The Art of Murder Read online

  “Did anyone hear the shot?” Gilles asked the most obvious question first, knowing the answer before they spoke.

  “No.” Alexis had appointed himself the unofficial spokesman for the group. “It’s a big house, solidly built, and as you have seen, Monsieur Duval’s studio was on the third floor.”

  Gilles nodded.

  “Unless someone was in the room above or below, or in the immediate vicinity, that is certainly possible.” He didn’t necessarily buy it, but this was not the time. “Did Monsieur Duval own the weapon?”

  Andre nodded.

  “Yes, and there are several more in the games room.” Alexis hesitated. “It’s a very masculine room.”

  “Ah.” There were certain things implied here, perhaps only that Duval had taken an interest in the one room and let a designer do the rest.

  The studio was Spartan enough. With a complete absence of decoration, it was a room with few distractions. He tried another question, a trick which had worked once or twice in the past.

  “So where was everyone when it happened?” He was rewarded with nothing but blank looks, at each other as much as him, which was pretty much as he expected, but no one took it any further.

  “I’m sorry.” He shrugged, holding his cheek for a moment. “Of course we have no way as yet of knowing when it happened. There will be an autopsy, of course.”

  Alexis gave a short twitch of the head that approximated a nod of agreement.

  “Just what I was thinking.” He gave Gilles a speculative look.

  Gilles had the impression he might be useful if he would open up. Clearly he was unwilling to do that here.

  He didn’t appear to be defensive, just sensible, perhaps even professional, which was what he was purported to be. Good bodyguards were tough and quick-acting in a given situation, but that did not necessarily imply dullness of mind or outright stupidity. Alexis seemed very professional considering the circumstances and his age.

  “We will need to have the names of every person who was in the house for the last twenty-four hours, anyone who stays here or works here, your home address if different, and a phone number if you have one.” Henri played the bad guy, while Gilles studied them as was his way. “We’ll need your date of birth, place of employment, things like that.”

  The young lady was crying over her paper, and it was possible she hadn’t even heard it.

  “It’s all right, Mademoiselle Verene, just do your best.” Gilles used a gentle but firm tone, as their cooperation would eventually dry up.

  Anything they could get out of them immediately might be helpful.

  “I don’t know anything.” Then she broke up again in a paroxysm of tears, her body wracked by involuntary spasms. “Oh, God, why? Why, Theo?”

  She bawled her eyes out in a very physical kind of release that would be difficult to fake in a convincing manner. The refrain of loss and grief went on and on, until she finally subsided into sobs and sniffles.

  “Perhaps the post-mortem will provide us with a time of death, but there is always some leeway in such matters.” Yvonne convulsed anew upon hearing Gilles’ words, and the housekeeper, who had an air of great dignity in spite of everything so far, gave him a dark look that was also complex, perhaps more complex than it should have been. “Yes, Madame?”

  “This is all I can say.” She proffered her sheet and Henri hustled over to take it.

  She was holding something back. He saw it in the firmly clamped jaws and mouth.

  “Thank you ever so much, and we know that this is a very difficult time for all.” Henri had a certain charm and Gilles admired him for it. Although in some ways Henri was an indifferent investigator, he had his strengths and usefulness.

  Jules Charpentier had written about three lines, and this wasn’t surprising. Henri collected all of their statements. He flipped through them to ensure their addresses were legible and complete.

  “Did Monsieur Duval own a Colt forty-five calibre pistol?”

  The housekeeper began to weep, but she nodded as well, saying something incoherent. She tried to compose herself, and began again, but it was beyond her ability to speak at the moment.

  “He had a pistol in his office, and several other guns, rifles and shotguns.” Alexis wasn’t crying, but he appeared shaken.

  “Where in his office?” Henri stood with pencil poised.

  “In his desk drawer.” It was Madame Fontaine, who had the duty of supervising cleaning staff.

  “Was the drawer locked?” Gilles suspected the answer before he heard it—as often as not people were unbelievably careless with firearms, but in a household with no children, they never thought there was any danger.

  “No…rarely.” Alexis looked at Madame Fontaine, who nodded in the midst of blowing her nose.

  “Was it kept loaded?” Henri’s question was the obvious one for a cop.

  “Yes.” Alexis nodded.

  She stared out the window for a while, sniffling, her body wracked by the need to breathe and spasms of grief.

  Finally she answered.

  “Yes, it was only locked sometimes. There were things he needed in there.”

  “What do you mean, sometimes?” Henri was right on it.

  “It’s been years, but when he went on a trip or somewhere.” Alexis’ explanation made humble sense.

  It was typical human behaviour.

  “Was Monsieur Duval despondent about something? Did he appear troubled lately? How were things going for him?”

  “Monsieur Duval was murdered.” Everyone’s jaw dropped and they all turned to stare at Hermione, who sat with jaws clenched, endlessly twisting her soaked handkerchief, and glaring at the police while refusing to look at anyone else or any other thing around her.

  “What makes you say that?” Gilles did not contradict her, as people said the damnedest things in this state, but he spoke reasonably enough.

  His tone said it all.

  “He wasn’t that sort of a man.” Her anger was another state of grief he was not unfamiliar with.

  Yvonne had a stony look on her face. She appeared in a trance. It was merely one kind of grief, in his experience. One phase of it, anyway. The other woman was trying to force him to believe. It was like she hadn’t heard it.

  Was it just emotion? A state of denial, or did the Fontaine woman really know or suspect something? There was nothing careful or studied about her attitude or body language. At that particular moment, he had no doubt she believed it implicitly. Rene had been keeping this little surprise up his sleeve.

  “Yes.” Gilles spoke pleasantly, nodding at Henri to take notes.

  The statements weren’t much to go on either way, at least not so far.

  “I was wondering about that. What sort of a man was he?”

  Predictably enough, this brought fresh tears from Yvonne, a glare from Hermione, and a shrug from Jules. Alexis looked into his eyes and nodded in agreement. The driver stared out the window.

  “She is right, Inspector. He really wasn’t the sort.”

  “What makes you say that, Monsieur Ferrauld?”

  Alexis took a deep breath.

  “Theodore Duval was a self-made man. He was born with nothing. He survived Verdun. Surely you must have some idea of what that means.”

  Jules nodded vigorously in agreement.

  “That is exactly right.”

  Gilles nodded, having been there himself, one of the lucky few to receive a superficial wound in the last stages of the battle. He still had a scar on the outer part of his right leg, just above the knee, from a machine gun bullet.

  “Yes. I was there.”

  “Well, Monsieur Duval struggled to make something of himself, and fought every day of his life to achieve what he has…what he did.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  Henri scrawled more notes.

  Whether or not it was a suicide, the personality of the victim was crucial to understanding the results or events of their life, and their death, at least
in his own opinion.

  It was one of Gilles Maintenon’s little pet theories, one borne out by time and experience. They all had their methods, and it was by no means as cut-and-dried as all of that, but it was at least something to go on.

  “Inspector?” Henri stood by the coffee carafe on the service cart.

  “Yes, thank you, Henri. Perhaps a glass of water first?”

  Madame beckoned to the maid, who left the room.

  Gilles felt in his pocket for the bottle of narcotic pain pills provided by Dr. Etienne.

  His jaw ached as if all the fiends of hell were pounding away on tiny chisels with miniature sledge-hammers. He sorely missed Andre Levain, whose perspective was always valuable. Levain knew Gilles better than he knew himself, or so it seemed at times.

  Perhaps that was the real problem with Henri—he wasn’t Levain.

  ***

  Having taken over a small room furnished with a desk and a few chairs, a private study on the second floor that had book shelves lining one wall, Gilles studied the woman before him in his peripheral vision. There had been some books on a shelf in the salon as well. Those were all leather-bound, a set of matching tomes such as any wealthy person might display more for status reasons than any real reading pleasure. The ones in here, many of them paperbacks like the one in the studio, looked as if they had actually been read.

  “I understand your feelings in this matter, and I want you to know I take everything you say very seriously.” The Madame’s eyes bored into his from across the desk.

  “I meant what I said.” She hesitated. “I know what you are thinking.”

  He didn’t bother to ask what he was thinking. In her black house dress and flat shoes, she was a stereotype, but he was never fooled by such things. She was a product of her upbringing, rather than any real defect of intelligence or environment.

  “Did Monsieur Duval have enemies?”

  She shrugged in contempt at his stupidity. He was a fool not to see it, but he needed hard information, and the man was a perfect stranger to him.

  “Had he received any threats that you know of? Had he had any unusual visitors lately?”

  “No, not really, I—” She flushed and started over. “Yes, and no. They are all unusual. But that’s not what I mean.”

  “Well, take your time.” Gilles sat back. “Was Monsieur Duval behaving any differently lately? Were there any deviations from his normal routine? Did he go out, or come in, or stay away unexpectedly? Who has he been with lately?”

  The throbbing in his jaw was subsiding, but only a little. He had taken two of the pills. Perhaps he should have tried three or even four, although the doctor had prescribed two.

  “Monsieur had some unusual friends?” Gilles jotted a quick line on his page.

  He underlined it carefully three times, and then looked up into her hot black eyes.

  “What I am trying to say, Inspector, is that he had no reason to want to do this terrible thing, and would have been fundamentally opposed to it. He was a very moral man, strong in his beliefs as well as his character.”

  The spring sunlight came slanting in through the window and the room was heating up.

  “All right. Not the sort of person who commits suicide, and in fact, Madame, people almost always show some signs, that in reflection, looking back, may have been obvious. You saw no such signs?”

  “None.” The dark-haired woman, about forty-five years of age, stared back at him with a calm dignity in her black, moist eyes. “He had every reason to live, and no reason to go to that extreme.”

  “What about his health?”

  “He seemed fine lately, although you would have to speak to others.” She reached again for the pen and the paper. “I will give you his doctor’s name and address, and get the addresses for the others.”

  “Yes, the brother and sister. Give us as many friends, as many names as you can think of.” Gilles thought for a moment. “When do you get up? When do you go to the kitchen, or begin work, that sort of thing?”

  Hermione was prolific once away from the others, and many of his questions centred on neutral subjects of the daily routine in the house. If anyone could be said to cooperate fully, it was her.

  When she showed signs of drying up, he prompted her for more.

  “Did he go to church? Did he go to confession, or to Mass on Easter, that sort of thing? Did he ever see a psychologist? Nothing like that?” At one time it was the fashionable thing to do, to get one’s dreams analyzed.

  “No psychologist, but he did go to Mass sometimes, usually on Sunday.”

  So he didn’t do the evening Masses. That would have been out of character for one such as Duval. He would have gone out at night, but there wasn’t much to do on a Sunday morning in the city. The country might be different, but according to her Duval didn’t have a hunting lodge or a villa, or anything like that. When he traveled, which wasn’t often, he stayed in the best hotels. He had a hard time leaving his work behind, in her estimation, and was never gone for long.

  He asked her to write down the name and address of the church. She didn’t have the exact street address, but the name of the church and the priest were enough. Apparently he went when the impulse drove him as much as anything else. Perhaps it was a way of breaking away from his routine once in a while, without wasting a lot of time at it. Gilles knew where the place was. He had never attended that church in particular, but a cousin of his wife’s had been wed there.

  “And how did you get in to clean the studio?” He’d been saving that one up, but she had a ready answer.

  “I, or I should say Emilie, cleaned only during the day, when he was there to let her in.”

  All of this was interesting enough in its own way. During the course of the interview, he made copious notes and began to build a picture of the daily patterns of life in the household.

  According to Madame Fontaine, Alexis was a wonderful man, very strong, very brave, and a good bodyguard. While she wasn’t very competent to judge such things, that was his impression as well. The driver, Frederic, was a dull person, fond of his wife but not overly faithful by inclination, complained about everything, liked to take a drink, and was basically an honest fool by his own lights. He was perfectly content with an easy job, three square meals a day and spending pretty much every night at home with his family. While the Verene woman was certainly pretty and she could see why Monsieur Duval found her attractive, she was suspicious, subject to nameless fears for the well-being of her employer, whom she had always treated with the utmost in professional deference. This was not hard to believe. As for Jules Charpentier, she didn’t know much about him, but he was scrupulously polite and easy to provide for on his short visits, and she had the impression he did not abuse his power with the employees, of whom there were several hundred. He lived in town in quite a nice neighbourhood. Presumably he had shown up on business affairs, which he did routinely, but she did not keep track of Monsieur’s appointments. That was between Monsieur Duval and Alexis, who apparently could type and took dictation on the rare occasions when that was necessary. She had picked up most of this by a process of osmosis that he was not unfamiliar with.

  Madame Fontaine had four children of her own, a son and three daughters. They were all grown up and had moved out, successful enough people in their own way, as well as seven grandchildren. A widow, she lived with her cat in a small flat at the back of the house on the third floor. At one time, the fourth floor had been rooms for servants, but Duval lived alone and they didn’t need a lot of people to look after the place.

  “Would children have been a problem for your employer? I mean, if they were running around the house?”

  “No. We would have taken a flat elsewhere, but the question never came up.”

  A knock came at the door. Henri popped his head in.

  “A gentleman has arrived from Lyons.” Madame Fontaine’s hand flew up to her mouth in a look of consternation. “And Andre will be along shortly, he just
rang up.”

  “Thank you, Henri. Well, I guess that will be all for now, Madame.”

  Chapter Three

  No known enemies

  The housemaid had only been employed for a short time, and to her knowledge Monsieur Duval had no known enemies, and there had been no recent tension in the household. She was of the opinion that he was a wonderful man, a very good employer, and seemed to be happy with life most of the time. There were the occasional irritants in everyone’s life, of which she could not give an example right off the top of her head. He did not press her on it, as he had no wish for her to begin making things up.

  She had her impressions of the household but her state of mild shock and a kind of dread of unemployment overcame her. She had never met Alain. Yvonne was a regular in the household, of indeterminate status to Emilie, for the maid insisted Gilles call her that. She knew her own status in this place well enough. Only ladies and gentlemen were entitled to a surname. She waited on Yvonne but didn’t report to her or take her orders. She got her instructions from Madame Fontaine and Monsieur Duval, in that order. She knew nothing of Jules Charpentier and not much about Frederic who had flirted with her at first until she made it clear this made her uncomfortable. They had remained distant.

  She worked during the day unless other arrangements had been made, in which case she needed some notice as she had an infant and a mother-in-law, who looked after her daughter during working hours. Her mother-in-law had her own life to live and her own responsibilities. Emilie’s husband was employed at a dairy, also during daylight hours. They were presently estranged, due to his alcoholism, but she had some hopes of eventual reconciliation. She was from a village thirty kilometres east of the city and had moved here years ago.

  After asking her to write down her daily routine, and account in writing as best she could for her movements in the preceding forty-eight hours, he reassured her that she was not a suspect and was startled at the look of sheer terror this inspired in her pallid and rounded features. It was wise to remember that class expectations played a role in his relationship with people at a crime scene, and he spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make her understand that this was all dull, drab routine.