The Splendour Falls (29 page)

Turning from the house, I pressed on down the path towards the château, which I knew lay some ten minutes’ walk away, although I couldn’t see it from here.

Since I’d first gone into the tunnel after the gypsy earlier that evening, the wind had shifted subtly and the clouds were drifting in to catch the brilliance of the sinking sun. The air was cold and singing past my ears. A strand of hair whipped stinging in my eyes, blinding me for a moment until I could push it back and blink the tears away. I tucked my chin into my collar, dug my hands deeper in the pockets of Paul’s red jacket, and hurried on.

The path wound round and down and up again, past caves and staring houses that hunched shoulder to shoulder to watch me scurry by. And then the houses blended to a single wall that guided me along the rising slope towards
the narrow, soaring clock tower at the château’s gate. I bustled upwards, feeling the now-familiar burning of my laboured lungs, and glanced at my wristwatch to check the time.

Surprisingly, the walk had taken less than ten minutes – it was just past seven, which meant that, even though Harry and Danielle had started first, I was likely to arrive at the meeting place ahead of them, considering my cousin wasn’t moving at top speed and was moving in the dark, on top of that. I slowed my pace a little, to ease the pressure on my pounding heart.

And then my heart, quite suddenly, seemed not to beat at all.

Ahead of me, almost at the very spot where Paul had fallen yesterday, a man was sitting on the low stone wall. He sat with body angled forward, elbows braced on knees, head bent to contemplate his loose-linked fingers. He was frowning.

Behind the pensive figure of Armand Valcourt, the château cast a stark and stretching shadow on the smooth deserted pavement. Deserted now, but not for long. At any moment now my cousin and his gypsy nurse would shuffle up the steps from the dank tunnel, and walk through that door just there … just
there
…

My gaze swung past Armand’s bent shoulders to the cliff face further up the road. Fighting back the rising tide of panic, I struggled to reassure myself. There was a gap between the boards, so Jean had said, a gap that one could look through, to make sure the way was safe.
Oh, dear God, let them have the sense to look
, I prayed, in the
fervent way that non-believers pray, when they hope to be proved wrong.

I wasn’t the least bit worried, at that moment, for my own safety. Armand might be a killer, but he hadn’t struck me as a psychopath. He must have suspected, from the very first, that I was somehow linked to Harry, to the man who’d seen him leaving the scene of Didier Muret’s murder. He’d seen Harry’s face, after all; any fool would have noticed the resemblance between my cousin and myself. And Armand Valcourt was no fool.

And yet, he’d always been a perfect gentleman. He didn’t know I knew, I thought – that was the key. And as long as I kept up a normal front I doubted he would try to harm me now. After all, I reasoned, there was no way Armand could know that I’d just come from seeing Harry, not unless I told him myself, and I was hardly about to do that. I could just tell him I’d been walking on the cliff path – hardly a suspicious activity – and he’d have no cause to think anything had changed between us. No, he wouldn’t harm me, I decided, steadying my lurching pulse with a concerted effort.

But if he came face to face with Harry, now, and Harry barely able to stand up straight, let alone defend himself …

A crowd of tourists would have made the roadway safe, but it was suppertime and no one was about, not even a straggling student or a local resident – not one soul, just as it had been the afternoon before. I flicked another watchful glance towards the door set in the cliff face, and squared my shoulders. History, Harry always said, went round and round, repeating – but the tragedy of yesterday would not
be replayed tonight, not while I had the power left to stop it. Forming a smile that felt natural upon my face, I took a bold step forward, and another.

He was so deep in contemplation that he didn’t hear my footsteps drawing closer, and when I finally spoke to him his head came up with a startled jerk.

‘A penny for your thoughts,’ was what I said. What thoughts did killers think, in private?

He turned towards me, no longer frowning, his preoccupied expression fading to a warmer look of welcome. ‘My thoughts aren’t worth a penny,’ he said evenly, in French. ‘You’ve been walking? By yourself?’

‘Just as far as the chapelle.’

‘The Chapelle Sainte Radegonde?’ His eyebrows lifted a degree. ‘It’s not the safest walk, that, for a woman on her own.’

‘Quite safe in daylight, I should think.’ So many things, I thought, were safe by daylight. Even talking to murderers. Or at least, that’s what I hoped. Mind you, there wasn’t that much daylight left, and I was running out of time to think of some way to make Armand Valcourt move from where he sat, leaving the way clear for Harry to get down to the police.

Think, damn you, think
, I ordered my racing mind, but no ideas came. My hands shook ever so slightly, and I tucked them back in my pockets to keep them still.

Armand noticed. ‘You are cold?’

‘No. No, it’s just—’ And then it finally struck me, what excuse to use. ‘It’s just this place,’ I said, quite honestly. ‘It’s difficult to stand here, so soon after …’

‘
Dieu
, I didn’t think. I’m sorry.’ He sent a brief look up the road and raked his hair with one lean hand, then met my eyes again and smiled. ‘Have you ever seen the sunset from the walls of the château?’

The château, I thought. Public place, with lots of people. Perfect. Trying to keep the relief from showing in my voice, I replied that I had not. ‘Is it very lovely?’

‘It is something to be remembered.’

The walk up the hill was a short one, but to me it seemed to take an age. I held my breath as we passed the door that hid the tunnel’s entrance, and fancied that I heard somebody stir behind the wooden panels, but it might have been imagination, or the wind. The wind had risen sharply with the sinking of the sun, and it caught now in my throat as I quickened my step to keep pace with Armand’s longer strides.

The young guide at the château admission booth looked faintly surprised when we appeared. Her wide eyes swung from me to Armand, and she cleared her throat. ‘Monsieur …’

Armand reached for his wallet. ‘Two adults.’

‘But Monsieur …’

‘We wish to see the sunset,’ he explained. He passed a bill across the narrow counter, with its tumbled stacks of coloured brochures and souvenirs. I didn’t see the exact denomination of the note, but it was rather more than the price of our admission. The girl took it slowly from his hand and looked at it, hesitating, then took two pink tickets from below the counter and handed them to Armand.

I frowned as we walked up along the gravel path, past
the Royal Apartments on our way to the far western wall. ‘Why the bribe?’ I asked him, casually. The only other visitors I could see were heading in the opposite direction, so I’d already half guessed what Armand’s answer would be. And I was right.

‘The château closes to the public at this hour,’ he said, with an uncaring shrug. ‘But it’s no problem. The workers stay on for a while yet, to finish up the closing, and they know me well. We’re neighbours.’ He stepped aside to let me go ahead across the short bridge spanning the dry moat that split the grounds. Directly in front of me, the ruined Moulin Tower rose like a sentinel at the château’s westernmost edge, its jagged, roofless silhouette a foil for the brilliant wash of colour on the billowed clouds behind.

It looked as though the very sky was burning.

‘It will be still more splendid in a moment.’ I heard the click of Armand’s cigarette lighter and smelled the drifting smoke as he moved up to join me. ‘I hope you found your cousin well?’

My mouth went dry as dust. ‘What?’

‘You have,’ he said, ‘a most revealing face.’

Some distance off a set of ancient hinges creaked a protest that was silenced by a final-sounding thud. They were closing the gates to the château.

‘It was bound to happen, I suppose,’ Armand went on, lifting one hand to gently touch my hair, ‘but I’m still sorry he had to tell you.’

I felt the change in my own eyes. He dropped his hand.

‘You are afraid of me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want that. I didn’t want …’ The dark eyes angled downwards, shutting me out, and he pulled sharply at his cigarette.

My heartbeat lurched arhythmically and for a second time I steadied it. Don’t panic, I thought, just stay calm. Surely Harry would by now have reached the meeting place, the place where the steps started down to the fountain square, and he would not wait long before deciding something must have happened to me. Unlike Harry, I was never late.

No, I reassured myself, he’d realise something had gone wrong and he’d go straight to the police, as he’d intended. And then the police would telephone the château where, somewhere, a handful of straggling staff members were still working through their closing duties, and the police would ask if anyone had noticed me upon the road, and then
someone was bound to tell them … Yes, I thought, trying desperately to convince myself, that’s how it would happen. If I only kept my head and kept Armand in conversation, then everything would be all right. It was only a matter of time before someone came for me.

He will come
… The promise, in a voice not quite my own, flowed, through my mind and over me and filled me with an oddly quiet calmness. I cleared my throat. ‘May I please have a cigarette?’

I was breaking faith with Paul, I knew.
Nothing for pleasure
, that’s what Thierry had said was the rule of Yom Kippur. No food, no drink, and certainly no cigarettes. And yet my request was not for pleasure, it was purposeful. It bought me time. If Armand found it odd that someone shut into a deserted ruin with a murderer would think of smoking, he didn’t let on. His face remained impassive as he handed me the packet and the lighter.

The wind rose wilder up the tower walls. It took me several tries to light the cigarette, the flame kept blowing out.

Armand stood watching me. ‘I wouldn’t have hurt you,’ he said.

Past tense, I noticed. Lovely. My own voice, to my surprise, was nearly normal. ‘So what happens now?’

‘I don’t know.’ He looked suddenly an old man, very tired. ‘It’s … difficult, this business. And so much, I think, depends on you.’

‘On me?’

‘What you decide.’

‘I see.’ I felt a fleeting stab of warmth upon my cheek
from the dying sun. ‘Well, I don’t see how I can decide anything. I haven’t heard your side of things.’

‘And do you want to hear?’

‘Of course.’

He looked at me a long moment. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Believe what you like.’

‘No, you’re only saying this because you’re frightened …’

‘Well, of course I’m bloody frightened!’ I shot back, against my best intentions. ‘You’ve killed two people that I know of – maybe you killed your wife too, I don’t know. My God, Armand, I’d be a fool not to be frightened!’ I broke off suddenly, horrified by my outburst. Never antagonise your attacker, that’s what all the advice columns said, and never let him see your fear. My heart sank miserably as I waited for Armand’s reaction.

He was watching his own cigarette glow crimson in the angry wind. He flicked the end and loosed a swirl of sparks that quickly died. ‘I didn’t, as it happens, kill my wife.’ His smile was very tight, and brief. ‘I thought about it, off and on. She was most … irritating, sometimes, and there were days she pushed me almost to my limit, but in the end she died quite naturally – her heart …’ He raised his eyes then, looked away. The hand that held the cigarette was very steady. ‘Then Didier, my loving
brother-in-law
, he came to me and asked me if I knew about the will. Brigitte’s will. Not the one she’d made when we were married, but the one she’d written out herself the week before her death. Didier, he was a clerk for Brigitte’s lawyer, then – he’d seen the envelope addressed by her one morning in the office post, and being curious he opened
it. It was a legal will, he told me, signed and witnessed, everything. Brigitte,’ he said, ‘had left me every cent she owned, on the condition that I turn my house, my land, into an institute for her damned artists. God!’ The word came out with all the bitterness that lingered still within him. ‘Without her money, I was lost – I had so little of my own. And yet, to get the money she would make me give up all I
did
own. She would have robbed her daughter of the legacy we Valcourts have been born to since before the Revolution. No,’ he said, his voice low and determined, ‘the money, it was Brigitte’s, but the land … the land is
mine
. It will be Lucie’s land when I am gone, and no one has a right to steal that from her. No one,’ he repeated. I glimpsed a violence in the deep black eyes, a quiet violence, carefully contained, but even as his gaze swung round to lock with mine it vanished like a thing imagined. ‘Didier, he knew how I would feel. He’d counted on it. He had kept the will locked in his desk; the lawyer hadn’t seen it. A little bit of money to destroy it, that’s what he’d been after, and when Brigitte died, well … he knew he could ask for any price, and I would pay it.’

‘But surely, the people who witnessed the will …’

‘Ah yes. Your Monsieur Grantham, he was a witness, did you know? And he asked me, when Brigitte died, what happened to the will. I told him she had changed her mind, and Didier, he told this story also.’

‘But he didn’t keep his promise. To destroy the will.’

‘No.’ He shook his head, looked down again. ‘No, at every turning there it was, that damned will, waved in my face. A most convenient blackmail scheme, I must admit.’

‘You might have gone to the police. Explained what happened. Maybe they could—’

‘No. No, you can’t understand. You don’t have children, Emily,’ he told me softly, accusingly. It was the first time he had called me by my name. ‘Children, they are everything. We owe to them a name they can be proud of, and a future with no shadows in it. Lucie deserves that much from me. I couldn’t risk a scandal.’

I challenged him. ‘Is that why you killed Didier?’

‘It’s cold,’ he said. His cigarette was dead and he reached in his pocket for another. ‘The wind, it’s cold. You must be frozen.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re shaking. Come, let’s sit down.’

The only place I saw to sit was on the broad low wall that jutted from the west face of the Moulin Tower. Beyond that wall the sun had flattened on a purple haze of hills, spilling its brilliance into the darkly flowing river, and the wind had turned electric with the threat of a coming storm. I slowly shook my head, staring at the crumbled wall and thinking of the sheer and plunging drop it masked on the other side. I was thinking, oddly enough, not of Paul being pushed from the cliff but of my mother, years ago on a family trip to Cornwall, chasing me constantly down the sea spray-slicked footpaths and warning me: ‘Don’t go near the edge!’ She would be proud of me, I thought, for finally heeding her advice.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to sit down.’
Stay in the open
, I told myself,
don’t drop your guard
.

Armand smiled, tightly. ‘Not on the wall. Just there,
beside the tower. By the door.’ There was a sort of trench-like entryway that led up to the Moulin Tower’s wooden door. The leaves lay thick upon the pavement there, unmoving, proof that the ivy-choked walls on either side blocked out the wind with ease, and against one wall, nestled in the ivy, was a narrow concrete bench. It offered shelter, but not safety. Safety lay in staying out upon the lawn, where anyone might see us.

Again I shook my head. ‘I’m fine.’ I hugged my arms around my waist to stop the trembling. ‘You were going to tell me about Didier.’

‘Ah, well,’ he shrugged, as the flame of the lighter danced behind his cupped hand, ‘that was an accident. Not that I regret it, but it was not meant to happen. I was that week in Paris, meeting buyers, but each lunch hour I telephoned Lucie, to talk. She likes for me to ring her when I’m out of town. Most days we talked of school, of François, but on that Wednesday Lucie asked me could she have a shovel.’ His jaw tightened a little, remembering. ‘I asked her why, and she said Uncle Didier was going to go digging for treasure with a man, an English man. She said she’d heard them talking just that morning, by the river, and she thought it sounded fun. Fun.’ His smile held no humour. ‘I felt like I’d been punched. I’d warned Didier once, you understand – I’d paid him well not to dig on my land, to ruin my vines, looking for those foolish diamonds. I told him if he ever tried again to touch my land, my daughter’s land, I’d kill him. I didn’t mean it,’ he qualified. ‘I don’t believe I meant it. But I had to make quite sure he understood. So when I heard from Lucie, what was going on, it made me angry.’

Only Lucie, I thought, had got the story wrong, as usual. She’d heard Didier and Harry talking about tunnels, about digging for treasure, God knows what. And Didier, who had hoped to learn from Harry some new clue to help him find the diamonds, had no doubt been rather stunned himself to learn he’d wasted his effort. Small problems of communication, I thought, that had led to murder.

Armand shrugged. ‘I had to talk to Didier, to stop him, so I hired a car and drove to Chinon. He was alone and drunk, when I caught up with him. He laughed at me … he
laughed
… and so I told him that I’d had enough, that I wasn’t going to give in any longer. That I didn’t think he even had the will any more. I hadn’t seen it for months. That made him angry.’ I saw his faint smile glimmer in the gathering dusk. ‘Didier, he didn’t like to be called a liar. Said he’d show me I was wrong. He went upstairs, and so at last I knew where he kept Brigitte’s will. I only meant to take it back, to burn it – but Didier, he tried to stop me …’

‘So you killed him.’

‘He was very drunk. It was easy to take the will from him, but he came after me, attacked me on the first floor landing. I pushed him off – not hard, but he went back over the railing.’ Armand shrugged, a short and callous shrug without remorse. ‘There was nothing I could have done.’

‘You could have reported it. It was an accident, for heaven’s sake.’

‘But why? Why let that bastard draw me into an enquiry, headlines in the newspapers, gossip in the cafes? He was dead, I owed him nothing, so I left him where he was. I don’t regret what I did. If I had to do it again, I would
still have left the house, only,’ he admitted, ‘I’d have left it by the front door, not the back. I thought the back door would be safer, not so many windows facing me, and the lane beside is always dark. I hadn’t counted on your cousin coming up the path.’

‘He didn’t see you,’ I informed him.

‘Did he not? I was so certain that he did. I thought I’d killed him, too, but I did not have time to check. I could not risk a neighbour looking out and seeing me.’ He lifted the cigarette, his mouth twisting. ‘The next day, when Martine called me in Paris to tell me Didier was dead, I learned no other body had been found. The man who’d seen me, he was still alive, and though he had not talked to the police, he was a danger. I could not risk another blackmailer, you understand. So I came back to Chinon. And then,’ he said, quite simply, ‘I saw you.’

So I’d been right, I thought. He’d seen the resemblance from the very beginning. ‘Is that why you sent me the invitation?’ I asked. ‘Because you wanted me to lead you to my cousin?’

‘I wanted to find out who you were,’ was his reply. ‘And when I learned you had no brother, that you were in Chinon by yourself, I thought it must be just coincidence, that you looked so much like him. I was surprised, at lunch, when you mentioned a cousin – I hadn’t thought of cousins – but then you said this cousin lived in England, so …’ He shrugged, a little sadly. ‘I did not know, for sure, until this morning. When you told me.’

‘I see.’

He watched my face a moment, mulling something over.
‘You said your cousin did not see me. And yet you knew,’ he mused. ‘Who told you?’

‘You were seen.’

‘The gypsy,’ he decided, his mind sifting through what I’d told him that morning. He was very sharp, I thought. ‘It was the gypsy with the dog, was it not? The one who follows you around. So, it is just this gypsy’s word against my own, then.’ The knowledge seemed to please him, and I kicked myself for having told him anything.

‘My word as well,’ I said, lifting my chin with a courage I didn’t quite feel. ‘You shouldn’t be telling me this.’

‘You won’t repeat it.’

My belly crawled with sudden cold. ‘Oh? And why not?’

‘Because of this.’ I guessed his intent even as he reached for me, but I didn’t have the time to move away. The kiss was hard, and yet it scarcely registered – I was past feeling anything. I simply stood and let him kiss me, unresponsive. At length he drew back, touched my cheek. ‘We have this still between us, you and I,’ he said. ‘From the moment I first saw you …’

When he bent to me again, my mind stayed stoically detached and analytical. Past Armand’s shoulder I could see the little ivy-shrouded bench, with dead leaves drifted underneath it. I saw the wooden doorway to the Moulin Tower, bound firm with iron hinges, and I watched it shifting inwards as the wind went rushing past it. Impossible, I told myself. The tower was off limits, closed to tourists, it was always locked. The door could not have moved.

Armand drew back a second time and, frowning, lit a cigarette. He smoked too much, I thought absently. Like
Paul … And suddenly my thoughts weren’t absent any more. The feeling came back in a searing flood that scalded every nerve to painful rawness.

I didn’t move, but mentally I took five paces back, away from Armand. I could perhaps forgive him for the death of Didier – a tragic accident, unplanned, partly orchestrated by the victim – I could forgive him that, and as for Brigitte’s will I understood a father’s drive to shield the future of his daughter, however much I disapproved of his methods. But Paul … No, I decided firmly – never. Day of Atonement notwithstanding, I could never forgive him for Paul.

‘You are thinking of the boy,’ said Armand. He hadn’t lied about my expressive face. ‘Two people, you said – I have killed two people. Did the gypsy see that as well?’