The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (18 page)

The republic of reason seemed in full retreat, for the annual turnover generated by clairvoyants, mediums, commercial mystics and visionaries now amounted to well over four million euros in the new currency. She tried to calculate the sum in francs, but abandoned the attempt when she read that every other person living in Martinique was actually in touch with the beyond. Dominique Carpentier’s enlightenment values of reason, justice and humane discipline were evidently out of step with the times. The little shops selling idols, crystals, fragrant candles, Buddhas, Krishnas, magic herbs in silken sachets, beads and bangles, which guaranteed health, longevity and sexual power on a scale unimaginable to ordinary mortals, flourished in every city, lurked in corners of bookshops, advertised in women’s magazines, could now be contacted direct via our website; one white witch, a pagan defender of Gaia, even gave astrological readings over the phone. All you need is a gullible soul and a credit card. The sects were led onwards to glory by rich men. The Greek guru enjoyed the use of a villa in Tuscany and a condo on the beach in Miami, handsome gifts from devoted followers, undeclared for tax purposes, for the guru owned nothing in his own right. He had risen above property. His spacious dojo in Paris was funded by an English aristocrat, who flew over on Wednesdays to attend the miraculous healing sessions, where, after an hour and a quarter of martial arts practice, they all got in touch with their lower abdomens. O Lord, I wander among the foolish and dawdle before the gates of Paradise, where the angel stands, bearing his drawn sword. The Judge bowed her head in unbelieving prayer and terrible exhaustion.

Her mobile lit up and shivered across the desk without ringing. She peered at the number. Withheld. She looked up at the clock. Fifteen minutes to midnight. Then she snatched up the phone.

‘André? Where are you?’

‘Outside. Looking up at your window. Security won’t let me in.’

The Judge rose up, stiff and joyful. She flung open the shutters and leaned out. Two floors beneath her, in the narrow cobbled street, gazing upwards through the orange shadows, stood André Schweigen. She greeted the wide smile and square features of the man who had stifled fires with his bare hands for love of her.

‘I’ve just driven down,’ he called.

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘It’s too hot in the afternoon. Come downstairs. I’ve got some news. And some fresh evidence.’

André Schweigen kept the Faith alive. The case mattered more to him than any other because it opened the doors to the Judge.

_{*  *  *}

Her house lurked breathless and shut up on a little hill, north-east of the city, surrounded by a blank stone wall and a discreet curtain of pinède. She irrigated her garden via a computer-controlled system of pipes, which hissed and spat in the dark. They heard the spray and smelt the water as they climbed out of their cars. Schweigen hesitated before removing his small case from the boot. She had not invited him to stay with her. A warm wind stirred the stunted pines; Schweigen began to justify himself, standing there on the gravel in the perfumed dark.

‘I did try to tell you I was coming. I left three messages on your answerphone here,’ he announced. ‘The switchboard had closed at your office and you usually turn off your mobile at work.’

‘It’s all right, André. You can stay the night. I was feeling a little dispirited. I’m glad you’re here.’

She fiddled with her keys. The terrace lights all came on in a burst and immediately fizzled with insects. Her mother’s clafoutis lay prostrate in the fridge, untouched. Had the fruit congealed into rubber? She prodded the flan in hope.

‘She only made it for me on Sunday morning. It’ll be delicious. Here, have a fork.’

They wolfed the poached apricots, then slopped down a carton of iced tea, sitting side by side at the kitchen table, like naughty children, staying up late without permission.

‘Where does your wife think you are?’ asked the Judge, pushing her plate away. Her house remained cool, even in summer, behind the blue shutters and the deep stone walls. Schweigen shrugged, irritated and a little desperate.

‘I told her I was bringing the evidence to you. So she thinks I’m here. With you.’ The Judge raised one eyebrow and delivered her ironic smile, then she took off her glasses and rubbed her forehead. He looked carefully at her tired eyes.

‘I see. Well? What have you come all this way to show me, André? Where’s the evidence?’

Schweigen retrieved a self-sealing plastic sack from his briefcase, which contained a small blue box and a folded square of Christmas paper.

‘Look.’

He rewrapped the box in shining decorated foil. The Judge watched intent as the paper fitted perfectly, each crease tense and exact around the gift. She had no need to read the card, still swinging from a shining silver thread, for she knew the words by heart:
To my darling Marie-T, Je t’aime, ma petite chérie, Bisous, Maman
– in the elegant careful hand of Madame Marie-Cécile Laval.

‘We bagged up all the waste-paper baskets and anything of interest in the dustbins. Remember? This box was concealed under the lower bunk in the children’s bedrooms and only discovered when we released the chalet back to the owners. They’re going to sell the house. Even though I told them nobody actually died there. The woman kept the box, just in case. You found the paper downstairs. It was the address on the box which made me put them together. Look.’

He held the cover up to the light suspended above her kitchen table; the engraved letters gleamed gold against the blue:

GOLDENBERG’S

Montpellier

‘You know them?’ He looked at her, smug and expectant.

‘Of course. I bought my bracelet there.’ Schweigen glowered at the bracelet, jealous of its constant presence upon her arm.

‘I thought I’d find out what Cécile Laval gave to her daughter. She had already planned her own death. It was her last gift. It must be significant.’

The Judge stretched and yawned. It was half past one in the middle of the night. André had devised yet another implausible and extravagant excuse to spend taxpayers’ money and come in search of her. His love rendered him unreliable and unprofessional.

‘André! What if it’s not significant at all? What if it’s a harmless golden necklace or a charm bracelet? What if Monsieur Goldenberg doesn’t even remember what he sold to whom in the Christmas rush? Anyway, I thought Marie-T wasn’t even at the chalet when they all went up the mountain.’

‘I must try.’

The Judge stood up and stacked their plates in her tiny dishwasher. Schweigen faced her out, dogged and obstinate. She watched him, inscrutable; but as she studied his grey eyes, measured each deepening line on either side of his mouth, she began, despite her irritation, to comprehend his sincerity. She realised that he loved her with a violence that she could neither control nor return; but that his hunt for the remaining members of the Faith was just as genuine, and as relentless. Both passions were entwined in the fibre of the man. His obsession with his work matched her own; but his search was not impersonal, detached; the blue box from Goldenberg’s was not a slight excuse. His love was written across his face, his shoulders, his clenched hands, and so was his resolve.

‘Come to bed,’ said the Judge.

Schweigen breathed out, a long sigh of tiredness and release, and reached for her hand. She closed her fingers tight within his palm and he felt her short nails sharpen against the skin.

_{*  *  *}

‘Schweigen’s here, isn’t he?’

Gaëlle’s mouth clenched, sullen with resentment. Here they were, June almost over, the beaches swollen with early tourists and holiday-makers, the Faith shelved, the Lübeck trip fading, all the interviews and reports analysed, typed up, filed and recorded on disc, hard copy in the dossiers and the information downloaded on to the office M-Drive. The trail had gone dead, and yet, behold the apparition of André Schweigen, confident, aggressive, spotted swaggering across the car park. The Judge got up, stretched and walked to the window. She looked down into the street, fixing the spot where he had stood. She emerged from the short night of five hours’ sleep limber and subtle as a cat. Gaëlle glared at her loveliness, the sleek black wedge of hair, her olive legs and flat, black classic shoes.

‘So? What’s he doing here?’

This time the rebellion escaped from Gaëlle’s carefully policed intonation, and the Judge swivelled round, ready to cuff her Greffière’s multi-pierced ears.

‘He has fresh evidence on the case, Gaëlle. I know you don’t like him, but watch your tongue.’

The affair between Schweigen and the Judge was never mentioned or acknowledged, and this silence rebounded like an echo between the two of them, as if they were two stone cliffs with an abyss below.

‘Oui, Madame le Juge. We are the servants of Isis, sworn to obey Her commands.’

The Judge laughed out loud at this demure, but calculated piece of insolence, and tapped the top of Gaëlle’s vast and yellowing computer.

‘To work, my girl. Anything on the pseudo-Greek guru’s personal accounts?’

‘Not yet. Interpol are sending me a complete printout.’

‘Fine.’

‘Shall I disinter the Faith?’

‘Not yet. We’ll wait for Schweigen’s call.’

This came soon enough. Just before ten o’clock Schweigen rang direct from the counter at Goldenberg’s.

‘Dominique? Would you reassure Monsieur Goldenberg that he is not breaching any sort of confidentiality if he tells me exactly what he engraved on the golden locket the late Madame Laval presented to her daughter, before she arranged her departure to the stars? I don’t want to bother with a warrant for a bon de commande.’

A voluble protest from the besieged jeweller could be heard in the background.

À ma fille bien-aimée

(To my beloved daughter)

Marie-Thérèse

Suis-moi

(Follow me)

The oval locket had contained a recent laughing photograph of Madame Laval, digitally enhanced and then cut down to size. The loving message whose meanings spread outwards in ripples of possibility had been carefully engraved on the secret cavity inside. The Judge smoothed out the bon de commande and gazed at the handwritten words. Then she looked up, scowling at Schweigen’s triumphant defiance.

‘André, this proves nothing whatever.’

He ignored her. ‘Will you summon the girl for an interview or shall we go up to see her?’

These were his alternatives. The Judge hesitated for a moment.

‘Gaëlle? Can you raise the Domaine Laval on the telephone. I’ll arrange a brief meeting this morning if possible.’ She rounded on Schweigen. ‘I imagine that you are driving back to Strasbourg tonight? Yes? Good. Then we’ll take both cars. The Domaine is on your way.’

‘I’m coming too,’ snapped Gaëlle, who had felt excluded long enough.

8

PERSEPHONE’S DOUBLE

They skimmed the suburban villas spouting from the red earth and rose up towards the vineyards that pulled away from the city in precise and everlasting green rows. Some fresh souches, strung along wires, gleamed thin and green, their roots clear of weeds, with a young rose planted at the end of every row. The roses functioned as the early-warning system against odium, mildew and black rot. The Judge loved the rhythm of the year in the vineyards; the pruning in January, spraying the plants with sulphur in the early spring, when the narrow roads became downright dangerous as the great green machines, like elongated moving croquet hoops, trundled along between the flowering ditches. The early-summer landscape threw all its remaining moisture into a sea of white flowers and clouds of red roses, trumpeting the rich time of ripening green before the coming of the great heat and sagging leaves. The weather counted for everything. Pray for rain in May and June, then a boiling summer with the odd mild thunderstorm, no hail, please God, no hail, and a warm September right up to the vendanges, and the jubilant arrival of the seasonal workers; they were Spanish when she was a girl, now Poles and Romanians trudged down the steep rows, gathering in the harvest. Here they come, sometimes entire families, all ages, shouldering the great red plastic buckets and refusing to slacken their pace on the stony red earth of her father’s land, and his father’s before him. Her childhood had followed this rhythm, and she would never have left the family estate had she been born the eldest son.