Life: A User's Manual (18 page)

For a few weeks the public paid enthusiastic attention to this mystery, which was taken up by dozens of amateur Maigrets and journalists scraping around for a story. The double crime was turned into a far-flung twist of the Bazooka affair, with some commentators claiming Breidel had been one of Kovacs’s strong-arm men; the story was mixed up with the FLN by some, with the
Main Rouge
anarchists by others, and also with the right-wing Rexists, and even with an obscure story of pretenders to the throne of France, since amongst Elizabeth’s alleged ancestors there was a certain Sosthène de Beaumont who was none other than a legitimatised bastard son of the Duc de Berry. Then, as the investigation began to peter out, the police and the gossip-columnists, the armchair Holmeses and the inquisitive onlookers began to tire of the business. Without a shred of plausible evidence, the coroner’s verdict was that the crime had been “committed by a tramp or lunatic, such as are still too often to be found in suburban areas and on the outskirts of our villages”.

Outraged by a judgement which told her nothing of what she felt she had a right to know about her daughter’s fate, Madame de Beaumont asked her lawyer, Léon Salini, whose liking for criminal cases was well known to her, to reopen the investigation.

For many months Véra de Beaumont had almost no news at all from Salini. From time to time she received laconic postcards informing her that he had not given up hope and was pursuing his enquiries in Hamburg, Brussels, Marseilles, Venice, etc. Finally on 7 May 1960 Salini came back to see her: “Everyone,” he said, “from the police on, has grasped that the Breidels were murdered for something they did or for something that happened in the past. But up to now no one has been able to uncover any clue at all which would direct their enquiries in one direction rather than another. The life of the Breidel couple seems to have been absolutely uneventful, in spite of the itching feet they seem to have had in the first year of their marriage. They met in June 1957 at Bagnols-sur-Cèze and married six weeks later; he was working at Marcoule, she had recently been hired as a waitress in the restaurant where he took his evening meal. His life as a bachelor also left no gaps for mysteries. At Arlon, the small town he had taken his leave from four years earlier, he was thought of as a good workman, a foreman in the making, potentially good enough to set up his own small business; to find work he had to translate himself to Germany, to the Saar actually, and went to Neuweiler, a small village near Saarbrücken; then he went to Château d’Oex in Switzerland, and from there to Marcoule, where he was working on a villa being built for one of the engineers at the reactor site. In none of these places did anything sufficiently serious happen to him that might motivate his murder five years later. Apparently the only incident he was involved in was a brawl with soldiers after a dance.

“Things are completely different for Elizabeth. From the moment she left you in 1946 until her arrival at Bagnols-sur-Cèze in 1957, her life is a blank, a complete unknown blank, except for the fact that she introduced herself to the restaurant manageress under the name of Elizabeth Ledinant. The official investigation established those facts anyway, and the police tried desperately to find out what Elizabeth might have been up to over those eleven years. They hunted through hundreds and hundreds of files. But they found nothing.

“So I reopened the investigation with nothing to go on. My working hypothesis, or more precisely my initial scenario, was this: many years before her marriage Elizabeth had committed some heinous fault and was forced to flee and hide. The fact that she finally got married shows that she thought she was at last completely free of the man or woman whose vengeance she had had reason to fear. But two years later, nonetheless, that vengeance strikes her down.

“Overall my reasoning was coherent; but the gaps had to be filled in. I conjectured that if the problem were to be soluble, then the heinous fault must have left at least one extant trace, and I decided to comb systematically all the daily newspapers from 1946 to 1957. It’s a tiresome task, but in no sense an impossible one. I hired five students to work at the Bibliothèque Nationale listing all the articles and fillers dealing – explicitly or implicitly – with a woman between fifteen and thirty years of age. For every news story that fitted this criterion, I conducted further investigations. Thus I examined several hundred cases corresponding to stage one of my scenario; for example, a certain Emile D., driving a royal-blue Mercedes with a young blonde in the passenger seat, ran over and killed an Australian camper trying to hitch a lift between Parentis and Mimizan; or again, during a brawl in a Montpellier bar, a prostitute using the name of Véra slashed the face of a man called Lucien Campen, alias Monsieur Lulu, with broken bottle-glass; that story appealed to me, especially because of the name Véra, which would have illuminated your daughter’s personality in a quite disturbing way. But unfortunately for me, Monsieur Lulu turned out to be in prison, and Véra alive and well and running a haberdashery at Palinsac. As for the first story, that one also came up short: Emile D. had been arrested, convicted, and given a heavy fine and a three months’ suspended prison sentence; the identity of his travelling companion had been kept out of the papers in order to avoid a scandal, as she was the lawful wife of a cabinet minister in office at the time.

“None of the cases I had to examine withstood these complementary checks. I was on the verge of giving up the whole affair when one of the students I had hired pointed out that the event we were hunting for could well have happened abroad! The prospect of having to go through the lost pets of the whole planet did not exactly fill us with joy, but we buckled down to it nonetheless. If your daughter had fled to the States I think I would have lost hope sooner, but this time luck was with us: in the Exeter
Express and Echo
of Monday the fourteenth of June 1953 we read this heartbreaking story: Ewa Ericsson, the wife of a Swedish diplomat posted to London, was spending her holiday with her five-year-old son in a villa she had rented for a month at Sticklehaven, in Devon. Her husband, Sven Ericsson, had had to stay behind in London for the Coronation celebrations and was due to join her on Sunday the thirteenth of June, after attending the great reception given on the evening of the twelfth by the royal couple for more than two thousand guests. Ewa’s health was not strong, and before leaving London she had taken on an au pair of French origin whose task was to look after the child, since a local charlady would take care of the cleaning and do the cooking. When Sven Ericsson arrived on the Sunday evening, he saw a horrible sight: his son, bloated like a kipper, was floating in the bath, and Ewa was lying on the bathroom tiles with her wrists slashed; they had died at least forty-eight hours earlier, that is to say on the Friday evening. The facts were accounted for in this way: told to bath the little boy whilst Ewa took a rest, the au pair girl, intentionally or unintentionally, allows him to drown. Realising the inexorable consequences of her act, she decides to run away immediately. A little later Ewa discovers her child’s corpse and, mad with grief, not knowing how to live on without her son, takes her own life. The absence of the charlady, who was only due to come again on the Monday morning, prevented these events being discovered before Sven Ericsson’s arrival and also gave the au pair girl forty-eight hours’ head start.

“Sven Ericsson had only ever seen the girl for a few minutes. Ewa had put small ads in various places: the YWCA, the Danish Cultural Centre, the Lycée français de Londres, the Goethe-Institut, the Swiss Centre, the Dante Alighieri Foundation, American Express, etc., and had taken on the first girl to turn up, a young Frenchwoman of about twenty, a student with nursing qualifications, tall, blonde, with pale eyes. She was called Véronique Lambert; her passport had been stolen a month before, but she showed Madame Ericsson a copy of the declaration of loss made out at the French consulate. The charlady’s statement contained little further detail; she clearly didn’t like the way the French girl dressed and behaved, and had spoken as little as possible to her, but she was nonetheless able to state that she had a beauty spot beneath her right eyelid, that there was a picture of a Chinese junk on her perfume bottle, and that she had a slight stutter. This description was circulated throughout Britain and France to no avail.

“I didn’t find it difficult,” Salini continued, “to establish with certainty that Véronique Lambert was indeed Elizabeth de Beaumont and that her murderer was Sven Ericsson, because when I went to Sticklehaven a fortnight ago to try to find the charlady so as to show her a photograph of your daughter, the first thing I learnt was that Sven Ericsson –
who, ever since the tragedy, had carried on renting the villa year in, year out, without ever using it
– had returned there and taken his own life, on the seventeenth of September preceding, only three days after the double murder at Chaumont-Porcien. But if this suicide on the very site of the first tragedy proved the identity of Elizabeth’s murderer beyond doubt, the main point still remained unclear: how had the Swedish diplomat succeeded in tracking down the girl who had caused the deaths of his son and his wife six years before? I was vaguely hoping that he’d left a letter explaining his act, but the police were adamant: there was no letter near the corpse, nor anywhere else.

“But my hunch had been correct: when I finally got to question Mrs Weeds, the charlady, I asked her if she had ever heard of an Elizabeth de Beaumont who had been murdered at Chaumont-Porcien. She rose and fetched a letter which she handed to me.

“‘Mr Ericsson,’ she said, ‘told me that if anyone came one day to speak to me about the French girl and her dying in the Ardennes, I should give him this letter.’

“‘And if hadn’t come?’

“‘I was to wait, and after six years, to send it to the address marked on it.’

“Here is the letter,” Salini continued. “It was intended for you. Your name and address are on the envelope.”

Motionless, stiff, and silent, Véra de Beaumont took the pages from Salini’s hand, unfolded them, and began to read:

Exeter, the sixteenth of September 1959.

Madam,

One day, sooner or later, whether you find it by looking for it or having it looked for, or whether it reaches you by mail in six years’ time – that’s how long it has taken me to slake my vengeance – you will have this letter in your hands and you will finally know why and how I killed your daughter.

A little over six years ago, your daughter, who used the name of Véronique Lambert, was engaged as an au pair by my wife, who was not very well and wanted someone to take care of our son Erik who had just turned five. On Friday 11 June 1953, for reasons I still do not understand, Véronique, either on purpose or by accident, allowed our son to drown. Incapable of assuming her own responsibility for this criminal act, she fled, probably within the following sixty minutes. A little later my wife discovered the corpse of our son, became insane, and slit her wrists with a pair of scissors. I was in London at that moment, and I did not see them until the Sunday evening. I swore then to devote my life, my fortune, and my mind to taking my revenge.

I had only seen your daughter for a few seconds when she arrived at Paddington to catch the train with my wife and our son, and when I learnt that the name she was using was fake, I despaired of ever tracking her down.

During the debilitating sleepless nights which began to afflict me then and have never since left me in peace, I recalled two anodine details that my wife had told me when mentioning the interview she had had with your daughter before giving her the job: my wife, learning that the girl was French, spoke of Arles and Avignon, where we had stayed several times, and your daughter said she had been brought up in that area; and when my wife complimented her on her English, she said she had already spent two years in Britain and was studying archaeology.

Mrs Weeds, the charlady who worked in the house my wife had rented, and who will be the guardian of this last letter until it reaches your hands, was of even greater help to me: it was she who told me your daughter had a beauty spot beneath her right eyelid, that she used a perfume called “Sampang”, and that she stuttered. It was with her, too, that I searched the villa from top to bottom looking for any clues that the false Véronique Lambert might have left. To my discomfiture, she had not stolen any jewels or things, but only the kitchen purse my wife had got ready for Mrs Weeds to do the shopping, containing three pounds eleven shillings and sevenpence. On the other hand she hadn’t been able to take all her own things and she had left, in particular, the linen of hers that was in the wash that week: various cheap underclothes, two handkerchiefs, a rather loud print neckerchief, and, especially, a white blouse embroidered with the initials E. B. The blouse could have been borrowed or stolen but I hung on to those initials as a possible clue; I also found various objects of hers scattered around the house – in particular, in the lounge she had not dared go into before fleeing in case she woke my wife, who was sleeping in the room next to it, the first volume of Henri Troyat’s serial novel
Les Semailles et les Moissons
, which had been published a few months earlier in France. The label inside revealed that this copy came from Rolandi’s Bookshop, 20 Berners Street, a bookshop specialising in lending out foreign books.

I took the book back to Rolandi’s. There I learnt that Véronique Lambert had a borrower’s ticket: she was a student at the Institute of Archaeology, a branch of the British Museum, and lived in a Bed-and-Breakfast at 79 Keppel Street, just behind the Museum.

Breaking into her room was a waste of time: she had left when my wife took her on as an au pair. Neither the landlady nor the lodgers could tell me anything. I had more luck at the Institute of Archaeology: not only was there a photograph in her registration file, but I was able to meet some of her classmates, and amongst them there was a boy with whom she’d gone out a couple of times; he provided me with a key piece of information: a few months earlier, he had invited her to see
Dido and Aeneas
at Covent Garden. “I hate opera,” she had told him, and added, “It’s not surprising, my mother was a singer!”