Murder on French Leave Read online

  ‘Any idea what it’s all about?’ I asked her. ‘I mean, I’m all for people doing their own thing, etcetera, but this does seem to be going a bit far, in every sense. What do you make of it?’

  ‘How would I know?’ she asked indifferently.

  ‘But I think perhaps you do,’ I said, spacing the words to give them emphasis, narrowing my eyes and putting everything I’d got into the penetrating look.

  It didn’t even get through her outer casing. She can be very cool when she chooses and it occurred to me that, should she fail to get her foot in the theatre, she would have no trouble making a fortune at poker.

  Ten

  (i)

  I believe the question of Ellen’s returning to England with Toby was mooted and quickly dismissed. I no longer remember what excuse she made for refusing, for I had other things on my mind and had become for the time being partially oblivious to what was going on around me. However, it may well have been her reluctance which put him in such a nasty temper and ended our fête champêtre on a somewhat sour note. I do recall that, as we were leaving the restaurant and I picked up a menu card saying I would keep it as a souvenir, he asked me in waspish tones whether I did not wish to have it autographed by all present as well.

  The cars arrived punctually at three, the village, now clear of obstruction and traffic, was shuttered and somnolent and we reached Lisieux in under half an hour. Here we parted company, getting a languid wave from Toby as he turned north towards Cherbourg.

  Two preoccupations engrossed me at this time and since both fought equally hard for attention I found my mind switching from one to the other, without advancing a centimetre in either direction. The only hope of achieving some progress lay in an hour or two of solitude and I therefore told Robin I would forgo the pleasure of accompanying him to the airport on Monday morning. I explained that I needed time to prepare myself for work on Tuesday, for I had been able to give so little of it to the proper study of my part that, if the drift continued, I was in real danger of winning a special award at Cannes for the dullest performance of the year.

  His plane was scheduled to take off at two o’clock, so he had planned to have an early lunch at the airport. Pierre was to pick him up at eleven-thirty and Ellen to deputise for me in seeing him off.

  Long before this, however, he had wended the now familiar way down to the piscine, for yet another conference with his friends in the deep end.

  ‘You may be relieved to hear,’ he told me afterwards, ‘that the case is by no means closed. The Müllers and everyone else remotely connected with Mrs Baker are still being prodded and will be called in for more questioning whenever fresh evidence comes to light. In fact, I get the impression that everyone is prepared for the ramifications to drag on for months, or years if need be.’

  ‘So they are not sure that Sven is guilty?’

  ‘Well, technically he is because with the case they have built up, it is up to him to prove his innocence, not the other way round. That’s the way they do things over here, but of course it doesn’t always stop there.’

  ‘And has any fresh evidence come to light?’

  ‘In a sense, it has. The full dossier on the arrest and trial of Dr Müller has now come in from Germany. It contains some rather sensational disclosures.’

  ‘Oh, splendid!’

  ‘Not quite your brand of sensationalism, I must warn you. The fact is that apart from their both being doctors there is not a single point of resemblance between the careers of Dr Felix Marcus and Franz Müller.’

  ‘You are quite right not to call it my brand,’ I assured him.

  ‘Here is something you may like better: there is very little resemblance between the true case-history of Dr Müller and the one described to you by Sven.’

  ‘Yes, I do like that a little better, but it doesn’t get us very far.’

  ‘It tells us something rather significant about Carlsen, don’t you think?’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘That he deluded himself as much as anyone. Would you care to hear the true facts about Müller?’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘Well, to start with, he ran a T.B. clinic, as you already know. No suggestion of head-shrinking or of the patients being there under duress. In fact, they paid exorbitant fees for the privilege.’

  ‘But a private hospital, and he was in sole charge?’

  ‘Yes, but he was a highly qualified practitioner and specialist in pulmonary diseases. He’d previously worked in state hospitals, but he’d developed some very unconventional theories about the treatment for these complaints, and there lies the crux of the story.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When he found these theories weren’t being taken seriously by the medical profession, he became obsessed with the dream of trying them out on his own. Hence the clinic, and hence, finally, his downfall. There is some uncertainty about how he raised the money to start it. Probably he sank all his own private means because, despite the huge fees, he was unable to pay for his defence at the trial. It was a very posh set-up, I might add, and the nurses were chosen for their looks, as well as their skill. The surroundings-beautiful was one of several crackpot ideas of therapy for these cases.’

  ‘Why crackpot? I should think there might be a lot in it.’

  ‘Medically speaking, it apparently doesn’t matter a damn whether the patient has Helen of Troy or King Kong handing out the pills, so long as they’re the right pills.’

  ‘And were they?’

  ‘Yes, on the whole. I gather that most of the patients who recovered would have done so anyway, under conventional treatment; and most of those who died would also have done so anyway, in the normal course of things; but there were exceptions. He did bring off one or two rather sensational cures, in cases which had been written off as hopeless. He got a good deal of publicity for these, which, as you can imagine, didn’t make him any more popular with the orthodox members of his profession.’

  ‘Who were gunning for him, I suppose?’

  ‘Giving him enough rope to hang himself would be nearer the mark.’

  ‘Except that he wasn’t hanged. According to Sven he got four years for manslaughter. Was that true?’

  ‘Yes, but this is where the script and the facts really do part company. There never was any young female strangled with her own hair. The case concerned a young man and he died in his bed, between midnight and three a.m. The trouble was that until then he was considered to have made such a miraculous recovery that he was due to be discharged the following week. So naturally his family raised hell, and egged on, no doubt, by other interested parties, demanded a full-scale investigation.’

  ‘And what did that produce?’

  ‘That he died from an overdose of an extremely dangerous drug.’

  I thought this over and then said: ‘It could have been suicide?’

  ‘Suicide, accident; it makes no difference which. The point is that it amounted to criminal carelessness that such a large dose of that particular drug should have got into the wrong hands, whether the hands belonged to a patient, or to some incompetent member of the staff.’

  ‘No question of Dr Müller being personally responsible?’

  ‘None whatever, because no motive. It’s true that he was on the premises at the time, but this young man was his star patient, a terminal case who had fully recovered. He was the last person Müller would have wished to dispose of.’

  ‘Nevertheless, he got all the blame for it?’

  ‘It was his own choice,’ Robin explained. ‘He was the sole authority for the treatment each patient received and when it came to the crunch he took sole responsibility. In any case, he probably had no option. You could say that he was morally to blame, whoever actually administered the dose.’

  ‘And they never found out who that was?’

  ‘The question hardly came up. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to show that anyone had acted maliciously and if Müller had any ideas about it he never voic
ed them. As I say, he assumed full responsibility, right from the beginning.’

  ‘But, you know, Robin, that could have been quite a shrewd move on his part. Supposing he had done it deliberately, for some motive which never came out? Then, when the investigation got going, it wouldn’t have needed very quick thinking to realise that by taking that holy attitude he would be laying himself open to a few years for manslaughter, rather than a life sentence for murder.’

  ‘When you speak of motives not coming to light, I presume you are harking back to the spy element and Dr Felix Marcus, but I assure you there’s no foundation for it. Müller dedicated his whole life to that clinic. He visited each of his patients twice every day and he ate and slept on the premises. And the suggestion of his being some kind of political hothead is equally wide of the mark. Like so many of his breed, he remained outside politics all his life. You could say that he got a harsher sentence than he strictly deserved, but you don’t have to invent high-flown romantic reasons for that. The hostility he had aroused and which contributed to his punishment had nothing to do with revolutionary views or communist plots.’

  ‘Pure professional jealousy, in fact?’

  ‘Yes, and I suppose it was a sort of loyalty on Sven’s part which made him spin you such a yarn. Also it would appeal to his romantic nature that one of his colleagues should have been martyred for his political opinions, rather than for causing the death of an innocent youth through sheer carelessness.’

  ‘I’m still not entirely convinced that it was sheer carelessness. Apart from the spy thing, he could have had some other motive. Furthermore, I don’t recall that his movements were ever properly accounted for at the time of Mrs Baker’s murder. His wife says he joined her in the main hall at the time they had arranged, and he is presumed to have been in his office up to that point, but so far as I know we only have their word for it.’

  ‘No, there have been many more words for it than that, I assure you. But I can’t go into it now, can I? Terrible Pierre will be here at any moment and I still have some packing to finish.’

  This conversation sent the pendulum swinging over to the other side again and, instead of applying myself to my own business when Robin and Ellen had left, I gathered up the pages of ‘The Waiting Room’, and the menu card from the Auberge du Père Bernard, and seated myself at the desk for a spell of concentrated thought.

  However, I had reckoned without Lupe and her passionate though somewhat unco-ordinated approach to housework. So long as I sat in my bedroom, it seemed that the only patch she needed to clean was around my feet. When I escaped to Ellen’s room I found that the bed had been stripped off to air, and all the blankets and sheets draped over the rest of the furniture. In the salon the rugs had been rolled back and chairs stacked on to tables, in readiness for floor polishing. In desperation, I crept into the bathroom, meaning to recline in the tub for a bit, and had craftily locked myself in before discovering that it was half filled with soapy water and Robin’s shirts and socks. I could not even steady my jangling nerves with a cigarette, because she had removed all the ashtrays and plunged them into the kitchen sink.

  The only solution was to seek refuge outside and I blessed the benevolent French custom of providing the freedom of a table and chair, plus indefinite shelter from the storm, in return for the price of a cup of coffee.

  I had intended to go no further than the brasserie opposite the flat, but changed course as I was crossing the road. Mademoiselle Pêche was already installed there, with her sandwich and carafe, proving that she was either a very persistent trier, or that I had been wrong about her motives in the first place.

  I made a diagonal crossing and turned into the Champ de Mars, hoping that its ambience might stimulate inspiration. This it signally failed to do, and when I emerged at the exit by the Avenue du Bourdonnais I was no nearer solving any of the puzzles which I was beginning to fear would stand forever between me and my work unless I could get them untangled.

  Things took a turn for the better when I seated myself at a table in the café where Robin and I had forced our company on the unwilling Reg Baker. Reminders popped up all around and ideas soon began to flow from them. I was served by the same waiter as before and this time I noticed that he was wearing a heavy gold signet ring. Well-dressed women, dragging poodles, shuffled past me in their dozens, and when I glanced up at the Ecole Militaire I saw four pigeons pecking and preening on the gravel forecourt.

  Furthermore, I even caught a glimpse of Mr Baker, and guessed that he had also caught a glimpse of me, for he had threaded his way through the pavement tables and was almost up to the door, when he reacted in precisely the same way as I had at the sight of Miss Pêche. He hesitated, then wheeled off in the opposite direction and walked rapidly away.

  All these memory-jerkers had their effect and, two coffees and forty minutes later, the light at the end of the tunnel was beginning to burn with a reasonably cheerful glow. The next task was to formulate a programme to carry me on to stage two and it finally resolved itself into three separate projects of varying degrees of trickiness: to make another appointment with Mireille; to ascertain the licence number of one particular car; and to invent a plausible excuse for another meeting with Adela, preferably in her own house.

  The first and technically the simplest of these could not be accomplished until the following day, when the hair-dresser’s reopened, but I had already set some mental wheels in motion for the other two.

  I was so elated by the progress I had made and so engrossed in plans to extend it that I lavishly overtipped the waiter and then stood up, leaving my bag unfastened. He must have been bracing himself for something of this kind, for he sprang forward, wagged his finger at me and launched into a lecture about the many naughty people who would not scruple to profit by my carelessness.

  I felt profoundly grateful to him, but realised I should have to stop going there, as I was really beginning to scare him to death.

  (ii)

  I treated myself to lunch at a restaurant, partly to indulge my self-satisfied mood and partly to avoid further skirmishes with Lupe, should she still be rampaging round the flat. It was after two when I got back there and the place was deserted, with no crease or speck to show that it had ever been inhabited. However, the implications of this had barely impinged when the telephone rang.

  It was Robin on the line and he used the brisk, rather remote tone of voice which I associated with preoccupation in matters relating to the criminal classes.

  ‘Where on earth have you been, Tessa? Listen, I’m coming back to Paris. I thought I’d better warn you.’

  ‘What’s happened? Another late arrival of the incoming aircraft?’

  ‘No. I can’t explain over the telephone, but I’ve just had some information which makes it necessary to stop on for a bit.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it. And all is now revealed.’

  ‘Is it?’ he asked, descending from his high horse. ‘What is revealed?’

  ‘Why Ellen isn’t back. I was about to start sending cables and now I needn’t bother.’

  Instead of his confirming this, there was silence and I thought we had been cut off.

  ‘Robin! Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Now listen, don’t flap. I’m positive she’ll be back in a moment, but in point of fact she left here just after one o’clock.’

  ‘But that’s over an hour ago. It shouldn’t take more than twenty-five minutes, at this time of day.’

  ‘Nearer forty.’

  ‘Nevertheless. Did you actually see her leave?’

  ‘No, but Pierre was waiting for her and we’d arranged what time and all that. It’s bound to be all right. I expect she came in, found you weren’t there and went out again. Yes, that’s obviously what happened.’

  ‘No, it obviously isn’t,’ I told him. ‘I’ve looked in her bedroom and one thing is definite. She hasn’t set foot there since Lupe left.’

  ‘Okay, so she got Pierr
e to drop her off at Saint Germain or somewhere, instead of coming straight home. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Oh, Robin, she wouldn’t do that without letting me know. Would she?’

  ‘Do try to keep calm. I’m sure there’s a very simple explanation, but if she hasn’t turned up by the time I arrive I promise to organise a search party.’

  ‘All right, but do hurry! No, no! What am I saying?’

  ‘I’m not clairvoyant. What are you saying?’

  ‘Please do not hurry. Make your taxi go very very slowly. I’ve seen too many pile-ups on that ghastly auto-route. Oh, Robin, you don’t think that’s what Ellen . . . ?’

  ‘No, of course not. Pierre’s a most careful driver. Just keep calm and try to contain yourself until I get back.’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed, resisting the insane impulse to beg him to be quick about it.

  It was only when he had rung off that it struck me that I had not asked him about the nature of the business which was bringing him back to Paris; but the thought was immediately crowded out by others, more pressing, and I returned for another inspection of Ellen’s room. Even the record player was closed and the records neatly stacked, a sure sign that she had not spent two minutes there in the recent past.

  Irrespective of my commands and countermands, I knew that I had another half hour to wait, before stationing myself at the window to watch for Robin’s arrival. I decided to spend them in my bedroom, so as to pounce on the telephone the moment it rang.

  I went over to the desk, where I had thrown down the script and menu card, meaning to lock them away in one of the drawers. It was while stooping down to do this that my eye was caught by something out of place. Lying all by itself in the scrubbed and polished waste-paper basket was a crumpled wodge of paper, the size of a tennis ball.

  The significance did not immediately strike me. When it did, I dipped my hand in the basket, the blood pounding so furiously in my ears that I almost lost my balance and toppled out of the chair.