Murder is a Long Time Coming Read online

  Murder is A Long Time Coming

  Anthony Masters

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Prologue

  The cherry trees were in blossom on the morning they died. It was dawn and their delicate fragrance was in the misty air, along with the hint of lavender and herbs. They crossed the Provençal orchard quietly, their hands bound, their guards following. The interrogation had been short, the accusations damning – and their protests had been stilled by blows. They were hardly more than boys and their terrified parents and relatives were not allowed to accompany them to the place hurriedly chosen for their execution.

  The mist was fleecy and translucent and the path through so familiar to all of them. They had played here as children; taken the girls of St Esprit here as adolescents. Now their footsteps were muffled on the flinty path for the last time. A light, darting breeze brought petals floating down and a few settled in the young men’s hair. Most of them were smoking cigarettes given to them by their captors and they greedily drew the smoke deep inside them. No one spoke and the sigh of the dying wind stilled the slender branches of the cherry trees. Some of the young men had Roman names – Octavius, Sylvain, Antonius, Petronius. There were six of them, numbed, unbelieving, innocent of anything except lust and selfishness and natural curiosity. Still they could not understand, not accept. They were like the trees, stilled now, without alarm.

  At the end of the orchard was a stile and beyond it a grassy field. There, a woman waited, shivering a little in the early morning stillness. The fragrance from the nearby lavender fields increased as their captors nudged them on. There was no commanding officer; it was to be a quick, revengeful business – an example to the community.

  They were pushed towards a corner of the field and put into a single line. A German soldier took a photograph, then another. Still no one spoke. The wind came back and the mist rolled over the olive grove beyond, making the stunted trees insubstantial. A twisted limb appeared here and there – and then was gone.

  ‘We haven’t done anything.’ His voice burst out, cracked and coarse in the stillness. ‘We haven’t done anything,’ he repeated, more muted, more helplessly accepting.

  ‘Please,’ whimpered another. ‘Please –’

  Suddenly, the woman who had been watching ran forward and stood in front of the line of young Frenchmen.

  ‘Kummel would never authorise this,’ she shouted. ‘You can’t just mow them down –’

  ‘How do you know what his orders are?’ one of the Germans sneered. ‘Or shouldn’t we enquire?’

  There was a burst of laughter and then a long pause. The woman still stood there uncertainly, but, ignoring her, the German soldiers assembled in a ragged line. There were eight of them – only a year or so older than their victims. The wind came for the third time, and with it the fusillade of shots. The noise seemed to go on for a very long time and the young men crumpled and fell. The last to go was the woman, who fell slowly, finally embracing the earth. The grass rustled, the wind leapt and died – leapt and died again. Then, the shots ceased.

  Slowly, a German soldier put down his gun, took his camera out of his tunic pocket and began to photograph the bodies.

  1

  June 1990

  The house and gardens were still, somnolent in the afternoon heat. Marius walked slowly down the tiled path to the walled garden, dreading what he was going to find in the old conservatory. There had only been two scrawled notes so far. He had torn them both up, but another was bound to follow. Of course, he had seen him. Trespassing. That was why he didn’t hurry as he had done the other times. He knew what the note would say. There was no point in seeing it sooner than he had to.

  A bee circled in front of him, lazily inscribing a long loop in the drowsy, pollen-hazed air. Marius glanced behind him at the faint noise of the drawing-room doors opening and closing. It was the old woman. His mother. Come out to sniff the heady aroma of the sun-baked garden, like an old cat sensing comfort. Maybe memory even. Since the stroke she had lost her identity, her clarity, so much of her mind. But maybe the basking flowers and the dusty shrubs might stir some dim sensation in Solange’s dulled consciousness. The house with its four cupolas, ivy-strangled walls, flaking grey shutters and overgrown, weed-choked flower-beds seemed a suitable wilderness background to her own husk of a being. She stumbled through the long grass on the drive, childishly looking about her. Marius quickened his pace. He didn’t want her to amble after him.

  In front of the Château Letoric was a small ornamental lake with a fountain at its centre. In its heyday, the cherub spouted water from a pouting mouth, but now its mouth was jammed with rotting vegetation and water creepers clung to its stone body like vines. The lake still had water in the centre, but the edges were thick with reeds and weed and bulrushes.

  Now as Marius opened the conservatory door, he was struck by the virulent buzzing of copulating insects which filled the humid air inside. He smelt geraniums, mint, decay all in one compressed perfume. Deliberately procrastinating, he looked ahead. Beyond the conservatory was the overgrown garden. Beyond that the forest that stretched to Viles.

  Sure enough the note was there, spiked by a garden fork. A typically melodramatic symbol, worthy of Jean-Pierre. The wine Marius had taken at lunchtime suddenly rose in his throat like bile and he began to shake somewhere inside – somewhere that hurt. At forty-eight Marius had thought he was immune to emotional shock, and certainly the reaction to Jean-Pierre’s first two clumsily scrawled notes had been comparatively low-key. The hurt had not lingered. But when Marius began to realise how serious he was, he knew that everything in his world was at risk. Essentially Monique would not be able to accept what had started all those summers ago.

  The note read: ‘GIVE ME WHAT I’M OWED – OR EVERYONE WILL KNOW.’ And what Jean-Pierre considered himself owed was 250,000 francs.

  Marius scrumpled up the cheap notepaper. He would see Jean-Pierre and stop all this childishness right away. Quietly, severely, he would tell him that he was committing a criminal offence and that whilst he was prepared to overlook it, to put it down to the crude act of a crude mind, he was not going to allow it to happen again.

  His curious, new-found confidence put Marius in a defiant mood. He shoved the paper into the pocket of his corduroy trousers and moved outside into the turgid sun again. It seemed, if anything, to be even hotter. A butterfly darted from behind a lavender bush and the sweet musky smell made him feel light-headed. The memories flooded his mind with erotic recollection. It had been here on the long soft grass that they had first made love so many years ago. He’d been a boy when it started. Both the same age. Both wanting the same thing. Not needing to ask, just drawn together by instinct. The garden was more or less the same as it had been then: overgrown, the grass slightly rank, moon daisies growing amidst the wilderness, unpruned roses straggling up the walls. Marius began to shake again. But this time not out of fear. Despite himself some of the old desire had returned.

  ‘I’ve never known what collaboration really means.’

  ‘It all seems clear to me,’ said André.

  ‘Does it?’

  Annette and André Valier were sitting in the back garden of their home in St Esprit. Theirs was a tall elegant house in a street of tall elegant houses. Shuttered, balconied, plastered – all were inhabited by the professional pe
ople who had decided to live in the small-town atmosphere of St Esprit, conveniently near Aix yet with a charm of its own.

  André was editor of the Journal Discours with an office in Aix. He was dark-haired, slender, with rather a fidgety little goatee beard – an affectation that had always irritated her, just as his tendency to lecture her did. When she had first met him they had both been at the Sorbonne and André had been very much the successful student, clever with politics, clever with social manipulation, surrounding himself with his own élite group of sycophants and acolytes. He played the intellectual grasper and she, as a shy innocent from a devout Catholic family, had felt privileged to be allowed entry to André’s circle – and later to his bed. But over the years he had become drier; more provincially than nationally ambitious; a big fish in a murky pool – while she had lost her faith and gathered small-town sophistication.

  Annette ran a high-class local restaurant. Uneasily childless, they had filled their lives with friends and food, ideas and conversation, wine and discussion. They were still young, still in their thirties, with enough money to enjoy foreign travel. And then there was golf and the Press Club in Aix. The restaurant was quite a social focus too, so they had little time to themselves, and the frantic pace of their lives dowsed the pain of twelve years of failed conception. The failure had started out as a surface wound between them, but now it was deepening, beginning to fester.

  Today, the recently revived Larche affair dominated their conversation. Most people in St Esprit had spent months talking about it, and Journal Discours had not only run some contentious leading articles on the affair but had also had its correspondence columns filled with the suddenly released voices of those who had harboured fermenting bitterness and suspicion.

  ‘It all comes down to the same thing in the end,’ André continued. ‘They’ve had nothing else to think about since the war.’

  ‘It’s 1990,’ she said. ‘Forty-five years. A long time.’

  ‘Yes – it is a long time. But time here is different. Haven’t you noticed?’

  He sounded faintly mocking and she looked up sharply. The mocking note had only entered his voice recently, and it was combined with an impatience that Annette found increasingly threatening. Ever since she had been so summarily dismissed from Henri Larche’s employ, André had been disappointed in some way she couldn’t understand. As much as he tended to get on her nerves, she clearly was now beginning to dissatisfy him. Annette couldn’t understand what she had done; after all the restaurant by the river was very successful, and what had been so special about working for a retired judge who was writing a dowdy family history? Far less interesting than running a restaurant, she thought defensively.

  ‘We’ve been here ten years, André. I can hardly remember Paris.’

  ‘Things happen in Paris. Nothing has really happened here since the war; nothing of any note, nothing to remember.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’

  ‘Is it? What did Giono write about Provence?’ He got up and went into the house, leaving her with the depressing certainty that he was going to read to her – and then lecture. Maybe we should have more people around, she thought. Maybe they should limit the times they spent together although, God knows, they were limited enough already. They always seemed to be surrounded by people. She reached for her bag and took out a small mirror and stared critically into it. Drawn-back dark hair, large brown eyes, good complexion. Less favourable points then obtruded. There was a hint of sallowness, lines around the mouth, a droop to the chin. Was he going with someone else, she suddenly wondered. Was their mutual inability to conceive finally driving him away? All the little irritations and contemptuous impatience – was that what it meant? The first shock of the idea made her tremble in the swamping heat. She longed for the Mistral to blow, longed for something to shatter the calm. That was the problem with their lives. The calm. Like St Esprit. The town lived – had lived – too long in calm waters. Its inhabitants were thirsting for change. And perhaps – perhaps André was too.

  She had never told André the real reason that Henri Larche had sacked her. But she knew it was because she had read Marie Leger’s letter to him in all its filth and candour. He couldn’t bear her knowing. She had been amazed herself. Amazed and frightened. But it was all over now and she admired her own enterprise with the restaurant even if André didn’t, patronising her with his distant interest.

  He was coming out now, book in hand, his face wreathed in the self-indulgent smile of the man with the captive audience. His beard almost wagged with complacency.

  ‘Listen. “All civilised people see the day beginning at dawn or a little after or a long time after or whatever time their work begins; this they lengthen, according to their work, during what they call ‘all day long’ and end when they close their eyes. It is they who say the days are long. On the contrary, they are round.”’

  ‘Yes,’ said Annette dutifully. ‘In Provence the days are round. I’ve never felt their length – even in the restaurant.’

  ‘The days are long in Aix,’ he replied. ‘They don’t worry about collaborators there. There’s too much to do.’

  ‘Maybe in round days the past isn’t so far away,’ she ventured. ‘Maybe the 1940s are as near as the 1990s.’

  ‘I think that’s true.’ He was no longer mocking, back to his old self. But who was that other person inside him? The one who was growing tired of her?

  ‘You never explained,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Explained what?’

  ‘You said collaboration was all too clear to you.’

  ‘Well, so it is to anyone,’ he began patronisingly. ‘During the German occupation most people colluded with the occupying forces in some small way or the other simply by living and eating and drinking and going about their daily business. But there were some who actually aided the German occupation. They were the traitors. Some were caught right away; others confessed later. But some continued in public office unsuspected. If it hadn’t been for the Lyon trial nothing would have happened. Larche would have retired safely. No accusations were made. A minor war criminal – an old Nazi – half crazy, demented, talked about a Frenchman heading up that tribunal. He never mentioned Larche’s name, but the tongues have been wagging ever since.’

  ‘I know Henri Larche. He is a man of honour. I can’t help feeling that the Journal stirred it up again,’ she said flatly.

  ‘You mean I did.’

  The tension between them was back. In all their years of marriage, Annette had never criticised André’s editorial integrity. Now, in a few seconds, the conversation had become a weapon in her hands. Why? Was it his earlier mockery? Her own suspicions of the person inside him? And was she going to use the weapon? Annette wiped perspiration from her brow. ‘You let it through,’ she accused.

  ‘Daudein’s a good journalist.’

  ‘He dug it up again.’

  ‘He only wrote about what was there.’

  ‘There was nothing there. Just rumours.’ Annette paused. She could back off now. But again she continued. ‘All your tame sleuth did was to dig up dirt – and there’s plenty of it in this town.’

  ‘When local rumour suggested Larche might have presided over an unofficial tribunal that executed half a dozen young men from this town. We had to investigate.’

  ‘Larche denies everything.’ She paused. ‘Those young men murdered a German officer – it was the Germans who killed them.’

  ‘It seems they may well have wanted a respectable civilian – a judge, say, to give the tribunal some hint of respectability.’

  ‘Isn’t it better to forget it all? Safer?’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘Everybody. It’s too long ago – even if the days are round.’

  ‘I don’t think it is.’

  ‘He’s an old man.’

  ‘There are many old people who remember.’

  ‘And he has a wife who was a heroine in the Resistance.’

  There’s an
irony.’

  ‘She was badly tortured.’

  ‘Another irony.’ André’s voice was strained now, but so was hers.

  ‘She’s ill.’

  ‘She doesn’t know what’s going on. This won’t harm her.’

  ‘It’ll hurt his son,’ she snapped.

  ‘Marius? He’s a policeman. Interpol. He should be able to understand everyone’s concern.’

  ‘I know them. Remember? They’re people to me – vulnerable people.’

  There was a long silence between them while they both thought of their real bone of contention. Annette knew they weren’t really arguing about Henri. They were sparring, hoping to hurt, fighting round the deep pit of their childless lives and the desiccation of their personalities.

  ‘I’m merely stating all the facts. I’m sure he’ll accept that all the facts about his father should be revealed. After all, it could clear his name.’ André was blandly reasonable.

  ‘Facts? They’re all rumours.’

  ‘Facts will emerge.’ He sounded almost pompous now.

  ‘Half the letters are anonymous.’

  ‘I never knew you cared so much.’ He was genuinely surprised.

  ‘I don’t,’ she said quietly and almost told him what she did care about. She stared up at André, wondering if he was about to do the same. The silence between them lengthened.

  ‘You are not making progress. You should be asking more questions, trying to clear my name. The point is – as I never headed that tribunal, who did? Everyone should be regarded as a possible traitor; everyone who was in a public position at that time.’ Henri spooned omelette into his mouth. It was runny, under-cooked, and in the dim, shadowed light of the high-ceilinged dining-room, the food looked palLid and inedible. At the other end of the table sat Solange. In the middle, Marius. Early dinner had become a habit, served by Estelle, the only family retainer left, who creaked out from St Esprit every day on her black-framed relic of a bicycle. His parents were recluses now: Solange because of her illness; Henri because of his shame. Marius found it curious that Estelle still grimly came to offer her half-cooked cuisine. The other servants – the housekeeper and the gardener – had long since departed, shortly after the Lyon trial. Excuses had been made: age, family responsibilities, fatigue, ailments – the list was endless. His father, originally incapable of cooking, made little messes and a nurse would call occasionally to see Solange.