Auguste Raby-Labassat was already at the château. With him, sitting in a chair in the huge kitchen, her face blank as if she were shocked, was Marie-Hélène. Darcy was prowling about the room.
‘It’s hit her hard,’ Auguste said. ‘They’d just moved into the house from the cottage. I think my father fancied the house really. He just couldn’t stand being in the same place as Bronwen. He seems to have gone down to the cellar to fetch wine for tomorrow. Marie-Hélène says he was intending to celebrate with a little party for me and my wife. She persuaded him we should drink something a little better than his own wine.’ Auguste sighed. ‘It wasn’t really very good.’
‘Who found him?’
‘Marie-Hélène,’ Darcy said. ‘She’d been to the cottage. She couldn’t find him when she returned and eventually she found him at the bottom of the steps. There were two broken bottles.’
‘It must have happened soon after he telephoned me,’ he went on. ‘I came straight out. Whoever did it probably even heard him talking to me, saw Marie-Hélène leave, and followed him to the cellar.’
The cellar was a big place with stone-flagged floors and an arched ceiling, and a surprising number of bottles for a family that was supposed to be poor. But then Pel glanced at the labels and saw that most of them were the Baron’s own wine and that none of the rest was of particularly good quality.
The body lay at the bottom of the stone steps that led down from the kitchen and a chalk line had already been drawn round it. About it was spilled wine, shattered glass and the necks of two bottles, both still corked. The police photographer was busy with his camera, photographing the body from every possible angle.
‘Did he fall?’ Pel murmured. ‘Or was he pushed?’
Doc Minet looked up. ‘If he fell,’ he said, ‘as he appears to have done, he must have come down those steps at a hell of a speed. Which seems to indicate he might well have been pushed. He appears to have hit his head on the stone pillar there at the bottom.’
Doc Cham looked up from his position beside the older man. ‘Except,’ he said, ‘that’s not what happened.’
There was obviously more to come. ‘Go on,’ Pel said.
‘There’s blood on the pillar there,’ Cham pointed out. ‘But no sign of hair or tissue. The back of his head’s knocked in. But not, I suspect, by collision with a stone pillar. It looks to me as if he was hit by a heavy blunt instrument, the natural successor to the club, man’s first tool of aggression and the most common of murder weapons.’
‘The blood on the pillar’s only a smear,’ Minet pointed out. ‘It could have been placed there. Deliberately. It’s rough stone but there’s no hair or tissue adhering to it.’
‘What about the blood on the floor?’
Leguyader appeared from the shadows in the back of the cellar. He was obviously in top gear, at full throttle and with all stops open. He was at his pompous best and, judging by the way he looked at Cham, the honeymoon between them had come to an end.
‘A great deal can be gleaned from the shape of blood spots and splashes,’ he said. ‘The great criminologist, Alexandre Lacassagne, noted the relationship between the shape of blood spots and the position of the victim.’
‘Facts,’ Pel snapped.
‘These are facts,’ Leguyader snarled back. ‘As we’ve discovered on many occasions, drops of blood falling from a moving object hit a flat surface obliquely and leave a spot shaped like an exclamation mark. Two ovoid shapes with pointed ends, the points directed to each other, one long, one small. The point of the smaller spot indicates the direction of travel. There are spots by the door at the top of the stairs and spots down here. The ones we see here indicate he fell down the stairs all right but not necessarily from the top.’ Leguyader paused. It was obvious the three of them had been having an argument and Leguyader had prevailed. ‘But that’s not all. We have another interesting thing. He seems to have been carrying two bottles. Seems, I say. They appear to be a cheap Chablis, which I gather was one of the favourites of the Gaussac woman. He was obviously intending they should celebrate their return to the château.’
‘We know that,’ Pel snapped.
Leguyader wasn’t put off in the slightest. ‘This is the point–’ Pel waited impatiently. Leguyader would inevitably go on to the very end. But, knowing that whatever else he was, he was an expert, Pel held on to his temper.
‘When you carry two bottles of wine,’ Leguyader continued, ‘you usually carry them both in the right hand with the necks between the fingers, leaving the left hand free to close doors, switch off lights, et cetera.’
‘If you’re right-handed.’
‘He was,’ Leguyader said smugly. ‘I took the trouble to find out. In which case, the fingerprints of the right hand should be on the necks of the bottles which, you’ll notice, remain unbroken. Prélat’s examined them and he tells me there are none. He thinks they’ve been wiped. Why? People fetching wine from the cellar wipe the bottles in the kitchen, not in the cellar. And, in any case, there’s no cloth down here. Take a look around you. So – if he did wipe them before taking them upstairs, where did the cloth go? Not with him. Because he didn’t make it back to the kitchen.’
Trust Leguyader’s sharp eyes to spot the irregularity, Pel thought.
‘This brings us to another thing,’ Leguyader went on. ‘If he simply stumbled on the stairs, the bottles would surely have been dropped there in his efforts to regain his balance. That seems unlikely, though, because they’re here near the body on the floor of the cellar. If he’d released them on the stairs, in fact, one of them might perhaps not have been broken. It might even have rolled undamaged to the bottom. As it is, both broke. And broke here in the cellar. Moreover,’ Leguyader paused, ‘if they’d come from up there on the stairs, the wine would have shot with the splinters of glass across the stone floor in a rough line from the stairs into the cellar. Wine’s like any other liquid. You’d have roughly the same affect you have with blood, but on a larger scale. Instead, you’ll notice it’s made a circular splash pattern. And the patterns are virtually alongside and one on each side of the body. I think they were taken from the rack after he died and were dropped and broken to indicate exactly what we were expected to believe.’
Leguyader smiled. ‘I think,’ he ended cheerfully, ‘that he fell going down the stairs, not going up. And I don’t think he was carrying any wine.’
Doc Minet confirmed the theory. ‘Something hard and heavy,’ he said. ‘Two blows, we think.’
‘There should be a heavy hammer down here,’ Leguyader said. ‘I’ve talked to the son. It was used when the family brewed their own beer. To bang the taps into the barrels. It hasn’t been used for years for that but it was kept to prop open the door, which had a habit of swinging to. It should be at the top of the stairs. But it’s not. It’s missing.’
It sounded a good and careful deduction commensurate with the facts.
Returning upstairs, Pel found Darcy talking to Aimedieu. ‘Who else was in the house?’ he asked.
‘Nobody. Just the Baron. Marie-Hélène had just left. But that doesn’t mean a thing. The door’s always open. In this village, nobody locks doors except at night. Anybody could have walked in, and most of the village know their way around because a lot of them had worked at one time or another in the house or the garden. Marie-Hélène says he might have fallen. We know he liked a drink. Sometimes one too many.’
‘How long was she at the cottage?’
‘She says half an hour.’
‘I’d better talk to her.’
Marie-Hélène was still sitting in the kitchen. She was ashen and looked broken. ‘He’d been drinking,’ she admitted. ‘Something was worrying him.’
‘Do you know what?’
‘This place, I think. It’s evil. It’s affected everybody. He liked it as it was and Bronwen was always wanting him to spend money on it that he didn’t possess.’
‘You know he didn’t.’
‘I knew everything about him.’ There was a touch of pride in the old woman’s voice. ‘I always did. Ever since I was a young girl. He was a good man. He always stood up for the village. Years ago he stood up against the Conseil Général over the building of a new road. It would have made things easier because it’s always hard to get big tractors and trailers through, and when they’re loading outside the bakery, you can’t get past and have to reverse and go round by the church. But that’s how it’s been for generations and people who live here don’t think in terms of what’s easy but how it’s always been.’
She sighed. ‘There was talk once of re-routing the river in the valley and doing away with the bridge there, but he stood up against that, too. There was even a plan drawn up in 1975 that included an artificially made beach and a restaurant and bar, so that people could sailboard. There was a village meeting. We thought it would bring people from as far away as Dijon on hot afternoons and we didn’t want that.’
‘Couldn’t the Baron have profited by it?’
‘Yes. Someone – I think it was the Maire – tried to persuade him and said there was money in it. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He was an honest man. A bit silly and more easily persuaded nowadays, because he was old, but he was right. This is rural France and we don’t want to be the playground for people from the cities.’
‘Was anybody else involved in this project besides the Maire?’
‘The Englishman. Gilliam. I think he was for a while. But nothing came of it. They couldn’t get enough support. Perhaps if they had, something would have happened and they would have overridden the villagers.’
‘That wouldn’t have made Jaunay a very popular maire.’
‘He wouldn’t have worried. He has money. He’d just have moved away.’
It was not until late the next day that they found out about the hammer. It was in the cottage. Marie-Hélène was making pressed beef in a tin with a plate on top and the hammer was being used as a weight.
‘I reckon he was killed with his own mallet,’ Darcy said. ‘I’ve found his tool box. He’d been repairing a cupboard door in that room his mother used. His tools were there and the cupboard door’s off. He’s been chiselling away at the wood. There are chips on the floor. But the wood’s oak and you can’t chisel oak without a mallet. Apparently, the one he uses is an old-fashioned type with inset lead strips on the head. I think he had it in his hand and when whoever killed him appeared, he came down the stairs to meet them. He was still carrying the mallet and he put it down to talk. As he turned away, it was picked up and used to hit him. I think the first blow sent him staggering down the steps and it required another – in the cellar – to kill him.’
Auguste Raby-Labassat seemed already to be making plans to move into the château.
‘My children will enjoy living here,’ he said. ‘Particularly in the summer.’
‘What about the winter?’ Pel asked.
‘We’ll do as my father did and live in the great kitchen.’
‘You care a lot about this place?’
Auguste turned. ‘Of course I care,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sentimental. Sentimentality’s a failure of feeling. But if I live here, it will help keep this corner of France as the French want it. Any government worth its salt would prevent the invasion of France by foreigners.’
‘Are you concerned about that, too?’
‘Very much so.’
‘We’re supposed to belong to a common Europe. We’re not foreigners any more. Nobody is. We’re Europeans.’ Pel didn’t believe for a minute he was anything but a Burgundian but he was anxious to see how Auguste regarded it.
Auguste’s views were clear. ‘I can’t afford to be broad-minded,’ he said. ‘To me, this is France.’
‘Would you go to any lengths to keep it so?’
Auguste regarded him sternly. ‘Any lengths,’ he said.
Alain Raby-Labassat’s attitude when he arrived was very different. ‘We should sell,’ he said at once. ‘We’re all in debt – except perhaps Auguste.’
He had appeared with his sister, and ever since they had been huddled in a corner of the chilly salon earmarking items for their future possession.
‘Under the law,’ he said, ‘we’re entitled to a third share of the estate. That’s the law. And his estate includes all this junk.’
‘This junk,’ Pel pointed out, ‘is antique. It could be very valuable.’
‘All the more reason why we should sell it and split the proceeds.’
‘The place would look very odd if the rooms were emptied.’
‘That’s not my affair.’
‘Do you know of a will that could alter things?’
‘He never left a will,’ Philomène said, and Pel noticed that both of them kept referring to their father as if he were a complete stranger. ‘He was gaga. I know this: He wouldn’t have left me much. He thought I was a fool. Come to think of it, I do, too, now. But that’s by the way. Still, he was nobody to talk, was he? That damned Bronwen was nothing to write home about. I wish I knew how much there was. If we shared it out we’d all be better off.’
‘Except, perhaps, Auguste, who’s proposing to live here.’
They spoke almost together. ‘That prig,’ they said.
Pel decided he didn’t like them very much.
At the time of his father’s death, Alain had been playing the clarinet at St-Eloi and the other members of his group were prepared to vouch for him. Philomène had been at home with three teenage children to prove it, watching a 007 film on television. Auguste claimed he had been at his office working and his wife agreed he had been late home. He had even been seen leaving his office by a woman with an apartment across the road. But Aimedieu had been to check the place and had noticed there was a back door, so he could have left by it and returned the same way to depart finally by the front door where he could be seen by the woman across the road. They would all benefit in a small way by their father’s death, though it seemed there would hardly be enough to make murder worthwhile.
‘There’s very little money,’ Auguste insisted. ‘I’m sure of that. And some of the contents will have to be sold. I’ll just keep the most valuable articles and get rid of the poor stuff.’
‘Your brother and sister seem to want you to sell the lot.’
‘I’ve thought of that.’ Auguste’s smile was crafty. ‘I’ll appeal to the Ministry of Fine Arts and National Treasures. They’ll back me, I’m sure. I’d like to make an inventory for them.’
‘When?’
‘Now. Before Alain and Philomène get their hands on anything. There are folios of drawings done by my great-grandfather for a start. They’re valuable, I feel sure, not only artistically but historically. Will that be possible? I’m quite happy to have a policeman around while I do it.’
There was another one in the village whom it might be a good idea to see while they were about it. Two, in fact: Jaunay and old Sully.
Jaunay was out on one of his sites but old Sully was sitting in his shabby little living-room. They knew he was there although the shutters were closed against the sun. He met them at the door, dancing with excitement. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said at once. ‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t kill him. I never touched him.’
‘Who?’
‘The Baron. The Baron, of course. Him.’
‘How did you know the Baron was dead?’
‘It’s all over the village. Everybody knows. Everybody. Madame Laniel next door told me.’
‘How did she learn?’
‘From Madame Croix, I expect. That’s where she always gets her news. Madame Croix. She’s a widow and she keeps her ears open. Madame Croix. It was the man in the car did it. He was the one. The man in the car.’
Pel remembered the poacher, Arnaud, had mentioned seeing a car in the village about the time the Baroness had disappeared.
‘What was this car like?’
‘Black.’
‘What sort?’
Sully didn’t know. He’d never had much to do with cars, he said. ‘Perhaps a Renault. But it might have been a Peugeot. I can’t say.’
‘But you saw it in the village?’
‘Yes. It’s been hanging about for a day or two.’
‘Is it still here?’
‘No, no, no. It’s gone. Gone.’
‘Did you see who was driving it?’
‘No. A man, I suppose. But it might have been a woman. Women drive cars. But I think it was a man. Or maybe a woman. I don’t know.’
‘Did you see its number?’
‘Yes. Well, no. That is, some of it. It had a 2 in it. But I don’t know. I’m not good on numbers. Or cars. I never owned one. Never.’
It didn’t sound like Jaunay’s car, which was a yellow Peugeot and it didn’t sound like Auguste Raby-Labassat’s. He drove a silver-grey Citroën BX15. Alain, they knew, had an elderly Peugeot, coloured fawn, and the best Philomène could manage was the ancient Deux Chevaux painted psychodelic pink with flowers.
‘How about Gilliam?’ Pel asked.
‘Red,’ Darcy said. ‘Orange-red. I saw it outside his house. His wife has one the same colour. You remember we saw her driving off in it.’
‘Could red seem to be black in a bad light?’
‘It could.’
Sully’s neighbour, Madame Laniel, was no wiser than Sully. She was a thin vinegar-faced creature but she seemed to have sharp eyes and she remembered a car hanging around the village. ‘Would it be the type who wanted to buy my house?’ she asked.
‘Which type?’
‘He said he was a builder.’
‘Jaunay?’
‘No, it wasn’t him. Perhaps he was an architect.’
‘Name of Charrieri?’
‘No. He said he was working for a group who were buying up property. They wanted my house.’
‘Were you prepared to sell?’
‘No. I’ve lived here ever since I was married. He said he wanted to make a hairdressing salon out of it.’
‘A hairdressing salon? Here? In Faux-Villecerf?’
‘That’s what he said. We could certainly do with one.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Little. Fair-haired.’
‘What about this car?’
‘It was a small car. Like Monsieur Vardie’s.’
‘And the driver?’
‘I couldn’t see him. It was getting dark when I saw it.’
‘What about the number?’
‘There was an X in it. And I saw some of the number. A 2 and a 3 and a 5. I didn’t look very carefully but I noticed that. It went past too quickly to catch anything else.’
Monsieur Vardie turned out to be the baker and an enquiry at the bakery elicited the information that his car was a Renault 304, dark green.
‘Which,’ Darcy said, ‘could look black at dusk.’