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Paul did the talking for us both, in flawless French. He didn’t tell the whole truth, mind. He was careful not to contradict the tale he’d spun for the librarian, about being a student working on a paper, only this time he did mention he was trying to find my cousin. “Braden,” he said. “Harry Braden. He’s from my university. I believe he was here in Chinon last week, doing research, and I thought he might have come to talk to you…?”
Victor Belliveau raked us with a measuring look. “No, I’m sorry, he did not come here.”
“Oh. You didn’t write him a letter, then?”
“No.” Another long and penetrating look. “You say it is something to do with the tunnels, this paper you are writing?”
“Well,” Paul scuffed his shoe against the step, “sort of…”
“Then perhaps I can help you myself,” said Victor Belliveau, with a rusty smile. He pushed the door a fraction wider. “Please,” he told us, “do come in.”
The French did not ask strangers into their homes as a matter of habit, and it would have been unspeakably rude to have refused his invitation. Feeling slightly guilty for intruding on the man’s privacy in the first place, I followed Paul across the threshold.
There were only two rooms on the ground floor, a large square kitchen and a second room in which a bed, a coal stove and a sofa were the only furnishings. The far wall of the kitchen groaned beneath the weight of rustic bookshelves, stacked two deep in places, an intriguing mix of paperbacks and expensive-looking volumes leaning wearily on one another. The other walls were bare, with jagged cracks that ran from the ceiling like thunderbolts. In one corner some plant—an ivy branch, it looked like—had actually worked its way through the heavy plaster and been unceremoniously hacked off for its trouble. Still the rooms, while spartan, were surprisingly clean, and the tile floor had recently been swept.
Victor Belliveau seated us in the kitchen, round a large scrubbed table spread with newspapers. “Would you like a drink?” he offered. “Wine? Coffee? No?” He shrugged and poured himself a glass of thick red wine. “I had some brandy here the other day, but I’m afraid it’s gone. They took it,” he said, jerking his head toward the window and the tangled yard outside. “Damned good taste, if you ask me.”
At Paul’s blank look the poet smiled again. “I’m sorry, of course you wouldn’t know. I meant the gypsies,” he explained. “I have a family of them, usually, living on my land. That’s why the yard is such a disaster. Good people, gypsies, but they don’t believe in guarding the environment.”
“Gypsies?” The word came out rather more sharply than I’d intended, and the bland and guileless eyes shifted from Paul to me.
“Oh, yes. We’ve plenty of gypsies round here, my dear. Mine stay here several times a year. One’s never sure exactly when—they just turn up when the mood strikes, with their caravans. Not everybody likes them, but they don’t much trouble me.”
“I see.” The scarred table felt suddenly damp beneath my splayed fingers.
“But what was it you needed to know, about the tunnels?” he asked, his glass trailing moisture on the table as he leaned forward in his own chair, helpfully.
Paul played his part extremely well, I thought. Having only just left school himself he made a most convincing student—even borrowed pen and paper to make notes, his face attentive, serious. I tried to listen to what Victor Belliveau was telling Paul about the history of the tunnels, but my mind kept wand
ering off to other things.
Like gypsies, for example. Of course it was coincidence, and nothing more, that Victor Belliveau let gypsies on his land. There must be half a dozen other people living in these parts who had a gypsy caravan parked down their back lane. And besides, I reminded myself, the gypsy with the little dog who haunted the fountain square had nothing at all to do with me. Nothing at all.
“…up to the Chapelle Sainte Radegonde,” Belliveau was saying, “but that has long since fallen in. One has to use imagination…”
His mention of the chapelle set my mind wandering again, this time to Harry. Bloody Harry. I ought to have that printed on a T-shirt, I thought. He’d probably be quite amused by all the trouble I was going to, just because I’d found that King John coin. There was bound to be a simple reason why the coin was here and Harry wasn’t.
“He died last Wednesday,” Victor Belliveau said, shrugging, and I came back to the conversation with a jolt.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A friend of Monsieur Belliveau’s,” explained Paul, for my benefit.
“Well, I knew him, let us say,” the poet qualified drily. “We were not friends. But this is why the gypsies left, you see. We’d had the police round a few times, asking questions, and gypsies don’t much care for that. Not that I was a suspect, or anything,” he said, smiling at his own joke, “but as I said, I knew the man quite well. It was a sad case. He drank too much.” He shrugged and raised his own glass, which I noticed had been filled again.
Paul raised his eyebrows. “You don’t mean Martine Muret’s husband, do you?”
“Yes, Didier Muret. You know them, then?”
“Only Martine,” said Paul. “I never met her husband. Ex-husband, I should say.”
“Ah, she is a lovely woman, Martine, don’t you think? I believe I wrote a sonnet to her, once. But she chose Muret. God knows why,” he said, smiling above his wine glass. “He was an idiot.”
I frowned. “Didier Muret—that was his name?”
“Yes, why?”
Didier… I turned it round again, concentrating. It rang a bell, that name. I was sure it was the name Harry had mentioned—either that, or something very like it. It was a common enough name. There were probably dozens of Didiers living in Chinon. Still, I thought, it never hurt to try…
