The Dress Thief (38 page)

‘Because you’ve told her.’

‘We could play a game, try to guess who the painting is meant to show. The one your friend Lutzman did
of the mayor looked like a squashed monkey.’

‘Because the mayor looks like a squashed monkey.’

She’d followed him out into the snow, angry at his refusal to be riled. ‘She’ll hate it. Madame la Comtesse hates modern painting.’

He’d told her that, on the contrary, if she cared to step into her mistress’s writing room, she’d see several Lutzman landscapes on the wall. After that, he’d ignored
her, crunching to the garage where the chauffeur had finally got the Mercedes engine to catch. Haupmann’s voice chasing him –

‘Doesn’t your fine painter have a servant who can bring the wretched thing over? Have you turned into an errand-boy, saving a Jew the trouble of a walk in the snow?’

Actually Lutzman did have an assistant, a cheerful, stocky young man who’d proved himself handy for lugging
easels and paintboxes up to the castle. Young Raphael Bonnet would watch his master at work, mix his paints and wipe his brushes
and was occasionally allowed to fill in a detail or two. And yes, Bonnet was supposed to have delivered the finished painting several days ago, but he hadn’t. It was Christmas Eve in three days and Jean-Yves had run out of patience.

In Lutzman’s studio, Célie Haupmann’s
scorn ringing in his ears, he’d found the artist at work on a landscape. His own portrait stood on another easel, unframed and unfinished. So sticky, paint came off on his fingers. Not a chance of its being ready in time. Disappointment had slammed him and he’d turned on the artist. ‘Are you not capable of a simple commission, man?’

Lutzman had blinked, then said in a voice without inflection,
‘It is a portrait,
mein herr
, not a cake. It is complete when it is complete.’ Was that triumph in his raven eyes? They seemed to say,
I have what you need, so for once I have power over you
.

A cord had snapped in Jean-Yves. ‘Have you never heard of Christmas, damn Jew?’

Wicked words. Bitter words, because he knew that Haupmann would taunt him when he arrived home empty-handed. He hadn’t planned
what happened next.

*

Thirty-five years on and he was finally going to make his confession. He knelt under the skylight, the sun hard upon him. ‘I killed a man and have tried to make amends. I have given my life to make good. Let me be forgiven.’ He kept his eyes shut, reaching into the silence for an answer. For absolution. ‘End my punishment.’
Downstairs, a door clashed. Footsteps, then a high
voice: ‘Papa? It’s me. Are you there?’

His heart pitched violently. He lurched to his feet and staggered to the wall for support.

‘Papa?’

A child rushing upstairs to see her father. She would find a corpse. He must stop her … His vision fractured, every muscle in his chest twisting. He fell to his knees again.

‘Papa? Oh God …’ Ninette was beside him. ‘Papa, are you ill?’

He heard a male voice
and realised that Ferryman was coming up after her. He rasped at his secretary to fetch water from the kitchen. When Ferryman came back with an old tin mug the cramp finally lessened. The water tasted foul.

‘Lucky we found you, monsieur,’ Ferryman said as he helped Jean-Yves downstairs. ‘A neighbour saw you go in. Thing is, there’s an emergency at the castle.’

Ninette took over. ‘Mme Haupmann
tried to get out of bed and fell. The nurse couldn’t lift her, so had to call for the doctor. Haupmann’s burbling on about you being –’ his daughter began to laugh – ‘a murderer.’ She gasped as the laughter caught in her throat, doubtless from shock. ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry, but you should have seen their faces.’

*

The doctor doubted Haupmann would last the night and offered to take her to hospital.
‘For convenience’s sake. Mme de Charembourg wishes it.’

‘You spoke to my wife?’ Rhona had been nowhere near Haupmann since they’d arrived for the wedding.

The doctor looked a little uncomfortable. ‘I have, Monsieur. Madame sent for me, while you were being fetched. Understandably your lady doesn’t wish for a death to take place here so soon after your daughter’s wedding. She feels it would be
 …’

‘Inconvenient? I think it would be cruel to move Haupmann now and surround her with strangers. Let her pass quietly here, tended by her nurse.’ Jean-Yves ushered the doctor out. He told the nurse to get some rest, saying he would sit with the invalid for an hour or so. At the bedside he held a glass of water to the yellowish lips and said conversationally, ‘I went to Lutzman’s studio today,
Mme Haupmann. I owned up to my crime, spoke the words out loud and asked God’s pardon.’

The nurse had put a rosary into Haupmann’s hand. The beads ticked restlessly as the housekeeper absorbed his words. She muttered, ‘They were behind with their rent. His wife reckoned if you liked your picture, you’d let them off. That’s how Jews think – money and what they can get.’

He stood and walked to
the other side of the room, her poisonous words testing the limits of his charity. He stopped to look at a framed print of the Virgin and child, which aggravated his mood further. Mary looked more like a Swiss milkmaid than a girl of Nazareth. Straightening it he said, ‘I have lived three decades torn from the company of God for a crime I committed.
Your spiteful words sent me to Lutzman’s house
with my pride stirred. You must admit the part you played.’

The silence, broken only by the stubborn click of beads, unseated something in him. He strode back to the bed and grabbed the string. It broke and beads bounced to the floor. ‘You’ve never killed a man, have you, Madame? But your hatred and bitter prejudice have incited others to act. All your adult life you’ve pulled people’s emotional
strings and stood back with a smile on your face, enjoying the consequences. Confess it.’

‘No reason to.’

‘My mother gave you money to bribe the local chief inspector – Kern. You asked him to erase all trace of my visit to Lutzman’s studio. He was diligent – he had Danielle Lutzman arrested, kept in a solitary cell so she couldn’t incriminate me. She nearly went mad, separated from her child.
Later Kern filed a report saying itinerant thieves did the killing. Neat, but there is always a reckoning. Kern took hundreds of thousands of francs from us, and bought himself a fast car. He crashed it into a tree on a bend by the river.’

‘Didn’t know Kern.’

‘He and his wife came here for dinner once a month, right up until war broke out. Drop the pretence, Madame. Make your confession.’

Haupmann’s lips cracked with the effort of speaking. ‘Your mother loved you so much.’

‘I know. She helped wash away my crime, but I wish I’d had
the guts to face it –’ a movement made him look up. ‘Rhona? How long have you been there?’

‘Long enough. Is it over?’

‘We should send for the priest.’

Rhona raised an eyebrow. ‘And give the Abbé a taste of her rambling goodbyes? I can’t think that’s
wise.’ She came to stand beside him. ‘What you were saying just now—’

‘Not here,’ he interrupted.

‘Actually this is probably the safest place. Am I to take it you’re guilty of a mortal sin?’ She might have been asking about the weather, or what he’d like for lunch.

Not trusting himself to speak, he crouched down and picked up Haupmann’s scattered rosary beads. A moment later he heard the gentle
creak of the rocking chair beside the fireplace. Rhona was rocking, her eyes half closed. In the country, she threw off Parisian chic. Out came the tweed, the cable-knit cardigans. She was less brittle here.

She yawned. ‘Is guilt why you make such a fuss of the little tart who works for Javier? I know she’s something to do with this place and what went on here.’

‘I don’t want to discuss it,
and I certainly don’t want a quarrel. Not with poor Haupmann forced to listen.’

‘I doubt she’ll be telling tales, Jean-Yves.’ The chair creaked back and forth. ‘Very well,’ Rhona sighed. ‘Since you won’t talk to me, I’ll tell you what I know. A year or so after the war finished, I had our London chauffeur follow you on one of your
trips out. You were always so secretive, pretending you were going
to your club in town, but you always headed off in the wrong direction. So I had you followed. I thought you had a mistress, you see. Well, we’d been ten years married. It seemed possible.

‘The chauffeur tailed you to Wandsworth, to a squalid road. I went there a few days later. I knocked at a narrow little house and said I was the health visitor. The stupid woman who lived there invited me in,
even though I had no bag and no badge. She gave her name as Lutzman. I asked if she was related to an artist of that name, as we had some paintings by him in our home. I must have a sympathetic manner because, after a few false starts, I got her life story. She said she’d never told anybody so much about herself. Your name came up – she admitted she’d sometimes taken money from you.’ Rhona imitated
a high, Germanic voice; ‘“I tell him always Mathilda and I need nothing, but when he is gone away there is money in a drawer or on the table. He is the reverse of a thief.” I’ve never forgotten that phrase –
reverse of a thief
. You’re a do-gooder by stealth, my noble husband.’

Rhona fell silent and Jean-Yves suspected she was seeing herself back in Danielle’s dingy London parlour. He knew it
when she said reflectively, ‘There was a brat in the room and I remember it watching me, sucking its thumb, and all I wanted to know was where its mother was and was it yours. I asked the woman about Mathilda and she started crying. Mathilda,
I deduced, had died giving birth … that brat is yours, isn’t it? You paid for its schooling.’

‘Yes, I paid for Alix’s schooling. Who told you?’

‘Now then
 …’ Rhona closed her eyes, pretending to think. ‘Receipts in your desk drawer, I seem to recall. Thirty pounds a term to Kingswood Place, Hampshire. Imagine my feelings, my husband paying for a beggar’s education while refusing his own daughters their chances.’

He stared at her, prepared to believe that last comment was a joke. No, she seemed utterly in earnest. It had always baffled him, her
ability to fashion the universe to suit herself. ‘I never refused Christine or Ninette anything – the best schools, horse-riding, music tuition, Italian lessons, deportment, finishing school. And now driving lessons. What did I deny them?’

But Rhona wasn’t listening. ‘So, is Alix yours?’

He considered his reply. ‘She is not your concern.’

‘Is that the classically educated way of saying “she’s
my bastard”? I intend to know, Jean-Yves.’

‘There is only one person entitled to ask that question: Alix. And until she asks, I will say nothing.’

An annoyed shrug answered him. Rhona had stopped rocking. ‘You and the girl’s mother … you were lovers? For how long? Where did you meet?’

He sighed. His instinct was always to close down these conversations, but now he thought,
Why go on denying
it?
‘I’d known Mathilda since she was a child. I met her in her father’s studio
in Kirchwiller.’ Over the corpse of her father, but that was a detail he would not share. ‘I helped her and her mother move to London, and kept in touch with them. Yes, I helped support them. Mathilda charmed me, but I assure you my feelings were entirely brotherly and I saw relatively little of her during her childhood.
Then war broke out. Unknown to me, she enrolled as a nurse and we met in France, behind the lines, when she was assigned to the casualty station near Arras where I was recovering. She was twenty-two.’

‘This was all by chance, I suppose?’

‘You don’t imagine anyone could plan assignations amid that chaos? I emerged one day from a blur of sleep and morphine to find her smiling down at me.’

‘And
smiled back, even though you were married to me? Even though I was waiting at home, terrified for you every minute?’

Jean-Yves felt a wave of pity. Rhona, rocking again in her chair, hands clasped so tightly the bones showed, had once been the entirety of his desires. The sum of his dreams. ‘I smiled back and we met again, after I was sent home to that sanatorium in south London. She’d been sent
back too and was working there.’

‘Happy coincidence. You had an affair?’

‘A brief one. She married someone else that same year and then she died. That’s all there is to say.’

‘All?’ Rhona got up so fast her chair skidded backwards. ‘You betrayed me and all you have to say is “that’s all?”’ She slammed both hands against his chest, her nails piercing through
his clothes. For the second time
he dropped Célie Haupmann’s beads.

Rhona clawed at his neck. ‘How could such a woman eclipse me? A pauper … a foreigner! Was she so beautiful, or just a clever slattern?’

‘She was beautiful, and she was no slattern.’

‘No? Bedding you when you were already married?’

‘You’ll never understand, but I loved Mathilda from the first moment I saw her. She was in terrible need, and I was the only person
in the world who could help. I had no idea how deeply I felt until years later when I opened my eyes in a hospital near Arras. I realised—’

‘What?’

Realised I should have waited and married her
. Backing away from the raking fingernails, he felt his legs collide with Célie Haupmann’s bed. He shoved Rhona away and the fight seemed to go out of her.

He said, ‘Let’s remember where we are.’

A moment
later he was reeling from a vicious slap.

‘It all began here, didn’t it?’ Rhona forced herself past him and stood over Haupmann, whose eyelids fluttered. ‘I heard what you said to this old witch. You killed Lutzman and she knew it. It’s why you’ve kept her here all these years on full salary. Keeping her sweet. Keeping her quiet. Isn’t that right, Haupmann?’

For a hideous moment Jean-Yves thought
Rhona was going
to strip the bed cover off the old woman. He grabbed her elbow. ‘Control yourself. Show some decency.’

‘She knew you were a killer. It’s why you’ve stayed away from here most of your life. Well, I could go to the police. I heard enough to have you arrested.’

‘You won’t,’ he said, pulling her away from the bed, steering her towards the door. ‘You’ve got more to lose than I have.
Now get out. Send in the nurse and have the priest fetched.’