Put on by Cunning (23 page)

Wexford had engaged rooms for one night – onthe advice of his travel agent in the Kingsbrook Precinct – at the Hotel de la Rose Blanche in the
place
. Its vestibule was cool and dim, stone-walled, stone-flagged, and with that indefinable atmosphere that is a combination of complacency and gleeful anticipation and which signifies that the food isgoing to be good. The chef’s in his kitchen, all’s right with the world.

Kenneth Ames had known nothing more about Mademoiselle Lerèmy than her name, her addressand her relationship to Camargue. It was also known that her parents were dead and she herself unmarried. Recalling the photograph of the two little girls shown him by Mrs Mountnessing, Wexford concluded she must be near the age of Camargue’s daughter. He looked her up in the phone book, dialed the number apprehensively because of his scanty French, but got no reply.

They lunched off seafood, bread that was nearly all crisp crust, and a bottle of Monbazillac. Wexford said in an abstracted sort of voice that he felt homesick already, the hors d’oeuvres reminded him of Mr Haq and antipasto Ankole. He got no reply when he attempted once more to phone Thérèse Lerèmy, so there seemed nothing for it but to explore the town.

It was too hot to climb the belfry. On 24 July Saint-Jean-de-l’Éclaircie was probably at its hottest. The square was deserted, the narrow steep alleys that threaded the perimeter just inside the walls held only the stray tourist, and the morning market which had filled the Place do la Croix had packed up and gone. They went into the cathedral of St Jean Baptiste, dark, cool, baroque. A nun was walking in the aisle, eyes cast down, and an old man knelt at prayer. They looked with proper awe at Fragonard’s ‘Les Pains et Les Poissons’, a large hazy canvas of an elegant Christ and an adoring multitude, andthen they returned to the bright white sunshine and hard black shadows of the
place
.

‘I suppose she’s out at work,’ said Wexford. ‘A single woman would be bound to work. It looks as if we’ll have to hang things out a few hours.’

‘It’s no hardship,’ said Burden. ‘I promised Jenny I wouldn’t miss the museum.’

Wexford shrugged. ‘O.K.’

The collection was housed in a sienna-red stucco building with Foundation Yeuse lettered on a black marble plaque. Wexford had expected it to be deserted inside but in fact they met other tourists in the rooms and on the winding marble staircase. As well as the Sevres, Burden had been instructed to look at some ancient jewellery discovered in the Condamine, and Wexford, hearing English spoken, asked for directions from the woman who had been speaking correctly but haltingly to an American visitor. She seemed to be a curator, for she wore on one of the lapels of her dark red, near-uniform dress an oval badge inscribed Fondation Yeuse. He forced himself not to stare – and then wondered how many thousands before himhad forced themselves not to stare. The lower part of her face was pitted densely and deeply with the scars of what looked like smallpox but was almost certainly acne. In her careful stumbling English she instructed him where to find the jewellery. He and Burden went upstairs again where the American woman had arrived before them. The sun penetrating drawn Venetian blinds shone on her flawless ivory skin. She had hands like Natalie Arno’s, long and slender, display stands for rings as heavy and roughly made as those on the linen under the glass.

‘We may as well get on up there,’ said Wexfordafter they had bought a
flacon
of Grasse perfume for Dora and a glazed stoneware jar in a Picasso design for Jenny. ‘Get on up there and have a look at the place.’

The two local taxis, which were to be found between the fountain and the hotel de la Rose Blanche, were not much in demand at this hour. Their driver spoke no English but as soon as Wexford mentioned the Maison du Cirque he understood and nodded assent.

On the north-eastern side of the town, outside the walls, was an estate of depressing pale grey flats and brown wooden houses with scarlet switchback roofs. It was as bad as home. Worse? ventured Burden. But the estate was soon left behind and the road ran through lemon groves. The driver persisted in talking to them in fast, fluent, incomprehensible French. Wexford managed to pick out two facts from all this, one that Saint-Jean-de-l’Éclaircie held a lemon festival each February, and the other that on the far side of the hill was the amphitheatre.

They came upon the house standing alone at a bend in the road. It was flat-fronted, unprepossessing but undoubtedly large. At every window were wooden shutters from which most of the paint had flaked away. Big gardens, neglected now, stretched distantly towards olive and citrus groves, separated from them by crumbling stone walls.

‘Mariana in the moated grange,’ said Wexford. ‘We may as well go to the circus while we’re waiting for her.’

The driver took them back. The great circular plain which was the base of the amphitheatre was strangely green as if watered by a hidden spring. The tiers of seating, still defined, still unmistakable, rose in their parallel arcs to the hillside, the pines, the crystalline blue of the sky. Wexford sat down where some prefect or consul might once have sat.

‘I hope we’re in time,’ he said. ‘I hope we can get to her before any real harm has been done. The woman has been dead nine days. He’s been here, say, eight . . .’

‘If he’s here. The idea of him being here is all based on your ESP. We don’t know if he’s here and, come to that, we don’t know who he is or what he looks like or what name he’ll be using.’

‘It’s not as bad as that,’ said Wexford. ‘He would naturally come here. This place, that girl, would draw him like magnets. He won’t want to lose the money now, Mike.’

‘No, not after plotting for years to get it. How long d’you reckon we’re going to be here?’

Wexford shrugged. The air was scented with the herbs that grew on the hillsides, sage and thyme and rosemary and bay, and the sun was still very warm. ‘However long it may be,’ he said enigmatically, ‘to me it would be too short.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Martin should have seen Williams by now and done a spot of checking up for me at Guy’s Hospital.’

‘Guy’s Hospital?’

‘In the course of this case we haven’t remembered as often as we should that Natalie Arno went into hospital a little while before Camargue died. She had a biopsy.’

‘Yes, what
is
that?’

‘It means to look at living tissue. It usually describes the kind of examination that is done to determine whether certain cells are cancerous or not.’

Once this subject would have been a highly emotive one for Burden, an area to be avoided by all his sensitive acquaintances. His first wife had died of cancer. But time and his second marriage had changed things. He responded not with pain butonly with an edge of embarrassment to his voice.

‘But she didn’t have cancer.’

‘Oh, no.’

He sat down in the tier below Wexford. ‘I’d like to tell you what I think happened, see if we agree.’ On the grass beside him the shadow of Wexford’s head nodded. ‘Well, then. Tessa Lanchester went on holiday to that place in California, Santa – what was it?’

‘Santa Xavierita.’

‘And while she was there she met a man who played the guitar or whatever in a restaurant in the local town. He was living in America illegally and was very likely up to a good many other illegal activities as well. He was a con man. He had already met Natalie Arno and found out from her who her father was and what her expectations were. He introduced Tessa to Natalie and the two women became friends.

‘He persuaded Tessa not to go back home to Boston but to remain longer in Santa Xavierita learning all she could about Natalie’s life and past. Then he took Natalie out swimming by night and drowned her and that same night left with Tessa for Los Angeles in Natalie’s car with Natalie’s luggage and the key to Natalie’s house. From then on Tessa became Natalie. The changes Natalie’s body had undergone after five days in the sea made a true identification impossible and, since Tessa was missing, the corpse was identified as that of Tessa.

‘Tessa and her accomplice then set about their plan to inherit Camargue’s property, though this was somewhat frustrated by Ilbert’s intervening and the subsequent deportation. Tessa tried in vain to sell Natalie’s house. I think at this time she rather cooled off the plan. Otherwise I don’t know how to account for a delay of more than three years between making the plan and putting it into practice. I think she cooled off. She settled into her new identity, made new friends and, as we know, had two further love affairs. Then one of these lovers, Ivan Zoffany, wrote from London in the autumn of 1979 to say he had heard from his sister-in-law who lived near Wellridge that Camargue was about to re-marry. That alerted her and fetched her to England. There she was once more able to join forces with the man who had first put her up to the idea. They had the support and help of Zoffany and his wife. How am I doing so far?’

Wexford raised his eyebrows. ‘How did they get Williams and Mavis Rolland into this? Bribery?’

‘Of course. It would have to be a heavy bribe. Williams’s professional integrity presumably has a high price. I daresay Mrs Woodhouse could be bought cheaply enough.’

‘I never took you for a snob before, Mike.’

‘It’s not snobbery,’ said Burden hotly. ‘It’s simply that the poorer you are the more easily you’re tempted. Shall I go on?’

The shadow nodded.

‘They hesitated a while before the confrontation. Tessa was naturally nervous about this very important encounter. Also she’d been ill and had to have hospital treatment. When she finally went down to Sterries she blundered, not in having failed to do her homework – she knew every fact aboutthe Camargue household she could be expected to, she knew them like she knew her own family in Boston – but over the pronunciation of an Italian name. Spanish she knew – many Americans do – French she knew, but it never occurred to her she would have to pronounce Italian.

‘The rest we know. Camargue told her she would be cut out of his will, so on the following Sunday she made a sound alibi for herself by going to a party with Jane Zoffany.
He
went down to Sterries, waited for Camargue in the garden and drowned him in the lake.’

Wexford said nothing.

‘Well?’

As befitted a person of authority sitting in the gallery of an amphitheatre, Wexford turned down his thumbs. ‘The last bit’s more or less right, the drowning bit.’ He got up. ‘Shall we go?’

Burden was still muttering that it had to be that way, that all else was impossible, when they arrived back at the Maison du Cirque. Ahead of them a bright green Citroen 2 CV had just turned into the drive.

The woman who got out of it, who came inquiringly towards them, was the curator of the Fondation Yeuse.

The sun shone cruelly on that pitted skin. She had done her best to hide it with heavy make-up, but there would never be any hiding it. And now as She approached these two strangers she put onehand up, half covering a cheek. Close to, she had a look of Camargue, all the less attractive traits of the Camargue physiognomy were in her face, too-high forehead, too-long nose, too-fleshy mouth, and added to them that acne-scarred skin. She was sallow and her hair was very dark. But she was one of those plain people whose smiles transform them. She smiled uncertainly at them, and the change of expression made her look kind and sweet-tempered.

Wexford introduced them. He explained that he had seen her earlier that day. Her surprise at being called upon by two English policemen seemed unfeigned. She was astonished but not apparently nervous.

‘This is some matter concerning the
musée
– the museum?’ she asked in her heavily accented English.

‘No, mademoiselle,’ said Wexford, ‘I must confess I’d never heard of the Fondation Yeuse till this morning. You’ve worked there long?’

‘Since I leave the university – that is, eighteenyears. M. Raoul Yeuse, the Paris art dealer, he is, was, the brother of my father’s sister. He has founded the museum, you understand? Excuse me, monsieur, Ifear my English is very bad.’

‘It is we who should apologize for having no French. May we go into the house, Mademoiselle Lerèmy? I have something to tell you.’

Did she know already? The announcement of the discovery of the body at Dorset’s would have scarcely appeared in the French newspapers until three days ago. And when it appeared would it have merited more than a paragraph on an inside page? Amurder, in England, of an obscure woman? The dark eyes of Camargue’s niece looked merely innocent and inquiring. She led them into a large high-ceilinged room and opened latticed glass doors on to a terrace. From the back of the Maison du Cirque you could see the green rim of the amphitheatre and smell the scented hillsides. But the house itself was shabby and neglected and far too big. It had been built for a family and that family’s servants in days when perhaps money came easily and went a long way.

Now that they were indoors and seated she had become rather pale. ‘This is not bad news, I hope, monsieur?’ She looked from one to the other of them with a rising anxiety that Wexford thought he understood. He let Burden answer her.

‘Serious news,’ said Burden. ‘But not personally distressing to you, Miss Lerèmy. You hardly knew your cousin Natalie Camargue, did you?’

She shook her head. ‘She was married. I have not heard her husband’s name. When last I am seeing her she is sixteen, I seventeen. It is many years . . .’

‘I’m afraid she’s dead. To put it bluntly, she was murdered and so was your uncle. We’re here toinvestigate these crimes. It seems the same person killed them both. For gain. For money.’

Both hands went up to her cheeks. She recoiled a little.

‘But this is terrible!’

Wexford had decided not to tell her of the goodfortune this terrible news would bring her. Kenneth Ames could do that. If what he thought was true she would be in need of consolation. He must now broach the subject of this belief of his. Strange that this time he could be so near hoping he was wrong . . .