The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (6 page)

‘Look at this pattern. They nearly all have higher degrees or advanced qualifications. Some of them went to the same universities – all well-known prestigious institutions. They’ve all achieved an exceptional level of education. Most of them are not just experts in their fields – they are the sole expert. That’s why you have such a cautious lot of obituaries. And why the Swiss hushed the whole thing up. They were famous people. It’s embarrassing, peculiar. Hmm, predominantly scientists. Only a few come from the arts, and when they do they are always linked to music. Gerhart Liebmann. He was Swiss, an opera producer and director of the Berliner Staatsoper. I’ve seen his work discussed in the papers.’ The Judge was already pulling at the threads. ‘So that explains the patterns of recruitment. They draw in the people they already know, and recruit from the circles in which they move.’

‘And this mass suicide took place on the summer solstice. So they operate on a system that is linked to the moving cosmos.’

‘All religions do,’ said Schweigen, sugaring his coffee well beyond the normal dose.

‘Exactly. Well, nearly all. Noël is simply the winter solstice festival left over from the pagans. The Muslims generate their holy days through the lunar calendar, as do the Jews. But this Faith seems to have a closer union with the stars than either the Muslims or the Catholics. What’s this?’

The Judge drew forth a grubby photocopy of a smeared graph, traversed by two undulating lines and covered in random dots. She could see no writing on the chart at all. It looked like a musical score for some complex form of Gregorian chant. She turned it several ways up, trying to read the paper from different angles. Suddenly her face cleared.

‘I know what this is. Look. It’s a chart of the middle heavens. This curved belt contains the stars of the zodiac – it’s that part of the sky where you can always see the sun, the moon and the bright planets. And these marked dots are star clusters. Look – these are the stars in Taurus, here is Orion, and this group here are the Pleiades. Where was this found?’

‘It was pinned to the noticeboard in the kitchen. It’s not the original. That was clearer and some of the stars were highlighted.’

‘Do the Swiss still have this chart?’

‘God knows.’

‘Find out. I want a colour photograph. As clear and detailed as possible. The original would be better. And it’s only going to rot in a box if the Swiss have wound up their investigation.’

‘There was a full moon on the night they died,’ ventured Schweigen, alarmed by this astrological development. ‘How will this chart help?’

‘We can’t assume that they were all killed off in Switzerland. More of them may be out there. And this chart may tell us if and when the next departure is due to take place. And it may also tell us where they think they’re going.’

She peered again at the faces of the dead, framed as portraits, with their names, ages, professions, next of kin listed below, but now she was looking for something unambiguous, a face she expected to find.

‘One of them must spend all his time peering down a telescope or looking at charts on his computer. Which one is the astronomer? Or the astrophysicist?’

Schweigen flicked over the pages in the file, unhesitating.

‘This one. And he’s the man who didn’t take the poison. He was shot.’

Anton Laval, aged
56
, born Lyon, senior researcher with the CNRS at Grenoble, often featured as one of the consulting scientists in the popular late summer television programme, La Nuit des Étoiles. The Judge studied the calm handsome face for some time. If she recognised him, she gave no sign.

‘Maybe that’s our Professor,’ said Schweigen. ‘On the other hand at least twelve of them were Professors.’

‘It says here he wasn’t married. Who was registered as his next of kin?’

‘One sister. I saw her yesterday.’ The Judge raised her darkened eyes to his face, her mouth remained inscrutable. ‘She lives about eighty kilometres to the north-east of here, a huge domaine, beyond Nîmes. She was still distraught with grief when I asked about her brother. I had to stop and wait while she pulled herself together. She couldn’t tell me much. No more than she gave to my colleagues last year, just after the event. They were asking very silly questions though. Did he have any enemies? Who might want to shoot him? There were nearly seventy other people lying dead all around him. It looked like he was just following the fashion.’

‘And as far as the secret sect is concerned she seemed to think it quite extraordinary that he could believe in anything to the point of sacrificial martyrdom. She’s the devout Catholic and he’s the sceptic. Or that’s more or less what I gathered. She’s in the local curé’s pocket. She kept saying how much she missed her brother, but she’s absolutely convinced that she will see him again and that they will be reunited. I thought she was a bit mad.’

‘She’s a widow, but she always kept her nom de jeune fille because she runs the estate. She’s on that list. Marie-Cécile Laval.’

_{*  *  *}

But five years earlier neither Schweigen nor the Judge had suspected Madame Marie-Cécile Laval of being a member of the Faith. She cooperated willingly with the investigation, talked frankly about her brother, unfailingly loving in everything she said. Her unflinching tenderness seemed odd. When someone commits suicide the reaction of disbelief is usually followed by rage against the person who has so brutally slammed the door and gone. Madame Laval’s gentle, emotional forgiveness disarmed her interrogators. She opened her house to them, handed over her brother’s papers, presented a countenance of such cultivated intelligence that all suspicion faded.

Schweigen always remembered Madame Laval as he had first seen her, surrounded by beautiful eighteenth-century furniture, gilded mirrors with dusty Cupids, a cabinet inlaid with rosewood and mother-of-pearl, family portraits by once famous artists, stiff sofas covered with replicated material, exactly matching the original patterns but too bright to be genuine. The Domaine teetered over the edge of fading splendour; the baroque fountain was beginning to lose its shells, moths had nestled in the drapes. Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. Madame Laval sat quietly in a corner of her depleted elegance, weeping over the corruption of all earthly things. Her sole desire was to bring her brother’s body home. Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.

Schweigen had indeed called upon Madame Laval the very day before he first met the Judge in the flesh, and those days, which he now thought of as the first days, seemed private, secret. Madame Laval lurked in the middle distance, an unknowing, silent witness to what had taken place between André Schweigen and the Judge. Two weeks after that first meeting in May
1995
the Judge called him at work.

‘Monsieur Schweigen? Dominique Carpentier à l’appareil. Thank you for the map of the stars. Very clever of you to get hold of the original.’

‘Well, that wasn’t hard. The Swiss didn’t want it.’

There was a pause. Schweigen clenched his left fist. He had sounded ungracious. How could he keep her on the line? But she had already moved on to the next step of the dance.

‘I’ve discovered that Madame Laval has at last managed to secure the release of her brother’s body and she is bringing him back to the Domaine for burial. I thought we might attend the funeral together and pay our respects.’

‘The funeral?’

‘Ah yes. She is holding a full-blown Catholic requiem Mass at the church in the village, then the cortège will retreat to the family mausoleum for a private burial in the vaults. The curé is up for the full Mass with choir and speeches, because she hasn’t asked for burial in the graveyard. I’m not sure he could have accepted a suicide.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘The curé is my uncle.’

‘You actually know the Laval family?’

‘Not so well any more. But I did once. My family are also vignerons – in the same commune. Everyone will be there at the funeral, including my parents. It would look very odd if I wasn’t.’

‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ Schweigen snapped. He felt cheated. He suspected that his temper might not be reasonable, but he couldn’t stop himself. The Judge sounded faintly amused.

‘It wasn’t relevant before. Now it is. So I’ve told you.’

Schweigen became even more incensed. His investigation had been hijacked. ‘But you knew who Marie-Cécile Laval was and you didn’t say anything.’

He was stamping his feet like a child. Regarde-moi. Occupe-toi de moi. I’m the person who’s important here, moi, moi. The Judge ignored his enraged squeal.

‘Can you come?’ An immense patience flooded the line. Schweigen caved in.

‘Mais bien sûr. Where shall I meet you?’

‘At the church. The funeral is at
15
.
00
heures. Can you get there by
14
.
30
at the latest? I will already be there and I want to be inside the church.’

_{*  *  *}

Unexpected, aggressive and ferocious, the heat assaulted his black suit and bound him fast as he teetered off the plane at Nîmes. None of the hired cars within his budget had air conditioning. He roared sweating through the vineyards with all the windows open, the hot air rushing past. Already the land seemed parched and gasping. Cicadas rattled in the trees; a glassy haze coated the green. He never took his family south in the summer, no matter how hard his wife pleaded with him; the heat was simply unendurable.

The little square in front of the church glimmered in a leopard skin of light and shade, shadowed with great plane trees. A café colonised the paving. The village smouldered quietly behind closed shutters. He heard the chink of plates being collected in the half-dark. Only the tourists ate outside; and the season had barely begun. The café had piled away some of the tables to make room for the arriving cars. Strangers in fine clothes and dark glasses already patrolled the square. The great west doors of the church, siege barriers covered in nails, stood open. The hinges had been renewed; crows perched on the corbel table. Only brides and coffins entered through the great west doors. The undertaker’s men, eerie, comfortable and sinister in black, skulked just inside, waiting.

Schweigen imagined the hearse like a large refrigerated meat van. Anton Laval had been dead for nearly a year. What was the point of prising him out of the vaults in Switzerland and hauling him home – a poison bag of blackened skin and rotting bones? He was nearly an hour early and yet so many people were already there. Schweigen parked under the trees. The heat billowed around him. He sat for a moment with his eyes closed, wondering if he could put his jacket back on at the very last moment. The cicadas were deafening.

Then the car door opened on the driver’s side and there stood the Judge, within his grasp, her black hair, slick and tight, wrenched into a thick plaited coil. She leaned over him; he smelt the crisp folds of her sleeveless black linen shift, absorbed her dark glasses with fine golden rims and black high-heeled shoes.

‘Bonjour, Monsieur Schweigen.’

He stood up, stiff, sweating and off guard, wondering if he would ever, in all his life to come, desire a woman again as powerfully as he wanted this calm, untouchable Judge. She stepped back and stretched out her hand towards him. He could not read her eyes, and so he hesitated; then he took possession of her cool fingers in his clammy grasp.

‘I think you need something to drink,’ said the Judge.

_{*  *  *}

He watched the people with whom she shook hands, tried to calculate which ones were family and which ones were probably more distant friends and acquaintances. One woman with opulent olive breasts clasped the Judge firmly in her arms and demanded her ‘nouvelles’. Schweigen retreated into the church, occupied a pew with a clear view of the altar and lectern and chastised himself for unreasonable jealousy. He regained control of his emotions and his face in the shadow of a pillar, and became altogether calmer in the musty dark. He had not set foot inside a church since his son’s baptism. The Judge slithered in beside him and produced a handwritten list of names, some of which were marked with an asterisk. She moved her briefcase to the other side so that her thigh rested against his and whispered against his cheek; even her breath cooled his simmering flesh.

‘All these people are relatives of members of the Faith who left in the last departure. Some others are colleagues and friends. I may not have all the names. This is my uncle’s list for the enterrement, which I compared with the one in the dossier. But it won’t be complete. People just turn up at funerals, others don’t even at the last moment. But if any members of the Faith still exist, then they may well be here in this church. Don’t worry about photographs. I’ve had the entrance wired with CCTV. We’ll have a video for cross-reference with the information we already have. This seemed such an excellent opportunity.’