Paris Requiem (15 page)

James leaned forward nervously. He hadn’t noticed the Chief Inspector at the theatre. Nor did he know where the man had learned quite so much about him.

‘Like me, he was inevitably thinking of the impact the play Olympe Fabre performed in night after night might have had on her tragic actions. As you know, Madame, in the play there is a suicide pact. The heroine commits a crime of passion. She kills herself, in the full expectation, I imagine, that her lover will do the same.’

A hush had settled on the table. Everyone stared at
Marguerite
. Her brow was gathered in serious consideration.

‘I see, Chief Inspector. I do see. With the slight difference that Olympe was neither a woman married to a man twice her age, nor had a child, it now only remains for you to find the absent party to her double suicide. Are you hoping that another body, this time a young man’s, will turn up in the Seine? Do you know who this person might be?’

Marguerite’s tone bordered on irony without quite
toppling
over into it. James was unsure of her intent and was about to intervene when the leap of emotion in Durand’s face held him back. The man’s features held all the marks of someone who had just suffered a savage slur on his reputation.

If Marguerite were a man, James felt certain, Durand would now challenge her to one of the city’s famed duels. Instead he fingered the edge of his knife, which lay innocently enough on the table. As if unaware of his action, he tested its
sharpness
on his thumb, back and forth, forth and back, until a tiny drop of blood appeared. Surprised, Durand blotted it quickly on his napkin and said with steady authority. ‘Surely, this is not the moment for such speculation, Madame.’

Marguerite gave him a charming smile. It wiped away any negative interpretation he might have made of her
earlier
comments. ‘You are altogether right, Chief Inspector. I
am, as you must know, very pleased that you are putting all your skills into the matter of my young friend’s death and that it haunts you as it does me. Your Commissaire speaks very highly of you.’ With that, she rose from the table. ‘We shall talk more in due course.’

James followed her with his eyes, saw her sinuous form move in and out of the mirrored maze until it vanished
mysteriously
. He had a sense that he had missed some important cue, but he wasn’t certain quite what it might be.

Later, after they had all risen from their tables and he had been introduced to more people than he could hope to remember and the quartet was playing again, he caught a glimpse of the Chief Inspector and Marguerite half hidden behind a column on which a bronze dancer stood. He moved in their direction, placing himself casually in front of the pillar. He was almost certain that in the intensity of their
conversation
, they wouldn’t see him.

‘Frankly, Chief Inspector,’ Marguerite was saying. ‘I do not think you are on the right track. Rafael Norton is not capable of such foolishness.’

James stiffened. His mind careened. He almost abandoned his hiding place for direct confrontation, then thought better of it. Marguerite was doing his work.

‘Double suicide. No. No. It is not in his style.’

‘People we admire,’ the Chief Inspector italicised the word, ‘can often blind us to their less honourable, less rational parts.’

‘That may be so, Chief Inspector, but I doubt this
particular
intrigue that you have invented. Olympe may have been capable of suicide, but not as part of such a banal plot. There was no reason.’

‘Monsieur Norton could well have feared the arrival of his older brother. A Jewess, after all, a Jewess with a less than immaculate past would hardly be someone to bring into a respectable family.’

There was silence for a moment and James imagined Marguerite shaking her head emphatically.

‘All the gossip at the theatre points only to him,’ Durand was insistent. ‘If you think that they didn’t mutually persuade each other into suicide, the romantic suicide of doomed, despairing lovers, and that he was somehow interrupted in the act, then the crime becomes even more serious. We will have to suppose that he persuaded or helped her to her death in a fit of jealousy or out of a sense of dishonour because she had betrayed him with some unworthy rival. There was another man, someone at the theatre mentioned. But I don’t have a name. Yes. Either that, or Monsieur Norton’s love had grown cold and he found an expedient way of ridding himself of a mistress who had become too persistent.’

‘No, no, no, Monsieur l’Inspecteur. None of this fits at all with my knowledge of these two people. You will have to find some evidence to convince me.’ Marguerite’s voice had a tremor in it. ‘My own sense is that you need to cast your net wider.’

‘And you think that Monsieur Norton’s absolute conviction that Olympe did not kill herself, is evidence of nothing at all?’

‘Nothing at all. Neither a momentary amnesia, nor a cover-up.’

With that, Marguerite appeared from behind the column and quickly walked towards her guests. The music was drawing to an end. Applause filled the room.

James hurried after her.

‘May we have a moment alone? Perhaps after the others have left?’ He slipped automatically into English. ‘I would so like to speak with you.’

She looked at him and then behind him. James turned slightly and saw Durand’s vigilant gaze on them.

With a smile that had nothing of complicity in it, Marguerite held out her hand for the formality of a parting. ‘Ask
Pierre to show you to the library on your way out,’ she
murmured
. ‘Ah, Chief Inspector, Monsieur Norton must already leave us. But not you, I trust. I particularly wanted to
introduce
you to Anatole Bartholi.’

‘I would be honoured, Madame,’ he bowed slightly, then turned to James. ‘We will meet again very soon, Monsieur Norton, I have no doubt. No doubt at all.’

In the lamplight, the library had the soft stillness of a cocoon. Ranked books watching over him like so many benevolent gods, James sat back in the striped sofa with a sense of well-being which he knew had everything to do with the magic spell of the place and nothing to do with the situation in which he now felt himself inextricably entangled. The stubborn insistence of Chief Inspector Durand’s voice as it spun its web of malign speculation was at a distant remove. Far closer was the intimate waft of cherry blossom which
fluttered
in through the half-open window and brought with it Marguerite’s presence – so appealing, so reasonable, yet so subtly mysterious.

He must have dozed off, for he suddenly heard her voice in a double register, both inner and outer. He ploughed through the haze of dream and sat up.

She was looking down at him with a whimsical smile. ‘I’m so very sorry, Monsieur Norton. Sometimes my friends decide to stay for longer than they are altogether welcome. Let me get you a cognac.’

She walked to the far end of the room and poured two glasses from a decanter as James gathered his wits.

‘I wanted to talk to you about the situation, about several things in fact,’ James began when she had sat down in the chair opposite him.

‘You overheard my conversation with the Chief Inspector?’

‘Yes.’

She sighed. ‘I suspect our dear Chief Inspector is more suggestible than Olympe ever was. He has been hypnotised by the very cases he purports to investigate. He sees crimes of passion everywhere. The very notion that Olympe would be taken over by her role – a part in a play that is already based on a real case … oh yes, Monsieur, perhaps you didn’t know … Well that is altogether preposterous.’

‘So you do not think we are dealing with a crime of passion?’

She stared at him for a moment.

‘Do you think your brother is capable of such things?’

‘The Rafael I know is most certainly not.’

‘But you imagine a Rafael you don’t know?’

James sipped his cognac thoughtfully. ‘I imagine,’ he said slowly, feeling the rigor of her gaze, ‘I imagine that a woman could be madly, overwhelmingly in love with him. And that he might return that love.’ It wasn’t what he had intended to say. An imp of the perverse had taken him over and
propelled
him.

‘Ah, as for that …’ The sudden flush in her cheeks said more than her words. She collected herself quickly. ‘But there was still no reason for suicide. There was no cause for despair. There was nothing to stop their love. Nothing.’

James suddenly had an image of his mother hovering above him, her anger palpable in the rigidity of her features, her morality, her faith affronted. He prodded her away, not without a superstitious shiver. ‘No. Of course, you are right.’

‘What we must absolutely do is find some evidence to point the Chief Inspector in another direction or he could make Rafael’s life difficult. He is not predisposed in his favour. He does not like journalists. Nor for that matter Jews.’

‘Touquet, I believe, said that Durand was an upholder of scientific detection, an honest man.’

She shrugged. ‘Science can take many forms. Let’s hope the
juge d’instruction
is better disposed.’

‘Juge d’instruction?’

‘Yes, the judge who will lead the legal investigation of the case. One will be named very soon I imagine or perhaps already has been …’ she paused. ‘But Touquet is right. Durand is not an altogether unreasonable man. I feel certain that if there is a track we can point him to, I can sway him onto it.’

James remembered the way the man had responded to the mildest of Marguerite’s ironies and had a feeling that the Chief Inspector might not be as tractable as she assumed. It seemed likely that the Chief Inspector was in at least two minds about aristocrats as well, even the most democratic amongst them.

But he nodded. ‘Yes. And it’s precisely these other tracks that I wish to speak to you about.’

She looked at him expectantly.

He drew out Olympe’s daybook from his pocket where it had made an unsightly bulge all evening. ‘I wanted your help on this. It belongs to Olympe. It charts her appointments. My brother …’ He paused, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘My brother is not altogether easy to talk to when it comes to the poor girl. And you have known her for so many years …’

She laughed. It was a warm, rich sound. ‘You have made Olympe’s case your own. I can see that. I wonder at it. Perhaps you too have grown a little fond of her?’

‘There is no cause for wonder.’ He responded a little stiffly. ‘You must understand. I would like to get my brother home as quickly as possible. I have a certain expertise in sifting
evidence
– and in this case, a necessary detachment.’

‘And you have her appointment book where Durand does not …’

James relaxed, chuckled. ‘It literally fell into my hands when I was in Olympe’s apartment. Together with some letters.’

‘Expertise, indeed.’

James turned the pages of the notebook until he had reached the last three weeks of Olympe’s life and handed it
to Marguerite. ‘Perhaps you could help me with the names some of the initials she noted here stand for. It might provide some clues. There is also a Marcel who wrote to her with great regularity. Do you know who he is?’

‘Marcel?’ Her cheek dimpled. ‘Ah yes, Marcel Bonnefoi. A fond and rather foolish young man. He adores actresses. He feels he can help them with their art.’

‘Could I meet him?’

‘It could be arranged. If he is still in Paris. The season as you know is coming to an end. But there is no harm in him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone an adored creature like Olympe.’

‘Does my brother know of his adoration?’

She laughed outright. ‘You are becoming as severe as our Chief Inspector, Monsieur Norton. A woman behaves a little badly and you say, famously like Dumas,
Tue-la!
Kill her. I can see how your thoughts are progressing. Rafael could never be jealous of Marcel. That is another preposterous idea.’

‘So he knows him?’ James was stubborn.

‘Of that I cannot be certain. You must ask him yourself. I am not his keeper.’ She looked down at the notebook.

‘There were also letters from an Armand, a Julien and an F de M. Do those names mean anything to you.’

Marguerite shook her head thoughtfully. ‘I don’t believe so.’ She paused. ‘You know, Monsieur Norton. Actresses have many admirers. Olympe was a very attractive young woman. If these men had been important to her, she would probably have mentioned them to me.’

‘Did she mention a painter called Max Henry?’

‘Decidedly, you have been busy, Monsieur. Yes, Olympe mentioned that she had posed for a few canvases. He is a neighbour. But nothing more, I believe.’

‘Do you know how she treated her admirers?’

‘You mean might one of them have harboured a passion that grew suddenly violent?’

‘Exactly.’

She shivered, then rose to refill their glasses. She didn’t speak again until she had sat down. ‘Anything is possible of course. But my own sense of Olympe is that she was kind. She wasn’t a trifler. An
allumeuse
as we say, a deliberate kindler of men’s passions. There was a sweet seriousness about her. But one never knows with admirers.’

Emotions passed over her face in swift succession and settled in regret. She looked down at the notebook. ‘Here. 28 May. Di. Didi. That was her childhood nickname for her sister, Judith. Then RN, that is your brother. He figures quite often. P, I imagine is Papa, yes, he is noted on the Monday he mentioned. The others LI, IB … I don’t recognise.

James pulled her back. ‘So you know about her sister?’

‘Shouldn’t I?’

‘Rafael didn’t. Not until Monsieur Arnhem mentioned her.’

‘I see. But that is understandable. There are certain things it is perhaps best to keep from men. With your experience of the world, you will know that, Monsieur Norton.’

She met his eyes and James felt his pulse beat with a sudden odd insistence. But she was already elsewhere, her expression dreamy, tinged with apprehension.

He needed to bring her back. ‘How long had you known Olympe? How did you meet her?’ he asked softly. ‘Tell me about your friendship.’