The Corpse with the Silver Tongue (31 page)

I calmed myself, as much as I could, the machine stopped beeping, and I began. “I sent the e-mail to you, then I sent the same e-mail to Bud Anderson, and myself . . . you know, just to be sure. I checked on news stories in Vancouver and, oh God,” I took a big breath and said it fast, “I discovered that Bud's wife, Jan, had been killed. I didn't know until then. I felt badly about the e-mail I had sent Bud, so I sent another one, apologizing about the first one . . .”

“I know about Mme. Anderson's death. It is a terrible thing that the wife of a fellow officer would be killed just because she is his wife, and because people want him to stop hunting them down. I have told him this. He telephoned me at home, in my bed, to send me to bring you to safety. I have also spoken to him today.”

“How is he?” I was anxious about Bud. I wanted Moreau to tell me he was fine.

“He is a strong man. I, too, am a strong man, and I do not know how it would be if my wife died this way. I think he has a difficult time ahead of him. He has asked me to keep him informed about you. He is concerned about you. He helped you a great deal last night, by contacting me. I was on the scene quickly because of his call. Please, continue with your story.”

“It's not a ‘story'—it's what happened,” I snapped. He shrugged, and I carried on, regardless of the implication. “I heard voices outside Madelaine's window. One voice was definitely the man I had heard in the cellars, but the other voice was too muffled for me to know who it was, or even if it was a man or a woman. I thought that they must be the people who'd gone into the cellars to find me, that they'd discovered that I'd run off, and were searching the area around the Palais for me. I
thought
they'd gone away. Bud phoned me, and I went into the bathroom to talk to him—I thought I was safer in there. Then I called the police, and I finally got through to Bertrand, and he told me to wait, so I waited. When I heard a knock at the door I listened in case it was him. Like I said, the door burst open, I hit my head, and that's it. Nothing. Until I opened my eyes here, with Bertrand beside me.”

“I saw you at the Palais before the ambulance took you. Do you remember that?” asked Moreau, pointedly.

I shook my head. “Thanks for coming,” I said, a bit sheepishly.

“Do you remember what you wrote in the e-mail you sent me?” he asked sharply.

This time I nodded. “Yes, of course. I can remember everything up to the blow to my head.” It was time to ask the critical question. “Did it all make sense to you?”

Moreau nodded. “It did. And we have them. They did not try to flee. One is very sorry—knowing that wrong was done. The other? Pah—the other is very arrogant. They are not talking. They have lawyers.”

“I'm glad you have them,” I said. “Well, maybe
half
glad.”

Bertrand was translating very quickly, but looking increasingly puzzled. I suspected that he didn't really know about everything that had been going on. I decided to try to help.

“Do you know who's been arrested, Bertrand?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“So Captain Moreau hasn't told you who the killer is?”

Again, he shook his head. “I have been here the whole night and day,” he said. He looked tired.

“Why don't you tell him?” I asked Moreau.

“
You
tell him,” he replied. “Tell him what you told me in that e-mail, which my wife very kindly translated for me on the telephone while I was driving to the Palais.”

“Are you sure?” Was this a sign of trust on the part of Moreau? He nodded, then got up, offered Bertrand his seat, and motioned that he was going outside to make some phone calls. Bertrand didn't have to translate, so he just listened. He looked pleased to be sitting down.

I began.

“It was complicated, and I was stupid. It took me longer to put things together than it should have done. I think I was a bit distracted so I wasn't really focused, like I usually am on a ‘real' case. What finally helped me was the birthday cake, the type of boxes the snails were kept in, and discovering that I could hear Chuck's voice from Alistair's balcony.”

“What birthday cake?” asked Bertrand. “I do not remember any birthday cake.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “There wasn't one.”

“I see,” said Bertrand, but I could tell that he didn't.

I decided to try another approach. “You've heard everything I told the captain in my interviews, right?” He nodded. “You know how I bumped into Alistair, and he invited me to the party, and how he died, and about the break-in at the museum, and my theory that the necklace that disappeared was the Roman necklace that the archives mentioned, and that Madelaine was pictured wearing, and that Alistair was going to give to Tamsin?”

He nodded again.

“It was agreed that everyone, except maybe Tamsin, had a reason to want to steal the necklace.” More nodding. “Okay, so I had to work out if the theft of the necklace was the reason for the deaths, but I realized I couldn't do that until I worked out
how
Alistair was killed. I eventually managed to put two and two together: I knew that snails would eat and intensify the taste of dill, which I believe Alistair was feeding them, but I also learned, or, rather, worked out, that snails' bodies would also intensify the toxic effects of the digitalis in foxglove leaves. There were foxglove leaves in the gardens at the Palais, so all someone had to do was to feed those leaves to the snails and they'd become quite poisonous. Knowing that Alistair often took extra pills when he wanted to feel at his best, they could be pretty sure that he'd be the only one who'd succumb to the total dose—though, to be honest, I don't think that the murderer cared if anyone else became seriously ill, or even died, so long as Alistair was killed.”

“You could have all died?” asked Bertrand, wide-eyed. This time I was the one nodding, and, thankfully, it didn't seem to hurt quite as much. “You were
all
ill. Wasn't the murderer afraid they would die themselves?”

“Good question,” I replied, “but the murderer just made sure they hardly ate any snails at all, so they only had
some
symptoms of digitalis poisoning—enough so that they didn't stand out from the rest of us. If the killer had poisoned the snails long before they were cooked, then I thought it didn't matter where everyone was the night of the party. It didn't matter who went to the kitchen. But it
did
matter. I realized, much later on, that access to the kitchen was
vital
, because that's how the necklace was stolen.”

“So the necklace was in the kitchen?” Bertrand's eyes were even wider. “
Where?
”

“In the birthday cake.”

“What birthday cake?”

“Exactly.”

Bertrand threw up his hands. “I do not understand. Why was the necklace in the birthday cake? And where
was
this birthday cake? I was there when we searched the apartment. There
was no
birthday cake.”

“
That
was what I missed. It was stupid of me. You see, when I saw Alistair in the Cours Saleya and he invited me to the party, he told me himself as he was leaving that he was off to collect a very special birthday cake. Later on, Tamsin told me that, on their wedding day, Alistair had hidden a gift for her in a dessert jelly, so I wondered if he'd maybe hidden the necklace he was giving her in her birthday cake. When I'd looked around the Townsends' kitchen, there
was
no birthday cake. Now, if there
had
been one, you guys wouldn't have taken it for testing, because we were all poisoned before we'd got to that part of the meal. So the cake
should
have been there but it wasn't. When I innocently said to Tamsin that I fancied some cake after our meal she got very upset. I always thought it odd that she'd
known
her necklace was gone, but I finally—
finally
—worked it out: Tamsin had guessed that her necklace was hidden in the cake, the cake had been placed in the kitchen—ready for presentation later on—and she'd noticed that the cake was missing when she came through the kitchen to the balcony after Alistair's death. That's how she knew that her necklace was gone. The murderer had also known of the necklace's hiding place and had stolen both the cake and the necklace, all in one go.”

“What did they do with the cake? You cannot hide a cake!”

“Ah, you can if everyone thinks it is garbage. The killer simply tossed the cake into the garbage chute in the kitchen, knowing that they could retrieve it later on. If anyone saw the discarded cake in the garbage room before they had time to get to it, they'd just assume it was rubbish.”

“Ah,” said Bertrand, his eyes lighting up a little. “The killer went to the place where the chute deposits the garbage and collected the necklace from the cake later on? After they are out of the hospital?” I nodded. “Does everyone have access to this place?”

Again I nodded. “I'm going to guess it's locked, but that residents each have a key.”

“That excludes Beni?” asked Bertrand.

I smiled. “I wish it did, but I suspect he could have got hold of a key if he'd wanted one,” I replied, thinking of the two sets of keys I'd seen tossed out of Tamsin's purse onto the seat of Beni's car.

“What about Madelaine?” asked Bertrand.

“Her kitchen showed signs that she'd been entertaining someone—there were two of everything washed and wiped dry there. I believe the killer brought food containing a poison, maybe it was more digitalis. I don't know for sure because your boss refused to tell me what had been found in her system. He even ate with her. There was a smell of garlic in her living room, but not in her kitchen: I interpreted that to mean that the food was brought there, not prepared there. Maybe something like soup? There were bowls in her kitchen—they had been used but not put away. Lots of garlic would disguise many less pleasant flavors. I know that everyone had the opportunity to do this. Tamsin took the longest bath in history; Beni claimed to have parked far away; Chuck and Gerard had been at the Palais for hours. I believe that the only reason that Madelaine was killed was so that the portrait of her, a photograph of her wearing the Collar of Death, could be stolen. If the killer didn't have the portrait, they wouldn't be able to prove the necklace was what they claimed.”

“So the museum break-in . . . ?”

“Ah, well, that was a tough one. Once I allowed myself to consider everything objectively, I realized that there
was
only one person who could have done it, and, I'm sorry to say, he did. Doctor Benigno Brunetti ‘robbed' his own museum. He staged the whole thing himself. He removed something, some component, that the window installer needed to be able to finish his job. He didn't demand that an alarm be connected before ‘leaving' the museum and then he broke a window that would have been too small for anyone but a child to crawl through. All to rather clumsily cover up the removal of the Roman family archive that, had Alistair had his way, would have proven the necklace was worth much more than anyone imagined.

“You see, while Alistair had put the whole thing about the necklace together, Beni hadn't. Beni believed the necklace to be the one mentioned in the archives, but knew nothing about its links with the Gestapo, Madelaine, or Gerard's sister. Even if he had, I don't think he'd have cared. I seriously think that anything less than seventeen hundred years old is of limited interest to Beni—except when it comes to women, of course. All he knew was that, if Alistair had the necklace, it wouldn't be long before he came calling on Beni's expert opinion to increase its value immensely. The ‘theft' of the archive was the only way that Beni knew to prevent Alistair from profiting in a way that Beni thought was reprehensible. I think the archive will be found, safe and sound. Beni wouldn't damage or destroy it. He loves old things far too much to do that.”

“So we have arrested Doctor Brunetti?” asked Bertrand.

“I believe so. I told Moreau about my theory in the e-mail I sent, and he said he acted upon it. I know it's not a big or important theft, and I'm not even sure what the charges will be, exactly. I can't imagine it will do Beni's professional career much good. We all have to live with the consequences of our actions. I suppose at least Beni will not be subjected to Tamsin's unwanted attentions anymore.”

“What about the murderer? Was Beni the killer?” Bertrand couldn't wait.

“No, Beni wasn't the killer. I don't think he could harm a fly. I was unsure about which of the others might have done it: I honestly believed that Tamsin, Gerard, and Chuck all had the capability to kill someone. Tamsin Townsend isn't the dimwit she pretends to be. She's got a brain and a plan . . . and that plan involves separating rich men from their money. I could quite believe that she would have killed Alistair to get her hands on his estate,
and
the jewels that he wouldn't let her wear. Gerard was obsessively attached to his dead sister, the Palais, and the gardens. To be honest, I could imagine him killing to protect the Palais from the plans that Alistair had for a swimming pool—and, of course, he'd know all about foxgloves and digitalis. As far as I knew, Chuck, like Beni, had only ever been able to discover half the story of the necklace. Beni knew the Celtic, Druidic, and Roman parts of the story, but Chuck only knew about the Gestapo connections. Gerard never told anyone except Alistair about the architect's wife running off to Germany with the necklace that had been dug up at the Palais, nor had he told anyone but Alistair about Madelaine's time at the Palais during the war. Chuck might have wanted to own something that was a part of Gestapo history, but how would he have known about the portrait of Madelaine? Or the fact that this necklace was an ancient one, rather than just something that had been fashioned during the war years?”