Death in Bordeaux Read online

  DEATH IN BORDEAUX

  Death in

  Bordeaux

  ALLAN MASSIE

  First published in 2010 by

  Quartet Books Limited

  A member of the Namara Group

  27 Goodge Street, London W1T2LD

  Reprinted 2010

  Copyright © Allan Massie 2010

  The right of Allan Massie to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted

  by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in

  any form or by any means without prior

  written permission from the publisher

  A catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 0 7043 7287 0

  Typeset by Antony Gray

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  T J International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  PART TWO

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  I

  March, 1940.

  His wife, Marguerite, said the Chambolley case was becoming an obsession with Lannes. This was unusual. Normally she took no interest in his work. In truth he preferred it that way. So she was right to this extent, that she had noticed it was getting on his nerves, no doubt about that. It had begun three weeks previously, with a telephone call at five in the morning. He had got up grumbling to himself but moving quietly so as not to wake the children, and had then to wait on his doorstep shivering in a clammy mist till the car from headquarters arrived, with young René Martin at the wheel, full of apologies because the bloody thing wouldn’t start.

  ‘So, it’s a corpse, then.’

  ‘All I know, chief. In the rue Cabanac between the station and the abattoirs.’

  Not the first to have been discovered there.

  ‘I’d have been as quick walking.’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Pull in to the station, there should be a bar open by now. We’ll have a coffee.’

  Coffee with a shot of Armagnac made him feel human, ashamed of snapping at the boy who wasn’t reasonably to be blamed for a car that wouldn’t start.

  Two agents – uniforms – were waiting at the corner of the rue Cabanac, relieved to see the PJ arrive. That by itself told Lannes it was nasty.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  Foghorns from a tug making its way up the Garonne drowned the reply. Then the shorter of the two said, ‘There’s no doubt it’s murder, even though we haven’t of course examined the body. Never seen anything like it, superintendent. Jules here puked, and I don’t blame him. Naturally when I say I haven’t seen the like, I make an exception of what I saw in the trenches. But then, even there, well, war’s natural, as you might say, you expect horrors, and this here, it’s downright unnatural.’

  He coughed, a spluttering choking kind of cough, as if he too might vomit, and then stood aside. Young Martin shone his torch and Lannes was able to see the body. There had been too many in his life, he often thought. All the same there was always a shiver of anticipation like that produced by the three hammer-blows before the curtain went up in the theatre. Now his first impression was of whiteness. The dead man’s trousers had been pulled down round his ankles and the vast milkiness of flabby thighs held the attention. But the real horror came when René directed the light to the face and to the object held between the lips. He must have recognized it for what it was more quickly than Lannes, for, with a cry of disgust, he dropped the torch and turned away retching.

  ‘That’s right, it’s the poor bugger’s cock,’ the shorter agent said. ‘I told you it was downright unnatural. To cut it off and stuff it in his mouth – what kind of beast would do that?’

  ‘Well, there’s one less of them now, that’s certain,’ his colleague, recovered from his bout of nausea, but still sweating and mopping his brow with his handkerchief, said, with, to Lannes’ mind, an unpleasant satisfaction in his voice.

  ‘So that’s what you think?’

  ‘It’s obvious, superintendent, isn’t it? Clear as day. Filthy brutes.’

  ‘You think he was asking for it then?’

  ‘Not what I said, superintendent. But . . . ’

  Lannes sighed, knelt down, examined the body, touched the dead man’s cheek lightly with his forefinger. He would have liked to remove but no . . . apart from the repugnance with which the thought of touching it filled him, that was something that had to be left to the specialists. Who were indeed soon with them, allowing routine to take over as they got to work. Lannes established that the agents had themselves discovered the body in the course of their patrol, told them he wanted their written report on his desk before they went off duty – ‘and make it full, everything you saw, even if it doesn’t seem important’ – had a few words with the medical officer, Dr Paulhan, an old friend he could rely on, and told young René they might as well be off. There would be door-to-door inquiries to set up, soon as possible, before people left for work.

  ‘But we’ll keep these two clowns out of it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s odd,’ René said, starting the motor which this time sprang straight into life, ‘nobody’s opened a window or come on to their doorstep to see what was going on, and yet you’d think someone must have been woken up and curious, wouldn’t you, chief?’

  ‘He wasn’t killed there. Just dumped. I’m sure of that.’

  The light was turning to a pale grey. A baker pushed up the metal shutter of his shop, and a bar in the Cours du Marne was already open, as men dropped in for a coffee, brandy or pastis on their way to work. Lannes lit his first cigarette of the day.

  ‘Wonder who the poor fellow was?’

  ‘He’s called Gaston Chambolley,’ Lannes said. ‘Was called.’

  ‘Oh, you know him then, chief. A customer? That’s not so bad.’

  ‘No, not a customer.’

  Though he might have been, or come to be, the way he’d come to live. He’d been lucky. Till now.

  And then: ‘At least I suppose it’s Gaston, not Henri,’ he said, to himself really, but speaking aloud.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Gaston and Henri . . . They’re identical twins. But no, it must be Gaston.’

  It was a few weeks after he came back, wounded, from his war that he met them. He had enrolled at the university, at his father’s suggestion, even insistence. ‘You’ve always had your nose in a book,’ the old man had said, urging him to seek a career as a lawyer. ‘There’s always a need for them, God knows why. Leastways they never starve.’ That had been his opinion, admiring and envious, formed when he f
irst came to Bordeaux from the farm, and worked in a bar near the law-courts. Actually, over the years, Lannes had come to know a good many lawyers, even here in litigious Bordeaux, who had never made it, whose careers had come unstuck – even if they didn’t starve. Indeed Gaston Chambolley was one of these failures.

  He had soon met the twins – they were on the same course, fat jolly boys, all the more jolly, he supposed with some resentment, because both had been judged unfit for military service. When he looked at them and thought of some of the poor runts who had been with him at Verdun, and were still many of them there buried forever in the mud or rubble, well, it gave him a nasty taste in the mouth. All the more so indeed when someone – was it sly little Bergotte? – had said, ‘Of course, you know, their grandfather’s a doctor, a very distinguished one, I’m told, a professor and consultant, and there’s no doubt he found a convenient condition for the pair that would render them exempt.’ Yes, it had been little Bergotte, a nasty type really, though, having got a bullet in his lungs at the first Marne gave him some cause to sneer at the twins. He had continued to do so, but Lannes himself had soon found his resentment fade. They were so full of life and jokes, so really and naturally blithe and cheerful, yet also both so intelligent, so interested in matters beyond the aridity of the law course, and yet so modest, gentle and eager to please, that he had very quickly accepted the friendship they offered. He owed them a lot. They had opened his eyes to many things, painting for instance, and novels he might never have found for himself.

  Moreover, in snobbish Bordeaux, he was grateful that they had accepted him, the peasant’s grandson, whose father kept a stationer’s shop, as their equal and a friend. Soon he was saying to himself, ‘If they managed to screw their way out of the war, good luck to them.’ It wasn’t till some time later that he realized that they were actually ashamed of having missed it, and that, contrary to little Bergotte’s insinuations, the condition which had kept them out – something glandular affecting the heart, as he remembered – was absolutely genuine. Actually they were even a little in awe of him because of what he had been through – though this embarrassed him – and that they too were grateful for the friendship.

  So much so that they continued to see each other after he met Marguerite, abandoned his law course to marry her, and, to his father’s disappointment, became a policeman. Indeed Henri was godfather to Lannes’s older boy, Dominique, himself now at the Front in this new war which nobody was yet fighting.

  It was all miserable.

  ‘Stop at that bar,’ he said to René. ‘We could both do with coffee and something stronger to go with it. It’s a raw morning, and that was a horrible sight.’

  There was worse to come: calling on Henri to break the news. He always hated this duty, ‘By far the worst part of the job’, he told Marguerite. And so much worse in this case. But he couldn’t delegate it, was ashamed of wishing he could.

  He found him still in his dressing-gown. The apartment above the bookshop in the rue des Remparts smelled of dust, tobacco, old books, leather, dog and coffee. Henri greeted him with a smile. They embraced as they had done for so long. Perhaps Henri felt some stiffness in Lannes, for he said: ‘But it’s not a social call, not at this hour since you know my habits, and from the look on your face you are not seeking information, for which, besides, you wouldn’t have disturbed me so early. Therefore . . . it’s Gaston, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. It couldn’t be worse.’

  They got through the formalities, the routine business, saying little to each other; then, at the morgue, the identification, for the necessity of which Lannes apologized; then went to his office.

  He poured them both an Armagnac.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘drink it. It’s no real help but it’s a help nevertheless.’

  ‘Poor boy,’ Henri said. ‘I’ve been afraid for so long it would come to this. He’s been beaten up more than once, you know.’

  At least Henri hadn’t had to be confronted with the mutilation.

  ‘No,’ Lannes said, ‘I didn’t know. There’s no record of a complaint that I’m aware of.’

  ‘He’d have been ashamed. That can’t surprise you.’

  ‘I suppose not. He was still an advocate, a member of the Bordeaux bar, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Up to a point. He stuck to the law longer than I did, as you know, but he had scarcely practised for years now. Things haven’t gone well with him. He was drinking too much, and also . . . ’

  He let the sentence die. Neither of them wanted to add to it. Lannes sought for words of comfort, could find none.

  Henri said: ‘It was disappointment, you know, the sense of failure, that drove him to it. To its expression that is, for he was always, I fear, inclined that way. But it was the emptiness of his life. He did once say that it was the excitement rather than the act itself that appealed. It was always better in anticipation than performance. But it became an addiction.’

  A tear ran down his great moon face, and he began to sob. Lannes, still finding nothing to say, waited. Many people had cried, for various reasons, in that room, and he had never grown accustomed to it. It embarrassed him, even when, as sometimes, he also experienced disgust. At last Henri mopped his face with a white-spotted red handkerchief, and, to compose himself, gazed out of the window at the steel-grey of the sky. He picked up the photograph of Marguerite that stood on the desk.

  ‘He wouldn’t have wanted her to know what he was, what he had become. He never entirely lost his pride and he had a great respect for her, affection too. Now I suppose all the world will know.’

  Lannes, touched by his friend’s distress, searched for words of comfort, without success, then fell back on the necessary routine.

  ‘When did you last see him? I’m sorry, Henri, but I have to ask these questions. The sooner the better. It’s the way it is.’

  ‘I understand. You’ve a job to do. Yesterday afternoon, as it happens. About four o’clock. The rain had just started and his hat was dripping when he came into the shop.’

  ‘Were you expecting him?’

  ‘Not really, but it happened two or three times a month that he would call on me at the shop. There was no need to give warning, you know. He was my best friend as well as my brother, and I’m sure he would have said the same of me. Twins have a special bond. But you’ll know that, Jean, with Alain and Clothilde.’

  ‘I suppose so, though it’s not quite the same with them, boy and girl, not, obviously, identical like you and Gaston. How was he yesterday? Anything at all unusual?’

  ‘Nothing at all. He was in good spirits. Despite everything, that was normal with him. He was resilient, you understand. He’d come for a good talk and also to borrow money.’

  ‘Was that something that happened often?’

  ‘Often enough. We called it a loan, but, well, I never looked for repayment. I have a good income and poor Gaston no longer has – had, I should say.’

  ‘Did he say what it was for?’

  ‘No, never. We were past that. And I didn’t ask. What would have been the point? It wasn’t necessary. Now I wish for the first time that I had refused him. Poor boy.’

  ‘I hadn’t seen him for a long time myself,’ Lannes said.

  ‘No, you were one of the old friends he preferred to avoid, and not only, or not at all really, on account of your job. He had an affection for you, and he respected you also, as he respected Marguerite, and he would have found it embarrassing. As a matter of fact, he saw very few people, and you could almost say he had become a solitary, a recluse. He spent most of his time at a small house in Bergerac he had inherited from one of our aunts, and, because he no longer practised at the bar, he occupied himself in writing a book, a history of Bordeaux and Gascony at the time of the English Occupation. How much of it got written I don’t know, but the subject filled his days. That’s to say, it featured in his talk and he had me set aside any relevant books that came my way. But really, you know, I have often thought
it was an excuse, something that allowed him to pretend to himself that he wasn’t a failure and what the world calls a degenerate. So he had very little social life, except what his compulsion drove him to, if you can call that social life. And now it’s killed him, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Too early to say, but . . . Shall I walk you home?’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘He was such a happy boy,’ Lannes said.

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  Inevitably Lannes spoke to Inspector Troyat of the Vice Squad.

  Troyat, lean, heavy-eyebrowed, lugubrious, sighed.

  ‘Oh, I know who you mean. Course I do. He came my way a couple of times. Liked them young, you know, and there was a complaint, not from a parent but from a schoolmaster. I had my doubts about the man’s motives, nevertheless had a word with Monsieur Chambolley. No more than that. Till lately he was discreet. Recently, I’m not so sure. It takes them like that as they get older. Time running out, you know. Like Judge Ballardin and that young girl, you remember. So I’m not surprised how it ended, but then I never am. Takes a lot to surprise me, after twenty years in Vice. Mind you, I liked him. Couldn’t help doing so. He was always the gentleman. Rotten way to go. Hope it was quick.’

  ‘Quick enough.’

  Lannes was reluctant to speak of the mutilation which had, anyway, been performed when Gaston was already dead.

  ‘Can you give me the name of that schoolmaster?’

  ‘It was a couple of years back. I’ll look it out for you. But you’d be wasting your time there. Nasty chap, but feeble, a pervert himself, that was my opinion. Meanwhile you might ask at Les Trois Roses in the rue de Saigon. Tell Jérome I sent you. He’ll co-operate. He did of course, but it wasn’t worth much. He knew Gaston, well naturally he did, but hadn’t seen him that night, not for weeks really.

  ‘To be quite frank, superintendent, I was never happy having him here. It’s not really his sort of place and I run a respectable house as Inspector Troyat will tell you. But when Monsieur Chambolley had had a few, which wasn’t uncommon, he was inclined to become careless, demonstrative, you know. And I couldn’t have that. Had to ask him to leave more than once. I wish I could help you because, despite everything, I liked the old boy, and it’s always horrible to hear of one of my customers ending that way. But I’m sorry, I can’t. Have a drop of red, will you? I’ve always been on good terms with the police, as Inspector Troyat will confirm.’