Iain Pears - The Last Judgement

Again, there was no answer. Rouxel was not resisting her questions, not even resenting them or trying to stop them. Nor did he seem worried. He just wasn’t very interested.

‘“And they were judged every man according to their works,”’ she quoted. ‘Are you prepared for that, monsieur?’

At last she gained a response. Rouxel gave a bleak smile and stirred slightly. ‘Is anybody?’

‘I wonder how long it will take for the cavalry to get here,’ she said, looking at her watch.

‘Who?’ Argyll asked.

‘Montaillou and his friends. They should have arrived by now.’

‘And then what?’

Now it was her turn to look indifferent. ‘I don’t really care. What do you think, Monsieur Rouxel? Should I explain?’

‘You seem like a young woman who believes things can be explained. Accounted for, understood and made comprehensible. At my age, I’m not so sure. What people do and why they do it is often incomprehensible.’

‘Not always.’

‘I think they’re here,’ Argyll said, moving to the window and peering through the curtain. ‘Yes. Montaillou and a few others. One looks as though he’s being told to guard the gate. Another is on the front door. The other two are coming in.’

Montaillou and the other man, whom Argyll had never seen before, came through the front door and into the study. While the Intelligence officer had been polite at their last meeting, now he abandoned even a nominal attempt at courtesy.

The other man seemed more detached. In his late fifties, with close-cropped grey hair and a sharp nose, he had a look of alertness that was now masked by resigned concern.

‘A few hours ago I said I would not charge Mr Argyll or disrupt your career,’ Montaillou said in a clipped voice that barely concealed his fury. ‘I’m sure you’ll understand if I say that I no longer feel able to stand by that.’

Flavia ignored him. Possibly not the best way of disarming his anger, but what the hell? ‘Hello again, Inspector Janet,’ she said. ‘How delightful to see you again.’

The grey-haired man nodded at her uneasily. Argyll gave him a quick look-over, at close quarters, for the first time. The man who was supposedly the only one they could trust. Whatever happened, he thought, Franco-Italian relations over art thefts would take a long time to recover.

‘Hello, Flavia,’ he replied with an almost rueful, apologetic smile. ‘I’m really very sorry all this has happened.’

She shrugged.

‘But why did you come here?’ Janet went on. ‘What was the point?’

‘I know what the point was—’ Montaillou began. But Janet held up his hand to silence him. Flavia noticed that. It was interesting. She’d always known that Janet wielded more power than his status strictly warranted; that unlike Bottando he was one of the cadre of officials who knew a lot of people; who could phone contacts and fix things by having a quiet word. But this was new. Montaillou implicitly accepted the man’s greater authority. And Janet still seemed to acknowledge some sort of obligation, or connection to her and the Italian department. It gave her a chance that, at least, she would be heard.

‘I made a promise,’ she said.

‘You have any explanation? Any evidence?’

‘I think I can give a good account.’

‘It will have to be good.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think we’ll need any proof or anything. It’s not that sort of case. I fear this is not going to end with anyone arraigned, or extradited or tried, somehow.’

‘Are you going to suggest that French Intelligence was behind the deaths, then? I do hope not,’ Janet said. ‘However inadequate Monsieur Montaillou’s handling of this case...’

She shook her head again, noting the rift. That could be useful; no great love lost between these two representatives of the French state. ‘No. He — and you — merely made it more difficult to find out what was going on.’

‘So who did kill these people?’

‘She did,’ Flavia said simply, pointing at Jeanne Armand. ‘Or at least, she organized the first murder and committed the second.’

A complete silence greeted this, with not even the woman sitting in the chair breaking it with any protest. Eventually it was Argyll who reacted first.

‘Oh, Flavia, really,’ he said. ‘What an idea! Does she look like a murderer to you?’

‘Do you have any evidence for this, either?’ Janet asked.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing conclusive. But Monsieur Rouxel was in Rome that day, heading a delegation to the Interior Ministry. The call which summoned Ellman to Rome was made from the Hotel Raphael. And in the next room but one to Ellman was a witness that Detective Fabriano interviewed. A Madame Armand. That was you, was it not?’

Jeanne Armand looked up and nodded. ‘Yes. But I told the truth. I heard nothing of any interest. It was a dreadful coincidence that I was staying in the same hotel, of course—’

‘Dreadful,’ Flavia agreed. ‘And not entirely frank of you.’

‘I thought it best to protect my grandfather. I—’

‘— didn’t want his name in the papers just before the prize-giving. Yes, of course.’

‘But it was still a coincidence,’ Janet said quietly. ‘Unless you convince us otherwise.’

‘I say again, I have no proof. But I can tell you a story, if you like. You can believe it or not as you wish. Then I will quietly take the next plane home and forget it.’

She looked around, but nobody either urged her on or told her to keep quiet, so she took a deep breath and began.

‘We have a whole loose network of people, spread over several generations and several countries. Some dead, some alive. Jules Hartung, already fairly old when the last war began. Jean Rouxel, Mrs Richards, Ellman, all the same generation and in their twenties in 1940. Much younger was Arthur Muller. Youngest of all is Jeanne Armand here. They came from Switzerland and Canada and England and France. But all of them were profoundly marked by that war, and in particular by what happened on the twenty-seventh of June 1943. The day that the Resistance network dubbed Pilot was broken up by German army Intelligence.

‘If you want, we can talk about that later. First I want to tell you what happened. When Arthur Muller commissioned Besson to steal that picture, he was acting very much out of character. A more upright, honest and straightforward man could scarcely be imagined. He did not do things illegally. But in this case, he got involved quite deliberately in a crime. Why? We know he wanted to examine a picture, but why not write to Jean Rouxel and ask?

‘The answer, I suspect, is simple. He did. And was fobbed off.’

‘That’s not true,’ Rouxel said. ‘I had never heard of the man before last week.’

‘No. Your secretary screens all your mail. She saw the letters, and answered them for you. Initially, I imagine she thought Muller was potty; he had good reason for not being entirely frank and saying why he wanted to look at the picture. Whatever, she blocked all his approaches.’

‘You’ll have a hard job proving that,’ Jeanne said.

‘I know. When you killed Ellman, you made sure you took and destroyed the file of correspondence he’d taken from Muller’s apartment. I imagine that contained all your letters to him.’

‘And maybe not.’

‘Indeed. As I say, I’m just telling a story. When the police arrested Besson, he was interviewed and passed on to Montaillou. He rang to enquire about the painting. You talked to Madame Armand, is that right?’

Montaillou nodded.

‘So she knew the picture was heading for Muller, and she now had an idea why it was so important. She wanted it stopped, so she said that Muller was a complete madman, obsessed with revealing that Rouxel had bungled the inquiry into Hartung’s guilt. It was she who pressed you to get it back before it left the country, warning of possible embarrassment.’