The Corpse with the Silver Tongue (14 page)

The two men and I managed to find large refuse bags, dusters, cans of spray polish, rags for wiping and drying, and several rolls of paper towels, all of which we put to good use for the next fifteen minutes, clearing up the detritus from the paramedics, the police and the fingerprint guys. (Here's something I learned that day: Always wipe off fingerprint powder with a damp cloth
before
attempting to use spray polish—what a mess I made.) We all got on with our own areas. Gerard worked around the dining table, Beni saw to the sitting room, and I tidied the balcony. I was the lucky one; I watched the light change from day to night on the horizon, and I got to enjoy the cooling air—just as we had all done the evening before.

Gerard had shown us how to use the chute in the kitchen that sent the refuse bags plummeting to the basement for collection there by the janitor. After we'd all washed our hands, Beni announced that he should move the car to a visitor parking spot. Gerard and I decided to try to find what we needed to make a cup of tea and something to eat. Beni headed out, and I proceeded to open and close doors in the kitchen, discovering that the Townsends seemed too live exclusively on tinned pâté de foie gras, crackers, assorted nuts, and cheese straws. The contents of the fridge didn't help much either: lots of champagne, six bottles of beer, smoked salmon, a couple of plastic containers of cooked lobster, a variety of cheeses, some eggs, milk, spread, toasting bread, and cream.

There
were
fresh beans with which to make coffee, but the coffee maker looked like it had been designed by
NASA
. You'd probably need a degree in engineering to be able to make it work at all. Gerard looked flummoxed by it all. Once again, I came up with a plan.

“Well, we'll work with what we've got. They've taken all the flatware and glasses we were using last night, so we'll just use whatever is left and I'll lay out an assortment of things so we can all snack. Okay?”

Gerard nodded. “I will prepare the table—the settings are all in the other room, under the stairs,” he said gravely, and off he went.

I started to pull out tins and packets (making sure they were all sealed . . . after all, we'd probably been poisoned by something we'd eaten there the night before!) and then began to ferry serving platters to the table on the balcony. On balance, I thought it would be better than eating at the table where Alistair had died. Five minutes later the balcony looked quite festive. I'm not the world's most highly domesticated creature, so I allowed myself to survey the table with pride, even though under the circumstances it seemed inappropriate somehow.

Gerard and I both sat down outside, and I lit a cigarette.

“It is terrible, this,” said Gerard quietly. “Terrible.”

“Yes, it is,” I replied. Taking my chance, I added, “You were fond of Alistair?”

“He will be missed” was Gerard's safe reply, with a great emphasis on the “h” of “he.” Beni had said much the same thing: funny how neither of them had said that
they
would miss him, but rather that the man would be missed, in the abstract sense. I decided to try again.

“Had you known Alistair for long?” I, too, spoke quietly. It seemed a shame to disturb the peace of the evening.

“Since 'e moved 'ere, five years past,” replied Gerard factually. Not only did he have trouble with the English “h,” he struggled with tenses, too. But, bless him, he was trying very hard to speak his best English. “
He
is a good man.
He
loves life,” he added.

Again, it struck me as odd that Gerard would say much the same about Alistair as Beni had, earlier in the day.

“Were you friends?”

Gerard thought for a moment then said, “No, not friends. He is very kind to me. We know each other a little. He likes it when I tell him stories about the old days. But we are not friends. I have always work in the gardens, and now I live in an apartment at the back—at the discretion of the Syndic. M. Townsend, Alistair, is a wealthy man. He invites me to his home, but we do not mix outside of his home and some of the Syndic meetings.”

“I bet he enjoyed your tales about ‘the old days' here—Alistair was always a bit of a history buff,” I lied.

“Ah yes, he is,” replied Gerard smiling. “We sit inside in the shade, or maybe out here, and he asks me to tell him all the stories I know. It is good to think about old times. Sometimes I remember things I have forgotten. He is . . . gracious.”

I opened a bottle of champagne and offered Gerard a glass. Well, if Tamsin couldn't drag herself away from her bubble bath, why shouldn't I act as the hostess? Besides, I fancied a glass myself, and I had
only
brought out the Veuve Cliquot, rather than the Dom Perignon, after all. Gerard smiled an affirmative, and I poured. As on the previous evening, my knowledge of etiquette for bizarre circumstances was letting me down. I wondered if it would it be alright for us to begin to eat, or whether we should wait for the widow to join us. As I felt my tummy rumble I decided I would just dive in. I loaded up a cracker with pâté de foie gras and had at it. Oh my God—I
love
that stuff . . . However politically incorrect it might be to enjoy the product of force-feeding fowl, I cannot believe there is a taste in the world more wonderful, more satisfying, or more haunting, than foie gras. Once tasted, always desired.
Bliss!
I relished the flavors bursting in my mouth, as Gerard copied my actions, and we both gave ourselves over to a moment of indulgence . . . tinged with only a little guilt.

I knew I had to apply myself, so I pulled myself back from the brink of disappearing into paroxysms of delight. I asked, as innocently as I could, “Was there anything about the Palais that particularly interested Alistair?”

“Oh yes,” replied Gerard, swallowing quickly, “he is interested in the man who was the architect—he wants to know all about the building from the time when it was built until he arrives.” Gerard spoke slowly, his French accent guttural but understandable, his words chosen with care and pronounced carefully. “My father comes here as a gardener before the First War. I live here all my life, always in the same apartment. My father and mother live here. Now I live here. My father knows men who work on building the Palais when they are boys. They tell him stories, and he tells me. Ten men die building this,” he waved his arms around him, “it is very sad. But more blood than that is spilled here, as I tell M. Townsend.”

“Really?” I encouraged him. “In what way do you mean?”

“Ah, in many ways. The men who die building it, and, to be sure, there are more deaths here since—some are natural, as you expect; there are two duels in the gardens in the early years; in the 1960s a man kills his wife, then his mistress, then himself—all of them are residents here and, of course, there are the terrible things that happen in the war. But even before it was built there is a scandal. They are digging the foundations, and there are bodies. Not graves, but bodies. My father tells me all about this. M. Townsend says this story is most interesting. It is a tragedy.”

“Oh, I love an old story like that,” I lied, again. “Do tell me about it.”

Gerard pushed back in his seat and looked up at the dark sky, then directly at me, and slowly began. “The architect is appointed by the owner of the land. He is well established and, as you can see from the building, he favors the classic look for the Belle Epoque buildings in this area, which is very fashionable. He arrives from Paris in 1878 with his bride, who is very beautiful and thirty years less in age than him, and they set up home lower down the hill in the Carabacel area. They have a baby—a boy, but it is not an easy birth. The woman she can have no more children. She breaks down, as you say, and is not seen much from that time. Soon afterward they find the bodies. A workman who sees them tells my father they are four bodies. They are bones only. They are in a hole that is not deep. It is at the edge of the site for the building. One body is a woman—this they know because she wears jewelry. One is a man, who has a sword, and two look like children. The men who find the bones are afraid, so the architect he comes and takes them all away himself. Later, my father is told, the workers they see the wife of the architect at a party, and she is wearing the jewelry from the bones of the woman. They think that this is bad. They think it is against God. So they all give up their jobs and go to work on another building.”

“It must have been a difficult choice for them to do that—to leave steady employment,” I commented.

“No, it is not. There are many jobs in Nice at this time. This is 1880, the start of the Belle Epoque, when the railway is here from the north, the city grows very fast, and it is full of the English, the Russians and the Italians. Everywhere there is building. In any case, it is good that they leave because very soon there are many problems here. It begins with the young wife. She is having an affair with one of the assistants to her husband—a young man from Germany, of about her own age. There is a story that the architect challenges the man to a duel. In any case, the man disappears, and the wife as well. The child is still with the architect. Then men fall sick, there is talk of cholera—which kills many, many people in Nice fifty years before. There is terror. Many workmen leave the building. The owner of the land replaces the architect and gets another man to manage the making of the building, the architect has nothing left but his son, who dies when he is very young, then the architect himself is sick, and he kills himself at the building site one night.” Gerard's eyes were sparkling and he was slightly flushed. It seemed that he thrived on tragedy.

“They all died? Very Shakespearean! Very sad.” What else could I say? “Did anyone see the jewelry again?”

“Ha! This is what Alistair says to me! All this sadness and you ask about this thing. Maybe you are like him?” I could see what he meant. I had to put him right on that one.

“Oh, no, Gerard—I'm sorry, I don't mean to appear to be heartless, but I was talking to Beni about the necklace that is missing, the one that Alistair was going to give Tamsin for her birthday. And I wondered if that necklace might be the jewelry of which you speak.”

“Huh! I do not know this,” was Gerard's somewhat sulky reply. “It is just a piece of metal, in any case. It is not beautiful. It is ugly. It is not as important as a human life. Why would anyone kill for a piece of metal?
Life
is what matters. Life is not to be replaced.”

Well, he wasn't going to get any argument from me on that one, but, again, I'd seen people kill for “pieces of metal” before—and they hadn't been priceless, ancient, and possibly mystic pieces of metal, either!

“Did Alistair really seem more interested in the jewelry than the lives lost?”

“Always. He is always asking more and more about the jewelry. But I know no more. This is what I know. It is what my father tells me. I do not know more than he tells me. It is impossible.” Gerard was starting to get a bit hot under the collar on the topic, so I was actually quite relieved when the buzzer sounded in the kitchen. I let Beni back into the front door of the building, and a few moments later he came out on to the balcony, looking pink in the face and huffing and puffing that he'd had to park at the bottom of the gardens because it was very busy at the Palais that evening. He wasn't kidding—he'd been gone for
ages.

It was almost as if Tamsin had been waiting until her entire audience was assembled ready for her entrance
(in fact, I'm sure she was)
, and she wafted out onto the balcony almost immediately after Beni's arrival, wearing something loose, flowing, and black. She looked appropriately tragic. I only shook my head in disgust internally.

“Hello. Ah—I'm
famished
,” she announced dramatically, waving a black chiffon scarf imperiously at the table, and she sat. Not
one
word of thanks for all the cleaning we'd done, not even a nod in my direction for having laid out what was, in my eyes, a feast. Ungrateful so and so! I seethed, and sipped my champagne. At that moment I was sorry I hadn't opened a bottle of Dom after all. I was 300 per cent certain I wouldn't be pouring her anything, anytime soon. Of course, Beni did the honors, pouring her champagne, trying to “tempt” her with the morsels in front of her and telling her how marvellous she looked, given the circumstances.

I was about a nanosecond away from needing a sick bag—I hadn't over-indulged, I just find all that sort of hypocritical crap totally nauseating. I pulled myself together, kept repeating, internally, what Bud had said about
not
being judgemental, and decided to smile at the Widow Townsend.

“Come now, Tamsin, you must eat
something
. I've done my best with what's here, but, at some point, you're going to have to get some real food in so that you can look after yourself properly. Would you like me to get some groceries for you tomorrow?”

Tamsin looked puzzled, then she smiled, dabbed at her dry eyes, and said, “Oh Cait, I don't really cook, or anything like that. Ally said I made good reservations so I didn't need to be able to cook, and he was right. I do make good reservations. Don't worry about me, I can manage to eat very well, thank you.”

“What if you don't feel like going out?” It had to be asked.

“Oh,
everyone
will deliver to us. It's not like England, or America, you know—all the
good
places deliver here . . . It's not just pizza or curry, absolutely
everyone
will deliver
everything
.”

Well, that was me well and truly put in my place. After all, how could I have
not
known
that
? Bitch! And that was my
considered
judgement of the woman.

Beni came to my rescue. Or, at least, he tried to. “Cait would not know this. She does not live here like us. She lives in a part of the world where this is not usual.” It was something of a back-handed compliment.