The Splendour Falls

‘Yes.’

‘Ah.’ The single syllable spoke volumes. ‘I can make enquiries, if you like, about your cousin. And I know this gypsy well, I’ll talk to him, although I don’t think he will tell me much. I know he looks rough, but he doesn’t make much trouble.’ He glanced at me. ‘Perhaps, Madame, your cousin’s absence …’

‘Disappearance.’

‘… has made you, how shall I say, sensitive to things that are not there?’

I swallowed that small rebuke, along with a mouthful of brandy, and felt the muscles of my jaw tighten. No point in wasting my breath, I told myself. It was obvious that my suspicions hadn’t been taken very seriously. I watched in silence while he made a final entry in his notebook and flipped it closed.

‘I must thank you, Madame, for your time and for your patience. You’ve been most helpful.’ It was a lie, I knew, but he told it well. I hadn’t helped at all, unless he counted holes poked in his suicide theory as evidence of my helpfulness. I smiled faintly at him and he nodded, rising to take his leave of the Chamonds with both respect and muted sympathy.

He hadn’t been gone from the bar thirty seconds when Garland Whitaker swept in, looking rather like Lady Macbeth, with just the proper touch of déshabillé and an air of drama hanging over her. Behind her Jim moved silently, tall and stoic.

Garland took the chair the young policeman had been sitting in. Paul’s chair. She leaned in closer, placing one hand on my sleeve in a gesture that was meant to be comforting. ‘Oh, Emily, how awful for you,’ she sympathised. ‘I simply couldn’t have done it, not this soon after … Well, you know. Did he ask very many questions?’

I looked sideways, at the wide blue eyes so greedy for a breath of scandal, and felt my patience slipping from me. ‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’ Something of my contempt must have shown in my face, because she dropped her hand and shifted a little further away from me on the plump cushions.

Madame Chamond crossed over from the bar and took a seat, her warm low voice like balm upon my blistered nerves. ‘You must be tired,’ she said. ‘And you have finished your brandy. Edouard …’ Turning, she called her husband’s attention to my empty glass, and in an instant he was at my side as well, bottle in hand. He had brought glasses for his wife and the Whitakers as well, but when Garland urged him to take a seat he straightened up with a courteous shake of his head, and tightened his grip on the brandy bottle.

‘No, I cannot stay. I must go back and see how Simon is, if you will please excuse me.’

He went out through the door behind the bar, into the passageway that led back past the office to the Chamonds’ private quarters. ‘Simon spends this night with us,’ Madame Chamond explained. ‘We could not leave him in that room alone. Tonight he sleeps in Thierry’s room, and Thierry keeps him company.’

‘Poor kid.’ Jim Whitaker frowned. ‘Shame it had to be him that found the body.’

‘Another five minutes,’ his wife said, ‘and it would have been me, darling. Oh, what a horrible thought.’ She shuddered with feeling, and I looked at her again.

‘What were you doing on the steps?’ I asked her. ‘I thought you were in Candes-St-Martin.’

‘I was. Monsieur Chamond wanted to stop in at the hardware store, you see, to do some shopping, so I said they should let me off at the château, and I’d walk back. It’s not far, I said, not when you use the steps. And I thought Jim might be lonely.’ She sent her husband a vaguely questing look. ‘But of course, you weren’t even here, were you darling?’

‘No.’

I thought she hesitated, waiting for some explanation, but it was clear Jim Whitaker was not in a communicative mood. ‘Well, anyway,’ she went on, ‘I started down the steps and ran smack into Simon and … well, you know. It was a horrible shock, let me tell you.’

For a brief moment I thought I caught the faintest glimmer of distaste in Madame Chamond’s normally immaculate expression. ‘It is a shock for all of us.’

‘It just doesn’t seem real, does it?’ Garland went on, unable to leave the wound unprobed. ‘I mean, one minute you’re talking to someone, and the next …’ Her eyes moved to the low round table at her side, and her train of thought was interrupted. ‘Isn’t that Paul’s book?’ She reached to grasp Ulysses. I’d had to pull it from the pocket of Paul’s jacket to get at the cigarettes.

Garland didn’t ask how the book had come to be there. She simply turned it over, with a sigh. ‘I guess he’ll never finish this, now. Not that it really matters. Poor Paul, I can’t believe—’

‘For God’s sake, Garland.’ Jim Whitaker leaned back against the window wall, and rubbed his forehead with a weary hand. ‘Just shut up.’ He spoke the words quietly, as though he had exhausted all his energy. To my surprise, it worked. Garland actually stopped talking, but her jaw compressed with irritation and I knew she’d give him hell come morning.

I held out my hand. ‘I’ll take that, please.’

She handed the book over in silence with a small uncaring sniff and, rising, said good night to us and left.

Jim sighed, a heavy sigh. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply. ‘Truly sorry.’ And pushing himself to his feet, he followed his wife out into the hall.