The Company of Saints (11 page)

Tea was at five, and dinner at 8.15. The Duvaliers would play bridge, and the young guests could amuse themselves. Bridge. That was perfect. She could imagine it: the tables set out, the cards, the scores, the paraphernalia she had seen in the Minister's Paris drawing room – a ritual as meaningless as everything else that generation did, except grow rich at the expense of life itself. She wasn't nervous. Just excited, as if it was the night before her mother died.

‘Where did Louise find that girl?' Irena Duvalier asked her husband. They were dressing before dinner. Both had excused themselves from the trip to the chateau; they rested for an hour and a half every afternoon, and spent an hour before tea discussing the day's newspapers.

Irena loved jewels, and her husband had amassed a rare collection of historic pieces. She chose an antique necklace of turquoises and diamonds, part of the French Crown Jewels.

Albert Duvalier shook his head. ‘I don't know. She's Louise's best friend, that's what I was told. Rather dull and middle-class. Why?'

‘Because there's something funny about her,' his wife answered, examining herself from different angles in the mirror. ‘If she's Louise's best friend, I wonder why she looks at her as if she hates her? I shall have a word with Isabelle about that girl. I don't think she should be encouraged. Should I wear the earrings?'

He considered for a moment. ‘No, just the necklace. The dress is exactly the right colour. Why do you say that girl hates Louise?' He frowned, feeling suddenly uneasy. His wife had an instinct for people which was never deceived.

‘Because I've been watching her,' Irena said. ‘And I've seen something in her eyes that I don't like at all. She must never come here again.'

They went down to dinner, and afterwards took coffee in the small salon where the bridge table had been set out: a red velvet cloth, fringed with gold, two sets of unopened cards, cigarettes in a Fabergé silver-gilt box, score cards set into velvet pads with the initial D embroidered on them.

Hélène refused coffee. She gave an anxious glance towards Isabelle Duvalier, who leaned over to her and said, ‘Hélène?'

Hélène blushed. ‘Madame, I've got an awful headache. Do you think I could go upstairs to bed?'

‘Of course.' The Minister smiled sympathetically.

‘Irena, Hélène's not feeling very well. You'll excuse her if she goes straight to bed?'

Irena's black eyes were cold as pit water. They examined Hélène for a moment, and froze the apologetic simper off her face.

‘If you're not well, do you want a doctor?' Her tone implied that it would be a great nuisance if she did.

‘Oh, no, no, thank you. It's just a migraine. I get them sometimes.'

‘Really? You shouldn't at your age. Perhaps you eat too many sweet things. Louise, can you amuse yourself while we play?'

‘Oh, yes, I'll watch. I've always wanted to learn, but mother says she hasn't the patience to teach me.'

‘That's because you've no card sense, my darling,' her father teased. They laughed, the little family group of five, and Louise said, ‘Poor Hélène – have you got aspirins? Shall I come up with you?'

‘No, no – it's just a headache. Madame Duvalier is right – I had too much chocolate cake at tea. I'll be fine in the morning. Good night everyone.'

‘Good night,' they said in chorus, and forgot about her.

Hélène went back into the dining room. Two maids were preparing the table for breakfast. ‘I left my purse in here,' she said. ‘Have you found it?'

‘No, mademoiselle.' They looked under the table. There was no purse.

‘I must have left it in the salon then,' Hélène said. ‘I'm not feeling very well. I'm going up to bed. Don't lay any breakfast for me.'

‘I'm sorry,' the senior parlourmaid said. ‘Would you like me to bring your purse upstairs?'

‘Would you? They're playing bridge and I don't want to go back and disturb them. Thanks so much.' She did look sickly, the women thought, with a patch of bright red on each cheek and the rest of her face a pasty white.

Fifteen minutes later the younger maid knocked on Hélène's bedroom door. There was a mumble and she went inside. The room was in darkness and a voice from the bed said thickly, ‘What is it?'

‘I've brought up your purse, mademoiselle.'

‘My what? I've taken a sleeping pill. Oh, yes, thank you.…' The words trailed off. The maid put the little purse on the dressing table and went out.

Albert Duvalier, with Isabelle as partner, won the first rubber. Louise was talking to her aunt, who was dummy for that hand. They didn't hear the door open, and it was the Minister herself who looked up from her cards and saw Hélène.

‘Hélène? What are you –'

The first bullet hit her square in the chest. The second and third killed Albert Duvalier instantly, and took half his skull away. Louise didn't manage a scream before she was cut down and Irena's strangled cry was choked off by a bullet in the throat. Hélène stood very still. There hadn't been a sound in the room except for the pop-pop of the silenced gun. She stepped forward to the table and shot Isabelle through the forehead, and her husband through the heart. Louise, eyes open, was twitching slightly. Hélène made sure of her. She paused for a moment by Irena and emptied the gun into her body, although she could see that she was dead.

Then she threw the gun on the ground. Blood was dripping everywhere, forming pools on the polished floor, soaking into the magnificent rugs. She stepped carefully to the door and opened it. She could see into the hall and to the stairs. There was nobody about. She didn't worry about touching anything. She was wearing a pair of Louise's gloves. When the household went to bed, an elaborate security system was switched on. She had been warned not to come out of her room and wander about during the night because the alarms were set until morning. The time was just after ten o'clock. The butler locked up and set the outside system at 10.30. Routine was inviolate in that house. The internal system closing off every room was operated by him as soon as the Duvaliers and their guests had gone to their rooms for the night. She had twenty minutes in hand, unless someone came through the hall.

She turned and ran up the stairs. She put the gloves back in Louise's drawer in her room. She was already undressed. She hung her dressing gown over a chair, put her slippers neatly by the bed. She didn't switch on the light – the light from the corridor was enough and her door was ajar. She had prepared everything in advance. There was a carafe of water beside her bed. Two Mogadon sleeping pills were by the glass. A tube of tablets for the treatment of migraine were also in place; one dose was missing. Hélène swallowed both pills, shut her door and got into bed.

When the butler began his routine of locking up and setting the first stage of the alarm system, he knocked and went into the salon. By midnight the news of the massacre of the Duvalier family was on the television and the radio stations. The French nation woke up to read the appalling story of mass murder, and the incredible escape of the young student who had been found deep in a drugged sleep in her room upstairs.

Davina switched on for the television news at eight o'clock. She watched and listened, and ate no breakfast that morning. When she reached her office Humphrey and Johnson were already in conference with their colleagues on the French and Italian desks. Davina didn't waste any time on saying good morning. ‘Have you got through to Rome?' she asked.

Humphrey nodded. ‘I couldn't talk to Modena, he wasn't available.'

‘God damn it,' she exclaimed. ‘The American Secretary of State and the French Minister of Justice! Within a month of each other.'

‘Larue wants to talk to you, Davina,' Humphrey said. ‘I explained your view about what happened in Venice – he isn't convinced that there's a connection.'

‘Then he's a bloody fool,' she snapped.

‘Anything more on the telex?'

‘They're still questioning the servants and the student, Hélène Blond. The theory is that the assassin walked in while they were playing bridge and gunned the lot of them, and then just walked out again.'

‘Shall I put the call through to Larue?' That was Johnson, and she said, ‘Yes, right away. And we'd better ask Washington to put us in touch with their operative in Venice. We're not going to get anything from Rome. Not available! God almighty!'

The staff and Hélène were taken up to Paris. She was bewildered, still dopy after the heavy drugs. The escorting police felt sorry for her. One of them kept saying how lucky she was.… On the journey she said she felt sick, and they took her into a country lane where she retched and retched by the side of the car. Shock, they agreed, delayed shock. Lucky girl, though. The salon on the ground floor of the Duvaliers' chateau smelled like an abattoir. Hélène made her statement to the chief of the Sûreté. She had to be taken out in the middle because she felt sick again. He sent her home to her aunt. She was already a public heroine. The modest little flat was under siege with reporters and television crews when she arrived, white as a winding sheet and shaking all over. Her aunt's doctor hurried over, prescribed tranquillizers and complete rest. She got into bed and lay under the covers, sallow and shivering, while her aunt fussed over her, and she promised to take the tranquillizers. Just let her be alone for a little. Please?

When her aunt went away Hélène waited for a while and then slipped out of bed. She went to the dressing table and looked at herself in the mirror. Her friends had known what they were doing. Pills to make her sick, to turn her into a pasty wreck. She smiled at herself in the glass. She knew the police believed her. The two maids would corroborate everything, even to finding her half asleep in bed. She had to keep calm, play the part of Hélène Blond, the simple student and friend of the family who had so nearly shared their fate. Even that stupid doctor who'd just gone away would confirm that she suffered from migraine. She'd complained of it as soon as the plan was worked out. She put her hands together as if she was going to pray. The Company of Saints used that as their recognition sign, like the secret signal of the brotherhood of Masons. She wasn't Hélène Blond. She was France. Her part was over. All she had to do was prove their faith in her. Prove that her nerve was as iron hard as her heart. She smiled at herself once, slowly, and then got back into bed. She dozed peacefully, tired out. Her aunt came into the room and cried over her as she slept.

Davina went for a walk that lunchtime. There had been a message from the Prime Minister's private secretary. Would Miss Graham please make a personal report at 5.15? Miss Graham left it to Humphrey to draft and then she set out to walk round St James's Park. Isabelle Duvalier, shot dead, with every member of her family. But why had the killer chosen to go into the house to murder her? Why not an attack in the street, during her public appearances? She was always lecturing, performing official functions. The woman was exposed to the assassin's bullet or the bomb a dozen times a month. Yet the chosen venue made it particularly horrible, involving the murder of her husband and young daughter, and her brother-in-law Albert Duvalier, the arms magnate, and his wife. Davina stopped and sat down on a seat by the edge of the lake. A young man was reading a paperback; he glanced up without interest as she joined him. Children were feeding the greedy ducks that swam in flotillas at the water's edge. Albert Duvalier was a figure of hate for a variety of people – people he had ruined in his quest for monopoly inside France; the pacifist and anti-nuclear organizations reviled him as a merchant of death. Had he been the target? She got up abruptly, and began to walk rapidly back along the path leading out to Birdcage Walk. A platoon of guardsmen drilled in the square of the barracks as she walked past. The drill sergeant's voice barked incomprehensible commands. Was Duvalier the real objective and the others a bonus? Killed because they were there and had to be silenced. Or was the Minister for Justice the prime target, as at first supposed? She'd better have a clear idea about that before she faced the formidable list of questions at 5.15.

Back in her office, she spoke to the army colonel who was head of SEDECE, the French equivalent of her own Service, a service to be feared and treated with respect. He was a dour, monosyllabic man, who didn't like women. It was whispered that he had lost his testicles in a shooting during the Algerian war.

He was no friend to Davina Graham, but he set his prejudices aside. France was in uproar over the killings. The press and the media were stirring up things as usual – the wildest accusations and rumours were flying round. He answered her queries truthfully and briefly. The gun was a Walther PPK, fitted with a small silencer of the latest design, giving maximum accuracy and negligible noise. The gun bore no serial number – it had been burned off by acid, and there were no fingerprints. There were no fingerprints anywhere in the chateau that didn't match the family's, their servants' and their guests'. The shooting had been done by a trained marksman. It was accurate and, except for the multiple bullet holes in Irena Duvalier's body, economical. All the bullets had come from the one gun. There was no sign of forced entry, no evidence of a car being used, or of footprints on the lawns. The killer had kept to the gravel paths and simply walked into the house, performed his ghastly task, and left. Interrogation of the indoor staff and the three gardeners and the chauffeur had not produced anything. All were being closely vetted now.

‘Tell me,' Davina cut in, ‘looking at the murders as an operation, properly planned and carried out, do you see any signature?'

‘I know what you're suggesting.' The colonel's nasal voice was sour. ‘The answer's no. It isn't the far leftists or the fascists. And it doesn't fit in with Moscow's methods. They don't go in for public mayhem.'