Ripley Under Ground (18 page)

Then it was the cellar. Tom showed it with the same ease, standing right on the stain, and shining his torch into the corners, though the light was good. Tom was a bit afraid Murchinson might have bled onto the cement floor behind the wine cask. Tom had not looked at that spot carefully enough. But if there was any blood, the officers did not see it, and gave the floor only a glance. This did not mean they would not make a more thorough search tomorrow, Tom thought.

They said they would be back at eight in the morning, if that was not too early for Tom. Tom told them that eight would be quite all right.

“Sorry,” Tom said to Heloise and Bernard, when he had closed the front door. Tom had the feeling Heloise and Bernard had been sitting in silence with their coffee the whole time.

“Why do they want to search the house?” Heloise demanded.

“Because this so-and-so American is still missing,” Tom said. “M. Murchison.”

Heloise stood up. “Can I speak to you upstairs, Tome?”

Tom excused himself to Bernard and went with her.

Heloise went into her bedroom. “If you don’t put this
fou
out, I am leaving the house tonight!”

That was a dilemma. He wanted Heloise to stay, and yet if she did, Tom knew he would get nowhere with Bernard. And like Bernard, he couldn’t think with Heloise’s indignant eyes glaring at him. “I’ll try again to get him out,” Tom said. He kissed Heloise on the neck. At least she permitted this.

Tom went downstairs. “Bernard—Heloise is upset. Would you mind going back to Paris tonight? I could drive you to— Why not Fontainebleau? A couple of good hotels there. If you want to talk to me, I could come tomorrow to Fontainebleau—”

“No.”

Tom sighed. “Then she’ll take off tonight. I’ll go and tell her.” Tom went back up the stairs and told Heloise.

“What is this, another Dickie Granelafe? You can’t tell him to get out of your house?”

“I never— Dickie wasn’t in
my
house.” Tom stopped, wordless. Heloise looked angry enough to oust Bernard herself, but she wouldn’t be able to, Tom thought, because Bernard’s adamance was beyond convention or etiquette.

She dragged a small leather suitcase down from the top of a closet and began to pack. Useless to say he felt responsible for Bernard, Tom supposed. Heloise would wonder why.

“Heloise, darling, I am sorry. Are you taking the car or do you want me to drive you to the station?”

“I take the Alfa to Chantilly. By the way, there is nothing wrong with the telephone. I just tried it in your room.”

“Maybe the word from the
flics
got it fixed.”

“I think maybe they lied. They wanted to surprise us.” She paused in the act of putting a shirt into her suitcase. “What have you done, Tome? Did you do something to this Murchison?”

“No!” Tom said, startled.

“You know, my father is not going to support any more nonsense, any more scandal.”

She referred to the Greenleaf business. Tom had cleared his name there, to be sure, but there were always suspicions. The Latins made wild jokes, and the jokes in a curious way became Latin truths. Tom might have killed Dickie. And everyone knew that he derived some money from Dickie’s death, much as Tom had tried to hide this. Heloise knew he had an income from Dickie, and so did Heloise’s father, whose own hands were not immaculate in his business activities, but Tom’s had, perhaps, blood on them.
Non olet pecunia, sed sanguis . . .

“There won’t be any more scandal,” Tom said. “If you only knew, I’m trying my best to avoid scandal. That’s my objective.”

She closed her suitcase. “I never know what you are doing.”

Tom took the suitcase. Then he set it down and they embraced. “I would like to be with you tonight.”

Heloise would have liked to be with him, too, and she did not have to say it in words. This was the other side of her
fous-moi-le-camp
! Now she was leaving. Frenchwomen had to leave a room, a house, or ask someone else to change his room, or go somewhere, and the more inconvenient it was for the other person, the better they liked it, but it was still less inconvenient than their screaming. Tom called it “The Law of French Displacement.”

“Did you telephone your family?” Tom asked.

“If they are not there, the servants are there.”

It would take her nearly two hours to drive. “Will you ring me when you get there?”

“Au revoir, Bernard!” Heloise shouted from the front door. Then to Tom, who walked out with her, “
Non!
”

Tom watched bitterly as the red lights of the Alfa Romeo turned left at the gates and disappeared.

Bernard sat smoking a cigarette. From the kitchen came the faint clatter of the garbage pail’s lid. Tom took his torch from the hall table, and went into the spare loo. He went down to the cellar and looked behind the wine cask where Murchison had been. Very luckily there was no bloodstain there. Tom went back upstairs.

“You know, Bernard, you’re welcome here tonight, but tomorrow morning the police arrive to look the house over more thoroughly.” He suddenly thought, the woods, too. “They might ask you some questions. It’ll only be annoying to you. Do you want to leave before they arrive—at eight?”

“Possibly, possibly.”

It was nearly 10 p.m. Mme. Annette came in to ask if they would like more coffee. Tom and Bernard declined.

“Mme. Heloise has gone out?” Mme. Annette asked.

“She decided to go and see her parents,” said Tom.

“At this hour! Ah, Mme. Heloise!” She collected the coffee things.

Tom sensed that she disliked Bernard, or mistrusted him, in the same way Heloise did. It was regrettable, Tom thought, that Bernard’s character did not come through, that it had such an off-putting surface for most people. Tom realized that neither Heloise nor Mme. Annette could like him, because they knew nothing about him really, nothing about his devotion to Derwatt—which they would probably consider “putting Derwatt to use.” Above all, neither Heloise nor Mme. Annette, with their quite different backgrounds, would ever understand Bernard Tufts’s progress from rather working-class origin (according to Jeff and Ed) to what might be called the edge of greatness by virtue of his talent—though he signed his work with another name. Bernard did not even care about the money side of it—which would again be incomprehensible to Mme. Annette and Heloise. Mme. Annette left the room rather quickly, and in what Tom felt was as much of a huff as she dared.

“There’s something I’d like to tell you,” Bernard said. “The night after Derwatt died— We all heard about his death twenty-four hours after it happened in Greece— I—I had a vision of Derwatt standing in my bedroom. There was moonlight coming through the window. I’d broken a date with Cynthia, I remember, because I wanted to be alone. I could see Derwatt there and feel his presence. He was even smiling. He said, ‘Don’t be alarmed, Bernard, I’m not badly off. I’m feeling no pain.’ Can you imagine Derwatt saying something as predictable as that? Yet I heard him.”

Bernard had heard his inner ear. Tom listened respectfully.

“I sat up in bed watching him for maybe a minute. Derwatt sort of drifted around my room, the room where I paint sometimes—and sleep.”

Bernard meant painted Tufts, not Derwatts.

Bernard continued, “He said, ‘Carry on, Bernard, I’m not sorry.’ By ‘sorry,’ I gathered he meant he wasn’t sorry he’d killed himself. He meant, just go on living. That is—” Bernard looked at Tom for the first time since he had begun speaking “—for as long as it’s supposed to last. It’s hardly something one has control over, is it? Destiny does it for you.”

Tom hesitated. “Derwatt had a sense of humor. Jeff says he might’ve appreciated your forging his work with such success.” Thank God, this went down not badly.

“To a point. Yes, the forging might have been a professional joke. Derwatt wouldn’t have liked the business side of it. Money might have made him commit suicide as easily as being broke.”

Tom felt Bernard’s thoughts starting to turn again, in a disorganized and hostile way, hostile to him. Should he make a move to call it a night? Or would Bernard take that as an insult? “The blasted
flics
are arriving so early, I think I’ll turn in.”

Bernard leaned forward. “You didn’t understand what I meant the other day when I said I’d failed. With that detective from London, when I was trying to explain Derwatt to him.”

“Because you didn’t fail. Look, Chris knew what you meant. Webster said it was very moving, I remember.”

“Webster was still considering the possibility of forgery, of Derwatt’s permitting it. I couldn’t even convey Derwatt’s character. I did my best and I failed.”

Tom said, trying desperately to get Bernard on the rails again, “Webster is looking for Murchison. That’s his assignment. Not Derwatt at all. I’m going upstairs.”

Tom went to his room and put on pajamas. He opened the window a crack at the top, and got into bed—which Mme. Annette had not turned down this evening—but he felt shaky and had an impulse to lock his door. Was that silly? Was it sensible? It seemed cowardly. He did not lock the door. He was midway in a volume of Trevelyan’s
English Social History
, and started to pick it up, then took his
Harrap’s Dictionary
instead.
To forge.
Old French
forge
, a workshop.
Faber
, a workman.
Forge
in French had only to do with a workshop for metal. The French for forgery was
falsification
or
contrefaire
. Tom already knew this. He closed the book.

He lay for an hour without falling asleep. Every few moments, the blood sang in his ears in a crescendo, loud enough to startle him, and he kept having sensations of falling from a height.

By the radium hands of his wristwatch, Tom saw that it was 12:30 a.m. Should he ring Heloise? He wanted to ring her, but he did not want to incur further disapproval of Papa by ringing at a late hour. Damn other people.

Then Tom was aware of being flung over by the shoulders, and of hands around his throat. Tom threshed his legs free of the covers. He was pulling ineffectively at Bernard’s arms to get his hands from his throat, and at last Tom got his foot against Bernard’s body and pushed. The hands left his throat. Bernard dropped with a thud to the floor, gasping. Tom turned on his lamp, nearly knocked it over, and did knock over a glass of water which spilt on the blue oriental rug.

Bernard was getting his breath back painfully.

So was Tom, in a sense.

“My God, Bernard,” Tom said.

Bernard didn’t reply, or couldn’t. He sat on the floor, propped on one arm, in the position of The Dying Gaul. Was he going to attack again as soon as he recovered his strength, Tom wondered? Tom stood up from his bed, and lit a Gauloise.

“Really, Bernard, what a stupid thing to do!” Tom burst out laughing, and coughed on his smoke. “You wouldn’t have had a chance! Even trying to escape! Mme. Annette knows you’re here, so do the police.” Tom watched as Bernard got to his feet. It was not often, Tom thought, that a near-victim could smoke a cigarette and walk around barefoot, smiling at someone who had just tried to kill him. “You shouldn’t do that again.” Tom knew his words were absurd. Bernard didn’t care what happened to himself. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“Yes,” Bernard said. “I detest you—because all this is entirely your fault. I should never have agreed to it—true. But you’re the origin.”

Tom knew. He was a mystic origin, a font of evil. “We’re all trying to wind the thing up, not continue it.”

“And I am finished. Cynthia—”

Tom puffed on his cigarette. “You said you felt like Derwatt sometimes when you painted. Think what you’ve done for his name! Because he wasn’t famous at all when he died.”

“It has been corrupted,” Bernard said like the voice of doom or judgment or hell itself. He went to the door and went out, with more of a look of purpose than usual.

Where was he going, Tom wondered? Bernard was still dressed, though it was after 3 a.m. Was he going to wander out in the night? Or go downstairs and set the house on fire?

Tom turned the key in his door. If Bernard came back, he’d have to bang to get in, and of course Tom would let him in, but it was only fair to have a bit of warning.

Bernard would be no asset tomorrow morning with the police.

16

A
t 9:15 a.m., Saturday October 26th, Tom stood at his French windows looking out toward the woods, where the police had begun to dig up Murchison’s old grave. Behind Tom, Bernard paced the living-room floor quietly and restlessly. And in his hand, Tom held a formal letter from Jeffrey Constant asking on behalf of the Buckmaster Gallery if he knew the whereabouts of Thomas Murchison, because they didn’t.

Three police agents had arrived that morning, two new to Tom, and the other the Commissaire Delaunay, who Tom thought was not going to do any digging. “Do you know what is the recently dug place in the woods?” they had asked. Tom said he knew nothing about it. The woods did not belong to him. The gendarme had gone across the lawn to speak to his confrères. They had been over the house again.

Tom also had a letter from Chris Greenleaf which he had not opened.

The police had now been digging for perhaps ten minutes.

Tom read Jeff’s letter more carefully. Jeff had written it either with an idea that Tom’s post was being looked at, or Jeff was in a mood to be droll, but Tom believed the first idea.

The Buckmaster Gallery

Bond Street W1

Oct. 24, 19——

Thomas P. Ripley, Esq.

Belle Ombre

Villeperce 77

Dear Mr. Ripley,

We have been informed that Detective-Inspector Webster visited you recently with regard to Mr. Thomas Murchison, who accompanied you last Wednesday to France. This is to inform you that we have heard nothing from Mr. Murchison since Thursday 15th inst. when he came to our gallery.

We know that Mr. Murchison wished to see Derwatt before he (Mr. Murchison) returned to the United States. At the moment we do not know where Derwatt is in England, but we expect he will get in touch with us before returning to Mexico. It may be that Derwatt has arranged a meeting with Mr. Murchison of which we know nothing. [A ghostly tea, perhaps, Tom thought.]

We as well as the police are concerned about the disappearance of the painting by Derwatt called “The Clock.”

Please ring us and reverse the charges if you have information.

Yours sincerely,

Jeffrey Constant

Tom turned around, in arrogant good spirits now—at least for the moment, and at any rate Bernard’s sullenness bored him. Tom wanted to say, “Listen, old crud, clot, or cock, what the hell are you doing hanging around here anyway?” But Tom knew what Bernard was doing, waiting to have another go at him. So Tom only held his breath for a moment, smiling at Bernard, who wasn’t even looking at him, and Tom listened to blue tits twittering over some suet that Mme. Annette had hung from a tree, heard Mme. Annette’s transistor faintly from the kitchen, and he heard also the clink of a police agent’s spade, distant in the woods.

Tom said with the deadpan coolness of Jeff’s letter: “Well, they’re not going to find any signs of Murchison out there.”

“Let them drag the river,” Bernard said.

“Are you going to
tell
them to do that?”

“No.”

“Anyway, what river? I can’t even remember which it was.” Tom was sure Bernard couldn’t.

Tom was waiting for the police to return from the woods, and to say they hadn’t found anything. Or maybe they would not bother saying that, maybe they would say nothing. Or they might go farther into the woods, searching. It might be an all-day affair. It was not a bad way, on a nice day, for the police to kill time. Lunch in the village or some village nearby, or more likely their own homes in the district, then a return to the woods.

Tom opened Chris’s letter.

Oct. 24, 19——

Dear Tom,

Thank you once more for the elegant days I spent with you. They are quite a contrast to my squalid abode here, but I sort of like it here. Last evening I had an adventure. I met a girl called Valerie in a St.-Germain-des-Prés café. I asked her if she would like to come to my hotel for a glass of wine. (Ahem!) She accepted. I was with Gerald, but he tactfully disappeared like the gentleman he sometimes is. Valerie came upstairs a few minutes after me, her idea, though I don’t think it would have mattered with the desk downstairs. She asked if she could wash up. I told her I had no bathroom, only a basin, so I offered to go out of the room while she washed up. When I knocked on the door again, she asked was there a bathroom with a tub. I said of course but I would have to get the key. This I did. Well, she disappeared in the bathroom for at least fifteen minutes. Then she came back and again wanted me to leave the room while she washed. Okay, so I did, but by this time I was wondering what on earth she could still be washing. I waited downstairs on the sidewalk. When I went up again, she was gone, the room was empty. I looked in the halls, everywhere. Gone! I thought, there’s a girl who has washed herself right out of my life. Maybe I didn’t do the right thing. Better luck next time, Chris!

I may go to Rome next with Gerald . . .

Tom looked out of the window. “I wonder when they’ll be finished? Ah, here they come! Look! Swinging their empty shovels.”

Bernard did not look.

Tom sat down comfortably on the yellow sofa.

The French knocked at the back windows, and Tom gestured for them to come in, then jumped up to open the windows for them.

“Nothing in the trench except this,” said the Commissaire Delaunay, holding up a small coin. It was a 20-centime piece, gold-colored. “The date is nineteen hundred sixty-five.” He smiled.

Tom smiled, too. “Funny you found that.”

“Our treasure for today,” said Delaunay, pocketing the coin. “Yes, the hole was recently dug. Very strange. Just the size for a corpse, but no corpse. You saw no one digging there recently?”

“I certainly did not. But—one can’t see the place from the house. It is concealed by trees.”

Tom went to speak with Mme. Annette in the kitchen, but she was not there. Probably she was out shopping, a tour that would be longer than usual, because she would tell three or four acquaintances about the arrival of the police who searched the house for M. Murchison, whose picture was in the newspaper. Tom prepared a tray of cold beer and a bottle of wine, and brought it into the living room. The French officer was chatting with Bernard. It was about painting.

“Who makes use of the woods there?” asked Delaunay.

“Oh, now and then some farmers, I think,” Tom replied, “who get wood. I seldom see anybody in that lane.”

“And recently?”

Tom thought. “I can’t remember anybody.”

The three agents departed. They had ascertained a few matters: his telephone was working; his
femme de ménage
was out shopping just now (Tom said he thought they might find her in the village, if they wished to speak with her); Heloise had gone to visit her parents in Chantilly. Delaunay had not bothered to take her address.

“I want to open the windows,” Tom said when they had gone. He did, the front door and the French windows.

The chill did not bother Bernard.

“I’m going to see what they did out there,” Tom said, and walked across the lawn toward the woods. What a relief to have the men of the law out of the house!

They had filled in the hole. It stood a bit high, reddish-brown earth, but they had been quite tidy about it. Tom walked back to the house. Good God, he thought, how many more discussions, repetitions, could he bear? One thing, perhaps, he should be grateful for, Bernard was not self-pitying. Bernard accused him. That was at least active and positive and definite.

“Well,” Tom said, entering the living room, “a tidy job they did. And twenty centimes for their trouble. Why don’t we leave before—”

Just then, Mme. Annette opened the door from the kitchen—Tom heard it without seeing it—and Tom advanced to speak with her.

“Well, Mme. Annette, the agents have departed. No clues for them, I’m afraid.” He was not going to mention the grave in the woods.

“It is very strange, is it not?” she said quickly, often a protocol in French for something else more important. “It is a mystery here, is it not?”

“It is a mystery at Orly or Paris,” Tom replied. “Not here.”

“Will you and M. Bernard be here for lunch?”

“Not today,” Tom said. “We shall go out somewhere. And as for this evening, don’t trouble yourself. If Mme. Heloise telephones, would you tell her I shall ring back tonight? In fact—” Tom hesitated. “I’ll definitely ring back by five this afternoon. In any case, why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”

“I bought some cutlets just in case. Yes, I have a rendezvous with Mme. Yvonne at—”

“That’s the spirit!” Tom interrupted. He turned to Bernard. “Shall we take off somewhere?”

But they could not leave at once. Bernard wanted to do something in his room, he said. Mme. Annette (Tom thought) left the house, possibly to have lunch with a friend in Villeperce. Tom at last knocked on Bernard’s closed door.

Bernard was writing at the table in his room.

“If you want to be left alone—”

“In fact, I don’t,” Bernard said, getting up readily enough.

Tom was mystified. What do you want to talk about? Tom wanted to ask. Why are you here? Tom could not bring himself to ask these questions. “Let’s go downstairs.”

Bernard came with him.

Tom wanted to ring Heloise. It was now 12:30 p.m. Tom could catch her before lunch. At home, the family ate on the hour, at 1 p.m. The telephone rang as Tom and Bernard entered the living room. “Maybe Heloise,” Tom said, and picked the telephone up.

“
Vous êtes . . . blur-r-p . . . Ne quittez pas. Londres vous appelle . . .
”

Then Jeff came on. “Hello, Tom. I’m ringing from a post office. Can you come over again—possibly?”

Tom knew he meant come over as Derwatt. “Bernard is here.”

“We thought so. How is he?”

“He’s—taking it easy,” Tom said. Tom did not think Bernard—gazing out the French windows—even cared to listen, but Tom was not sure. “I
can’t
just now,” Tom said. Didn’t they realize, after all, that he had killed Murchison?

“Can’t you think it over—please?”

“But I have a few obligations here, too, you know. What’s happening?”

“That inspector was here. He wanted to know where Derwatt was. He wanted to look at our books.” Jeff gulped, his voice had become perhaps unconsciously lower for reasons of secrecy, but at the same time he sounded so desperate that he might not have cared who heard or understood him. “Ed and I—we made a few lists, recent ones. We said we’d always had an informal arrangement, that no pictures had ever been lost. I think that went down all right. But they are curious about Derwatt himself, and if you could carry it off again—”

“I don’t think it’s wise,” Tom said, interrupting.

“If you could confirm our books—”

Damn their books, Tom thought. Damn their income. What about Murchison’s murder, was that his responsibility only? And what about Bernard and Bernard’s life? In one strange instant, while he was not even thinking, Tom realized that Bernard was going to kill himself, was going to be a suicide somewhere. And Jeff and Ed were worried about
their
income,
their
reputation, and about going to prison! “I have certain responsibilities here. It’s impossible for me to go to London.” In Jeff’s disappointed silence, Tom asked, “Is Mrs. Murchison coming over, do you know?”

“We haven’t heard anything about that.”

“Let Derwatt stay where he is, wherever that is. Maybe he’s got a friend with a private plane, who knows?” Tom laughed.

“By the way,” Jeff said, slightly more cheerful, “what happened to ‘The Clock’? Was it really stolen?”

“Yes. Amazing, isn’t it? I wonder who’s enjoying that treasure.”

The note on which Jeff hung up was still a disappointed one: Tom was not coming over.

“Let’s take a walk,” Bernard said.

So much for ringing Heloise, Tom thought. Tom started to ask if he might take ten minutes up in his room to ring her, then thought it better to humor Bernard. “I’ll get a jacket.”

They walked around the village. Bernard did not want a coffee, or a glass of wine, or lunch. They walked nearly a kilometer on two of the roads that led out of Villeperce, then turned back, stepping aside sometimes for wide farm trucks, for wagons pulled by Percheron horses. Bernard talked of Van Gogh and Arles, where Bernard had been twice.

“. . . Vincent like all the others had a certain span of life and no more. Can anybody imagine Mozart living to be eighty? I’d like to see Salzburg again. There’s a café there, the Tomaselli. Marvelous coffee. . . . Can you imagine Bach dying at twenty-six, for example? Which proves a man is his work, nothing more or less. It’s never a man we’re talking about, but his work . . .”

It was threatening to rain. Tom had long ago turned his jacket collar up.

“. . . Derwatt had a certain decent span, you see. It was absurd that I prolonged it. But of course I didn’t. All that can be rectified,” Bernard said like a judge pronouncing sentence, a wise sentence—in the opinion of the judge.

Tom took his hands from his pockets and blew on them, and stuffed them back in his pockets.

Back at the house, Tom made tea and brought out the whiskey and the brandy. The drink would either calm Bernard or bring matters to a crisis by making Bernard angry, and something would happen.

“I must ring my wife,” Tom said. “Help yourself to anything.” Tom fled up the stairs. Heloise, even if angry still, would be a voice of sanity.

Tom said the Chantilly number to the operator. The rain began to fall. It was gentle against the windowpanes. There was no wind just now. Tom sighed.

“Hello, Heloise!” She had answered. “
Yes
, I am all right. I wanted to ring you last evening, but it became too late. . . . I was just out walking.” (She had tried to ring him.) “With Bernard. . . . Yes, he is still here but I think he’s leaving this afternoon, maybe tonight. When will you come home?”

“When you get rid of that
fou
!”

“Heloise,
je t’aime.
I may come to Paris. With Bernard, because I think it will help him to leave.”

“Why are you so nervous? What is happening?”