Deadly Slipper (21 page)

As she backed out, she saw that Henri de Sauvignac had emerged from the house. He made no move to join his son, only stood on the terrace, like a frozen sentinel, overseeing her departure. She caught a final glimpse of him in her rearview mirror as she pulled away. His expression gave her quite a shock. His face was white, his eyes staring, his lips pulled back in a rictus of fear.

The bead curtain flew apart noisily. Mara strode into the bistro. Jazz’s entry was more sedate, snout first, a quick survey of the room, then a rambling approach to Julian, who was sipping a pastis while watching Paul do accounts at the bar. Julian looked up.

“Well? What happened?”

“They’re hiding something,” she cried, and hopped onto a stool beside him.

“Eh? Like what?” Paul slapped down his pencil.

She threw her hands up in frustration. “That’s just it. I don’t know. But it has to do with Vrac, and they won’t tell me because
Vrac is one of them.
The husband is especially secretive. He doesn’t want me anywhere near La Binette. Virtually warned me off.”

“What about the wife?” asked Mado, coming out from the back of the bistro, where she had been setting tables in preparation for the evening crowd.

“She seems sympathetic,” Mara ventured doubtfully, “but I don’t think she’s altogether there.”

“D’you mean gaga?” Paul produced glasses and a bottle.

Mara considered the possibility. “No. Just somehow slightly out of focus—or absent. I mean, as if she weren’t quite in the room with you, but listening at the door.” And she told them in detail about her
conversation with Henri and Jeanne de Sauvignac, as well as her encounter with the son.

“The man we met in the woods was Alain de Sauvignac?” Julian queried. Finding Jazz’s head within reach, he scratched it.

They all fell silent as Paul filled three glasses with white Bordeaux and topped up Julian’s pastis. Mado lit a cigarette. Finally, through a screen of smoke, she said:

“It’ll have to be you, Julian.”

“Eh?”

“You’ll have to go there and snoop around.”

He gaped at her, incredulous. “What? Search the château?”

“Not the château. La Binette. The farm holds the clue to everything.”

“Why me?”

“Well,
you’re
the orchid expert.”

“Oh, thank you very much.”

“Mado’s right,” Mara pressed him earnestly. “Don’t you see, Julian, if we can identify even some of the orchid sequence on La Binette land, it’ll prove Bedie was actually there.”

“I thought the
pigeonnier
already did that.”

“Not good enough. From the angle of the photo, she could have taken it from the road.”

“You can’t
see
it from the road,” Julian objected.

“Nineteen years ago, there may have been less tree cover. We need to prove that she was actually on that farm.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying
we
, when what you really mean is
me.”

Mara stared into her wine and made no offer to accompany him.

“So you want
me
to search the whole bloody farm?” Julian glared at each of them in turn. They avoided his eye. He drained his pastis and banged the glass down in disgust.
“Par pitié
, make me a sensible suggestion for a change.”

“Take a shotgun with you,” Paul advised with a spark of malice.

In the end, Julian gave in. It was true that reconstructing Bedie’s path would give Mara something concrete to take to the police. Let the gendarmes do the digging, he thought grimly, and then focused on the more cheerful, if faint, possibility that, if his quest were
really
successful, he would have his Lady’s Slipper.

•

Alain de Sauvignac’s phone call came at ten o’clock that evening. Mara snatched eagerly at the receiver.

“Yes, hello?”

“Madame Dunn?” His deep voice had a seductive quality to it. “Perhaps now you will be kind enough to tell me what this is all about?”

Mara took a lungful of air, exhaled slowly and told him as much as she thought he needed to know.

•

His terms were simple: information conditional on lunch. He came directly to the point. “I’d like to see
you again. Under more conducive circumstances.”

So now they were sitting on the terrace of La Vieille Guinguette, a little waterside restaurant upriver from the town of Maussac. Jazz dozed at Mara’s feet. The day was sunny and the fare simple, mainly traditional dishes like braised sheep’s tongues and tripe cooked with leeks. They ordered
tourain
, bread-thickened soup heavy with garlic and duck fat, a meal in itself. By the time they were adding red wine to the dregs
à la Périgourdine
, they were on a first-name basis and speaking French.

“I admit I was intrigued by you,” Alain said, pushing his empty bowl aside. “Who wouldn’t be?” He gave her a glance that was half admiring, half speculative, then retreated onto safer ground. “You speak French well. But your accent is unusual. I can’t place it.”

“Montreal,” she grinned, “and absolutely unique. We slur and drawl, flatten our vowels, and compress our sibilants. The point is, can you get us—Julian—onto La Binette land?”

“Your orchidologist friend?” Alain drew down the corners of his mouth. “I wouldn’t like to do so
à la dérobée
, as they say. I don’t hold much with sneaking. And what you’re asking is trespassing, after all. You also have to realize that, if you’ve already approached Papa and he refused to help you, you’re putting me in a damned difficult position.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “I suppose you think me deceitful.”

He flipped a hand in the air.
“Oui—et non.
If you truly believe Vrac had something to do with your sister’s disappearance, I can understand that your desire to know might override all—well, all scruples. However, you must also comprehend my father’s reticence. It might sound terribly old-fashioned to you, but Papa has a strong sense of noblesse oblige toward the people of the
territoire
, particularly la Binette and her son. The family worked on the estate, you know. La Binette and Vrac still do the occasional odd job. Local loyalties run deep.”

“Even to the extent of protecting a possible murderer? Other women have gone missing, too, you know.”

Alain shook his head. “No one’s protecting a murderer. Oh, I agree that Vrac and la Binette sometimes get up to things they oughtn’t, but Vrac’s not a killer. You demonize him because he’s ugly and mentally—shall we say incomplete? When really he only represents the dark side of all of us. Look, I’ve known him all my life. When my brother, Patrice, and I were little and Vrac a few years older, he used to jump out of the bushes at us, screaming and making horrible faces. He’d chase us through the woods, threatening to bash our heads in. I admit, we were terrified. However, I suppose, like most boys, there was also a side of us that relished the gruesomeness of it. I suppose you might say we turned it into a kind of game. We ran, he hunted us down. A variation
of cache-cache
.”

“Hide-and-seek? A rather nasty form of it.”

Alain grinned ruefully. “We took care not to let Vrac find us, let me tell you. The consequences could be pretty dire. In fact, it became a rule of the game. The hunter could do anything he wanted to you if he caught you.”

“Such as what?” Mara asked faintly.

“Oh, mainly shoves and punches. Vrac didn’t have the imagination to be very refined in his punishments. But far worse than that were his seizures. It was really frightening, watching him flail around and foam at the mouth. La Binette would have to hold him down until he grew calm again. Otherwise, he’d break things or hurt himself. But I can assure you, he never did us or anyone else any real harm. Everyone around here knows that.”

Mara leaned earnestly across the table. “Alain, that was Vrac as a child. Nineteen years ago, Vrac would have been a man of—what?—thirty? thirty-five? If he found my sister on his land, what do you think he would have done?”

Alain went silent, his gaze drifting unhappily out over the water. Restlessly, he shoved his shirtsleeves up, exposing tanned, muscular arms lightly furred with golden hairs. “In my opinion, Mara, apart from a few threats and obscenities, nothing.”

She fixed him somberly.

“And if he came across me alone in the forest? It wasn’t my imagination, you know. Someone was stalking me that day. Purposely trying to frighten
me. Or worse. I find it hard to believe that a chance passerby simply happened to decide to chase me through the trees.”

Alain tossed a heel of bread to the ground for Jazz. “So do I. But only because there were no passersby.” And when she looked puzzled, he went on to explain. “You see, you’d strayed onto Saint-Hubert terrain, the grounds of our local hunting association. My father is the association president. That day, it so happened that he asked me to do a routine check of the area, the posting of hunting-reserve and parking signs and so forth. I was on that footpath and in that stretch of forest for over two hours, Mara. During all that time I saw no one, apart from you and your botanical friend.”

Alain’s eyes met hers. In the sunlight, the dark-blue centers were surrounded by aquamarine. She held his gaze. At last, he sighed, slumping back in a gesture of defeat.

“All right. I suppose it could have been Vrac. He wanders around a lot, and the woods where you were aren’t that far from his land. But if it was he, I can assure you he would have only wanted to frighten you. I doubt he intended you any harm.”

Mara smiled tightly. “Another game of
cache-cache?
You don’t,” she challenged him, “really expect me to believe that?”

•

Julian’s first consideration was how to implement the search. He made it clear that this would not be so
easy, since no public footpath or hiking trail gave legitimate access to La Binette terrain. Going under cover of darkness was impossible for obvious reasons—he needed light to see and photograph the orchids that Mara required as evidence. The search would have to be conducted in broad daylight and at risk of Julian’s neck.

It was Gaston who came up with the only feasible strategy. However, he played up shamefully, refusing to talk on the telephone and insisting that all of them come to “consult” with him at his house in Le Coux. He was out of the hospital by then and being assiduously nursed by his wife and seven daughters, who treated him as if he really were a battle hero. Which was only right. He had, after all, been in something very like the wars. And still was because his boss was giving him trouble, sloughing responsibility for the accident onto Gaston in order to cover up his own track record of shoddy vehicle maintenance. But if Gaston’s engine hadn’t given out, he wouldn’t have been freewheeling down the road in the first place.

The four of them drove out on Monday evening, when the bistro was closed. They found Gaston in the garden, eating a roll of
petit-suisse
mashed up with sugar, like a schoolboy. White flecks of the creamy cheese stuck to his teeth. The bruising around his eyes had faded to an unattractive yellowish-green. His nose, no longer bandaged, was the color of an underripe aubergine. Paul and Mado gave him chocolates. Julian, who carried the flowers that Mara
had brought as a get-well present, dumped them unceremoniously in the
facteur’s
lap.

Gaston dragged it out as long as he could. First he commanded his daughters to bring chairs. The guests were then served apéritifs and a tasty homemade pâté spread on little slices of grilled bread. After that he and his family had to hear in detail about Mara and Julian’s encounter with Vrac and her visit to the château. Gaston was particularly fascinated by Mara’s description of the interior of the house, for he had never been farther than the kitchen. He was dismayed that the de Sauvignacs had refused to help her.

“Hmm,” he said judiciously. “More to this than meets the eye. But why would they cover up for Vrac? It doesn’t make sense.”

“They tried to make him out as simple but harmless,” Mara said. “Alain, too. But I don’t believe it for a moment. I’m sure he had something to do with Bedie’s disappearance. We’ve got to find some way of searching the farm without their knowledge.”

“She means me,” Julian pointed out unnecessarily.

Gaston rubbed his chin.

Finally, what he told them was this: Vrac fished, and la Binette went sometimes to market to sell cheese. That was their opportunity, when the two of them were away from the farm.

“And when exactly would this be?” Julian inquired sarcastically.

“Well…” Gaston pushed his fat lips out and considered. “The old woman sometimes goes to the
market in Le Bugue, which is on Tuesdays. Or sometimes she sells her
brebis
over in Montignac, which has its market day on Wednesdays. However, she doesn’t go every week. Only when she has cheese to sell. But since it’s May, you’re probably in luck because the ewes are milking. Now, if it were winter, that would be a different story.”

“What about Vrac?” asked Julian. “He’s the one I’m worried about.”

“I’m getting there. Don’t rush me. Vrac, on the other hand, comes and goes like a wild animal. Why, I’ve seen him standing still as a heron, up to his hips in the lower reaches of the Nauze one day, and prowling around the north shore of the Dordogne the next. The trick, as I said, is to hit on the very day when both of them are away together.”

“How?” they all wanted to know.

“It’ll take some planning,” Gaston admitted. “However, if you just give me a little moment, I think I can come up with
une stratégie
that’ll work.”

He then went deep into thought. Mara stared at him in frustration. Paul slumped in his chair. Gaston’s wife and daughters sat forward in theirs, goggling. Mado paced at the edge of the group, blowing smoke in the direction of the rosebushes. Damaged though Gaston was, Julian had to resist an urge to shake him until his neck snapped.

“What I suggest you do,” Gaston said slowly, coming up and squinting into the middle distance, “is go out early on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning.
There’s a copse above the farm, just below where the road winds up to Les Colombes. Hide your car in the trees, walk down, and find a spot where you have a good view of the farm. But you’ll have to keep a sharp eye out for the people in the château, too. That’s important because Madame walks in the woods every day and Monsieur still likes to shoot the occasional rabbit. You don’t want them to see you. It would give everything away. Monsieur de Sauvignac would be perfectly in his right to order you off since all of the uphill land around there still belongs to him.”