Pel was late leaving for the Hôtel de Police the following day. He had lingered over his breakfast coffee reading a report Goschen had left with him, so that he shot out of the house in a hurry and drove like a maniac for the city. As usual, as he hit the main road at the bottom of the hill from Leu where he lived, he was almost rubbed out by a lorry – and what a lorry! Eight wheels plus a trailer with another eight. As it appeared alongside him with a thunder that rattled his car, it was so tall he couldn’t see the top of it, just the driver’s mouth working as he called him names. There was nothing unusual about the incident – it happened regularly – but it shook Pel and he drove the rest of the way into the city as if treading on eggshells. The traffic cop on duty at the Porte Guillaume nodded gratefully as he passed. He knew Pel’s driving and the fact that he was often deep in thought. More than once he had had to nip smartly out of the way.
Still faintly dazed, Pel headed for his office, too absorbed to return the ‘Bonjour, patron’ of the man on the desk in the entrance. The man on the desk didn’t take offence. It happened often.
‘Silly con,’ he said to himself.
Reaching his office, Pel sat down and stared at Goschen’s report again.
Carmen Vlaxi. He turned the name over in his mind. They hadn’t heard much of him since his arrival in the area beyond the fact that he had a house at St-Symphorien-le-Grand and that he had a finger in more than a few pies. But nothing much had ever emerged. They hadn’t pinned anything at all on him so far, though he’d be well worth watching if he’d got into this speculative building-for-foreigners business. That, to Pel, looked as though there might be a great deal of money in it. But no leisure centre, no holiday village complete with swimming pool and palms was worth going into for profit for people like Carmen Vlaxi unless the land was acquired dirt cheap. But – and this was the point – Carmen Vlaxi was just the type to know exactly how to acquire land at such prices. They’d heard he’d run a protection racket in the south near the Spanish border so it could be assumed he would know the ins and outs of putting pressure on people. After all, whatever the aim, the methods were much the same.
He was still debating it with himself when Darcy appeared.
‘We’ve got a name,’ he said.
Pel was still deeply involved in his mind with Carmen Vlaxi and the speculative builders and at first didn’t grasp what Darcy was getting at.
‘What for?’
‘Not “what”, patron,’ Darcy pointed out. ‘“Who.” The woman found at Vieilles Etuves. I think your good friend Superintendent Goschen’s been pulling a few strings for us.’
‘I did happen to mention it,’ Pel said modestly.
‘Raby-Labassat,’ Darcy went on. ‘Bronwen Raby- Labassat. Aged forty.’
‘Bronwen? That doesn’t sound French.’
‘It isn’t. She was born in Cardiff in Wales. She married Honoré Eustache Raby-Labassat fourteen years ago. No children. Raby-Labassat has three, two sons and a daughter by a previous marriage. He’s a baron.’
‘Is he, by God?’ Pel’s interest grew. He would have loved to be a baron himself He always considered it a shame France had abolished titles.
‘Lives at Faux-Villecerf,’ Darcy continued. ‘It’s the other side of Aignay-le-Duc. Not much more than a hamlet. He has a château there.’
‘Who put us on to her?’
‘Local cop. Apparently her stepson, Auguste Raby-Labassat, reported her missing. She left home six weeks ago without saying why. Apparently it wasn’t unusual. She liked to go back to London from time to time – occasionally without telling anyone. They thought that’s where she was but when time dragged on, Auguste Raby-Labassat made enquiries of her family in Cardiff. They haven’t seen her for over a year. So if she’s been to London she didn’t visit them.’
‘Go on.’
‘He decided he’d better contact the police, and the local cop – name of Morelot – remembered reading a report of the woman found dead at Vieilles Etuves. The description fits. The stepson thinks it might be his stepmother.’
Faux-Villecerf lay on the side of a hill overlooking a valley where the remains of the sunflower crop filled the fields. The area was well wooded and, below the road, the land fell away to flat water meadows full of buttercup and marsh marigold. Edged with celandine, the fields ran alongside the River Trine, which was one of a group of streams formed when the River Rinat, a tributary of the Saône, had been split into a sort of delta by the lie of the land. Further south, the streams joined up again near Dampierre-en-Sarve. Beyond the streams the land rose again to a wooded peak known as the Croq de Chien.
The village was small with narrow streets and looked quite dead in the afternoon sun. It wasn’t dead, though, and Pel knew it wasn’t. Eyes were watching through shutters closed against the heat as the car paused and they tried to find the entrance to the château.
It sat on its hillside above terraced gardens, the south side of the land ending in a flat-faced cottage with a large cow-byre and barn resting on a patch of grass buttressed by a high wall above the road. They could see the château above them, near the church, a solid block of masonry in the mellow ochre stone of the region.
The courtyard was dusty and hot and surrounded by stables and outhouses. As they stopped the car a door opened. It wasn’t the main door, which was at the top of a flight of wide and imposing stone steps and looked heavy enough to require a squadron of dragoons to shift it. Instead, it was a small ill-fitting door half-obscured at the side of the steps. A policeman came out.
‘Sous-Brigadier Morelot, sir,’ he said. As he spoke, another man stepped into the sunshine. He was square and solid and, although still young, was just beginning to go bald. He looked worried.
‘I’m Auguste Raby-Labassat,’ he said. ‘You’ll be the police. Come in.’
It was a blazingly hot day but immediately they were conscious of the coolness inside the house. They were led along a long dark hall to what appeared to be the kitchen. It was an enormous room full of ancient cupboards made of pine. There was a fireplace vast enough to house a couple of horses complete with stalls, mangers and probably a carriage as well. In front of it was a vast scrubbed table big enough to play football on and two easy chairs. ‘Easy’ wasn’t really the word to describe them. They looked cheap, and as though they’d been picked up at a second-hand sale, and they matched neither in shape, woodwork or the colour of the fabric.
‘The family mostly live in here,’ Raby-Labassat pointed out. ‘Because of the cost of heating. It’s also handy for the garden and the courtyard.’
‘Do you live here, Monsieur?’ Pel asked.
‘No. I live in Dijon. I’m an accountant. But I stay here regularly every summer.
‘For a holiday?’
‘No. To cut the hedge.’
‘To cut the hedge?’
Raby-Labassat gestured and, crossing to the window, they saw that the ground dropped rapidly away from them to give a magnificent view over the valley to the hills beyond. They could see fields quartering the slopes, clumps of trees and a long line of cypresses, like guardsmen in single file, marching up the hill. What Auguste Raby-Labassat was indicating, however, was an enormous box hedge that ran the whole length of the front of the château just beyond the terrace. It was nearly three metres wide, rising regularly in square blocks and arches like the castellations of a fortress to the height of four or five metres.
‘I cut it twice a year,’ Raby-Labassat said. ‘Late spring and autumn.’
‘What with?’
‘Shears, a lot of it. We have an electric clipper but it’s old-fashioned and heavy.’
‘It must be hard work,’ Darcy observed.
A shadow crossed the young man’s face. ‘I hate it,’ he admitted. ‘Even humping the ladders about is hard work. But it has to be done.’
‘Couldn’t you get one of these gardening firms in?’ Darcy asked.
Raby-Labassat gave him a look that was a mixture of reproach and bitterness and it occurred to Pel that perhaps the family couldn’t afford a gardener. A household that lived in the kitchen and worried about fuel bills might well be in straitened circumstances.
‘My father will be here soon,’ the young man said. ‘I’ve asked him to be here.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He has a workshop in a cottage in the grounds. He enjoys working in it.’ Raby-Labassat paused. ‘That woman,’ he went on. ‘The one at Vieilles-Etuves. It’s Bronwen – my stepmother – isn’t it?’
‘We can tell better when we know more about her.’
‘She was murdered, wasn’t she? It was in the papers.’
‘Yes, Monsieur. She was murdered.’
Raby-Labassat nodded, as if satisfied.
‘While we’re waiting,’ Pel said, ‘could you produce a photograph of your stepmother? It will not only help identify the woman we found but we can have it reproduced and use it to discover her movements.’
Raby-Labassat turned without a word and from a drawer produced a large photograph of his family. The Baron was a tall man with spectacles and a grim expression, as if he were standing before a firing squad. The Baroness, the missing Bronwen, was a good-looking, dark-haired woman, past her best but still attractive. There were three children with them, a spectacled teenaged girl and two older teenaged boys, one of whom was recognisable as Auguste Raby-Labassat.
‘I dug it out,’ Raby-Labassat said. ‘When I heard you were coming.’
‘That was thoughtful of you, Monsieur,’ Pel said. ‘Has your father any interests at Vieilles Etuves?’
‘None at all. Of course, she might have had.’ Raby-Labassat drew a deep breath. ‘She married my father when he was no longer young. The marriage couldn’t be called a success. They went their own ways.’
‘What about your father? Did he – er – have other interests?’
‘Yes.’
‘What exactly?’
‘Carpentry.’
Pel had been expecting anything but woodwork. But he blinked and recovered quickly. ‘Would it be possible,’ he asked, ‘to see your stepmother’s room? It might help us a great deal.’
There was a moment of hesitation, then Raby-Labassat gestured at the door. ‘This way.’
He showed them into a small room across the huge hall. It was furnished as a kitchen – a modern kitchen with a dishwasher, a washing machine, a stainless steel sink and an electric cooker.
‘This is the kitchen she used,’ he said. ‘She used the old kitchen you saw as a living-room.’ He opened a door and beyond they saw another small room containing a bed and a few toilet accessories.
‘Is this your stepmother’s room?’
Raby-Labassat flushed. ‘It used to be the maid’s. But we don’t have a maid now. My parents used it. It’s warm in winter.’
Pel’s guess about the family had been a good one.
‘Did she sleep here just in winter?’
‘At first. She found the house cold. It can be very chilly in bad weather. It’s so big and there’s no central heating, of course. It would cost a fortune to install. So, soon after she married my father, she moved down here.’
There was no sign of anything male in the room. ‘And your father?’
‘He doesn’t sleep here.’ Raby-Labassat hesitated. ‘They didn’t agree and he had a room elsewhere.’
‘I see.’
‘My stepmother,’ Raby-Labassat said in a stiff, disapproving way, ‘ran things. My father wasn’t interested. He preferred his carpentry. He was always buying bits of wood to repair doors and windows. He left things to Bronwen. And as she’d never previously run anything bigger than a rabbit hutch, she had no idea how to do it. She wasted money and damaged things. And it’s my land.’ He sounded bitter. ‘My father said it was to be mine. He promised it. It wasn’t hers to waste. She was always anxious to sell off a bit here or a bit there. To raise money.’
Raby-Labassat stopped dead as if he felt he’d said too much. ‘Would you like to see upstairs?’
He led the way along the stone-flagged hall. It was unlit by daylight except for a stone-mullioned window at one end and the glass in a door at the other, which seemed to lead into the garden. The hall smelled faintly of damp and was as cold as the tomb.
At the end, turning right, they faced a flight of stairs, three metres across, with wide treads and constructed of stone. It seemed to go away up into the heavens. At the top they could see an enormous chandelier.
‘Originally, of course,’ Raby-Labassat said, ‘the family all lived on the next floor and only the staff lived on the ground floor. But, of course, these days it’s different.’ He seemed to be faintly embarrassed.
At the top of the stone steps was another long hall with doors leading off. At the end, through glass doors similar to those below, was a huge balcony with a magnificent view over the valley. ‘One of Theodore Archéatte’s splendid creations,’ Raby-Labassat said. ‘It sticks farther out from the house than any other balcony in the province. Don’t lean on the balustrade, though. It’s old and I don’t trust it.’
Pel peered over. Almost directly below him he could see the width of the vast box hedge that Auguste Raby-Labassat cut twice every year. No wonder he hated it. It must have presented a formidable task.
The young man was opening a heavy oak door. It led into a magnificent dining-room. It was papered in crimson and the walls were lined with enormous portraits of men and women in the dress of the 1870s.
‘We don’t use this place, of course,’ he explained. ‘It’s kept just as my great-grandparents had it. My great-great-grandfather was governor of Tunisia for a time. That’s him.’
He gestured at a portrait of a man whose fierce visage was festooned with moustaches and whiskers so that he looked like a tiger staring out of the undergrowth. He wore a high ear-slicing starched collar and cravat and across his breast a wide pink sash that was obviously part of some decoration. His wife, equally off-putting in expression, glared across the room at him from the opposite wall. The décor was mostly heavy Second Empire in style, with stuffed birds under glass domes and sepia photographs of the family and groups of soldiers obviously taken in North Africa.
Another door led into a salon. It was furnished in the same crowded fashion, with heavy bow-backed chairs and settees and more portraits of the same two people, but also now with a few younger people, even domestic pets. This room was a mixture of periods and it was clear the fittings and furnishings were all valuable but were all deteriorating slowly in the damp cold winters and hot summers of the region. The red glass chandelier obviously came from Murano.
‘My great-grandfather was the man who went to Algeria to draw up a constitution in 1830,’ Raby-Labassat said. ‘His father was a general under the great Napoleon. Another ancestor was Maire of Dijon.’ He jerked a hand at a painting of a man in a red robe. ‘That’s him.’
The coat of arms was quartered into devices of lions and stags rampant, arrows, flashes of lightning and palms, and bore the motto, Unconquerable.
Raby-Labassat gestured at his feet. ‘The floors were all made here in Faux-Villecerf,’ he said. ‘From wood that came from the Forêt de Diviot. So was that.’ He gestured at an enormous wardrobe that was ceiling-high and looked big enough to hold a circus in.
‘It’s Louis Quinze,’ he said. ‘The one next door’s Louis Seize. The furniture in the kitchen – the big old objects – is Henri Second.’
They were shown into the study of the great man. The carpet was clearly valuable, as was a tapestry hanging on one of the walls.
‘He was the first baron,’ Raby-Labassat said. ‘Created by Napoleon III for his work in Tunisia. My father’s the fifth baron.’
The bedrooms were all filled with the same dismal display of period furniture, though there was one room that was furnished in the style of the Thirties and looked out on to the courtyard and the top of a huge and ancient fig tree.
‘My grandmother’s room,’ Raby-Labassat explained. ‘She’s dead now. After my grandfather died, she went to live in Dijon but when she visited us she always lived in this part of the house. She remembered the place as it used to be, of course, and refused to allow any change. She always insisted on a fire in her room in winter. My father created this room for her. It has the sun all day. He’s very good with his hands.’
‘Do-it-yourself?’ Darcy asked.
The young man smiled. ‘He’s known in the village as “Monsieur Bricolage”. You can get into the courtyard by the stone staircase. The door at the end of the hall opens on to it and there’s a separate staircase my grandmother used. She was a heavy smoker and used to do it in bed. She once set the curtains on fire and had to be rescued. She wasn’t in a lot of danger but the room was full of smoke. After that she demanded a fire escape, so my father built one.’
He unlocked the glass doors to a small balcony. From it a small wooden staircase led down to the garden. Pel glanced at Darcy. Both of them were wondering what would have happened if the flames had spread to the staircase.
As they talked, they heard a car arrive in the courtyard. It was very noisy and Pel wondered if that was Louis Quinze or Louis Seize, too.
‘That will be my father.’ Raby-Labassat turned. ‘I’d better go and meet him. You’ll have to forgive him if he seems vague. He’s getting old and he’s had a lot of worries lately. He also–’ He gestured with his hand as if he were lifting a glass to his mouth. ‘Just a little. He’s all right but I have to watch him. Perhaps you’ll follow me down.’
As he vanished, Darcy looked at Pel. They were both aware of the chill in the rooms and were wondering what it must be like in winter when the winds from the east and north blew through the place.
Pel sniffed and rubbed his nose, convinced by the chill about him that the cold he had been expecting had definitely arrived. ‘I didn’t seem to notice the Baron’s room,’ he said quietly. ‘Did you?’