The Orchid Shroud (39 page)

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” said the gendarme.

P
ierre required regular updates on the landscaping project. Julian provided them willingly enough. It gave him a chance to rub in the fact that his plan was going ahead without most of the Crotte’s cost-cutting alterations. Unfortunately, his report this morning was not upbeat. He sat in Pierre’s newly completed office at the back of the pavilion, taking in the beige walls, the fluorescent lighting, and the smell of paint. Pierre’s environment, like the man himself, was dull, grudging, and guaranteed to give Julian a headache.

Pierre began: “You’ve been working on that so-called water feature for almost a week. Why isn’t it functioning?”

“It is. There’s just a spot of trouble with the return. It may have to do with the angle of the pump. I’m planning to have it out today to reset it.”

A moist, flabby sound told Julian that the Mouth-Breather had sucked air.

“I was against the idea of it from the start. Waste of good money. I suppose it’s how you fellows line your pockets, throwing in expensive add-ons. I don’t need to remind you our first delegation of local buyers will be coming through on Wednesday. Sixty-five percent of our sales are to restaurants in the area, so this is an important show. We’ve never received them on the premises before en masse, and I’m only too aware of the money this circus of Denise’s is going to burn. It had better pay off, or we’re in deep trouble. Our cost overruns for your landscaping services alone are unconscionable. Now you tell me the pump doesn’t work. I hesitate to inquire about the status of the overall project!”

“It does work,” Julian retorted irritably. “It just needs adjusting. And the overall project is doing just fine. We’re on schedule, the planting is done, the rockery is nearly finished, and, if I say so myself, the approach looks terrific—”

“Naturally you’d say that.” Pierre inhaled again, with a shiny display of gums.

Antoine appeared in the doorway.
“Ah, vous voilà,”
he addressed Julian. “Your lad needs help.”

Julian jumped up, glad of any opportunity to end the interview.

“And that’s another thing,” Pierre called after him. “That man of yours. Spends most of his time leaning on his shovel. I object to paying—”

By then Julian was out of earshot, hurrying after Antoine’s quickly disappearing back. He was surprised to find that the viticulturist had stopped to wait for him outside the pavilion. He was even more surprised when Antoine said:

“Pierre’s all right. Just doing his job, which is keeping track of the euros. It’s what he’s best at.”

“And I suppose marketing is what Denise is best at?” Julian asked.

“That, and she has a good head for business.” Antoine paused, gazing out over the valley. “I’ll step down one of these days, and the issue of succession will be difficult. Pierre is older and understands money. Denise is a risk-taker. She could move Coteaux de Bonfond in the direction it needs to go, or she could ruin us. I believe firmly that a body can have only one head.”

It was a significant admission that perhaps explained the animosity between brother and sister. Julian had no doubt that control of the winery was something Denise would kill for, ambitious as she was. However, it gave her more of a motive for bumping off her brother than Jean-Claude.

Fearing that Antoine had overheard the talk about the water feature, Julian tried to head off trouble. “Look, I know your first delegation is due next week. I can absolutely assure you that everything will be finished on time.”

“I count on it,” said Antoine. Typically brief, he knew what he wanted, got straight to the point, and didn’t try to do your job. He also made his expectations clear in a way that left you in no doubt that you’d better come up with the goods. Somehow Julian felt
that Antoine had always been like that. He could not, for example, imagine him as a whingeing child or a spotty, lovesick youth.

“I heard,” said Antoine, positively hanging around to chat, “about old Didier. And that Canadian woman. She’s a friend of yours, isn’t she? What was she doing out there with Didier anyway?”

“Trying to get information,” Julian said, purposely vague.

“Hmm. Police still think she had something to do with Fournier’s death?”

“Not anymore. They’re going after Christophe, from what I hear.”

Antoine frowned. Then he said, almost angrily, “Damned fool. Running off like that. Never had any sense.”

“Were you and he close?” Julian profited from Antoine’s unusual garrulity to ask. “Growing up as cousins, I mean?”

Antoine stuck out his lower lip. His shoulders lifted slightly. “There are a dozen years between us. To me, he was always just a spoiled little kid. Anyway, his side was too posh for us. My father liked land, the feel of earth between his fingers. Christophe’s father liked buildings. That was the difference.”

“But you’ve known him all his life,” Julian fished. “Do you really think he’s capable of killing anyone?”

This time, Antoine gave a full Gallic shrug. “Who isn’t? If the stakes are high enough.”

A
t the end of the lane, Bernard had downed tools. Antoine had said he needed help. What he needed was rescuing. The winery runabout was parked nearby with the driver’s door hanging open. Denise was standing in front of the human bulldozer, gesticulating emphatically. She saw Julian and turned on him.

“If it’s about the water feature—” he began.

“Screw the fountain!” Her slim body writhed with anger and her dark eyes sparked dangerously, reminding Julian of a spitting
live wire. He shuddered to think that he had bedded—or been bedded by—her not that long ago. “I want to know what you’re going to do about those
foutu
potholes.
C’est scandaleux!
They’re as big as bomb craters. I don’t want my buyers breaking their heads.”

Julian put up both hands, more as a shield than a gesture of placation. “Look, I’m sorry, but you have to expect a bit of gouging when you shift a ton of stone plus heavy equipment over a dirt road. I’ll have a grader here at the beginning of the week to level everything out. It’ll be as smooth as a billiard table, promise.” How he was going to organize a grader before Wednesday was one more thing he now had to worry about. Another was who was going to pay for it.

“It had better be. As for your fountain, I don’t want to know. Just get it working,
entendu
?” Denise scrambled into the car, slammed the door, and shot off toward the pavilion in a cloud of dust.

Julian turned on Bernard. “What the hell did you do to upset her so much?”

“Nothing! I swear it. She just drove up and came at me, shooting black looks like bullets and going for my guts.
Bordel!
If you ask me, I think she hit a pothole on the way up here and cracked her nut.” Bernard picked up his shovel. “So did you tell Pierre you have to replace the pump?”

“What?” said Julian. Something Bernard had just said about Denise caused a series of disconnected thoughts to rattle about in his brain like a sudden hailstorm. He stood for a moment, his jaw slack.
Bloody hell. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
“Er—no,” he said absently to his assistant. “Look, just get on with it, will you?”

T
he
faucheuse
blocked three-quarters of the narrow roadway, its cutting arm scything the tall grass on the right-hand verge. Julian seethed with impatience. There was no way past it, and leaning
on the horn, he knew from experience, would get him nowhere. Those fellows took a lot of abuse from motorists and were quick to turn touchy.

A kilometer or so down the road, where the road widened, more through happenstance than planning, the driver decided to be obliging. He raised the sawlike arm and pulled the big, bouncing machine slightly to the side, giving Julian just enough room to squeeze past. With a wave of the hand, he shot forward and sped away toward the turnoff to Aurillac.

He reached it too late. Mara, Laurent, and the Serafims had gone. With Didier still in hospital and Thérèse at her sister’s, there was no one there to let him in. The place had a blank, unfriendly look. He ran around the sides and back of the house, searching for a way in. All of the wooden shutters of the ground floor had been fastened, except one, which flapped loose against a small window at the rear. Needs must, he thought, and found a flat stone. With a muttered apology to the housekeeper, he smashed the window, using an edge of the stone to clear the jagged shards from the frame. There was barely enough room for him to squeeze through. He went in legs-first, scratching his arms and hands in the process, and dropping down with a crunch onto broken glass.

He was in the kitchen. He ran up three stone steps—the kitchen was built at a slightly lower level than the rest of the structure—into the main part of the house, through the long dining room and the grand salon, to the library. He went straight to the windows, opening them and throwing the shutters back. For what he had to do, he needed full illumination.

Light poured into the room. It fell in long rectangles on the tiled floor and struck a corner of the large table whereon Christophe’s family tree was displayed in all its bogus glory. Slowly, Julian took in the many generations of de Bonfonds displayed upon the walls. He paused before Hugo, before Henriette, studied attentively the portrait of Dieudonné the child and, farther
down the wall, the photograph of Dieudonné the man, smug and flush with the patina of prosperity.

Julian stepped back and took a deep breath.

“Right, you lot,” he said aloud to the host of listening portraits.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light. Xavier de Bonfond seemed to greet his declaration with a ghastly grin.

FRIDAY EVENING, 28 MAY

T
his had better be worth it.” Paul wiped his hands on his apron. The restaurant had cleared. He looked beat. He drew a chair up to the table and sat down heavily.

Julian tossed his napkin aside and swept his eye around the circle of faces. “Bernard put me onto it.”

“What’s Bernard got to do with it?” demanded Mado, looking around for their weekend waiter, but he had vanished outside for a smoke.

Julian grinned. “Denise nearly had the hide off him this afternoon, but we won’t go into that. The point is, when he was telling me about it, he described her as ‘shooting black looks like bullets.’ Now, I don’t know if you remember, Mara, but in one of her letters, Cécile also said something about Dieudonné’s ‘black looks.’”

“I took it as a turn of phrase,” Mara said vaguely. She wore a T-shirt that declared:
Everyone is born right-handed. Only the gifted overcome it
.

“No, I think they were both describing what they saw. In Denise’s case, I have a pretty good idea what Bernard meant. She has these black eyes that really gun you down.”

“And in Dieudonné’s case?”

“That’s what I went back to Aurillac to check. I had to have another look at those portraits.”

“Well?” they all asked.

“There were two babies.”

“We know that.” Prudence drummed a set of enameled fingernails on the table.

“Only one was put in the wall.”

Loulou pointed out, “We know that, too. Or at least they weren’t put in the same wall.”

Julian was enjoying himself. “Look, let’s start from the beginning, shall we? You remember, Mara, when I was telling you about recessive and dominant traits in orchids? Well, the same principle applies to all living things. It’s what makes us what we are. Now, if you look at Hugo’s and Henriette’s portraits, although the exact eye coloring is hard to determine, both of them are shown as having light eyes. Blue, we know in the case of Henriette, because Christophe told us she was famous for her
Myosotis
eyes. And almost certainly blue for Hugo. Cécile described the man who came to her in the night, the one we think was Hugo, as having a
‘regard bleu’—
a blue look.”

“Where’s this taking us?” Paul crossed large arms over a massive chest.

“To Dieudonné. It was impossible for me to determine the color of Dieudonné’s eyes from his photo because everything is reduced to brownish tints. However, the painting of Dieudonné as a boy told me what I needed to know.” He turned again to Mara. “You’re following me now, aren’t you?”

Mara struggled to remember her high-school biology. “Blue eyes are recessive. Two blue-eyed parents can produce only blue-eyed children.”

“Well”—Julian waggled his head—“it’s actually a bit more complicated than that because eye color is polygenic, but, yes, it would be extremely unusual for blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child. The fact that Hugo’s parents were both light-eyed stacks the odds against it even more.”

So what color, Mara tried to recall, were the eyes of Hugo’s and
Henriette’s son? Her memory worked up a round-faced child with dark, curling hair and dark eyes. In fact, a “black look.”

“I suppose what you’re trying to tell us is that if Dieudonné had dark eyes he couldn’t have been Hugo and Henriette’s child,” she said finally.

“Right. Or at least it would be very unlikely.”