The Three Evangelists (26 page)

‘Shall we help you clear up?’ Mathias asked when the police had left.

‘No,’ said Juliette. ‘I don’t want to see the others. They shopped Georges to Leguennec.’

Mathias pressed his big hands together.

‘You’ll be paid for the day, but the restaurant won’t open,’ Juliette said.

‘So I can help you clear up?’

‘Yes, as long as it’s just you,’ she said. ‘You can give me a hand.’

While he was sorting things out, Mathias tried to talk to Juliette, to explain a few things, to prepare her and calm her down. It seemed to comfort her somewhat.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Leguennec’s taking Vandoosler away with him. Now what else is that old man going to say to him?’

‘Don’t worry, he’ll pick and choose. That’s how he is.’

* * *

From his window, Marc watched Vandoosler going off with Leguennec. He had managed to avoid meeting his uncle that morning. Mathias had gone to Juliette’s, he must be talking to her, choosing his words. He went up to see Lucien. Completely absorbed in transcribing the pages from war diary number one (September 1914 to February 1915), Lucien motioned to Marc not to interrupt him. He had decided to take another day off work, judging that to have flu for only forty-eight hours was not convincing. As he watched Lucien working, totally oblivious to the world outside, Marc told himself that perhaps in the end that would be the best thing for him to do too. The war was over. So he had better harness himself up to his medieval plough, even though nobody was asking him to. He’d work for nobody and for nothing, as he got back to his lords and peasants. Marc went back downstairs and opened his files without enthusiasm. Gosselin would be caught sooner or later. There would be a trial, and that would be it. Alexandra had nothing more to fear, and would go on giving him a little wave from the street. Yes, it was better to plunge into the eleventh century than to wait for that.

Leguennec waited until they were in his office with the door shut before exploding.

‘So,’ he bellowed. ‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself!’

‘That’ll do,’ said Vandoosler. ‘You’ve got your man, haven’t you?’

‘I
would
have him, if you hadn’t allowed him to get away. You’re corrupt, Vandoosler, through and through!’

‘Let’s just say that I gave him three hours’ thinking time. That’s the least one could give him.’

Leguennec slammed both hands onto the desk. ‘Why for crying out loud did you do that?’ he shouted. ‘What’s this guy to you? Nothing. Why did you do it?’

‘To see what would happen,’ said Vandoosler nonchalantly. ‘One shouldn’t obstruct the course of events. That’s always been your weakness.’

‘You know what your little game might cost you?’

‘Yes, I know. But you won’t do anything to me.’

‘That’s what you think?’

‘Yes, that’s what I think. Because you’d be making a very big mistake, let me tell you.’

‘You’re well placed yourself, to talk about mistakes, don’t you think?’

‘What about you! If it hadn’t been for Marc, you would never have linked Sophia’s death and the murder of Christophe Dompierre. And if it hadn’t been for Lucien, you would never have connected all this to the murder of the two theatre critics, and you would never have identified Georges Gosselin as the bit player in the opera!’

‘And if it hadn’t been for you, he’d be in this office, right now!’

‘Just so. Shall we play cards while we wait?’ said Vandoosler.

A young assistant inspector opened the door in a hurry.

‘You could knock!’ yelled Leguennec.

‘No time, sir,’ said the young man. ‘We’ve got someone here who wants to see you urgently. It’s the Siméonidis-Dompierre case.’

‘The case is wrapped up. Get him out of here.’

‘At least ask who it is?’ suggested Vandoosler.

‘Who is it?’

‘A guest who was staying at the Hôtel du Danube at the same time as Christophe Dompierre. The one who drove off in the morning without noticing there was a body in the car park.’

‘Get him in,’ hissed Vandoosler through clenched teeth.

Leguennec gestured, and the young man called into the corridor.

‘The cards will have to wait,’ said Leguennec.

The man came in and sat down without being invited to. He was in a state of high excitement.

‘What’s all this about?’ asked Leguennec. ‘Hurry up. I’ve got a man on the run. Your name, occupation?’

‘Eric Masson, section head at SODECO Grenoble.’

‘As if I care, really,’ said Leguennec. ‘What’s your business?’

‘I was staying at the Hôtel du Danube,’ said Masson. ‘It’s not very grand, but I’m used to it and it’s near SODECO Paris.’

‘As if I care,’ Leguennec repeated.

Vandoosler gestured to him to take it easy. Leguennec sat down, offered a cigarette to Masson and lit one himself.

‘OK, I’m listening,’ he said, less irritably.

‘I was there the night Monsieur Dompierre was killed. The awful thing was, I drove my car out in the morning without suspecting a thing, and the body was just beside it, they told me afterwards.’

‘Go on.’

‘It was a Wednesday morning. I went straight to SODECO and parked in the underground car park.’

‘So bloody what?’ said Leguennec.

‘I’ll tell you so bloody what!’ said Masson, suddenly angry. ‘If I’m telling you these details, it’s because they’re extremely important!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Leguennec. ‘I’m having a hard day. Go on.’

‘Next day, Thursday, I did exactly the same. I was on a three-day training course. Put the car in the car park, came back to the hotel at night, after dining with the other people on the course. My car’s black, I have to tell you. It’s a Renault 19, with a very low chassis.’

Vandoosler made a sign once more to Leguennec to stop him saying ‘so bloody what?’ again.

‘The course finished last night. This morning all I had to do was settle up and leave for Grenoble, no hurry. I left the hotel, and stopped at the first garage to fill the tank. It was the kind of garage where the pumps are out in the open.’

‘Calm down for God’s sake,’ Vandoosler whispered to Leguennec.

‘So
that’s
why,’ Masson continued, ‘for the first time since Wednesday morning, I went round the car in daylight to take the cap off the petrol tank. It’s on the right, of course. And that’s when I saw it.’

‘What?’ said Leguennec, suddenly taking notice.

‘Writing. In the dust on the front wing, low down, someone had written something with their finger. At first I thought it must be kids. But they usually do it on the windscreen and write
PLEASE CLEAN ME
or something. So I knelt down and read it. My car’s black, as I said, so the dust and mud show up on it and the writing was very clear, like on a blackboard. Then I suddenly understood. It must have been him,
Dompierre, writing on my car as he lay dying. He didn’t die straightaway, is that right?’

Leaning forward, Leguennec was genuinely holding his breath. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He would have taken several minutes to die.’

‘Well, lying there, he had time and just enough strength to stretch out his arm and write. He wrote the killer’s name on my car. Lucky it hasn’t rained since.’

Two minutes later, Leguennec was telephoning the police photographer and rushing out into the street where Masson had parked his dusty black Renault.

‘A few more minutes,’ Masson was shouting as he ran along behind him, ‘and I would have taken it through the carwash. Funny old world, eh?’

‘You must be crazy, leaving a piece of evidence out in the street. Anyone could have come past and rubbed it out.’

‘Well, Monsieur, they wouldn’t let me park it in your courtyard. Those were their orders they said.’

The three men were now kneeling down beside the front wing of the car. The photographer asked them to get back so that he could get on with his job.’

‘I want a copy,’ Vandoosler said to Leguennec. ‘Get me a copy as soon as you can.’

‘What for?’

‘You’re not running this case unaided, as you very well know.’

‘Don’t I know it. OK, you’ll get your picture. Come back in an hour.’

At about two o’clock, Vandoosler was getting out of a taxi in front of the disgrace. Taxis cost money, but right now minutes counted. He hurried into the refectory and seized the broom handle, still not capped. He banged loudly seven times on the ceiling. Seven bangs meant ‘All evangelists down-stairs’. The usual code was one for St Matthew, two for St Mark, three for St Luke, and four for himself. Seven for everyone all together. Vandoosler had devised the system because everyone was fed up with coming downstairs and back up again for nothing.

Mathias who had come home after lunching quietly with Juliette, heard the seven bangs and repeated them for Marc, before going down. Marc in turn passed the message to Lucien, who tore himself from his reading, muttering, Ordered to the Front. Reporting for duty’.

A minute later, they were all in the refectory. The broom handle system was efficient, except that it made a mess of the ceiling and didn’t allow you to communicate with the outside world as a telephone would.

‘Is it all over?’ Marc asked. ‘They’ve caught Gosselin, or he’s killed himself?’

Vandoosler swallowed a glassful of water before replying.

‘Say you’ve got someone who’s been stabbed and knows he’s dying. If he still has the strength and the means to leave a message, what will he write?’

‘The murderer’s name,’ said Lucien.

‘All agreed?’ asked Vandoosler.

‘Yes, it’s obvious,’ said Marc.

Mathias nodded.

‘Right,’ said Vandoosler. ‘I share your view. And I’ve seen a few cases in my career. The victim, if there’s time, and if they know the murderer’s name, always writes it. Unfailingly.’

Looking preoccupied, Vandoosler pulled out of his jacket pocket the envelope containing the photograph of the black car.

‘Christophe Dompierre wrote a name in the dust on the body of a car before he died,’ he told them. ‘The name has been driving round Paris for three days. The driver has only just noticed the writing.’

‘Georges Gosselin,’ said Lucien.

No, said Vandoosler. What Dompierre wrote was Siméonidis S.

Vandoosler threw the photograph onto the table and sat down heavily on a chair.

‘Dead and alive,’ he murmured.

Wordlessly the three men approached the photograph to look at it. None of them dared to touch it, as if they were frightened. The writing was wobbly and irregular, and Dompierre must have had to raise his arm
to reach the car. But there was no doubt about it. It looked as if the writer had tackled it in spurts, as if summoning up his final strength. The only odd thing about it was that the last capital S was the wrong way round, so that it looked more like a 2.

Devastated, they all sat back in silence, shying away from the terrible accusation in black and white. So Sophia Siméonidis was alive, and had murdered Dompierre. Mathias shivered. For the first time, fear and distress settled on the refectory early that Friday afternoon. The sun was shining in through the windows, but Marc felt his fingers growing cold and a prickling in his legs. Sophia still alive, arranging a false death, having somebody else burnt in her place, leaving her piece of basalt as evidence. Sophia, the beautiful singer, prowling in Paris by night, in rue Chasle. Dead yet alive.

‘What about Gosselin?’ Marc asked in a low voice.

‘It can’t have been him,’ said Vandoosler, also speaking low. ‘I knew that already yesterday.’

‘You knew?’

‘Remember those two hairs of Sophia’s that Leguennec found in the boot of Lex’s car?’

‘Of course,’ said Marc.

‘Well, those hairs weren’t there the day before. When we heard about the fire at Maisons-Alfort, I waited for nightfall and I went out to vacuum Lex’s car. I’ve kept a little gadget from my police days. It’s a battery-operated vacuum cleaner, with clean bags. There was nothing in the boot, no hair, no nails, not a shred of cloth. Only sand and dust.’

Dumbfounded, the three men stared at Vandoosler. Marc remembered now. It was the night when he had been sitting on the seventh step, thinking about tectonic plates. The godfather had gone outside to take a leak, carrying a plastic bag.

‘It’s true,’ said Marc. ‘I thought you were just going out for a pee.’

‘Well, that too,’ admitted Vandoosler.

‘I see,’ said Marc.

‘So,’ Vandoosler went on, ‘when Leguennec requisitioned the car the next day and said he had found these hairs, it made me laugh. I had proof that Alexandra was not responsible. And proof that somebody had gone to the car, after me, in the night to put this bit of evidence in the boot to implicate the niece. And it couldn’t have been Gosselin, because Juliette said he only came back at Friday lunchtime. And that’s quite true, because I checked.’

‘But for Christ’s sake, why didn’t you say anything?’

‘Because I was operating outside the law and I needed to keep in with Leguennec. And also because I wanted the murderer, whoever it was, to know that his plan was working. I wanted to let out as much rope as possible, and to see where the beast would go if it was let free without being tied up.’

‘Why didn’t Leguennec take the car in on the Thursday?’

‘He did waste some time, that’s true. But cast your mind back. We didn’t think it was Sophia’s body until quite late on that day. And the initial suspect was Relivaux. It’s simply not possible to think of everything, impound everything and so forth on the first day of an investigation. Actually Leguennec knew he hadn’t been quick off the mark. That’s why he didn’t charge Alexandra. He wasn’t absolutely sure about those hairs.’

‘But what about Gosselin?’ asked Lucien. ‘Why did you tell Leguennec to bring him in for questioning, if you knew he was innocent?’

‘Same idea. Let things run their course. And see what the real murderer would do. You have to leave murderers free, so that they make some mistakes. You will have noticed that I allowed Gosselin to get away by warning Juliette. I didn’t want him to be questioned about the ancient history of the attack in the dressing-room.’

‘That was him?’

‘Must have been. You could tell, from Juliette’s face. But not the murders. In fact, St Matthew, you could go and tell Juliette that she can tell her brother now.’