Paris Requiem (35 page)

Before he had finished, he heard the click of the door. He tiptoed out and saw Violette, a basket filled with groceries in her arms. He greeted her, said he would be dining with Mlle Harriet and returned to his musing.

He was just thinking about the fire which had obliterated Madame Arnhem’s life and set the two sisters on such a treacherous path, when a sound from Ellie pierced his concentration.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked in a neutral voice.

‘I’m just writing something, Ellie dear.’

‘About what.’

He swallowed. He still didn’t know if she was focused in the here and now or not. ‘About a case.’

‘A case?’

‘Olympe. Can I get you something to eat, Ellie. Or a drink. Violette’s back.’

Her brow furrowed with the effort of attention. ‘Will you
pass me my notebook?’ she surprised him by asking. ‘I want to write, too.’

‘You mustn’t tire yourself, Ellie.’

She said nothing, not even when he handed her the book and the stubby pencils which lay beside it. She propped herself on an elbow and gesturing him away, opened the journal and began to write. A noise in the corridor made her stop. She was all alertness. ‘Who’s that?’

‘I imagine it’s Harriet.’

She slammed the cover of the book down. ‘I don’t want to see her. Don’t let her in here.’ Her nostrils quivered. There was fear in her eyes, like a rabbit trapped in light.

‘All right. But she only means you well.’

‘I want you with me. No one else. Please stay. You do me good.’

‘Of course, I’ll stay.’

‘Thank you, Raf. Thank you.’

James froze in position. The Ellie who wanted him by her side was the Ellie who thought he was Raf.

‘And you’re the only one I’ll ever allow to read this,’ she whispered looking up at him with a tender expression. ‘You’re the only one who understands me. You understand about the worm. The worm who comes in the night.’

James murmured helpless assent.

F
or the next days, he was taken up with Ellie. He
ministered
to her, sat or slumbered by her side in a state of semi-somnolent vigilance, fed her the potions and broth Ponsard had prescribed and which she took from James and no one else, even though she still addressed him as Raf. Whoever he was, it seemed that his presence had a calming effect. Ponsard testified to as much on both his visits, which brought with them the whiff of an emissary from some promised, some imminently rational land. Since Ellie was peaceful Ponsard decided that she was best left to rest and mend in her own way, before he undertook any further treatment.

‘The mind is still a mysterious entity to our science,’ he told James. ‘We tiptoe, we blunder and do what we can. But who knows whether your sister may not be her own best physician, with a little help from time. When the mists of delusion have cleared, we will see what else we can do.’

Ellie paid no attention to the doctor. She only hummed a little during his visits, some childhood tune, which had the ring of a skipping rhyme.

‘The wind blows low, the wind blows high, little Jessie says she’ll die …’

She hummed across Harriet, too. James – or rather the Raf he was meant to be – was the only person she addressed with any degree of alertness, and that only to ask for her notebook or a cooling drink.

As he sat by her side, he wandered back over her past
episodes
and had a vision of his mother sitting just like this, the house darkened in enforced slumber, the knitting growing in her hands with the speed of a magic beanstalk.

Once, too, when he had come home to visit from
Philadelphia
and finding no one else about, had rushed into Ellie’s room, he had surprised his father in a similar posture, newspaper still in hand, eyes half closed. Ellie, her features askance, was mumbling something incomprehensible, and his father, instantly alert, had rushed him away as if from some secret scene of perfidy. He had offered no explanation, except that Ellie wasn’t herself.

It astonished James that throughout those years, he had never penetrated quite so deeply as now into the terrifying reality that simple expression obscured.

Some time during his bedside vigil, James slipped away to phone both Touquet’s office and the Grand. He left a message for his brother, simply to tell him where he was. He also wrote a note to Chief Inspector Durand explaining that Madame de Landois had indeed penned the blackmailing letter, but it dated from some six years back and was part of an elaborate hoax which bore no relation to the present situation. He wondered at his own formulation and at quite what induced him to preserve the woman’s honour. Perhaps it was simply that if the worst had to be discovered about Marguerite, he wanted to be the one to discover it. The shadowy nature of this wish didn’t fail to strike him. He concluded, not without an aching irony, that since he couldn’t hope to compete with Raf in the
winning of women’s favours, maybe he was trying at least to equal him when it came to knowledge.

As for the ever-present puzzle of Olympe’s tragic death, it had come to him during the musings of these long days and gruelling nights, that a hidden key to her relations with Marguerite and indeed with Raf, let alone the prostitutes she had visited, probably lay buried with her sister Judith. Or indeed with her childhood friend Louise Boussel. He could imagine the Olympe he now thought he had some grip on confessing to these old confidantes, telling them things she couldn’t mention to her new friends. Or simply thinking matters through in their uncritical presence. He didn’t quite know why he had come to this conclusion, except that he knew Olympe was a loyal soul. He determined to see both women as soon as he could leave Ellie.

But something intervened. In Saturday’s five o’clock post, there was a letter from Raf asking him to meet him at the Grand by eight. ‘Tonight is the big night,’ Raf proclaimed in the cryptic tone of someone who suspected his letter would be intercepted by alien eyes. ‘I know you wouldn’t want to miss it.’

James fingered the bracelet the boatman had given him and which still lay in his pocket. He took it out to examine it in the light. Could Raf have given it to Olympe? And should he now, in all conscience, return it to his brother and convey everything he had learned?

Like some ultra-sensitive instrument that could read his inclinations even before he was aware of them, Ellie was suddenly not only awake, but aware of who he was.

‘Jim,’ she beckoned him to her side. ‘Jim, where are you going? What’s that you’ve got? And where’s Raf? Where has he gone?’

‘I don’t quite know, Ellie. But I’m going to meet him at the hotel later.’

She surveyed him, her eyes darkening with her appraisal. ‘You never did like spending much time with me, Jim. Always running. Leaving me to Father or to Raf.’

‘That’s not quite fair, Ellie.’ He was taken aback by her accusation, but also relieved that she now recognised him.

‘Isn’t it?’ She turned her attention to the bracelet and snatched it from his hand. ‘Where did you get that, Jim? That’s my bracelet. Raf gave it to me for my birthday. I thought I’d lost it.’

‘Yours?’ He prevaricated. ‘I found it lying about. It’s pretty. Very pretty.’

‘Help me put it on, Jim.’

The trapped fire of the emeralds danced in the light. He fumbled with the catch.

‘Never mind, Jim. You won’t have to put up with me much longer. Everything will be fine now. Now that the bracelet’s come back.’ She started her humming, then stopped abruptly. ‘Tell Raf there’s something I need to say to him. Say to him alone. It’s urgent.’

‘All right. I’ll see you later then, Ellie.’ He planted a light kiss on her brow. ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling a little better. Harriet will take care of your needs.’

‘Ah Harriet. Dear Harriet. So utterly dependable.’ She sighed, her eyes playing over the bracelet once more.

The bustling Saturday evening streets dispersed the cloistered air of the sickroom with a tingling rapidity. Women’s hats looked brighter and more elaborate than an array of exotic birds. The frothy confections of the neighbouring patisserie enticed. Near the Madeleine, a harlequin of a juggler threw striped pins in the air with such speed that their colours
metamorphosed
and dazzled. When a flower girl thrust a bouquet of fluttering sweetpeas towards him, he purchased them for their sheer evanescent beauty.

The Grand appeared before he had expected it. He lingered for an extra moment in the life of the boulevard. He found himself wishing he could lose himself in its careless
extravagance
, as if a roof and walls signalled a suffocating tomb from which he had too recently been released. These last days with Ellie, in fact the entirety of these last weeks, since he had witnessed Olympe’s dead body, had given him, he realised, a sense of his own precarious mortality and with it a sense that life was precious. It led him to confront the fact that he had not felt it to be precious before. Since Maisie’s death he had successfully shrouded himself in some stiff impermeable carapace where sensation didn’t penetrate. Years in limbo. Years of waste.

He half remembered a line from Shakespeare. ‘I wasted time and now time wastes me.’ An unnameable fear coiled in his stomach. With it came a fleeting image of Marguerite brushing against him as they stood by the fireplace and an anxiety about what Raf’s ‘big night’ might entail.

He hurried through the lobby of the hotel. Seeing the crowd at the elevator, he made for the stairs. By the time he reached his room, he was panting slightly. He turned the knob only to find the door locked. He knocked. There was no response. A second knock still failed to rouse his brother. Puzzled, he tried again, then after a glance at his watch which showed five minutes to eight, slowly made his way back down to reception. What could have led Raf to alter his stated plans?

The clerk handed James an envelope. Beneath the formal reticence, his eyes were avid with curiosity. James turned away to read his letter. The note was briefer than a telegram. ‘Emergency at Salpêtrière. Raf.’

Without pausing to deliberate, James headed for the door.

A motley crowd had gathered in the stifling corridor outside Dr Vaillant’s ward. Passage was all but impossible. Nurses in
billowing headdresses jostled with white-gowned doctors and orderlies bearing a stretcher. All of them were pressed backwards by a caped policeman, standing at the door of one of the cell-like cubicles. Working his way through the gaggle, James saw a lightning-like flare flash from the partially open door. Into the hush that followed it, came a commanding, ‘Don’t touch anything. Not a thing.’

Chief Inspector Durand’s voice. James pushed forward, his pulse racing faster than a greyhound. Before he could reach the door, a man barged past him, his elbows like battering rams. Dr Comte. His face was set in an ugly scowl. James uttered his name, but the man was as oblivious to his
surroundings
as a locomotive at full steam. He rammed his way between the women and charged down the corridor.

Torn between following him and making his way past the gendarme, James was momentarily transfixed by a second flash. He could smell the burning powder now, like rotting eggs.

‘Chief Inspector Durand’s expecting me,’ he shouted above the head of an orderly.

‘Name?’ the policeman barked officiously.

James told him.

He opened the door a fraction wider to squeeze through. James’s innards lurched. He saw the loose hospital gown first, swinging in the air as if a wind had propelled it upwards and refused to let it go. Beneath it, two limp stockinged feet turned in a ninety degree arc and back again with hypnotic slowness. Time was trapped in that infinitesimal motion.

He forced his eyes upwards. From a knotted sheet hung a woman, her bent face all but obliterated by a fan of dark hair. The hair crackled with life. It was the only life left in her.

‘There’s no room for anyone else in there now.’

James barely heard the gendarme’s words. His thoughts were too loud. Judith Arnhem. Judith was dead. Judith who
had predicted her own death, who had forewarned them. How had they allowed this to happen?

Immune to admonishments, he propelled himself back through the crowded hall in search of Comte. Why had Durand allowed the man to go? He pushed open the door he thought he had seen Comte enter. The cackles and screams of a ward besieged him. For a moment, in the pandemonium, he was disoriented. A stout matron emerged from the sea of rocking figures to block his passage. He asked for Dr Comte. With a shake of the head and a stern ‘not here’, she marched him backwards.

James tried a second and a third door. Both were locked.

From the far end of the corridor he now heard a new
commotion
. ‘Make way. Make way,’ a voice ordered.
Stretcher-bearers
moved in his direction. A sheet covered the figure between them. Keeping pace with the desolate retinue was the sticklike pathology student, Steinlen.

James gripped his arm. ‘You remember me? That’s a friend of mine you have there. I’d like to come with you.’

The bony youth gave him a harassed look. ‘That’s against orders. Specific orders.’ He shook James off. ‘Besides, she’s no one’s friend now.’

‘Whose orders?’

‘Police.’ A smug smile tugged at his lips. ‘They’re the only ones allowed in.’

James retraced his steps. He reached the cubicle just as the photographer struggled through the door, a tripod balanced in one arm. While he exchanged a word with the gendarme, James slipped unnoticed into the room.

Bent almost double, Arnhem sat on the palette of a bed and swayed slightly. He didn’t look up. His gnarled hands covered his face as if he might never lift them from there again. Raf stood next to Chief Inspector Durand. Both of them were staring up at the ceiling where a beam traversed the room. Screwed
into it was a hook of the kind that might once have been used for holding a candle tray. Stretched on the floor beneath them was the sheet he had last seen round Judith’s throat. It was tightly wound and regularly knotted like some giant’s
primitive
necklace. A toppled stool lay beside it. The air was stale, foetid with an aroma which could only be the stench of death.

‘Jim. You got here.’ Raf spoke first. ‘Olympe’s sister is dead.’ Raf’s eyes were vast with childlike wonder. A vein throbbed at his temple. ‘Monsieur Arnhem and the nurse found her hanging when he came to visit. It’s too awful. He had the presence of mind to insist on getting the Chief Inspector here.’

‘And I sent for you, Monsieur Norton. Your brother
intercepted
the message.’ Durand scowled at both of them. ‘A foul business. The matron told us the woman had been ranting of nothing but death for weeks. Which is why they had her in here on her own.’

‘Had her in here alone so they could do away with her more easily.’ Arnhem’s guttural hiss startled all of them. ‘You’re fools all of you.’

‘Be reasonable, Arnhem. I know it’s not easy when your child … your children … The point is if the medics wanted to get her, they could just give her an injection of something. A lot less trouble and you would have been none the wiser.’

‘Did you interview Dr Comte?’ James was so transfixed by the grief in Arnhem’s face, that his voice came in a whisper.

‘Comte raged. He had apparently just come on duty when I arrived. He gave his nurses a regular dressing down.’ Durand stroked his moustache reflectively. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to have been in their shoes. He told them when patients were put into solitary it was not so that they could be forgotten for days on end.’

‘What did the nurses say?’

‘Mademoiselle Laplanche …’ Durand checked his notebook, ‘said it was the weekend and they had all been run off
their feet and that they were two short of staff, because of illness, and that they had indeed looked in on Judith Arnhem at noon and she was sleeping peacefully.’

‘I presume you’ve asked the pathologist to run a check on what chemicals she had inside her.’