The Poisoning Angel (14 page)

‘I have to wait until the sauce coats both sides of the spatula at once,’ she chanted to herself. ‘Where Rose is concerned,’ the woman from Morbihan continued, with her back to the drawing room and eyes fixed on the wall in front of her, ‘you might also think of poisoning.’

She herself said that! She was becoming overconfident, but she enjoyed playing with fire.

Elderly Dr Baudoin followed her lead. ‘I thought of that as well.’

‘I would have let you taste her last soup, so you could check,’
went on the servant from Plouhinec, ‘but I gave what was left to blind beggars who could donate their useless eyes to the Vilaine fish.’

‘Hmm, hmm?’ Bidard de la Noë almost choked. ‘The villain’s dish, you say?’

‘The Vilaine fish!’

‘Oh, I thought you said …’

Young Dr Pinault was preoccupied, holding a finger to his temple as he gazed at a piece of furniture that the dead woman had polished and that now reflected her corpse, while Thunderflower put on a show of regret.

‘That poor Rose Tessier. I used to call her
Rouanen ar foin
(Queen of the Meadows). I did love her, just as I loved that poor unfortunate who died at the Hôtel du Bout du Monde where I was unable to stay. Perrotte suddenly fell into her plate there.’

‘Ruptured diaphragm,’ Jean-Marie Pinault pronounced automatically, while the cook added salt and pepper to the sauce, muttering to herself. ‘Not forgetting a few pinches of nutmeg to give its distinctive taste. Well, this béchamel is more like a roux but it’s not life or death. Will your doctors be staying to dinner, Monsieur Théophile?’

The two doctors scratched their heads and thought of other things, while the crime specialist gave a cough: ‘Hmm, hmm.’

‘You clear your throat a lot, Professor,’ observed old Dr Baudoin. ‘The start of autumn catarrh, perhaps?’

‘No, it’s this business that …’

‘Madame? Madame! Hmm, hmm!’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. Do please excuse me, Monsieur Bidard de la
Noë. As I rang your doorbell, I was watching two old Normans on the river bank. We’ve not seen their like here for a long time. They’re asking passers-by for a lock of hair, then sticking them to their bodies with mud …’

‘Madame, have you disturbed me in order to describe picturesque scenes from local life?’

‘I am Françoise Huriaux’s mother; you engaged her as a maid on 1 December 1850.’

‘Ah? Then do come in. How is my pretty little housemaid?’

‘Better. In Dr Baudoin’s care at the Hôtel-Dieu, finally, after receiving the last rites, Françoise is recovering. Now she’s out of the coma, the girl we took for dead is coming back to life.’

‘For ever?’ This worried Thunderflower, who was sitting on a chair in the drawing room, slipping Rose Tellier’s glass necklace through the buttonhole on a cuff from one of Perrotte Macé’s blouses.

‘Hmm, hmm, Madame Huriaux, tell your daughter we are impatiently waiting for her to return here.’

‘Oh, yes,’ confirmed the cook. ‘Just let her come back …’

Outside, the spring light was slanting through the foliage of a bush, which was coming to life again, and in at the window where it hit Thunderflower’s sensitive eyes; she shaded them with her palm. Next she bent down to bundle the necklace joined to the blouse into her bag, which was bursting at the seams, and put it away in a cupboard. Then she pulled the curtains across the panes framing the show of the perpetual rebirth of plant life, which annoyed her.

‘I’ll bake Françoise a wonderful little cake to welcome her back. It won’t fail to make an impact.’

‘That’s kind of you, Hélène,’ said the law professor, approvingly.

‘Monsieur Bidard de la Noë,’ began the mother of the hospitalised maid, resolutely. ‘I’m here to inform you, this 18th day of May 1851, that I wish my daughter to give up her employment in your household. She is handing in her apron. Better that than give up her life.’

The future Mayor of Rennes was flabbergasted. His bowed legs took him to sit in his Louis XV armchair, making it appear to have six feet. He gestured his visitor to a chair.

‘Well now, I’m sure you’ll appreciate I’m surprised, Madame Huriaux. Your decision is unexpected, but, most importantly, is it Françoise’s own? She is of age, after all.’

‘Come now, Professor. You know my daughter. You must have realised that at the age of twenty-three she is humility and gentleness but also blissful ignorance. That slight, slender creature is devoid of her share of intelligence.’

‘She’s an imbecile …’ muttered Thunderflower, standing beside the reattached kitchen door, biting into the skin of a lime. ‘But she’ll be bloody lucky if she never comes back here,’ she concluded, swallowing the bitter juice that flowed into her mouth.

She put the citrus fruit down, only slightly injured, on a console table. ‘Don’t worry, Professor. I’ve already found you another maid. Her name is Rosalie Sarrazin.’

‘Ever more prompt to take action, Hélène!’ said her employer, admiringly. ‘Four cooks and two housemaids, one dead, inside a year – it’s not easy to find suitable domestics. Fortunately it’s working out with you. That’s something. But Madame Huriaux, you also spoke of “giving up her life”. When she’s with you, does
Françoise consider me responsible for the sudden breakdown of her health, her dizziness, the difficulty she has in climbing stairs and even holding a needle? Is she of the opinion that I work her too hard? Does she complain about me?’

‘No, not about you.’

‘Then about whom?’

‘Could I speak to you in private, Monsieur Bidard de la Noë?’

Thunderflower took a deep breath. She was beginning to find the mother of the woman who had come back to life a bit too talkative. She would gladly have cooked her a little something to shut her up, but Bidard de la Noë ordered her, ‘Go into the kitchen and shut the door, Hélène.’

The servant obeyed. ‘
Quit, quit, quit
,’ she added in Bas-Breton, which might be translated as ‘OK, OK, I’m going.’ She got hold of a bottle of brandy hidden in one of the kitchen cupboards, and took a swig while, on the other side of the door, she could hear the blasted mother telling tales.

‘Lately Françoise would come home on a Sunday increasingly ill. She’d drink litres of water. Her hands and feet were swollen and she’d be tottering about.’

‘So the cook’s knocking back the brandy but it’s the maid who does the tottering.’ Thunderflower wiped her mouth with the back of her hand in amusement.

There was a lengthy silence on the part of the former deputy prosecutor, who responded only by saying, ‘Go on, Madame Huriaux.’

‘Often on her days off Françoise would tell me, “Oh, those herb bouillons of Hélène’s, I’ve had enough of them. Dear Mother, I can’t stomach any of what she serves up at meal times. When it’s
time for lunch or dinner, rather than saying. ‘
À table,’ she says, ‘À l’abattoir
’. Once, when I complained about what she’d made for me, she retorted, ‘If you want to be fed like Monsieur, ask him to invite you into the dining room.’ When I prefer to go hungry, she goes into my garret and pours oil of vitriol on to my clothes, to burn them.” I fear that one day, Professor, you will be telling me my daughter has died in your household.’

Thunderflower was pacing up and down the kitchen, still holding the bottle, and stopped to look at her reflection in the distorting mirror of a hanging saucepan.

‘Gracious me, I’ve filled out a lot. That’s no good, I was always so dainty. What I’m turning into …’

At the age of forty-eight, she lamented, ‘We shouldn’t have to grow old. The people who cross paths with me are lucky. They escape this shipwreck – except that little trollop, of course.’

Taking another swig out of the bottle, she amused herself by imitating her employer’s speech tic.

‘So you’re drinking, hmm, hmm, Hélène?’

‘I worship pure water and its horrors from afar, Monsieur the specialist in crime. Doubtless I’ll pay for it some day, but all that is yet to come.’

Fat Thunderflower had to resign herself to the fact that her colleague was not leaving the household feet first. As she heard the law professor asking, ‘Madame Huriaux, are you sure of what you are telling me?’ she made herself a promise: ‘I shall have to get back on form with Rosalie Sarrazin.’

‘Rosalie! Rosalie! Rosalie!’

A door on the first-floor landing opened soundlessly, and a dressing-gowned Bidard de la Noë slipped into the darkness to listen to nails scratching and something murmuring on the second floor.

‘Rosalie I don’t know what there is in that garret. Rose died there, Françoise was very ill and you’re going to die in there. I wouldn’t like to sleep there. Rosalie this is the Ankou speaking to you, tonight Monday 30 June 1851. Rosalie …’

The specialist in crime slowly took a flannel belt out of the loops on his dressing gown, and rolled the two ends round his hands, as if ready to leap upstairs in the darkness to tie up the cook, and hand her over to the police. But he hesitated: ‘Perhaps it’s just some morbid Bas-Breton trick. One can’t take action on a mere suspicion.’

Tuesday 1 July 1851, 10 a.m. In the still hazy morning sun, young Dr Jean-Marie Pinault went inside to order something at the bar on Quai de la Vilaine, then joined his colleague Dr Baudoin, who was looking at the front page of
Le Conciliateur
on the terrace.

‘Thankfully it’s not Sunday, because with all the servants gathering here early on the Lord’s day, we’d never have got a seat under the tree. What’s in the paper? Is the news good?’

‘Er …’ Baudoin hesitated under his grey cloth bonnet, tight over his skull. ‘I’ve been reading the speech that Louis-Napoleon has just made at Châtellerault: …
I have placed myself resolutely at the head of the men of order. I am marching forward without
a backward glance. To march in times such as ours, it is necessary to have both a motivation and a goal. My motivation is love for my country; my goal is to bring about the victory of religion over republican utopias, and to act in such a way that the good cause no longer trembles before error …
Nothing good will come of this kind of language. Something is afoot, something that before the end of the year will cause great uproar and occupy our minds.’

As a waiter brought two cups of coffee to their table, Pinault replied, ‘And what do you think about the latest drama at Bidard de la Noë’s?’

‘In my opinion,’ sighed the chief doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu, stroking his moustache, ‘the suspicion voiced discreetly after the death of Rose Tessier has become a certainty. And since last night Rosalie Sarrazin also died from ingesting a toxin, there’s a poisoner hiding in that house. Events have moved on, and I’m coming back definitively to my initial idea not only in the case of Rose but also in those of Françoise Huriaux and of course Rosalie Sarrazin. The symptoms, their sudden progress, our vain attempts to halt them, the very nature of the sufferings to which the two unfortunate women succumbed, everything points to poisoning.’

‘So what do you conclude, colleague?’

‘After our cup of coffee, young Pinault, our business on this terrace will be at an end. Our place will be in the office of the state prosecutor, alerting the judicial authorities.’

In a large office with walls and doors dripping with friezes and silly gilded mouldings, above a huge black marble fireplace dating
from the reign of the other madman of Saint Helena – how many was it he’d bumped off again? – the hands of the bronze clock showed eleven. Baudoin rushed in, having first taken off his cap.

‘Monsieur Malherbe, for a long time I have kept to myself not remorse but regret over the death of a servant in the house of your former deputy, Bidard de la Noë. Today, along with my young colleague Pinault, I have certified the death of another servant in this same house. Both these women were poisoned. My colleague and I are convinced of this. Even if no trace of poison were to be found in the entrails of the victims, we would still believe it was poisoning.’

The state prosecutor remained silent in his armchair facing the two doctors seated side by side on the other side of his desk in chairs with twisted legs. Another, bearded man strolled into the office and, as he passed a bookshelf, turned to say, ‘At Bidard de la Noë’s? A law professor with ambitions to be Mayor of Rennes wouldn’t be messing about committing that sort of crime. Who else lives there?’

‘A cook from Morbihan was there at the time of all three … incidents.’

‘There were three?’

‘Yes, well, almost …’

At last the prosecutor Malherbe spoke: ‘Monsieur the examining magistrate, rather than going round in circles, you know now where you have to go.’

After Notre-Dame-de-Bonne-Nouvelle had struck twelve for noon, a thirteenth chime rang out. The examining magistrate had
just pulled the cord beside the law professor’s front door. This time it was Thunderflower who opened it. On the quayside she saw two gendarmes in their blue and white uniforms – bicorn hats, and sword at their waists – flanking the bearded man who introduced himself: ‘Hippolyte Vannier, examining magistrate …’

The stocky man watched as the servant wiped her hands on her apron.

‘Are you the cook?’ he asked.

‘I’m innocent!’

‘Innocent of what? No one has accused you. Is Monsieur Bidard de la Noë there?’

‘At noon he sat down to a stew of peas. Come back in a little while, and bring a doctor because Monsieur Théophile will no doubt be very ill.’

The madwoman came out on to the granite doorstep and pulled the door to behind her a little way, adding in a low voice, ‘He’s about to have lunch. He’ll fall ill and perhaps die. It’s over. He won’t last the week. So much the better if he can be saved, but you’ll see that he can’t and things will go the same way as with the other three. They didn’t all die but they were all struck down. Can’t you hear a cart axle squeaking?’

The cook continued, ‘I’ll wait until Monsieur is buried before I look for new employers. This is all just between us, isn’t it? No one must hear of our conversation. Do you promise me that?’

Meanwhile the professor of law could be heard asking, ‘Hmm, hmm, who are you talking to, Hélène? What’s going on?’