Martin Walker - The Devil's Cave

‘One more thing,’ Bruno said. ‘The Countess had a younger sister. Do you have anything about her?’

‘She was a half-sister, born after the Countess’s father was widowed and then remarried. The Countess was very insistent that they were only half-sisters and that she deliberately tried to keep her away from Resistance activities, saying she was too young. I don’t think there was any love lost between the two.’

Bruno closed his phone to see Father Sentout dipping the last of his croissant into his coffee and smiling broadly. ‘An American cuckoo in the nest of one of the oldest families in France.’ He chuckled. ‘War makes for strange bedfellows.’

‘So the sister’s son Louis was also illegitimate, conceived at the same time, and also given the name of McPhee,’ Bruno mused, studying the list of baptisms.

‘That was something that never came up in any of the anodyne confessions I was occasionally permitted to hear,’ said the priest. But the child was not illegitimate, Father Sentout insisted, since he was later legitimized by her husband, de la Gorce.

‘I can imagine the family rows that must have happened when the old Count came home after being released from prisoner-of-war camp to find both his daughters with babies and no husband in sight,’ the priest said.

‘And now there are grandchildren,’ said Bruno, ‘including the man we now call the Count. Is that an honorary title?’

‘They all are these days, officially. But there are enough titles knocking around that family to equip them all. They are descended from Louis XIV, after all, even though it was through a mistress.’

The women, Bruno noted, seemed to have stayed true to the genes of their ancestress, the royal mistress. The Red Countess had never bothered to marry and nor had her daughter, the one who had spoken alongside her at the Renault plant in 1968 when the young Montsouris had thought the revolution was at hand. She had been newly pregnant at the time, since Father Sentout’s list gave the date of baptism for Athenais as January 1969. Had it not been for a change in French law in 1972 that allowed illegitimate children to inherit, neither Athenais nor her mother could have assumed the Red Countess’s title and property, and Count Vexin would have been the sole legitimate heir. That triggered another thought.

‘If we assume that this McPhee impregnated both sisters, who themselves shared a father, what would be the relationship between the two grandchildren, Athenais and the Count?’

‘Through their mothers, they shared a paternal grandfather, which made them half-cousins, But if McPhee was their common grandfather they would also have been full cousins.’ The priest frowned. ‘It’s an unusual case and rather complicated but I think the family relationship might have been too close for the church to sanction a marriage between them. I’d have to look it up.’

Bruno pondered this. And suddenly an image crossed his mind of the two infant grandchildren, Athenais born illegitimate in 1969 and her double cousin, the Count, born the following year as the heir to everything. And then in 1972 the law changed, allowing illegitimate children to inherit, and the Count’s claim on the family wealth and titles was suddenly overtaken by Athenais. The infant Count would have been too young to care, but his mother Heloise would have been stunned by the reversal. And from what he had seen of her, Heloise would have nursed the grudge. Might she have brought up her son to resent his brusque disinheritance? Could that have been a motive for murder?

‘How wealthy would the Red Countess be, Father? Would you know?’

‘In money, probably not well-off at all. In land and property, extremely rich, but much of the income is doubtless devoured by the cost of maintaining the old buildings. Why, do you think there is an issue of inheritance here? You said the dead woman in the boat was her granddaughter. Who inherits next?’

‘She has a daughter of her own in America. Presumably she’s the heir, that’s why I can’t see it as a motive.’

‘Make sure she’s kept safe. Do you remember your Balzac? I find I read him more and more.’

‘Not for years, but I remember what he wrote about every great fortune being founded on a great crime.’

‘No, not that, I was thinking of something he wrote in Le Cousin Pons , that “to kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.” When I think of the confessions I hear of hatred and malice towards relatives over inheritance, I come close to despair.’

Bruno took his leave and was threading his way through scattered children’s toys in the priest’s garden when his phone vibrated. It was Fabiola, announcing that she had spent the last forty minutes talking to various doctors at the Memory Research Centre in Paris. They had no record of the Countess being registered as a patient and they had scoffed at the claim that one of them was taken down to the Perigord by helicopter. Nor was she registered on the Alzheimer’s support network. Moreover, her colleague Dr Gelletreau could find no other doctor in the region who was treating her.

‘What’s the law on this?’ she asked. ‘This is an obviously ill woman with no doctor and those looking after her are lying about her care. We’re the medical centre for the region, do we have a legal right to intervene?’

‘I have no idea,’ he replied. ‘It’s out of my usual field, but she does have a full-time nurse. Can you call Annette? She’s a magistrate and if she doesn’t know the relevant laws she can find out. I’ll try the Procureur but it’s an obscure part of the law. And with someone as prominent as the Red Countess, it may get complicated.’

He was trying to phone the duty clerk when he was called to resolve a dispute between two stallholders over the amount of pavement space one was taking, and then another claimed access to her stall was being blocked by the crowd watching the next stallholder demonstrate a new device for chopping vegetables. Usually he enjoyed this routine, joking and jollying the stallholders into seeing reason. But this morning he was brisk and even curt, startling some of them into grumbles and wry jokes about Satan’s influence on the market of St Denis.

Feeling harassed and slightly ashamed of himself, and worried that events were accelerating out of control, he ran up the Mairie steps to his office and made his call. As he expected, the clerk in the Procureur ’s office said he’d have to call him back and couldn’t it wait? He groaned as he opened his computer to find dozens of accumulated emails waiting. Quickly, he scanned them to see what could not get the clerk’s treatment of waiting until Monday. But one address made him pause. It was from someone calling themselves Prevertlady on a Hotmail account. It had to be Isabelle. Jacques Prevert was the author of the book of poems she had sent him. The message was a simple mobile phone number, not one she’d ever used before, with the words ‘Borrow someone’s phone’.

He went down to the market and asked Stephane, busy serving at his cheese stall, and was handed his phone without question, although his friend gave a pointed look to the phone at Bruno’s belt. He called the number and recognized Isabelle’s voice saying simply ‘ Allo ’.

‘This is Stephane’s phone,’ he said, walking down the steps from the bridge to the privacy of the river bank.

‘Mine is a prepaid from FNAC, bought yesterday. You should get one, just in case. Listen, Bruno, this is getting very tricky. The Defence Ministry is trying to find out who’s behind these inquiries into the Count, saying there’s a big contract with the Lebanese military at risk. We know it’s true because we got a routine request to provide security for their defence minister, who’s apparently coming in to sign it. The Count’s companies have been doing fifty million a year and more in foreign sales and nobody wants to upset that.’