Aaron Elkins - Old Bones

"Well," Rene said, "we haven’t really-"

"Of course we will," said Mathilde. "It may take a few weeks to put things in order, however. It’s quite difficult at the moment without an automobile to get about in. Guillaume’s Citroen is still in the car park at Mont St. Michel, you know. I was hoping, Raymond, that you might go there and drive it back."

"The car? Yes, of course. But how would I get there?"

"Take someone else’s car, of course."

"But no one else has a car, my dear," Rene said. "Marcel picked everyone up at the airport or the train station in Dinan."

Mathilde shrugged crossly. She was not interested in details. "You can take a taxi to the train station, I suppose, and go from there, or perhaps you can rent a car. It’s all very annoying. I can’t imagine why Guillaume kept only the one car here. In Frankfurt we have-"

"Ha!" Behind Gideon, Claude had returned to the entrance to the salon. No one looked in his direction.

"-three automobiles and could easily do with another. It sounds ostentatious, I suppose, but-"

"Ha!"

Even Mathilde faltered. "-but as a matter of fact…as a matter of fact…"

"Ha!" There was a startlingly loud crash.

Gideon spun around in time to see Claude’s half-filled wineglass drop to the thinly carpeted stone floor and smash a few inches from where the carafe had splintered a moment before.

"Jesus Christ!" Ben Butts cried hoarsely. "What is it? Claude…!"

Claude’s body was rigid, arms spread, fingers clawing convulsively at the air. "Ha!" he cried. "Caah!" From one corner of his stretched lips a fine white froth seeped, as if his mouth were full of soap. His bulging eyes heaved.

"Oh, my God," Sophie murmured. "He can’t breathe!"

"Do something!" Mathilde commanded all-inclusively. "He’s having a heart attack!" And, her tone implied, on my Aubusson carpet.

Gideon, as paralyzed as the rest of them, finally pulled himself out of his chair and moved toward the stricken man. Before he got there Claude jerked as if an electrical current had pulsed through him, grunted through clenched teeth, then abruptly threw himself down on the floor, onto his back, like a circus performer who would momentarily spring unaided to his feet, all in one movement.

He didn’t spring to his feet, of course. He didn’t move at all, except for his outflung arms, which settled gently to the floor at his side in a quiet motion of terrible finality. His eyelids were lowered halfway over glazed and unfocused eyes. When his mouth fell open a moment later, a gob of foam welled from it and slid down his cheek toward his ear.

Head down, hands clasped behind his back, Joly listened to Gideon’s brief description of what had happened. When it was done he nodded once and stepped from the vestibule back into the salon to address the assembled household, who sat, edgy and subdued, in the alcove. Only Leona and Claire, in seclusion in their rooms, were absent.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said matter-of-factly, "I shall want to speak with each of you in the next few hours. After that, I expect to ask for your cooperation in remaining in the vicinity for the next several days."

"But we’re supposed to fly to the States tonight," Ben said.

Others began to protest too, but Joly cut them off. "If any of you find it an extreme inconvenience to remain until-let’s say Tuesday, three days-please inform me when we speak privately. But I hope that won’t be the case. It would create annoying and time-consuming difficulties for me and for yourselves. Madame," he said to Mathilde, "is there a room in which it would be convenient for me to hold interviews?"

"I suppose so," Mathilde said grudgingly. "Guillaume’s study is right across the hall."

"And someplace other than here where people might wait comfortably? I’m afraid I must ask all of you not to return to your rooms for the moment."

Mathilde fixed him with a penetrating eye. "Are your men going to search them?"

"Yes, they are."

She sighed her displeasure. "There are some chairs at the landing near the central staircase."

"Thank you. Fleury, please escort everyone as Madame du Rocher directs, and wait with them."

There was some muttering but they went meekly, except for Mathilde, who expressed restrained indignation at these high-handed police methods in her own home.

"Oh, and get somebody here from Pathology," Joly called after Fleury. "Dr. Fouret, if he’s available."

"I hope he’s a real doctor," Mathilde grumbled with a last scathing look at Gideon over her shoulder. Gideon spread his hands apologetically. His tentative, conspicuously amateurish attempts at CPR had not met with her approval. Nor with his own, but Claude had been so obviously beyond the reach of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation or any other earthly assistance that nothing would have helped in any case. Not even a real doctor.

So said Dr. Loti, the elderly physician-Guillaume’s doctor of many years-who had been summoned by Marcel after Claude’s shocking attack.

"Well," he said to Joly, coming from behind the folding screen that had been set up around Claude’s body and snapping shut his black leather case, "your professor friend here is right about the cause of death. I’m sure your laboratory will confirm it." He nodded at Gideon. "The smell of bitter almonds; very good, young man."

Joly’s glance at Gideon was not especially grateful.

"Look, Inspector," Gideon said, "this is your case. I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t know anything about it. I just happened to be here."

"So it seems."

"All I know about bitter almonds is what I read in Sherlock Holmes. I don’t even know what a bitter almond is."

"Mm." Joly turned to Loti. "Do you have any idea how quick death would have been?"

"Within minutes, probably only a very few. Cyanide is one of the most rapidly lethal of all poisons. It disrupts the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood the moment it’s ingested."

"Then we can certainly assume that it was in the wine," Joly mused. He stood looking at the crime-scene crew taking their photographs and bustling around the corpse on their knees. One man was dusting the pieces of the broken carafe with black powder. "Are you getting any prints?" Joly asked him.

"Yes. More than one person’s, I think."

"Good."

"But you know," Gideon volunteered, "you wouldn’t have had to touch the carafe if you wanted to put poison in it. In fact, you’d be crazy if you did."

Joly gazed down his nose at him for a long moment, his lips pursed. "Thank you," he said.

"You’re very welcome." Funny the way policemen never seem to be particularly appreciative when obliging laymen point out self-evident facts to them. "I think," he said prudently, "that I’ll get out of here and take another crack at those bones."

Inspector Joly did not object.

When the manoir had been built, the stairwell in the southeast corner had evidently been housed in a massive tower. The tower itself had disappeared long ago, probably in some nineteenth-century remodeling, so that there was no sign of it from the outside. Inside, however, the worn stone steps still spiraled in their old cylindrical casing, and the landings were big, hexagonal chambers of bleak, gray stone, sparsely decorated with gloomy fragments of Greek and Roman statues, and furnished with a few appropriately austere wooden chairs and benches.

Fleury had taken the family members to the landing on the ground floor, through which Gideon had to pass on the way to the cellar, and there they stood or sat, alone or in small, grim clumps, looking put-upon, annoyed, or bewildered. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of grieving, Gideon noted. Not surprising, given his own brief acquaintance with Claude.

Ray (one of the bewildered ones) approached him tentatively. "It wasn’t a heart attack, then? I mean, with the police here and all…?"