The Woman With the Bouquet (11 page)

Now there was nothing stopping her from breaking through the plaster wall.

The first three days, she thought it would seem indecent to go up there with a hammer and wrecking bar; and in any case, given the stream of visitors, she wouldn’t have had time. On the fourth day, when she saw that neither the telephone nor the doorbell were ringing, she promised herself that after a quick visit to her antique store, three hundred yards down the road, she would satisfy her curiosity.

At the very edge of town, the sign “G. and G. de Sarlat” in golden letters soberly announced an antique store of the kind that the region preferred: a place where one could hunt around both for major items—dressers, tables, wardrobes—to furnish immense secondary residences, and for knickknacks—lamps, mirrors, statuettes—to decorate well-furnished interiors. There was no particular style that dominated there, but most were represented, including some dreadful imitations, provided they were over a hundred years old.

Gabrielle’s two employees brought her up to date regarding the items sold during the fateful vacation in Savoie, then she spoke to her bookkeeper. After a brief meeting, she walked through the store that had filled with gossipy women the moment they had heard in the immediate neighborhood that “poor Madame Sarlat” was in her boutique.

She shuddered on seeing Paulette among them.

“My poor sweetheart,” exclaimed Paulette, “so young and already a widow!”

Paulette looked for an ashtray to put down her cigarette, smeared with orange lipstick, but could not find one, so she stubbed it out under her green heel, visibly unconcerned that she might burn the linoleum, and came toward Gabrielle, spreading her arms dramatically.

“My poor dear, I am so unhappy to see you unhappy.”

Gabrielle submitted to her embrace, trembling.

Paulette remained the only woman that she dreaded, for she was very gifted at ferreting out the truth in other people. Many considered her to be the most spiteful gossip, and she had the gift of penetrating people’s skulls with a laser beam—her insistent gaze, her protruding eyes—and then to find the turn of phrase that could demolish an individual’s reputation forever.

In the time it took to submit to her embrace, Gabrielle nearly choked on a few strands of Paulette’s dry, yellow hair, exhausted by decades of styling and hair dye, then she bravely confronted the face shining with swarthy foundation cream.

“Say, did the police question you? They must have asked you if you killed him, right?”

That’s it, thought Gabrielle, she already suspects me. She doesn’t waste her time, she goes straight for the jugular.

Gabrielle nodded, bending her head. Paulette reacted with a scream, “Bastards! To make you go through that! Someone like you, so crazy about your Gab, for thirty years you ate the carpet in his presence! Someone like you who’d have had any operation he asked for, who’d have changed into a mouse or a man! I’m not surprised! Bastards! They’re all bastards! Do you know what they did to me? When I was bringing up my second boy, Romuald, one day I had to take him to the hospital because the kid was all black and blue from slipping on getting out of the tub, can you imagine, the police came to get me at the emergency room to ask me if I hadn’t been battering him! Yes! They dragged me down to the station. And locked me up. Me! It lasted for forty-eight hours. Me, their mother, they thought I was guilty when all I’d done was drive my kid to the hospital. Swine! And did they do the same to you?”

Gabrielle understood that Paulette, far from suspecting her, was taking her side. She was sympathizing, as a former victim herself. For her, any woman who was interrogated by the police would logically become, by analogy with her own case, an innocent victim.

“Yes, me too, that very evening.”

“Jackals! How long?”

“Several hours.”

“Scumbags! My poor chick, was it humiliating, then?”

Paulette, offering Gabrielle the tenderness she felt for her own self, again crushed her friend against her chest.

Relieved, Gabrielle allowed her to rant and rave for a moment, then she went home to get started on Gab’s hiding place.

At noon, she went up the steps, the tools in her hand, and began to destroy the protective covering. The board jumped out, revealing a space where four small chests had been piled up.

She pulled over a low table and put the chests on it. While she had no idea what they contained, she did recognize them, for they were big metal cookie tins, and although the labels had been eroded by time and damp, you could still read “Madeleines from Commercy,” “Mint Humbugs,” “Lyon Marzipan Pillows,” and other such sweets.

She was about to lift the first lid when the doorbell rang.

Leaving aside her labors, she closed the door behind her with the key in the lock, then went down to open the door, determined to get rid of the importunating bore without delay.

“Police, Madame! May we come in?”

Several strong-jawed men were standing on the threshold.

“Of course. What do you want?”

“Are you Gabrielle de Sarlat, the wife of the late Gabriel de Sarlat?”

“Yes.”

“Come with us, please.”

“Why?”

“You are wanted at the police station.”

“If it’s to answer questions about my husband’s accident, your colleagues in Savoie already took care of that.”

“This is an entirely different matter, Madame. You are suspected of having killed your husband. A shepherd claims he saw you push him over the edge.”

After ten hours in police custody, Gabrielle was hesitant to confirm whom she despised more, the police chief or her lawyer. Perhaps she might have forgiven the police chief . . . When he was tormenting her, he was merely doing his job, adding neither viciousness nor passion, he was honestly trying to transform her into a culprit. Her lawyer, on the other hand, disturbed her because he wanted to know. And yet she was paying him to believe, not to know! What she was buying was his knowledge of the law, his experience of the courtroom, his energy to defend her; she didn’t care one way or the other whether he knew the truth.

The moment they were alone together, Maître Plissier, a good-looking, dark-haired man of forty, leaned toward his client with a self-important air and in a grave voice, the kind of voice given to heroic cowboys in dubbed American Westerns, he said: “Now, I would like you to tell me, and only me, the truth, Madame Sarlat. It will not leave these walls. Did you push your husband?”

“Why would I do such a thing?”

“Do not answer me with a question. Did you push him?”

“That was my answer: ‘Why would I do such a thing?’ I have been accused of a senseless act. I loved my husband. We were happy together for thirty years. We had three children together, who can testify to that.”

“We can plead a crime of passion.”

“A crime of passion? At the age of fifty-eight? After thirty years of marriage?”

“Why not?”

“At the age of fifty-eight, Monsieur, if we are still in love, it’s because we like one another, in a lucid sort of way, a harmonious, dispassionate affair, without excess, without drama.”

“Madame Sarlat, stop telling me what I am to think but tell me rather what you think. You might have been jealous.”

“Ridiculous!”

“Was he cheating on you?”

“Don’t defile him.”

“Who stands to inherit from your husband?”

“Nobody, he had no possessions. All the capital belongs to me. Moreover, we were married under separation of property.”

“And yet, his last name is that of a good family . . .”

“Yes, Gabriel de Sarlat, people are always impressed. They think I married a fortune whereas I only married a name with a handle. My husband didn’t have a penny to his name, and he never knew how to make money. Our property comes from me, from my father, rather, Paul Chapelier, the orchestra conductor. My husband’s disappearance does not improve my financial situation; it changes nothing, it even makes it worse, because he was the one who used to transport the antiques that we sold in the shop in his van and if I want to continue, I will have to hire an extra employee.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’ve done nothing but, Monsieur.”

“Maître . . .”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There is nothing I stand to gain through my husband’s death. Perhaps he would have gained more from mine.”

“Is he the one then, who tried to push you, with that very intention?”

“Are you mad?”

“Think about it. We could support such a hypothesis, that there was a struggle. On that mountain path, he decided to get rid of you in order to have your money. By pushing him, you merely resorted to self-defense.”

“Separation of property! He would not have inherited a thing upon my death, nor would I upon his. And why are you making up such improbable scenarios?”

“Because a man saw you, Madame! The shepherd tending his flock says that you rushed up to your husband and pushed him into the void.”

“He is lying!”

“Why should he lie, what purpose would that serve?”

“It’s absolutely extraordinary. When I suggest that there is no reason for me to kill my husband, whom I love, you doubt me, whereas you believe the shepherd on the pretext that there is no reason for him to lie! It’s a double standard! Who hired you? The shepherd, or me? It’s unbelievable! I can give you a hundred reasons why your shepherd might be lying: to look interesting, to become the hero of his canton, to take revenge on a woman or several women through me, to stir up shit just for the pleasure of stirring up shit! And besides, how far away was he? Five hundred yards? Eight hundred yards? A mile?”

“Madame de Sarlat, don’t go making up my defense for me. The shepherd’s testimony against us is damning: he saw you!”

“Well, I didn’t see him.”

Maître Plissier paused to look closely at Gabrielle. He sat down next to her and ran his hand over his forehead, worried.

“Am I to take that for a confession?”

“What?”

“You looked all around before you pushed your husband and you didn’t notice anyone. Is that what you are confessing to me?”

“Monsieur, I am trying to make it clear to you that after my husband’s fall, I looked all around and shouted out, loudly, because I was looking for help. Your famous shepherd did not come forward, did not reply. That’s rather odd, don’t you think? If he had gone to alert the guides, or down to where my husband was lying, perhaps then . . . If he’s accusing me, isn’t it to protect himself?”

“From what?”

“Non-assistance to a person in danger. I am talking about my husband. And about myself, by extension.”

“That’s not a bad idea to turn the situation around, however, I have to be the one to put forward such an argument. Coming from you it would sound fishy.”

“Oh, really? You can accuse me of something monstrous, but I mustn’t seem too clever, how pleasant!”

She pretended to be irritated although basically she was glad she had understood how to manipulate her lawyer.

“I’ll drag him in front of the courts, that shepherd, see if I don’t!”

“For the time being, you’re the one who has been indicted, Madame.”

“I had to go tearing down the mountain for hours to find some hikers and alert the rescuers. Your shepherd, if he saw my husband fall, why didn’t he go to help him? Why didn’t he alert anyone? Because if he had reacted quickly, perhaps my husband would still be alive . . .”

Then, exasperated at having to do the lawyer’s job for him, she decided to have a crying fit and she sobbed for a good ten minutes.

Once her convulsion was over, Maître Plissier, who had been duly moved, began henceforth to believe everything she said. She scorned him all the more for his reversal of attitude: to let himself be worn down by a few sobs, what an oaf! Basically, when faced with a woman full of resolve, there was not a man on earth any smarter than the next one.

The chief of police came back and began his interrogation. He kept going over the same points; Gabrielle replied in identical fashion, although not as sharply as with her lawyer.

As the police chief was cleverer than the lawyer, after he had excluded any motives of interest, he went back to the relationship between Gabrielle and Gab.

“Be frank with me, Madame Sarlat, did your husband not want to leave you? Did he have a mistress? Or mistresses? Was your relation as satisfying as before? Did you have any reason to reproach him?”

Gabrielle understood that her fate would be determined by this gray zone, and she adopted a tactic that she would maintain to the end.

“I’m going to tell you the truth, officer: Gab and I were the luckiest couple in the world. He never cheated on me. I never cheated on him. Try to find someone to tell you the contrary: you won’t. Not only did I love my husband more than anything in the world, but I shall never get over his death.”

If at that moment Gabrielle had known where a few months later this defense tactic would lead her, perhaps she would not have been so proud of her idea . . .

Two and a half years.

Gabrielle was remanded in custody for two years while waiting for her trial.

Several times her children tried to obtain parole for her, arguing that she should be presumed innocent, but the judge refused for two reasons: one essential one, the other contingent: the first was the shepherd’s testimony for the prosecution, the second the controversy that was exacerbated in the newspapers implying that judges were too lenient.

Despite the hard life in prison, Gabrielle did not get depressed. Just as she had waited to be liberated from her husband, now she was waiting to be liberated from this accusation. She had always been patient—a necessary quality when you work in the antique business—and she refused to be discouraged by this unexpected turn of events.

In her cell, she often thought about the four boxes she had left on the little table, the boxes containing Gab’s secret . . . How ironic! There she had done everything she could to open them, and she had been stopped with her hand on the lid. The moment she cleared her name, she would explore the mystery of the cookie tins. That would be her reward.