The Orchid Shroud (23 page)

“You mean Denise?” Julian asked, taken aback.

“That’s right. It ended like it started, fast and hard.”

Julian fell silent. He could see Denise as a killer. But did she have a motive? Besides, he recalled, she had been with him last night. Or most of it. And then he remembered that, of the many
past lovers she had told him about, Denise had not once mentioned Jean-Claude Fournier.

“I’m still for the
loup-garou
thing,” said Paul. “Look, if this Jean-Claude made a hobby of collecting werewolf stories, he probably believed in them himself. What’s wrong with him really thinking he’d solved the Le Gévaudan Beast mystery?”

“For heaven’s sake!” Julian exclaimed. “He was having Mara on. He promised her new information, so he had to deliver.”

But Mara broke in. “Paul may be right. I know it sounds crazy, and I thought he was putting me on at the time as well. But I wonder now if Jean-Claude mightn’t have been serious. You should see his house. Full of occult objects. And then there’s his book. You’ve read it, Prudence. He believed those folktales were based on actual events. I think he was genuinely excited about making the connection between the Beast of Le Gévaudan, the Sigoulane Beast, and Xavier de Bonfond. Imagine what it would have meant to him to come up with the solution to a baffling mystery
and
a live descendant responsible for the awful things that have been happening.”

“Bollocks,” Julian objected. “That Piquet fellow was killed by an animal. They know from the bite marks. Ditto for the woman who was attacked in Les Ronces. So, unless you seriously think Christophe turns into a werewolf, how the hell could he—or any human being—have been responsible?”

“I don’t know,” Mara admitted unhappily.

“Besides, even if that was what Jean-Claude tried to blackmail Christophe about, assuming he was crazy enough to do it, why would he have told you? Wouldn’t that be like giving away his line of credit?”

She said doggedly, “He needed to brag. At the same time, there was no risk. He knew I wouldn’t believe him.”

“Then neither would anyone else. Jean-Claude could never have
gone public with such a daft theory. Or blackmailed Christophe with it.”

Loulou cleared his throat. “Ah, but the threat of publicity might have been enough. That kind of daft theory, as you say, is just the sort of thing that would go down well in certain circles, with very embarrassing consequences for Christophe. He could have found himself the focus of an international cult. I think our Jean-Claude knew very well what he was doing.”

“Right, then.” Paul slapped his thigh. “All the
flics
have to do is find Christophe. They’ll sort out soon enough whether or not he really is the Sigoulane Beast.”

“Then hope to god they get him fast,” said Mado, looking very worried. “Before someone else gets eaten.”

T
he others had gone. Only Julian remained. He reached out to draw her to him.

“Look, Mara,” he murmured into her hair. “The police can’t really think you did it. You were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Her body felt small and unresponsive. She mumbled something into his shirtfront. He bent his head. “What’s that?”

“I said I couldn’t admit it in front of the others.” She looked him in the eye, but with difficulty. “And I was afraid to tell that awful adjudant. Jean-Claude tried to make a pass at me, Julian. Well, more than a pass. He came on in a very nasty way. I slapped him.”

“Damn right,” Julian said indignantly.

“You don’t understand. We struggled. And I—” She broke off and glanced away. Gently, Julian hooked his finger under her chin, turning her face back.

“You what?”

“I pushed him. Oh, Julian, I pushed him. Really hard.”

He stood still, taking this in. “Are you saying you shoved him over the terrace wall?”

“No!” She shook her head vehemently, and then muttered with
less conviction, “I don’t know. I didn’t think we were that near the edge. The thing is, he stumbled backward into the drinks trolley. I didn’t hang around to see what happened next. All I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“Okay,” he whispered, pulling her in to him again. “It’s okay.” But as he tried to reassure her, he wondered. Could Mara have unintentionally sent Jean-Claude sailing over the parapet after all?

Mara’s hypersensitive antennae immediately picked up Julian’s doubt. She stiffened.

“You don’t believe me.”

“Of course I do. Look, if anything, it was an accident. He assaulted you, there was a struggle. No one can blame you for running—”

The monstrosity of what he was saying hit her hard. She broke sharply from him.

“You think I did it!” Her voice rose in volume with every word. “You really think I knocked him over and then
left
him down there? That I would be capa-bu-ble of just
leaving
him for—for animals to eat?” She was close to tears. To her, that was his far greater offense: not just his suspicion that there had been more to the push than she remembered or wanted to admit, but that he thought her base enough to run away, knowing that Jean-Claude was lying, injured or dying, at the bottom of the ravine.

“No.” He tried to frame another denial. “That’s not what I meant.”

But she shouted him down. “You bastard! You really think I did it. Oh, leave me alone. Just leave me alone!”

If there had been a ledge handy, Mara really thought she would have shoved Julian off it.

M
ara sat at her kitchen table, head in her hands. It was one of life’s bitterest ironies that the people you trusted most did not, when the chips were down, trust you. Julian had gone, protesting ineffectually.
He, Loulou, Prudence, Mado, and Paul—all of them were secretly convinced of her guilt. And her cowardice. They were just too polite, or unwilling, to say so. She blew her nose. Miserably, she acknowledged that they, Julian included, were probably reflecting her own terrible self-doubts which, as the night wore on, grew increasingly greater. Over and over, she played through the scene: the struggle, the push, Jean-Claude staggering backward. It now seemed to her that she really had caused him to fall over the parapet.
But she had not knowingly left him to die
. Of that she was certain. Could she get off on a claim of self-defense? Or would she spend the rest of her life in a French prison? And then there was the mess the animals had made of him, eating him as he lay at the bottom of the ravine. The thought made her physically ill.

Jazz, sensing her despair, moved in to sit beside her. Also, he wanted his dinner. He ventured a low sigh. Then a sharp bark. She filled his feed dish and watched him woodenly as he gobbled his food. She herself had no appetite.

Well, at least she had the measure of him. Julian, that was. Not there in the crunch. Also, she was sure she’d surprised a guilty look on his face when Prudence had mentioned Denise. How hollow his protestations about permanence now seemed. Maybe it was her fate to get entangled with men with short shelf-lives. If she had thought of Julian as turning in circles, going nowhere, she now saw herself for what she was: a log in high water on which all manner of undesirable debris snagged and clung.

What she needed was a long, stiff drink, but she only had a bottle of supermarket Sauvignon Blanc in the house. She uncorked it and drank it at room temperature since she had forgotten to chill it in the
frigo
. It tasted sour, and it went straight to her head. By the time she had finished the bottle, it was nearly midnight and she was feeling slightly sick. She was tired to the bone, but knew she would not sleep. With a sigh, she rose and stumbled out to her studio. Her garden was filled with dark shapes, shrubbery in need of
trimming and oversized statues (Patsy’s) from the time when sculpturing had been her friend’s second avocation. May as well get it over with, she thought, flipping on the studio light and zigzagging through the obstacle course of litter on her way to the computer.

Patsy’s reply to her last message was waiting for her, cheerful and unperturbed by the latest developments:

With wooden fingers, Mara typed:

It took her forty minutes to complete her message. She almost forgot to ask, and therefore had to append as a postscript, the question that Patsy’s e-mail had raised:

TUESDAY MORNING, 11 MAY

R
ain thundered on the roof of the car. Like a frantic heart, the wipers beat their rhythm across the windshield, thudding at the bottom of their arc, squealing on the return. Christophe slowed. It had just gone six in the morning, but it was as dark as night and almost impossible to see. His headlights illuminated dancing puddles in the road immediately before him but scarcely penetrated the heavy sheets of rain that drifted diagonally across his view. Finally, he pulled onto the shoulder and cut the engine. He sat for a moment, staring out into the moving wall of water. Fumbling above his head, he flicked on the interior light of the car. A newspaper lay on the passenger seat, folded to expose the morning’s headlines:
Beast Strikes Again?
He opened the paper and scanned the front page to read again the part that had so disturbed him: “… An unidentified Canadian woman who was with the deceased prior to his death was questioned and released … dined with Fournier and discussed a business matter, claimed to have left him alive and well … treating the case as a suspicious death …”

With a rush of anxiety that made him almost nauseated, Christophe crumpled the paper into a ball. If he had foreseen the ghastly way things would turn out, he would never have involved Mara, would never have engaged that cunning bastard Jean-Claude. But now, even if Jean-Claude was no longer in a position to talk, Mara had seen him prior to his death, had discussed with him a “business matter.” Which meant that the two of them had
probably been in it together. Or at least that there was a risk that Jean-Claude had told her everything.

You can’t be sure of that
, a voice in his head reasoned.
But can you take the chance?
another voice, the voice of the eye, argued. If Mara had the information, what would she do with it? What could she
not
do with it? Christophe stared into the rearview mirror. His left eye, the yellow one, looked slyly back at him.
You must
, both voices rang out at once,
stop her from talking
. With a groan, he plunged his face into hands that he no longer recognized as his own.

TUESDAY MORNING, 11 MAY

I
f France ever held a contest for Most Glamorous
Boulangère
, Marie-Sylvette, née Méliès, of the Boulangerie Méliès in Brames, would have won hands-down. She was an imposing woman in her fifties who wore her hair swept up at the sides in two silver wings. She had a neat chin, full lips, dark, lustrous eyes, and exquisitely plucked eyebrows that expressed with the slightest twitch an impressive range of emotions. Her bosom thrust like a ship’s prow beyond a tightly controlled tummy, for she never appeared without a girdle, and the whole of her moved grandly about on slim legs that ended in small feet shod in smart mid-heeled shoes.