Murder on French Leave Read online

  ‘Sorry, I must fly, or I’ll be late for work. Call me up some evening and we’ll have a proper talk. Awfully sorry. Goodbye.’

  I did not stop to catch her reactions, but bounded into the car and slammed the door:

  ‘Bonjour, madame. Ça y est?’

  ‘Bonjour, Pierre and roulez, s’il vous plaît,’ I replied, and then I looked at my watch.

  Altogether, I had spent exactly six minutes on the pavement and we were still four ahead of schedule. Fear gave way to relief, and relief, such is so often the way of things, to a burning resentment. I felt angry with Mrs Baker for barging so ineptly into my life, and angrier still with her for making me feel such a mean pig. It was true that more pressing matters had prevented my lending more than half an ear to all her maunderings, but that was really no excuse. Even a deaf man could have recognised that she was dead scared.

  (ii)

  It was an exhausting, in parts exhilarating day, packed with the small terrors and triumphs which are normal to such occasions and I did not give more than a passing thought to Leila Baker until nearly ten hours later, when Ellen and I kept our evening rendezvous at the cinema.

  The film we had chosen was playing at a newly-opened cinema just off the Etoile, where the décor only, as the saying goes, was worth the price of admission. This was just as well, for about half a million other people had had the same idea and we had to spend ten minutes queueing in the foyer for our tickets.

  We managed to while away this period by swapping news and views of the day’s events, although I frankly admit that I assumed Ellen to be as little riveted by my experiences as I was by the latest data on the domestic life of Lupe and her sister; but, as usual, I had underestimated her.

  The early evening performance had just ended and the circle was emptying fast as we swam graciously upward on the red-carpeted escalator. Its descending twin, some yards to our left, was crammed with passengers, but one figure stood out arrestingly among them. His shabby old overcoat flapped behind him in the familiar fashion and the impression he created of being actually in flight was accounted for by the fact that he was galloping down, two steps at a time.

  Since he was patently in a raging hurry and since I had no desire whatever to detain him, it can only have been a reflex action which jerked my hand up and caused my voice to shout his name. He probably heard me, though, for he halted and made a half turn in our direction. A moment later other heads got between us and he must have been swept forward with the crowd making for the exit. I dutifully waited a few minutes after alighting, but to my surprise and relief he did not appear.

  ‘That was Mr Carlsen,’ I explained to Ellen, who was hovering at my side, in a fever of impatience to feast her eyes on the ice-cream advertisements, ‘I thought he’d seen us.’

  ‘You’ve got him on the brain. I didn’t see him.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. My brain is just about the only place where I haven’t got him.’

  ‘But, Tessa, you’re always thinking you see him, everywhere you go. I heard you saying at lunch the other day that you’d seen him at the races, and he’d been in bed all the time.’

  ‘Well, yes, I admit that, but I invented it, as it happens. This time was real.’

  ‘I bet it wasn’t, or he’d have come flying after us. It’s like I say, you’ve got him on your poor old brain.’

  ‘Have it your own way. Luckily it’s a matter of supreme unimportance,’ I said huffily, and with a sublime confidence which can rarely have been more misplaced.

  Six

  It is not necessary to dwell on the hours spent in the studios during this period, except in so far as they impinged on our private lives. My diligent study of the French language turned out to be superfluous, because I played an English Mees, who had teamed up with a group of students on a hitch-hike to the Dordogne. It was the director’s whim that, unlike most people wrestling with a foreign tongue, she was able to reel off great chunks of dialogue, without pause or waver, while retaining a thick, nasal Anglo-Saxon accent. The first I was able to learn by heart: the second, alas, came naturally.

  The main departure from routine was that I never had to clock in before eleven in the morning. By the French system, shooting starts at midday and continues almost without a break until eight or nine at night. I am not sure how this custom came about, but it has numerous advantages. For one thing, by the time work begins, everyone is fully awake, so less time is lost through inattention or hangovers, and still less from the endless tea and lunch breaks. It also prevents actors from fulfilling major engagements in the theatre while working on a film, which may be a good thing, and it entirely banishes all the terrors and privations involved in rising at six every morning, in order to be made up and on the set by nine o’clock, which is unquestionably a very good thing indeed.

  It was thanks to this routine that I was able to carry over my non-working life by starting each day in a civilised Madame Récamier fashion, with a tray of coffee and rolls, kindly supplied by Ellen, plus a session with the English and French newspapers.

  I habitually began with Figaro, partly in pursuance of the self-improvement course, which had now got a grip on me, and partly because all the main news was conveniently summarised on the front page. Sometimes I never got beyond the front page, for it promised nothing much inside except details of industrial unrest in Clermont-Ferrand, student unrest at Nanterre and Figaro unrest with practically everything; and the temptation to take a peep into the Daily Mail was almost irresistible.

  However, there were occasional rewards for perseverance and on Thursday morning, two days after Robin’s departure, I came across a headline which sent me ripping through the paper in search of the relevant page.

  The Champ de Mars was the name which first caught my eye and the fact that a woman had been found dead there naturally heightened the interest, although I managed to keep it down to simmering point by reminding myself that this open space was doubtless used by other members of the public, besides Adela and her poodles. As it happened, a glance confirmed that the dead body which had been bundled under a bench in the shrubbery was not hers. For one thing, the victim, after being knocked unconscious, had been strangled with her own hair. Furthermore, the last paragraph revealed that she had already been identified as Madame Leila Baker.

  In fact, it was the inconsolable husband who had made the identification and he had also drawn the attention of the investigators to the fact that a gold necklace, which his wife always wore, was missing. This, combined with the fact that no bag or purse had been found in the vicinity, manifested that robbery had been the motive. Mrs Baker’s age was given as thirty-seven and she was stated as hailing from New Zealand.

  There followed a stern homily, deploring a state of affairs which prevented innocent females walking abroad without fear of attack from monstrous assassins, comparable only to those operating in Chicago under the rule of Al Capone, but it contained nothing of a factual nature and I felt too numbed to read it through to the end. Apart from the natural shock of learning that someone I knew had been so brutally murdered, there were even more gruesome emotions to be reckoned with. However hard I tried to suppress it, the thought would keep returning that when Mrs Baker had waylaid me in the street, which can only have been some eight hours before she was killed, it was because she knew herself to be in mortal danger, and for some totally incomprehensible reason had sought to confide in me, or even, impossible as this might seem, to seek my protection.

  I tried to rationalise these beliefs out of existence by reminding myself that she had met her death at the hands of an unknown assailant after her money and valuables, and therefore any suspicions she might have held as to what was in store could only have taken the form of vague premonitions of impending doom, whose culmination neither I nor anyone else could have done anything to avert. It was a plausible theory, up to a point, for unquestionably much of her behaviour had been guided by intuition, and it gained colour from Sven’s observations concerning her
capacity to magnify ordinary mishaps into catastrophic proportions. The shock of Vishna’s death, too, would have been a powerful agent in rocking the balance of one who was well known to be emotionally unstable. The only trouble with this comforting theory was that I did not for one instant believe in it, and one of the principle stumbling-blocks was the memory of a curious remark of Ellen’s at the concert and which, in the light of this latest development, took on a new and sinister significance.

  However, I decided not to probe into this, or even to tell her of Mrs Baker’s death, until I had consulted Robin. Owing to the work schedule which I have already described, we had arranged that, except when some predatory female had seized upon my absence to invite him out to dinner, he would telephone me every night at ten o’clock, and that evening his call came through on the dot.

  I had discouraged Ellen from listening in on the hand extension, holding communications between man and wife to be more or less sacred, but, not wishing her to feel excluded, had allowed her to remain in the room and make what she could from my end of the conversation.

  Quite naturally, she soon grew bored with all the repetitions of ‘Oh, are you?’, ‘Oh, did you?’, etcetera, and drifted back to the television. This was the signal for confidential matters to be bruited, and as soon as she had left the room I told him about Leila Baker’s death.

  Evidently, it had not been reported in the English papers, for he was knocked sideways by the news and, more surprisingly, viewed it with deepest alarm. He went so far as to suggest that I should leave Paris at once.

  ‘But, Robin darling, do be serious. How could I contemplate such a thing? I’ve signed a contract, you know, and we’re scheduled to go on the floor in a day or two.’

  ‘That may not be the only thing on your schedule, by the sound of it. Surely there’s still time for them to get someone else for the part?’

  ‘But what reason could I give? You wouldn’t honestly expect me to say it was on account of a woman being mugged and murdered in a public park, and I’m not accustomed to that kind of thing? They’d say I was raving mad, and I’d never get another job here as long as I lived. My nom would be boue.’

  ‘Yes, rather appropriate. It strikes me that you’ve got yourself mixed up with that crowd, whether you like it or not, and there have been far too many unpleasant incidents. I relied on the acquaintance fizzling out when you started work, and now this has to happen! How do we know it was a straightforward mugging job? Those don’t usually end with the victim being strangled. They’re mostly just knocked unconscious and recover in no time.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that isn’t the way it’s done in France. The official view is that it was the work of some thug, after her money and her gold necklace, and presumably they base it on a bit more information than they gave out to the Press.’

  ‘And perhaps also the murderer was in full possession of his faculties and realised that the best way to make it look like robbery was to do a bit of robbing. I might add that the so-called official view is not always to be taken at face value. It’s quite a convenient stand to take, at this stage, and a way of lulling the real criminal into a false sense of security, as you very well know.’

  ‘Yes, I do know, and I agree with you that it may not be as straightforward as they would have us believe. All the same, I can tell you this much, if it’s any comfort to you; whoever killed her, it wasn’t Sven Carlsen.’

  ‘Oh? How do you know? You haven’t been seeing him again have you?’

  ‘Not in the sense you mean, but one or two fresh items were given out in the evening papers and they put him completely in the clear.’

  ‘Proceed.’

  ‘I’ve got it in front of me and it says that the local Prefecture were apprised of this miserable occurrence by an anonymous telephone call. Apparently, that’s usually the way they do get to hear about these things. Anybody declaring himself to have stumbled on a corpse is liable to be arrested on the spot and clapped into jug for a couple of years, while they sort it out. It can be inconvenient, specially if you happen to be innocent.’

  ‘You exaggerate, of course, but go on. What’s all this got to do with Carlsen?’

  ‘Well, Anon, whoever he was, must have been pretty quick off the mark. His call came through at twenty past eight. When the gendarmerie sped to the spot he had indicated, the body was still warm and they estimated that death could not have occurred more than one hour before, which puts the vital time between seven-thirty and eight. Agreed?’

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily put it anywhere of the kind, but go on.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it?’

  ‘Because death might not have been instantaneous. If your anonymous caller was as scared as you make out, he probably didn’t hang around long enough to make sure she was actually dead. Even if he did, it doesn’t follow that she died during the attack.’

  ‘Well, honestly, Robin, I don’t think it can have been more than minutes afterwards. The Champ de Mars is not exactly the Sahara, you know. Somebody would have noticed her there, specially if there were indications that she was still alive.’

  ‘That’s just conjecture, but obviously I’m upsetting some neat little theory of yours which lets Carlsen off the hook, so you’d better tell me what it is.’

  ‘Simply that at ten minutes to eight he was leaving a cinema by the Arc de Triomphe. I don’t know how much you remember about the evening traffic in that part of Paris, but I assure you that even Batman couldn’t have got from there to the Champ de Mars in under twenty minutes. Even then, he’d have to walk the last part, to the scene of the murder. I haven’t checked on how long that would take.’

  ‘And I implore you not to try. I’d much rather you kept out of it. All the same . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What if he’d done it in reverse? Supposing the murder had already been committed by the time you saw him? People often claim to have been sitting in a cinema. If they can dig out a ticket and a passable description of the film, it’s sometimes rather hard to disprove. I imagine that would not have been beyond Carlsen’s ingenuity?’

  ‘No, but it would have been beyond it to get from the Champ de Mars in under twenty minutes, whichever direction he travelled in. There’s no direct line to the Etoile by Metro; you have to change at Concorde, which is half an hour’s walk, all by itself. If he took the car, he’d have all the bother of parking it twice over, and that would have added another half an hour. The only other way would have been by taxi and you know how hard they are to find in that district. Besides, he would hardly have come running out, brandishing blood-stained weapons, to hail a taxi. The chances are that it would be imprinted on the driver’s memory. And, after all that, when he got to the cinema, he would have had to queue for a ticket, as I know for a fact. Anyway, why are you so set against him? I admit he’s pursued us rather tiresomely, but that doesn’t make him a murderer, does it? And it could all have been true about my suitcase, you know. Come to that, those keys might have dropped out of your pocket by accident.’

  ‘I know, and yet I feel in my bones that there’s something tricky about him. Also it is a fact that one of his colleagues has now been murdered and that’s not very encouraging, whether he’s to blame or not. I’d take it as a favour if you’d keep clear of the whole bunch of them.’

  ‘Of course, I will, Robin; but he isn’t involved in this, I promise you.’

  ‘No, you can’t. The sort of alibi you’ve described could contain half a dozen loopholes.’

  ‘But the point is that it wasn’t an alibi, in the sense you’re implying. He couldn’t have had the least idea that Ellen and I would be in the same cinema, and he made no attempt to establish his presence there. On the contrary, it was I who made all the running that time. I’m not even sure that he saw me, but he certainly didn’t come back to speak to us.’

  I had considered this argument to be so conclusive as to put all Robin’s nameless fears to rest, but had reckoned without masculine logic:


  ‘There you are!’ he said triumphantly. ‘That’s just the kind of thing that bothers me. Ever since we met him he’s been running after us like a devoted little puppy, and when you suddenly pop up and make it easy for him, what does he do? Ignores you and gallops off in the opposite direction. What are we to make of that?’

  ‘One thing we could make of it, I suppose, is that it was you he was after all the time, and Ellen and I had no part in his schemes.’

  I had intended this as a joke, but, strangely enough, he took it seriously.

  ‘Absurd as it may sound, Tessa, the same thought had occurred to me. Though it certainly doesn’t add up, unless he’s a straightforward crackpot.’

  ‘Not a murdering crackpot, though.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I’d still like you to keep well away.’

  ‘I intend to,’ I said, ‘and, judging by the last encounter, I don’t anticipate the slightest difficulty.’

  Ellen came back just after I had replaced the receiver and it flashed through my mind that I had omitted to ask Robin one important question. The telephone rang again almost immediately and I snatched it up, in the firm conviction that his mind-reading abilities were operating just as powerfully at long distance. However, the call was for Ellen.

  So then it was my turn to endure all the ‘Oh, have you’s?’ and ‘oh, did she’s?’ and after about the fourth one I left her to it and busied myself in the bathroom for five minutes. When I returned they had reached the: ‘Yay, okay . . . kay . . . see you, bye,’ stage and I put the inevitable question.