Death Has Deep Roots (13 page)

“Now, Monsieur Sainte,” said Macrea.

[The first part of his cross-examination is omitted. It was directed, skillfully enough, to showing in a sympathetic light the actions and sufferings of the prisoner in France. It did not succeed in shedding any new light on her relationship with Major Thoseby.]

“Now. Monsieur Sainte. On the night of the murder Major Thoseby telephoned you at half-past six.”

“That is correct.”

“When did he tell you to expect him?”

“As I have said, it was not stated when he would arrive. It might be half-past seven – it might be eleven o’clock. He was at a conference at—”

“Yes. We have heard that. What time is the evening meal at your hotel?”

“At seven. Most people eat early nowadays.”

“Yes. When does it finish?”

“It is finished by eight.”

“Major Thoseby did not arrive until eight-thirty. Had you kept dinner for him?”

This very simple question appeared to confuse the witness. For the first time there was a perceptible pause before he replied.

“No, I did not keep dinner.”

“But you said he had dinner when he arrived—” Macrea turned back some pages of his notes.

“A hotelier usually has something in reserve for an unexpected guest. Something in the kitchen.”

“I see,” said Macrea easily. “I was just trying to find out exactly how unexpected he really was.”

“I do not understand that.”

“I will make myself plain,” said Macrea. “Will you tell us, once more – I haven’t yet quite got it straight – when did you first hear from Major Thoseby?”

“Two days before. On the twelfth, that would be, his letter arrived. By the evening post.”

“Have you still got that letter?”

“No. I think it has been destroyed.”

“Why?”

“I am not a lawyer. I do not keep copies of all the letters that are sent to me.”

“Would you not, as an hotel-keeper, preserve a letter of that sort?”

“If I had a secretary, no doubt all letters would be beautifully filed. I do my own work in the office. I have not time for such things. Letters get lost.”

“Very well. When did you hear from Major Thoseby next?”

“As he had promised in his letter, he telephoned me at about half-past six in the evening of the fourteenth.”

“I see. You have told us what he said. Then you sent for the prisoner.”

“Yes.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I cannot remember the exact words. She knew of the letter, of course. There was no need to say much. I may have said: ‘He is coming this evening,’ or something like that.”

“Did you mention any time?”

“I think I repeated what Major Thoseby had said to me. He might be there at any time between eight and eleven.”

“You are sure you said that?”

‘To that effect.”

“You did not say, ‘He cannot be here before eleven.”‘

“Certainly not.”

“I want you to be very careful over this.”

“I am quite certain that I did not say that he could not be here before eleven. It would not have been true. Why should I have said it?”

“Monsieur Sainte, you received a letter. That has been destroyed. You received a telephone message. Only you know what was said. The jury, if they are to judge the matter at all, have to judge by results.”

“Yes.”

“As a result of what you told her, Miss Lamartine left the hotel and did not come back until half-past ten.”

“That is so.”

“Is it not reasonable to suppose then – we know how anxious she was to meet Major Thoseby – I put it to you that it is a more reasonable explanation that you said something to her like: ‘He cannot be here before eleven.’“

“I am certain that I did not say that.”

“You agree that it would explain her actions in a logical way?”

“I do not think that you can ever explain the actions of a woman in a logical way.”

Le Mans is not on the Loire, but it is the junction for all traffic coming south to the Basse Loire district. Nap got out of the train there at six o’clock on a grey morning. As he stood on the platform, looking like a ruff-necked starling, his overcoat turned up round his ears and his hair on end, he considered future moves.

It was Saturday. Such results as he might achieve, to be of any use to Mademoiselle Lamartine, must be obtained in three – at the most four – days.

The difficulty was to know where to start.

He would have to visit Père Chaise’s farm near Langeais and get what information he could from the neighbours. Whilst he was there he thought he might have a word with one of Monsieur Sainte’s “references” who lived at the Ferme du Grand Puits, not far from Langeais. His contacts after that were mainly in and around Angers.

An examination of the
indicateur
showed that he could either go straight to Angers and make his way up river or take the branch line to Tours and work back.

The deciding factor was the time of the trains.

If he went straight to Angers he would have no time for breakfast, and breakfast, after his second consecutive night in a French railway carriage, was beginning to assume a considerable measure of importance.

“Breakfast it is, then,” said Nap.

On such small decisions do great issues hang.

He selected the Café du Colombier, a small cheerful eating house in the main street of Le Mans and ordered, with less difficulty than he would have experienced in England, an English breakfast of ham and eggs. Over a cup of indifferent coffee he started to read an early edition of the
Courier de L’Ouest
which he had found in the wicker rack beside the table.

It was more than two years since he had last set foot in France, and there were many things in the paper to surprise him. He read of a Gaulliste meeting at Saugny which had been broken up by Communists and had ended in a pitched battle. Allowing for a certain journalistic coloring in the report there was no escaping the ultimate, ugly fact that one man had been killed and fifteen seriously wounded. He read on the next page of the gang of currency smugglers who, apparently with the connivance of venial officials, had been running what amounted to a private airport for the cross-Channel carriage of dollar notes. The leader of the gang, who seemed to have boasted to the police after his capture, had stated that the profits of his group in one year’s operations had exceeded a billion of francs.

It was not these events in themselves which Nap found so surprising. It was a coincidence of names. In charge of the investigations into the currency smuggling, he noticed, was Monsieur Bren of the Paris Sûreté. One of the wounded in the Saugny meeting – reading between the lines Nap imagined he must have been a Gaulliste organizer who had been roughly handled by the police – was a Pierre Roccambo. Now he had known both men. Both had worked with him in the affairs of the Franche-Comté Maquis.

For the first time he had a glimmering of an idea of the forces at work in France, forces which, did he know it, had already reached out and touched him at the extremities of their huge, opposed organisations.

Nap slept again in the train and woke at Tours. Here he found a branch-line train of toy-like wooden carriages which brought him, in due course, to Langeais.

After lunch a bus, terrifyingly driven, took him out to Pont Boutard. From there, as he saw from his map, he had a walk of two or three kilometres, southward again, into the Bois de Langeais.

When, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, he came in sight of the Père Chaise farm, Nap knew that the first part of his journey had been in vain. The farm was now unlived in. A house which boasts four walls and a roof rarely goes out of occupation in the over-farmed countryside of France but this was an exception. The fields had gone back to fallow. They were being grazed, and Nap followed the track past the farm until he could see the roof of the next building, another kilometre further on. Here he found the farmer – it was his cattle that he had seen on Père Chaise’s derelict fields – and a few words with him confirmed his first impression.

The Père Chaise farm had never been a lucky farm. The farmer produced a garbled account of the misfortunes of Père Chaise and his family during the war. The farmhouse had not been occupied since. Nap asked a few questions but it was evident that the farmer knew little more about it than Nap did himself. He knew the story of the English lieutenant. All the countryside knew it. He had been taken by the Germans and tortured to death. That was certain. All knew it.

Nap thanked him.

By the time he got back to Pont Boutard, the day was gone, and since there was no bus to take him to Langeais he spent the night, by invitation, at the corn chandler’s house. The corn chandler, who was also the district money-lender, was an agreeable scoundrel and talked far into the night of the German Occupation, of the Gestapo, of the Resistance and of the present state of France. He put at Nap’s disposal the marriage bed of his eldest daughter, a knobbed engine of brass and iron. Nap slept dreamlessly.

Early next morning he hired a bicycle from his host and set off for the Ferme du Grand Puits. It seemed, from the map, to be about eight kilometres away.

His way took him along the main road as far as Les Essards. Here he turned into a small, twisting, side road which climbed and dipped toward Avrillé-les-Ponceaux through the northern fringes of the Forêt de Rochecotte. It was a wild district of sandy uplands alternating with uncleared wood. After half an hour of industrious pedaling Nap saw the signpost he had been warned to look for and turned again. He found an unmetalled track, deeply rutted by cartwheels in the mud of winter, but now dried into an infernal tramway along which he skidded and bumped. The track was still climbing, and suddenly he came out from the trees and saw the farmstead in front of him. It lay cupped in the side of the hill, hull down to the crest, hidden from the world by the woods which surrounded it, but watchful and dominant in its own upland clearing.

The buildings were massive. Fifty yards downhill from the farm Nap saw the mansard roof and the winding handle of the well which no doubt served to give the farm its name. “Grand” must mean “deep,” he thought. You would have to go at least a hundred feet down into the chalk to get a water supply at a height like that.

He dismounted from his bicycle and stood for a moment surveying the steading. There was plenty of life about this farm. Chickens picking over the chaff at the barn door, a cat dozing beside the manure heap and keeping an eye on a gang of young turkeys braggarting up and down the yard.

A woman at one of the windows called something in a shrill voice and a moment later a fat man came out and stood in the doorway.

“Monsieur Marquis?” said Nap.

The fat man did not answer him directly.

“You are a stranger here,” he said. “It is evident from your speech. You are from Paris?”

“Monsieur has a discriminating ear,” said Nap.

“It is a facility,” said the man. “You were asking after Monsieur Pierre Marquis. He is no longer here. I purchased the farm from him and his brother, André. It belonged to them jointly, you understand.”

“That would be his younger brother?”

“On the contrary. Older. Much older. Seeing them together you would scarcely have said that they were brothers. I believe, however, that it was so. I see no reason to doubt it.”

“Oh, quite,” said Nap.

“As so often in these partnerships it was the younger who had the brain and the initiative. Or so it seemed to me.”

“I suppose,” said Nap, “you have no idea where they moved to. I have come a long way to find them—”

“I regret,” said the man. “It was three – nearly four years ago. Just after the war.”

“I see.”

“Wait, though, an instant. Jeanne! Jeanne!” He had a thin piping voice for so large a man. The woman whom Nap had already seen came to the door. “What was the name of the advocate? You recollect. The one who negotiated the sale.”

“Gimelet,” said the woman. “Of Rue de Gazomètre at Angers.”

“Why,” said Nap. “But that – yes. Thank you.”

“If Monsieur finds himself at Angers he might inquire. An advocate usually has the address of his client.”

“If only to pester him with bills,” said the woman, who seemed to be a realist.

“Thank you,” said Nap. “Should I be in Angers I will certainly visit Monsieur Gimelet, and pursue my inquiries.”

At the edge of the wood he paused and looked back. He found it difficult to account to himself for the powerful impression that the place had made on him. It was not the people. The fat self-satisfied man and his small dark wife: they were commonplace enough. It was not even the buildings, which were solid and well made, yet in no way remarkable. Was it, perhaps, the setting? The air of enclave; the suggestion of being the centre of a maze; the heart, as it were, of its own private mystery?

As he was about to get on to his bicycle Nap noticed something else. But for his personal experience of such things he might very easily have missed it. At the point where the shoulder of the wood overlooked the approach to the farm someone had, at some time, constructed a camouflaged shelter. Nap could still see the trench and the step, overgrown but unmistakable. When he looked more closely he could see where small trees had been cut down to give a clear field of vision, and looking backward in the direction of the farm he could still make out the crawl trench which would have served a sentry for inconspicuous access and a sudden retreat.

So the Ferme du Grand Puits had been a Maquis post too, in its time.

As Nap bicycled slowly back toward Pont Boutard and a late lunch, as he bounced in the bus which whirled back to Langeais, as he sat in the train which trundled him down the Loire Valley toward the town of Angers, the first very feint beginning of an idea was sown and planted its long roots in his mind.

On Tuesday morning before the proceedings opened Macrea found time for a word with Mr. Rumbold.

“Any word yet from that son of yours?” he asked.