Put on by Cunning (25 page)

The flamenco place was called La Mancha. As they passed down the stairs and into a kind of open, deeply sunken courtyard or cistern, a waiter told Laquin there would be no dancing tonight. The walls were made of yellow stone over which hung a deep purple bougainvillea. Instead of the dancers a thin girl in black came out and sang in the manner of Piaf. Laquin and Burden were drinking wine but Wexford took nothing. He felt bored and restless. Nine-thirty. They went up the stairs again and down an alley into the cobbled open space in front of the cathedral.

The moon had come up, a big golden moon flattened like a tangerine. Laquin had sat down at a table in a pavement café and was ordering coffee for all three men. From here you could see the city walls, part Roman, part medieval, their rough stones silvered by the light from that yellow moon.

Some teenagers went by. They were on their way, Laquin said, to the discotheque in the Place de la Croix. Wexford wondered if Camargue had ever, years ago, sat on this spot where they were. And that dead woman, when she was a child . . . ? It was getting on for ten. Somewhere in St Jean she would be meeting him now in the little green Citroen. The yellow hatchback Opel was presumably left in the long-term car park at Heathrow. He felt a tautening of tension and at the same time relief when Laquin got to his feet and said in this colloquial way that they should be making tracks.

Up through the narrow winding defile once more, flattening themselves tolerantly against stone walls to let more boys and girls pass them. Wexford heard the music long before they emerged into the Place aux Eaux Vives. A Mozart serenade. The serenade from
Don Giovanni
, he thought it was, that should properly be played on a mandolin.

Round the last turn in the alley and out into the wide open square. A group of young girls, also no doubt on their way to the discotheque, were clustered around the highest tier of the festival seating. They clustered around a man who sat on the top, playing a guitar, and they did so in the yearning, worshipping fashion of muses or nymphs on the plinth of some statue of a celebrated musician. The man sat aloft, his tune changed now to a Latin American rhythm, not looking at the girls, looking across the square, his gaze roving as if he expected at any moment the person he waited for to come.

‘That’s him,’ said Wexford.

Laquin said, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve only seen him once before but I’d know him anywhere.’

‘I know him too,’ said Burden incredulously. ‘I’ve seen him before. I can’t for the life of me think where, but I’ve seen him.’

‘Let’s get it over.’

The little green 2CV was turning into the
place
and the guitarist had seen it. He drew his hand across the strings with a flourish and jumped down from his perch, nearly knocking one of the girls over. He didn’t look back at her, he made no apology, he was waving to the car.

And then he saw the three policemen, recognizing them immediately for what they were. His arm fell to his side. He was a tall thin man in his late thirties, very dark with black curly hair. Wexford steadfastly refused to look over his shoulder to see her running from the car. He said:

‘John Fassbender, it is my duty to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may beuse in evidence . . .’

They were in the Pearl of Africa, having what Wexford called a celebration lunch. No one could possibly feel much in the way of pity for Fassbender, so why not celebrate his arrest? Burden said it ought to be called an elucidation lunch because there were still a lot of things he didn’t understand and wanted explained. Outside it was pouring with rain again. Wexford asked Mr Haq for a bottle of wine,
good
Moselle or a Riesling, none of your living waters from Lake Victoria. They had got into sybaritic habits during their day in France. Mr Haq bustled off to what he called his cellar through the fronds of polyethylene Spanish moss.

‘Did you mean what you said about there having been on conspiracy?’

‘Of course I did,’ Wexford said, ‘and if we’d had a moment after that I’d have told you something else, something I realized before we ever went to France. The woman we knew as Natalie Arno, the woman Fassbender murdered, was never Tessa Lanchester. Tessa Lanchester was drowned in Santa Xavierita in 1976 and we’ve no reason to believe either Natalie or Fassbender even met her. The woman who came to London in November of last year came solely because Fassbender was in London. She was in love with Fassbender and since he had twice been deported from the United States he could hardly return there.’

‘How could he have been deported twice?’ asked Burden.

‘I wondered that until the possibility of dual nationality occurred to me and then everything about Fassbender became simple. I’d been asking myself if she had two boyfriends, an Englishman and a Swiss. There was a good deal of confusion in people’s minds over him. He was Swiss. He was English. He spoke French. He spoke French with a Swiss accent. He was deported to London. He was deported to Geneva. Well, I’ll come back to him in a minute. Suffice it to say that it was after he had been deported a second time that she followed him to London.’

He stopped. Mr Haq, beaming, teeth flashing, was bringing the wine, a quite respectable-looking white Médoc. He poured Wexford a trial half-glassful. Wexford sipped it, looking serious. He had sometimes said, though, that he would rather damage his liver than upset Mr Haq by sending back a bottle. Anyway, the only fault with this wine was that it was at a temperature of around twenty-five degrees Celsius.

‘Excellent,’ he said to Mr Haq’s gratification, and just stopped himself from adding, ‘Nice and warm.’ He continued to Burden as Mr Haq trotted off, ‘She had a brief affair with Zoffany during Fassbender’s first absence. I imagine this was due to nothing more than loneliness and that she put it out of her head once Zoffany had departed. But he kept up a correspondence with her and when she needed a home in London he offered her a flat. Didn’t I tell you it was simple and straightforward?

‘Once there, she saw that Zoffany was in love with her and hoped to take up their relationship (to use Jane Zoffany’s word) where it had ended a year and a half before. She wasn’t having that, she didn’t care for Zoffany at all in that way. But it made things awkward. If she had Fassbender to live with her there, would Zoffany be made so jealous and angry as to throw her out? She couldn’t live with Fassbender, he was living in one room. The wisest thing obviously was to keep Fassbender discreetly in the background until such time as he got a job and made some money and they could afford to snap their fingers at Zoffany and live together. We know that Fassbender was in need of work and that she tried to get him a job through Blaise Cory. The point I’m making is that Zoffany never knew of Fassbender’s existence until he overheard Natalie talking on the phone to him
last month
.

‘I suspect, though I don’t know for certain, that there was no urgency on her part to approach Camargue. Probably she gave very little thought to Camargue. It was the announcement of his engagement that brought her to get in touch with him – perhaps reminded her of his existence. But there was no complex planning about that approach, no care taken with the handwriting or the style of the letter, no vetting of it by, say, Mrs Woodhouse . . .’

Young Haq came with their starter of prawns Pakwach. This was a shocking pink confection into which Burden manfully plunged his spoon before saying, ‘There must have been. It may be that the identity of the woman we found in that chest will never be known, but we know very well she was an impostor and a fraudulent claimant.’

‘Her identity is known,’ said Wexford. ‘She was Natalie Arno, Natalie Camargue, Camargue’s only child.’

Pouring more wine for them, Mr Haq burst into a flowery laudation of various offerings among the entrées. There was caneton Kioga, wild duck breasts marinated in a succulent sauce of wine, cream and basil, or T-bone Toro, tender steaks
flambés
. Burden’s expression was incredulous, faintly dismayed. Fortunately, his snapped ‘Bring us some of that damned duck,’ was lost on Mr Haq who responded only to Wexford’s gentler request for two portions of caneton.

‘I don’t understand you,’ Burden said coldly when Mr Haq had gone. ‘Are you saying that the woman Camargue refused to recognize, the woman who deliberately cut her hand to avoid having to play the violin, whose antecedents you went rooting out all over America – that woman was Camargue’s daughter all the time? We were wrong. Ames was right, Williams and Mavis Rolland and Mary Woodhouse and Philip Cory were right, but we were wrong. Camargue was wrong. Camargue was a senile half-blind old man who happened to make a mistake. Is that it?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Wexford. ‘I only said that Natalie Arno was Natalie Arno. Camargue made no mistake, though it would be true to say he misunderstood.’ He sighed. ‘We were such fools, Mike – you, me, Ames, Dinah Sternhold. Not one of us saw the simple truth, that though the woman who visited Camargue was not his daughter, she was not his daughter, if I may so put it, for just one day.’

‘You see,’ he went on, ‘an illusion was created, as if by a clever trick. Only it was a trick we played upon ourselves. We were the conjurers and we held the mirrors. Dinah Sternhold told me Camargue said the woman who went to see him wasn’t his daughter. I jumped to the conclusion – you did, Dinah did, we all did – that therefore the woman
we
knew as Natalie Arno wasn’t his daughter. It never occurred to us he could be right and yet she might still be his daughter. It never occurred to us that the woman he saw might not be the woman who claimed to be his heir and lived in his house and inherited his money.’

‘It wasn’t Natalie who went there that day but it was Natalie before and always Natalie after that?’ Burden made the face people do when they realize they have been conned by a stratagem unworthy of their calibre. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Of course it is.’ Wexford grinned and gave a rueful shake of the head. ‘I may as well say here and now that Natalie wasn’t the arch-villainess I took her for. She was cruel and devious and spiteful only in my imagination. Mind you, I’m not saying she was an angel of light. She may not have killed her father or plotted his death, but she connived at it afterwards and she had no scruples about taking an inheritance thus gained. Nor did she have any scruples about appropriating other women’s husbands either on a temporary or a permanent basis. She was no paragon of virtue but she was no Messalina either. Why did I ever think she was? Largely, I’m ashamed to say, because Dinah Sternhold told me so.

‘Now Dinah Sternhold is a very nice girl. If she blackened Natalie’s character to me before I’d even met her, I’m sure it was unconscious. The thing with Dinah, you see, is that odd though it undoubtedly seems, she was genuinely in love with that old man. He was old enough to be her grandfather but she was as much in love with him as if he’d been fifty years younger. Have you ever noticed that it’s only those who suffer most painfully from jealousy that say, “I haven’t a jealous nature”? Dinah said that to me. She was deeply jealous of Natalie and perhaps with justification. For in marrying her, wasn’t Camargue looking to replace his lost daughter? How then must she have felt when that lost daughter turned up? Dinah was jealous and in her jealousy, all unconsciously, without malice, she painted Natalie as a scheming adventuress and so angled the tale of the visit to Camargue to make her appear at once as a fraudulent claimant.’

‘I’d like to hear our version of that visit.’

Wexford nodded. The duck had arrived, modestly veiled in a thick brown sauce. Wexford took a sip of his wine instead of a long draught, having decided with some soul-searching that it would hardly do to send for a second bottle. He sampled the duck, which wasn’t too bad, and said after a few moments:

‘The first appointment Natalie made with her father she couldn’t keep. In the meantime something very disquieting had happened to her. She discovered a growth in one of her breasts.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘A minute scar where the biopsy was done showed at the post-mortem,’ said Wexford. ‘Natalie went to her doctor and was sent to Guy’s Hospital, the appointment being on the day she had arranged to go down to Sterries. She didn’t want to talk to her father on the phone – I think we can call that a perfectly natural shrinking in the circumstances – so she got Jane Zoffany to do it. Shall I say here that Natalie was a congenital slave-owner and Jane Zoffany a born slave?

‘Well, Jane made the call and a new date for the 19th. Natalie went to the hospital where they were unable to tell her whether the growth was malignant or not. She must come into their Hedley Atkins Unit in New Cross for a biopsy under anaesthetic.

‘Now we’re all of us afraid of cancer but Natalie maybe had more reason than most of us. She had seen her young husband did of leukaemia, a form of cancer, her friend Tina too, but most traumatic for her, her mother had died of it and died, it had been implied, through her daughter’s actions. Moreover, at the time she had only been a few years older than Natalie then was. Small wonder if she was terrified.

‘Then – due no doubt to some aberration on the part of the Post Office – the letter telling her she was to go into the Hedley Atkins Unit on 17 January didn’t arrive till the morning before. This meant she couldn’t go to Kingsmarkham on the 19th. I imagine she was past caring. All that mattered to her now was that she shouldn’t have cancer, shouldn’t have her beautiful figure spoilt, shouldn’t live in dread of a recurrence or an early death. Jane Zoffany could deal with her father for her, phone or write or send a telegram.’

From staring down at his empty plate, Burden now lifted his eyes and sat bolt upright. ‘It was Jane Zoffany who came down here that day?’

Wexford nodded. ‘Who else?’

‘She too is thin and dark and about the right age . . . But why? Why pose as Natalie? For whatever possible purpose?’