The Splendour Falls

But it wasn’t Isabelle’s face that made me stare. It was the face of the man beside her.

‘My God,’ I said.

It might have been a portrait taken yesterday. He was gazing straight into the camera lens, his dark eyes calm and composed, and although in the faded photograph his close-cropped hair looked white, I knew it wasn’t. It was blonde. Just as I knew those dark, dark eyes were blue.

With shaking hands, I turned the picture over and read the pencilled line of writing on the back: Hans and Isabelle, June, 1944.

I had forgotten Thierry. He looked across the desk at me, vaguely puzzled. ‘Mademoiselle?’

‘Thierry,’ I said slowly, ‘where is Monsieur Grantham, do you know?’

‘I do not know. He went, I think, to the police station to talk to Monsieur Belliveau. The poet – you remember? When I was leaving from the police, they had just brought Monsieur Belliveau for questioning. Not about Paul, you understand. It was about some Englishman who had gone missing. And Monsieur Neil, he tries to help because they were friends, once.’

Of course they were friends. Neil and Victor Belliveau and Christian Rand: they’d all been part of Brigitte Valcourt’s grand artistic parties at the Clos des Cloches. And Belliveau now shared his land with gypsies, so no doubt Neil had met the gypsy with the dog – the one who followed me. ‘My God,’ I said, again. Blinking back the foolish senseless tears of shock, I stared down at the damning photograph. Neil’s own eyes smiled up at me, from the face of another man, his image nearly creased beneath the pressure of my fingers.

There must have been a reason why he hadn’t mentioned his relationship to Hans. Just as there was a reason why he’d put that tape in Thierry’s hi-fi, and set it at a volume that he couldn’t stand. Because it had been Neil playing the Beethoven, it had … I’d seen him. At the end of his practise session, perhaps, but nonetheless … And it was a difficult piece to play – that’s why he’d looked so exhausted when I’d interrupted him; why his hair had been so damp around his face; why he’d been breathing with such effort, as if he’d just been running … running …

‘Ah,’ said Thierry, glancing beyond my shoulder. ‘You see? You speak of the wolf, and you see his tail. Here comes Monsieur Neil.’

I looked round wildly, and then, to Thierry’s sheer astonishment, I dropped the photograph and ran. I ran like a rabbit pursued by a hawk, up the curving stairway to the first floor landing, and out onto the empty terrace through the door that still stood open, as it had been open on the afternoon that Paul had died. I ran across the terrace and down the narrow stairs and out of the little door into the crowded square. No one paid me any attention. They kept on sipping wine and drinking coffee at their tables round the fountain while I turned and bolted up the breakneck steps to the château.

I didn’t stop running until I’d reached the top, and I only stopped then because I thought my lungs would burst if I went one step further. With my back to the low wall I slumped forward, hands on my knees, drawing in deep, sobbing, painful breaths of air.

The sudden scraping of a match in front of me brought my head up with a jerk, in time to see the gypsy’s black eyes smiling at me as, against the cliff face opposite, he touched the brief flame to his yellow-filtered cigarette.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

‘Would rather we had never come! I dread

His wildness, and the chances of the dark.’

The match flared in the breeze and died abruptly.

‘It is not safe, Mademoiselle,’ he told me, in coarsened English, ‘to stand so near the edge.’

I was gathering breath to cry blue murder when he moved. But he didn’t move towards me. Instead he turned and started slowly up the road, towards the château, with the little mongrel dog trotting on ahead of him.

I hadn’t expected that.

Stunned, I let my breath escape without a sound and felt my fear flip over into fascination. By the time he’d gone ten paces from me I had found my voice again. ‘Wait!’ I called after him. ‘Please wait!’

He stopped walking, looked back. The dog stopped too, impatiently, close by his master’s feet. I cleared my throat and asked the question.

‘You know what happened to him, don’t you? You were here.’

It was a rather ambiguous question, but he didn’t pretend to misunderstand me. He met my eyes and nodded slowly. ‘But I,’ he said, ‘was not the one who pushed him, Mademoiselle.’

At that he turned away again and walked on a few steps to where a wooden door hung scarred and derelict in the face of the yellow cliff. Through that door both dog and gypsy went without a backward glance. ‘Wait!’ I cried again, but it was too late. They were gone. A swiftly moving cloud passed over the sinking sun and in its shadow the breeze struck chill upon my face. ‘Follow,’ the wind whispered, swirling against the ancient stone. ‘Follow …’

My brain resisted. Don’t be an idiot, it told me. Go right back down those stairs, my girl, and straight to the police … But the unseen forces calling me, compelling me, did not respond to rationality. They pulled me numbly to that door and sent me through it like Alice on the trail of the White Rabbit. The door swung wide, and in a slanting triangle of light showed me a shallow flight of steps descending into darkness, a darkness that grew palpable as the door creaked gently to behind me.

Oh, hell, I thought. Why did it have to be a cellar? I held my breath, and swallowed down the cowardly swell of panic. Think of Paul, I told myself. The gypsy knows what happened …