Page 85 of The Splendour Falls
At sunset,
“It didn’t half give me a shock, I can tell you,” my cousin went on, shaking his head. “I mean, of all the bloody people for you to meet, your first day out!”
I slowly turned to stare at him, feeling rather stunned, like a racing driver who’d gone almost round the course at top speed only to slam into a brick wall at the final bend. “But it can’t be Armand.”
The two men shared a knowing look. “Look, love,” said Harry, “I know you like the man, but—”
“No, it isn’t that.” I shook my head, impatient to make him understand. “It’s just that I know who killed Paul, you see, and it wasn’t Armand Valcourt. It was Neil.” There, I thought, I’d said it; I’d finally put a voice to the painful thought. I stilled the treacherous quivering of my mouth, aware both men were staring at me. Couldn’t they see, I thought, how much I wanted to believe…?
My cousin frowned. “Who the devil is Neil?”
“Neil Grantham. He’s a violinist, staying at my hotel.”
“Ah.”
“Only he wasn’t playing the violin yesterday, it was a tape, and the opening allegro to Beethoven’s Third is at least fifteen minutes long, so he had heaps of time to run up the steps and push Paul off… I doubt if it takes me more than a couple of minutes myself to climb those steps, and I’m not nearly as fit as Neil.”
“Ah,” Harry said again, as if my explanation were perfectly clear. “And why would this violinist want to push a Canadian kid off the château steps, pray tell?”
“Because… because…” My chin trembled, and I realized the motive was no longer clear, not after what the gypsy Jean had told me.
“You’re way off beam, love,” Harry told me, gently. “It was Valcourt who did the killing.”
I didn’t take that in, at first—I only felt relief that nearly shook my body in a deep and swelling surge. It wasn’t Neil, my inner voice rejoiced, but I was half afraid to listen to it. I turned to the gypsy. “You’re absolutely sure?”
He nodded, his black eyes calm and certain. “Yesterday afternoon,” he explained, “I am coming down from here to the town, through the souterrains, the tunnels. I stop at the door in the cliff. There is a space between the boards in the door, and so I look, like always, to make sure the way is safe.” He drew one finger along the line of his eyebrow, frowning. “But it is not safe. He is there.”
“Monsieur Valcourt?”
His nod this time held sadness. “He is sitting on the wall, beside your friend, the young canadien. They smoke, they talk—they talk like friends. But the boy, he is not on his guard. He is not watching Valcourt’s face, as I am, so he does not see the danger. When Valcourt gives to him another cigarette, the boy lifts up both hands to light it, and…” No brutal gesture, this time, just a small regretful shrug. “It is so quick, there is no time for noise. The boy falls and Valcourt walks very fast toward the château. When I cannot see him any more I open my door, I come out. It is terrible, what I have just seen, you understand?” A brief pause while he lit another cigarette himself, still frowning. “I go down at once to see if the boy… but he is dead. He is dead.” The gypsy glumly shook his head, and sighed a spreading pall of smoke.
There was something unfinished about that story, I thought, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The little dog Bruno yawned with gusto and jumped onto my cousin’s bed, stretching himself into the blankets. And then I remembered. I remembered very clearly how I’d seen that dog the afternoon before, outside the phone box at the corner of the fountain square. Spurred by that memory, I took a stab in the dark. “So you went down and telephoned Monsieur Grantham, didn’t you?”
“To Monsieur…? Ah, the one who plays the violin. No, I do not telephone to him, Mademoiselle. I telephone to the police, to say there has been an accident.” He shrugged. “And then I leave as quickly as I can. I come back here, to tell your cousin.”
“I was asleep, I’m afraid,” Harry said, with a regretful smile, “and by the time I’d heard the tale from Jean all hell had broken loose at your hotel, which made it rather difficult to contact you.” His eyes were very gentle as he met my gaze. “I am a selfish bastard, aren’t I, love? I was so busy feeling sorry for myself I didn’t stop to think you might yourself be in some danger. I thought you’d be quite safe with Jean to keep an eye on you, and from what I heard I gathered Valcourt rather fancied you. I thought,” he said, a little sadly, “that it would be all right, you see. But when Jean told me Valcourt had just pushed your friend right down the château steps, I realized I was wrong. Of course, by then,” he went on, pushing himself upright on the pillows, “the word was out that the police were looking everywhere for Jean. His sister came to tell us that. So I could hardly send him down…”
“I told you,” said the gypsy, “that your cousin, she would come to us.” He shrugged with the complacency of one who trusts the mystic course of fate.
Harry smiled. “So you did.”
It hardly mattered, I thought, whether I’d found them or they’d found me. What mattered was what all of us intended doing now. For, in spite of Harry’s evidently weakened state…
I looked more closely at him. “God, I never thought. Were you very badly hurt? Do you need a doctor?”
“No,” he told me, rather quickly, hitching higher up in bed. Although he looked more tired than normal, he really didn’t appear too ill. “No, I don’t need a doctor.”
The gypsy also clearly thought the question daft. “My sister, she has seen him,” he explained. “She is better than a doctor. She finds us this empty house, to keep him hidden, and she comes each day to make for him the medicine. It is not good, she says, for him to move around too much.”
Even so, it seemed to me unthinkable to simply sit here and do nothing. Two men were dead already, and my cousin’s life was hardly safe from harm. I frowned and cleared my throat and was about to speak when I was interrupted by a gentle, furtive tapping sound, like the faint patter of a branch blown by the wind against a window pane.
Jean scraped his chair back on the floorboards and rose to answer the door. A different door than the one I’d entered the house by, but then the tapping sound had not come from the tunnels. It had come from the outside.
The door swung open and I saw for the first time just where I was—the slanting view of narrow path and waving grasses and the smudge of rooftops far below was unmistakable. I must have walked straight past this house, I thought, when I’d come up that first day alone and by accident to the Chapelle of Sainte Radegonde, and again when I’d returned to search with Paul. I would have to see the house from the outside, of course, to know just where along the path it stood, but all the same I knew that I was on the cliffs and just a stone’s throw from the lovely ruined chapelle. The tunnels had brought me this far.
I’d scarcely registered the fact before my attention shifted to the woman standing in the doorway. She was quite young, with an arresting face and a figure that begged the word voluptuous. Had I met her on the street, I would have thought her looks exotic—Italian, perhaps, or even Turkish, dark hair and eyes and olive skin—but I’d not have taken her for a gypsy. She looked so… well, so modern, really, in her stylish jeans and jumper; so unlike my own conception of a gypsy, and yet seeing her beside her brother Jean one couldn’t possibly mistake the family likeness.
This was, I thought, without a doubt Jean’s helpful sister with the healing hands, who came every day to nurse my cousin’s wounded head. Which probably explained why Harry had been so content to stay hidden, I thought drily. Already he had slumped again, wanting sympathy, assuming his most appealing little-boy-lost expression as he turned to face this newest visitor.