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I could see his outline now, at the top of the stairs. A few more steps, and he would be beside me. Panic froze my limbs, keeping me anchored to the stone while Armand edged his way toward me, past the arrow slit.
Then, in one flashing second, my whole world seemed to explode. The sudden stab of brilliant light came slashing through the arrow slit like lightning, and caught Armand full square upon the face. He tried to move and turned against the wall, and, frozen still, I heard the horrifying sound of grinding mortar giving way, and watched while Armand lurched to one side, out of sight. The light that had so blinded him kept shining, unconcerned, upon the settling dust and pebbles. It reflected even on the thick clouds moving low above the sharp and ragged edges of the roofless chamber I stood in.
And then I realized what had happened. The sunset, now, was nearly over. They had turned the floodlights on.
Armand hadn’t fallen, not completely. With one hand he kept a death grip on the stone ledge where the arrow slit had been. Half stunned, I sidled round and watched him while he scrabbled for a foothold. He couldn’t find one, but he managed to bring his other hand up to strengthen his grasp. And there he hung, suspended, muscles straining as he gathered all his energy to pull himself back up and in.
His fingers clung mere inches from my feet—I could have stepped on them, kicked at them, sent him to his death. It would, I thought, be no less than the man deserved. He’d killed Paul, hadn’t he? But even as I thought of Paul I knew I couldn’t do it, for in my mind I saw again Paul’s gentle face, his dark eyes gazing out across the darkly flowing river, and I heard again his voice telling me sadly: “People hate too much, you know?”
I knew.
And anyway, I thought, it was a sin to hate someone on Yom Kippur. I slowly crouched and braced myself with one hand against what remained of the wall, and stretched the other hand to take firm hold of Armand’s wrist. He raised his head to look at me. With all the floodlights angled up behind him I could only see a darkened outline of his face, I couldn’t see his eyes, and yet for some strange reason I believed I saw him smile at me. He turned his own hand slightly in my grasp until his fingers closed with mine. And then he just let go.
They told me later that when Armand fell, my group of would-be rescuers had only just arrived within the château grounds—that Harry was, in fact, still causing some kind of disturbance at the entrance booth. But somehow, when I spun away from the gaping, light-filled hole, Neil was there to catch me, his solid body shielding me from danger while his arms came rou
nd me strongly, firmly, warm as life itself.
I clung to him while, overhead, the clouds burst forth a final brilliant streak of golden red, as if the gates of heaven themselves had briefly opened, and closed again. My trembling stilled; the wind seemed to fall silent, and some weight I didn’t fully understand, a melancholy ages old, was lifted from my sobbing chest and drifted like an answered prayer into the darkness.
“It’s all right, don’t be frightened, now,” Neil said, his mouth moving down against my hair. “I’m here.”
Chapter 31
…the long fantastic night
With all its doings had and had not been,
And all things were and were not.
Inspector Prieur proved to be a decent man. I’d thought as much the moment I’d first met him, when he’d come walking across the château yard, calm in the midst of the confusion, and gently coaxed me out of Neil’s protective hold. He’d looked like someone’s grandfather come down for sports day, with a vacuum flask in one hand and a dark wool blanket in the other. “You must be cold,” he’d said to me. “I’ve brought you coffee.” And then, when I was ready, he’d begun to ask me questions, but even that had been relaxed—less an interrogation than an undemanding chat. When it was finished, he had looked at me with understanding. “There is a child, they tell me. A little girl.”
“Yes.”
The old inspector, weary-eyed, had fixed his gaze upon the Moulin Tower. “It can be difficult, a case like this. It can be difficult to prove. The suspect dead, and just one witness—no real evidence. And if the witness should rescind his statement, or refuse to testify…” The sentence hung unfinished, and he had raised his shoulders in a philosophical shrug. “Sometimes, the scales of justice find a level of their own, without our help,” he’d said. “And sometimes, in seeking justice, we don’t always serve it. Do you understand?” Not trusting my voice, I’d nodded carefully. “Good. Then I will see what I can do. There will be rumors, you understand; talk around the town. I can’t stop that. And if, when she is grown up, she chooses to come looking for the truth, then she will find it. But perhaps,” he’d said, his gray eyes very kind, “she will not look. It is better, I think, for a child to keep her heroes.”
A decent man, I thought again. I had blinked the tears back, smiled at him. “Thank you.” And suddenly I’d felt a crawling sense of déjà-vu. A memory of a younger man in uniform, much larger, who had smiled at me in just that way… “I’m sorry,” I had said. “This may sound foolish, but I wonder…”
He’d looked pleased. “Your father said you would remember. I told him no, that you were such a little girl in those days, but he was very sure.”
I’d blinked. “My father?”
So he’d kept his promise, after all. He’d promised me he’d ask his friends in Paris to inquire after Harry, stir around, but I hadn’t expected him to do anything. I certainly hadn’t expected him to send a chief inspector straight to Chinon. Harry’d put it rather well, I thought: Your father’s got a network strung through Europe that would put our Secret Service men to shame. I was just a bit surprised he’d actually remembered.
I’d felt an old and automatic need to apologize to the inspector for the trouble he had gone to on my family’s account; for the interruption of his holiday; for everything. He’d merely smiled, and shrugged it all aside.
“Your father is an old friend,” he had told me. “He was worried. And when Andrew Braden worries, it is rarely without reason.” Then against a blurring backdrop of black sky and brilliant lights he had tucked the blanket tighter round my shoulders, and left me with the vacuum flask of strong reviving coffee.
I could have done with that coffee now, I thought, as I nestled deeper into the cushions of my seat in the hotel bar and stiffened my jaws to smother a yawn.
For the second time that week, the bar of the Hotel de France was blazing light long after its official closing time. One would have thought it was the cocktail hour and not past midnight. How far past midnight I could not be sure—I seemed to have lost my wristwatch—but when last I’d asked Jim Whitaker the time he’d told me it was going on for one, and that had been before Monsieur Chamond brought out the second bottle of Calvados.
We were well down in that bottle now. Monsieur Chamond had abandoned his bartending duties to settle on the stool beside his wife, leaving Thierry with the job of keeping all our glasses full. Thierry, for his part, was deep in some debate with Christian Rand, and had filled his own glass rather more often than ours. It was a smashing Calvados, well-aged and mellow, resplendent with the golden warmth of apples from the finest fields of Normandy. After going twenty-four hours without food, that warmth had spread through all my aching limbs, and I’d long since given up my efforts to make sense of what was going on around me.
François was there… now, that was strange. I wanted several times to ask him how and why he came to be there, but my tired brain kept stumbling on the question, and no one else seemed interested, so I just let it pass. I was having enough trouble getting used to seeing Harry lounging opposite among the potted palms, his lean face animated while he chatted on to Neil as though the night had been a normal one, like any other. My cousin’s health had greatly improved, I’d noticed, since the gypsy woman Danielle had left us to go round to the police station, where her brother and the Chief Inspector were still sorting out the matter of official statements.
I didn’t doubt they’d get it sorted. Certainly everyone here had entered the conspiracy of sympathetic silence. Oh, we could talk about it now, between ourselves, but come the morning I knew even Thierry, facing questions from his friends, would simply shrug and shake his head and say: “A tragic accident” like the rest of us. He felt cheated by Armand’s death, I could sense that—it had robbed him of the chance to take his personal revenge upon Paul’s killer. But even Thierry couldn’t transfer all that hatred to Lucie Valcourt. A child shouldn’t suffer for her father’s sins.
Martine, I thought, would see she didn’t suffer. Martine had looked like a different person, up at the château, her face composed and elegant, expressionless, while she’d listened very quietly to Inspector Prieur’s explanations. And then with equal calm she’d asked him: “And my niece?”
