood for a moment before the great oak door trying to work out how on earth to operate the unfamiliar foreign latch.

  ‘Turn the central knob and lift. It’s heavy!’ de Pacy called back over his shoulder.

  Strangely, it was exactly the troubadour’s soulful reactions that Joe found himself experiencing as the door clunked shut behind him and he was left alone.

  The south-westerly sun angled through the stained glass windows, stencilling the paved floor with a pattern of rich colour. Vert, gules and azure—it was the heraldic names that sprang first into Joe’s mind in this medieval setting. Green, red and blue. The fairy-tale colours illuminated the only thing that moved in this dim and quiet place—dust motes. Disturbed by the opening and closing of the door, they were eddying in the rays and rising to the sculpted roof above.

  Joe observed their dance. A police scientist had told him once—and demonstrated with a high-powered Zeiss microscope in the CID laboratory—that ‘dust’ was not a simple substance. Perhaps Joe was even now watching flakes of human skin mingling in the air with minute shards of pounded stone. Perhaps if he made his way in further he would breathe in a blend of aggressor and victim? Good Lord! Joe shook away the fanciful thought. But he could see how a young man like Padraic might get carried away by this atmosphere.

  He breathed in uncertainly. He doubted that ‘thick’ was a suitable word to describe a scent but it was the first one that came to mind. Centuries of devotion and incense clotted the air and there was something else. A base note. Joe’s nostrils twitched in distaste. Rotting lilies. He glanced towards the altar but failed to spot the wilting blooms. But of course the flowers would not have been changed following the ban on entering. There were jugs of water and empty flower vases standing ready on a table. No flowers.

  He began to make his way towards the object of everyone’s concern. There it stood, built up with one long side abutting the north wall. The table-top tomb of Lord Hugues de Silmont, famous survivor of some crusade or other. Joe resolved to fill in the gaps of his knowledge. And, lying by his side, his even more famous wife, the Lady Aliénore.

  Rendered widower in his lifetime by the early death of his young wife, the old boy was once more, after a sleep of six hundred years, bereft of her charming presence. There he lay all alone, calmly oblivious of the raw gap in the matrimonial bed. All vestige of the sweet girl had been hacked and broken away. At least, not quite all. Sir Hugues’ feet rested on the body of a carved lion. A docile beast looking much more like a Pekinese dog, Joe thought. Still, rendering the heraldic beast small enough to slip under a man’s size tens was an impossible task for any sculptor, Joe allowed. His wife’s feet had rested on the shape of a sleek little greyhound. A whippet perhaps? Were they known in those days or had the sculptor scaled it down in size as he had the lion? The dog remained untouched. Its tail curled down cleverly over the tomb top and at the other end its nose was slightly tilted in adoration of its mistress. The poor creature now gazed with sad eyes at the empty extent of white marble on which she had reclined. So realistic was the carving, Joe almost expected to hear a throaty whine of distress. He patted the sleek haunches and murmured: ‘I know—it’s a bugger, old mate!’

  He looked around him to spot the remains. And there she was as Padraic had described her. A pile of largish pieces placed in a careful pyramid in the corner between the north and west walls. Joe walked over to take a closer look. Two small slippered feet poked out from the bottom of the heap and from the top there extended vertically one slender white arm, its clenched, beringed hand appearing to offer a pathetic gesture of defiance.

  He approached, eyes scanning the thick layer of dust on the floor. He grunted in disappointment to see two or three different shoe patterns, all so scuffed as to be indistinguishable from each other. He paused on the fringe of the disturbed area and scanned the remains.

  On a red silk kneeling cushion carefully placed centrally at the bottom of the small cairn was Aliénore’s head. The luxuriant gilded hair shorn by hammer blows, the nose smashed, the famous lips pounded into a gaping hole, none of her features remained intact. For a giddy moment Joe wrestled with a thought that had, he did believe, been seeded deliberately in him by the studied distribution of the remains. Celtic. The symbolism was connecting him with the head-hunting, head-worshipping Celts. But that was to do the Celts an injustice. The lopping off and triumphant display of an enemy’s head, if distasteful to a civilized man, was at least comprehensible. This vaunting, unreasoning destruction was beyond the realms of human understanding.

  Joe felt his limbs begin to twitch with disgust and rage. He could contemplate and draw evidence from the bodies of the recently dead and remain stolidly calm, so why this overreaction to a piece of old stone?

  He was being manipulated and had felt the pull on his strings, the pressure on his back, the opening of a path from the moment he arrived in this frightful place. The thought that pushed all others aside was that here, amongst a group of people who would all declare themselves dedicated to the creation of beauty, was concealed a soul who could take an obscene pleasure in destroying something more lovely than anything their hands were capable of producing. Surely such a soul would stand out like a block of black iron amongst these tinkling, golden, ephemeral but well-meaning daubers? A hornet amongst the butterflies?

  Unsettled, Joe breathed in cautiously and wondered. The stink here was strong. And he wasn’t detecting lilies. Had the steward not been so firmly in control of his stomach as the experienced Joe and vomited in some dark corner? No. The man had survived four years of war. He would have recognized rotting flesh as easily as Joe and not been physically perturbed by it. But perhaps the flesh, wherever it was, had not yet begun to rot at the time de Pacy visited?

  Joe followed his nose back to the tomb. His eye ran along the Latin engraving that encircled the three sides of the monument exposed to view. Hic iacet Hugus Silmontis, it read, under a swag of twining ivy, along the short west end facing the door, followed by armiger honoratus Provinciae along the long side. Four words completed the statement and acknowledged his wife: et Alienora, uxor sua was engraved across the short east end.

  Dangling from a projecting curl of ivy was the source of the stench.

  Chapter Eight

  Marseille, Monday lunchtime

  Commissaire Francis Jacquemin of the Paris Police Judiciaire, lean, attractive and gallantly moustached, was enjoying a rare moment of unbuttoned ease. Two buttons to be precise. It was as far as decorum would allow. He h
ad released his waistcoat to this extent under cover of the voluminous table napkin that defended his white shirt from the unctuous saffron-coloured sauce of the dish he was just finishing.

  He ran a finger round his starched collar to release a surge of body heat created by the spices and sighed. ‘Bliss! Utter bliss, my friend! Damned good idea to take ourselves off the hook and come out and celebrate. This is my first taste of bouillabaisse and—I’m sure you’re right—the best in Marseille. Nothing like this to be had in Paris!’ He took another sip of his chilled champagne.

  ‘All the same, I think you’re glad to be going back to the capital?’ his companion said carefully.

  The men grinned. Each was quite aware that the Parisian’s departure was welcome on both sides. Inspector Audibert had been accommodating and polite when presented with the unrequested assistance of the big noise from the Paris PJ. Many would have objected. It was a fact that the authority of the Paris Brigade Criminelle ended with their geographical boundaries and technically Jacquemin had no jurisdiction whatsoever down here in the south. Only the local force had the authority to slip on the handcuffs and haul the miscreants off to court.

  The criminal fraternity knew this too.

  In his clean-up of the Paris underworld, the Commissaire had torn through the gangs formed with the release of men after the war. Modelling themselves on the vicious ‘Bande à Bonnot’ they’d rampaged through the streets, robbing and murdering with a callousness and skill acquired in four years of killing.