Barbara Cleverly - Strange Images of Death

And the gruff response: ‘Tell him I’ll see him. Just give me a minute, will you, Félix.’

There was the sound of furniture creaking, foot-stamping and nose-blowing, and Guy de Pacy appeared in the doorway, rubbing an unshaven face. ‘Thank you, Félix. That’ll be all.’ Even red-eyed and black-bristled, he cut an impressive figure, Joe thought.

Joe went in and took the chair being pointed out to him. ‘Forgive the squalor,’ mumbled de Pacy, making a careless gesture around the room..

Joe looked for the squalor and saw that it consisted of one jacket flung around a chair back. Everything else was neat and comfortable, a working room supplied with arm-chairs and bookshelves. A phonograph standing in a corner was giving out a moody piece of Mahler that Joe thought he recognized. Kindertotenlieder. De Pacy hurried to lift the needle arm and turn the record off.

‘Now-where in hell did you get to this morning?’ de Pacy said, beginning to stride about the room. ‘I was looking to you to exercise some control over your fellow countrymen. Have you walked through the great hall? I peered in this morning and decided to leave them to it. Jacquemin thought it would be a good idea to keep the lot of them herded in together. Mad notion! He’ll find he’s got more corpses on his hands than he knows what to do with. By the end of the day, we’ll be looking at the Black Hole of Calcutta! And I’m quite sure I don’t care a button!’

The steward was talking in his bluff tone to fill a gap and distract Joe from an examination of his emotion-racked face.

Joe decided to have none of his nonsense.

‘I was in Avignon,’ he said. ‘At the morgue. She didn’t suffer, Guy, the pathologist assures me. She could hardly have been aware of what was happening to her. She looked very peaceful. I paid my last respects to Estelle and her baby.’

De Pacy uttered a strangled cry and went to collapse on the other chair, turning his face from Joe.

‘How the hell …?’

‘It’s not usual to make the sign of the cross twice over a body. Not unless, perhaps, you understand a second tiny life to have been lost also.’

‘My child,’ said de Pacy. ‘And I was only aware of his existence for one day. I say his because Estelle was quite certain that we would have a son. It might well have been a girl. Would they have been able to tell?’

The naive question wrung Joe’s heart and made him feel uneasy. Responding with kindness to the man’s grief: ‘It’s thought you would have had a son,’ he lied. Somehow he judged the devious answer would bring comfort to this military man.

The vision of Estelle in her blue Worth dinner gown came back to Joe with a memory of her perfume and the elation he’d sensed in her. Elation not chemically achieved as he’d thought, by cocaine, but by love. Orlando had had it right. She was in love. And Joe was looking at the object of her affections. Dishevelled and sniffling, de Pacy slumped in his chair and it was suddenly hard to see in this man the hero Estelle had clearly fallen for.

‘She loved you very much, Guy,’ Joe said quietly.

‘How do you know?’ The drooping head shot up. Far from distressing him further as Joe had feared, it seemed he’d triggered in de Pacy an eagerness to hear his reassurances.

‘I was with her on that last night. The night she wore her blue gown. She took me on to the roof … No! In all innocence, I assure you, old man! To give evidence. To tell me what she’d observed from up there on the night of the statue-smashing. She had an assignation-with you, I think-and she dashed off to keep it. But not before I’d got the clear impression that here was a woman in love. Not a sight I’ve had any personal experience of, I confess. Something similar but not like this. Once seen, never forgotten. You have been a fortunate man, Guy, to have known such affection.’

A watery smile rewarded his insights. ‘That was the last night we spent together. It was the night she told me. That she was having a child and that it was mine. You won’t understand the feeling, Joe. News like that turns your life around. It can be devastating … It can be elevating. It made me twice the man I was. I was damn nearly destroyed by the war …’

To Joe’s dismay, he began to peel away the grey kid glove from his right hand to show a twisted claw from which the skin had been burned away. The two men looked at it silently. De Pacy with revulsion, Joe with politely concealed embarrassment. In his tight London world, men did not go about revealing their war wounds. And, he suspected, in de Pacy’s world also. He was being granted a sight of the depths of despair to which the man had sunk over the past two days and he steeled himself for further revelations.

‘This isn’t pretty but, by God, it’s nothing compared with the state of my soul or whatever you like to call that inner spark.’ De Pacy gave a bitter smile. ‘I’m not a religious man, Sandilands, but I find myself using their vocabulary. I’m talking about that bit of us that is truly who we are. Is that the soul? Mine was atrophied like this claw. And then, one night, Estelle kissed my hand and burst into tears over it. And suddenly, what had been a bit of an unexpected fling for me became something far more serious. I knew I loved her. I asked her to marry me and she agreed. The future was suddenly in focus.’ He looked about him wildly. ‘I was ready to leave this suffocating place behind us, the years of servitude and subordination, and take off with her wherever she wanted to go. I’d even have gone with her to England. I have resources of my own. We’d have managed.’

He looked Joe in the eye. ‘How did he find out, Joe? How in hell did my cousin know? We were so careful. It started out as a flirtation and then an indulgence and, before we’d realized it, we were in it up to our necks and there was no going back. At my age! But then they say that love, like the measles, catches you harder the older you are. And I had a bad case! I knew he’d disapprove. Send her away. Find a way to hurt her. We decided to affect a cooling off and put on a show of dislike for the audience. We’d spend our days staring coldly at each other and our nights in each other’s arms. Estelle flirted with the other men-even you came in for a little attention-to put everyone on the wrong track and I pretended I didn’t mind. I was sure Bertrand was fooled.’

‘You were so afraid of your cousin finding out?’

‘Yes. Bloody mad Silmont! He hated her, discovered what we had become to each other and killed her because of it. Why did he have to kill her? She didn’t want any of this … his possessions … not any of it.’ He waved his arms around. ‘But I am his heir. He wouldn’t risk her presence, her influence over me contaminating the estate. If I’d married her, I’d have been-in his eyes-bringing back an infection into the family.’

‘You say you are his heir. Tell me, de Pacy-it may all be different in France-but what’s to prevent him, on a whim, changing his will and leaving his worldly goods elsewhere? In England, cats’ homes and donkey sanctuaries are known to thrive on last-minute changes of mind by vindictive old maniacs.’

De Pacy glanced briefly at a file on a top shelf and smiled. ‘Don’t be concerned. All arrangements are made and will be executed according to the law. And should there be any awkwardness about possessions I could call on the testimony of a specialist in Paris whom I insisted my cousin consult some time ago. The demented have no more legal powers than they have in your country. He knows this. He knows Silmont will be mine. He couldn’t bear the thought that a golden-haired, foreign and-I admit it-promiscuous girl, the image of Aliénore, should share it with me. That her son might inherit one day.