Injury Time (16 page)

Madame Vercollas was a younger edition of the woman who had answered the door. ‘Good afternoon …'

Sloan explained the nature of their errand. Laura Vercollas sat down rather suddenly in one of the armchairs. Her sister murmured something about a cup of tea and retreated to the kitchen.

‘I'm sorry to be silly, Inspector,' said Laura Vercollas wanly. ‘I ought to have known why you had come. My notary in Huisselot warned me to expect all this.'

‘Quite so.'

‘But he didn't know how long the formalities would take.'

Sloan cleared his throat. ‘Well, the due processes of law have been gone through now and I must warn you that …'

‘Yes, yes,' she interrupted quickly. ‘I do understand the procedure.' She twisted her lips into an awkward smile. ‘In a way, Inspector, it's a relief that you've come and the waiting's over.'

He nodded with suitable gravity. Just as sometimes it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive, sometimes it was a relief when the axe fell … He pulled himself together, glad he hadn't spoken aloud. He wasn't at all sure if they still used the guillotine across the Channel.

‘At least,' said Madame Vercollas stoutly, ‘I shall have a chance to tell the court that I didn't kill my husband, in spite of what they say.'

‘Can you prove it, though?' asked Detective Constable Crosby with interest.

She turned her gaze in his direction. ‘I don't know. My husband was—well—rather older than I, and not a well man. He died in a strange hotel from a massive dose of a narcotic, and the French police say that I gave it to him.'

‘Tea,' said Anne Pickford, coming into the room with a tray and dispelling any lingering doubts that Sloan might have had that both sisters were English.

‘And you say you didn't poison him,' said Crosby, leaning forward with the air of one trying to get something clear.

Madame Vercollas nodded gently. ‘I didn't kill Louis.'

‘The evidence …' began Crosby, to whom the arm's length nature of an Extradition Order had not been explained.

‘Is all against me,' she said at once.

‘Now, now, Laura,' said her sister, ‘you mustn't be defeatist.'

Detective Inspector Sloan, who prized realism for its own sake, hitched his shoulders forward and said: ‘You understand, madam, that it is the French authorities who …'

‘I understand all right,' she said calmly, ‘and I don't blame them for thinking as they do. For one thing, we were strangers in Corbeaux. I'd never even seen the place before.'

‘How did you come to be there?' asked Sloan.

‘We were staying in a resort about twenty miles away—Louis thought a holiday might do him good—when suddenly something or somebody there upset Louis and he insisted on leaving the hotel there and then and finding somewhere else that very night.' She hesitated. ‘He was like that.'

‘A difficult man,' pronounced Anne Pickford judiciously.

Laura Vercollas didn't deny this. She said, ‘That's something else they're holding against me: that he wasn't easy to live with …'

‘And you just happened on Corbeaux?' asked Sloan, interested in spite of himself.

‘Louis pointed to the map and said: “We'll try there.”'

‘He drove?'

‘I drove and he directed me,' she said. ‘It was practically dark by the time we arrived but he must have had a map because he steered me through the town all right—except for a one-way street that I had to reverse out of. He told me when to stop and I found we were outside the Hôtel Coq d'Or in the Place Dr Jacques Colliard.'

‘He went in?'

‘I went in, Inspector. Louis didn't move about more than he had to. Not since his last illness. He told me to book a room for five nights, and so I did.'

‘Why five?'

‘I don't know. But in the end, oddly enough, I was there for the five.'

‘You had dinner there?'

She twisted her lips wryly. ‘That's something else the police are holding against me. I think they think I'm another Madame de Brinvilliers. Louis wanted to have dinner in our room so they brought it up. We ate alone. You can see how their minds work, can't you?'

‘More tea?' asked Anne Pickford.

Laura Vercollas was not diverted. ‘Corbeaux is one of those
bastide
towns with a war memorial and fountain in the middle of the square. We had our meal looking out on to the Place. It was lit up and rather nice. And in the morning when I woke up Louis was dead in bed.'

‘Had you had snails?' enquired Crosby, who could not have been described as exactly Francophile. ‘Or frogs' legs?'

The ghost of a smile crossed her face. ‘
Potage
and
bœuf bourgugnon
. Nothing likely to upset anyone.' She paused. ‘Louis had been ill—I think I told you—and he was always careful what he had in the evening in case it kept him awake. He slept badly enough anyway and he had a lot of nightmares when he did get to sleep. He often used to call out for the doctor in the night, but it was in his sleep. He talked a lot in his sleep,' she said flatly.

‘What about?' asked Sloan. In his book talking while asleep was a passkey to the subconscious mind.

‘It was double Dutch to me,' said the Englishwoman of the Frenchman. ‘Names mostly. Hercule, Jean-Paul, François—they were always cropping up.'

‘Did you never ask him who they were?'

‘Once,' she said in a reserved manner.

‘And?'

‘He moved into the second bedroom.' She clasped her hands rigidly in her lap. ‘You must remember, Inspector, that he was much older than me and I was his second wife.'

‘That saying,' put in her sister truculently, ‘about it being better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave isn't true.'

Laura Vercollas flushed. ‘Let us say it was a marriage of convenience.'

‘
His
convenience,' added Anne Pickford tartly.

‘What happened next?' asked Crosby, who was still a bachelor.

‘The hotel proprietor sent for the doctor. I explained about Louis's illness and showed him all the medicines he had been having for it. He said that since we were strangers in Corbeaux he would telephone our doctor in Huisselot.'

‘Then what?'

‘At first everything was all right—well, straightforward anyway. I saw the undertaker and so forth and went to have a look at the cemetery—the French make rather a thing of their cemeteries.'

Sloan nodded. Even he had heard of
pompe funèbre
.

‘It was outside the town and I couldn't find Louis's map in the car, but I got there in the end.' She looked at the two policemen. ‘There was no point in my taking him back to Huisselot. It hadn't been his home town or anything, and when I came to think of it I didn't even know where his parents and sister were buried. It had never cropped up, and in any case he was a very secretive man.'

‘Quite so,' said Sloan.

‘All I knew was their names—Henri Georges and Clothilde Marie. The sister was Clémence …' Her voice trailed away as if she had just remembered something.

‘What is it?' asked Sloan sharply.

‘Nothing.' She shook her head. ‘I arranged the funeral and ordered some of those marble
éternelles
that aren't allowed in England, and then …'

‘Then?' prompted Sloan.

‘Then the doctor said that there would have to be a post-mortem after all. All of his sleeping draught had gone, you see.'

‘That's when they found out about the narcotic poisoning?' said Sloan soberly.

She nodded.

‘Didn't the fools think about suicide?' said Crosby, forgetting all about the professional
entente cordiale
that was supposed to exist between national police forces.

‘There was no note,' said Laura Vercollas with the air of one repeating a well-rehearsed list. ‘There had been no threats to end his life at any time. He wasn't in pain, and generally speaking physically ill people don't do it. To say nothing,' she added painfully, ‘of its being a funny time and place to choose—the first night in a strange hotel in a strange town.'

‘Looks black, doesn't it,' agreed Crosby ingenuously.

‘Louis wasn't exactly poor either.' Laura Vercollas apparently couldn't resist piling Pelion upon Ossa. ‘That interested the French police a lot.'

‘I'll bet,' said the Constable warmly.

‘That's all very well,' said Laura Vercollas with spirit, ‘but I didn't put that sleeping draught into the wine or the soup, no matter what anyone says.'

Had Crosby been French he might have said
‘Bravo'
to that. Instead he looked distinctly mournful. ‘They've got everything on a plate, though, haven't they?'

‘A strange hotel in a strange room,' said Sloan slowly, ‘and yet your husband found it easily enough.'

‘He had a map.'

‘No,' said Sloan quietly. ‘You couldn't find the map, could you?'

She stared at him.

‘And the only mistake he made in getting to the hotel was directing you up a one-way street.'

‘Ye … es,' she said uncertainly.

‘Streets that have been two-way can be made one-way.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘When you mentioned your husband's parents' names just now,' said Sloan swiftly, ‘you were going to say something else.'

‘It was nothing, Inspector. Only a coincidence.'

‘Coincidence and circumstantial evidence sometimes go hand in hand,' said Sloan sternly, hoping that he might be forgiven by an unknown number of defence counsels for picking one of their best lines.

‘It was when I was in the cemetery,' said Laura Vercollas. ‘I wandered about a bit, as one does, and I just happened to notice a tombstone to another husband and wife called Henri Georges and Clothilde Marie, that's all. Not the same surname. It was just a coincidence.'

‘And Clémence?' asked Sloan softly.

She shook her head. ‘There was a Clémence but in another part of the ceme—' She stopped and stared at him.

‘Madame Vercollas,' he said, ‘think carefully. You arrived in Corbeaux after dark.'

‘Yes.'

‘You yourself went into the hotel and arranged the room. Not your husband.'

‘Yes.'

‘You had your meal not in the dining-room but in your bedroom.'

‘Yes.'

‘Who answered the door to the waiter who brought it up?'

‘I did.'

‘Did he see your husband?'

‘No. He was in the bathroom when he came.'

‘So no one in Corbeaux actually saw your husband?'

‘No one.'

‘Did that not strike you as very strange?'

‘I hadn't thought about it.'

Sloan watched her face intently. ‘Had your husband ever mentioned Corbeaux in the past?'

‘He never mentioned the past at all, Inspector,' responded Laura Vercollas.

‘The Occupation?'

‘He wouldn't talk about the war at all except to say that he wanted to forget it.'

‘So he might,' said Sloan vigorously. ‘And he succeeded, didn't he? Except perhaps,' he added meaningfully, ‘when he was asleep.'

‘Those names, you mean?'

‘Hercule, Jean-Paul, François,' said Sloan.

‘And the doctor,' put in Crosby.

‘Madam,' said Sloan, ‘you told us the address of the hotel, didn't you?'

‘Yes, I did,' she replied quickly. ‘It was le Coq d'Or, Place Dr Jacques Colliard … Place Dr Jacques Colliard.' She stiffened. ‘Inspector, there was a plaque in the square. I noticed it particularly.'

‘Yes?' said Sloan into the sudden silence that had fallen in the neat sitting-room in suburban Berebury.

Madame Vercollas's voice had sunk to a whisper. ‘It said, “Place Dr Jacques Colliard, Martyr de la Résistance”.'

‘The doctor,' said Crosby, almost under his breath. ‘If what I am suggesting is so,' said Sloan carefully, ‘there will be other memorials too. Such men are not forgotten in France.'

She moistened her lips. ‘You mean Louis arranged to go back to Corbeaux to die? But why didn't he just …'

Sloan put the thought delicately: ‘Perhaps he wouldn't have been welcome.'

She looked up.

‘Perhaps,' he went on, ‘if they had known in Corbeaux who he was they wouldn't have had him in their churchyard …'

‘Are you saying, Inspector, he might have betrayed those men?'

‘They were hard times in France,' said Sloan obliquely. ‘No one knows what sort of unimaginable pressure …'

‘The names he couldn't stop dreaming about.'

‘The Gestapo,' said Sloan evenly, ‘might have gone on a “shopping expedition”, so to speak, that he would have found it hard to resist. Who are we to judge, madam? We are too young to know.'

‘It would explain how he knew the way in the dark,' she said.

‘And why he would never come to England,' said Anne Pickford intelligently, the teapot still in her hand.

Crosby looked puzzled.

‘Vercollas wouldn't have been his real name and he couldn't have got a passport,' she said.

Laura Vercollas was sitting very still. ‘Inspector, if those names that Louis couldn't stop remembering in his sleep are on the Corbeaux war memorial, the French police will have to think again, won't they?'

‘They will.' Sloan relaxed. ‘There's something you mustn't say to them, though, madam.'

‘What's that?'

‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.'

BLUE UPRIGHT

‘Good morning, sir.' The hall porter acknowledged Henry Tyler's arrival with his usual slightly inclined bow. ‘Sir Coningsby asked me to say that when you came he would be in the library.'

Henry nodded, left his umbrella in the stand made from an old shell-case and went inside the building which housed the Mordaunt Club. He was appreciative, as always, of the prevailing calm there.