House of the Hanged

‘It’s not so bad. You cry in her arms, you laugh in her arms, and every so often you scream blue murder at each other. I’d take that any day over the indifference I knew as a child.’

Leonard had found his own way of dealing with it, somehow managing to remain immune to her moods. Things hadn’t always been this way. Lucy could remember the rows when she was younger, the look of quiet satisfaction on her mother’s face when she succeeded in piercing his carapace of self-control and getting a rise out of him. Those days were long gone. Leonard now displayed an almost saintly forbearance in the face of her moods. Maybe he had simply been numbed into a kind of stupor. Maybe with time the same thing would happen to her.

Thoughts of Mother put paid to any possibility of dozing on for another hour or so, and Lucy swung her legs off the bed, making for the bathroom. The bathtub was still desperately in need of a new coat of enamel, and the crumbling cork mat had disintegrated further since last year, but the water was as hot as ever.

She stripped off her clothes, catching sight of her naked self in the long mirror screwed to the wall beside the sink. She examined the reflection with a cold and critical eye: too tall for the tastes of most men, and still too thin, although she had finally begun to fill out a little in the past year, her narrow hips losing some of their bony angularity.

She cupped her breasts in her hands, weighing them, as if judging between two pieces of fruit at a market stall – small fruit, sadly, oranges rather than grapefruits. There was little hope on that front, if Mother was anything to go by. Only pregnancy might improve on their modest proportions. Ten years behind the times, she mused wearily. Her lean look would have gone down a storm a decade ago. Nowadays, it was associated with poverty and deprivation and all the other unwelcome associations of the Depression.

Thank God for Claudette Colbert, the standard-bearer of small-breasted women everywhere. Only a few years before she had been prepared to frolic naked in a bath of wild asses’ milk in The Sign of the Cross – a picture which George and Harry had trooped off to watch half a dozen times, ostensibly as fans of Cecil B. DeMille, although Lucy suspected the fleeting glimpse of Miss Colbert’s nipples above the milky froth might have had more to do with her brothers’ devotion to that particular entry in the director’s oeuvre.

She ran a hand down over her pale belly, her fingers curling through the dark arrowhead of hair at the fork of her thighs, darker than dark, as good as black. That, she owed to the Spanish blood on her father’s side, along with the large eyes and the strong mouth whose lips were a touch too full for beauty.

Fortunately, the swirls of steam rising from the bath clouded the mirror, dimming her unforgiving gaze.

Chapter Six

Tom picked his moment carefully, arriving at the Hôtel de la Réserve when he judged most of the guests would be taking their breakfast. He knew that breakfast was a case of all hands on deck. The reception area was unlikely to be manned, allowing him to slip inside unnoticed, and maybe even sneak a look at the register in the process.

His instinct proved correct, although the register had been locked in the back office; he could see it lying on the desk. It didn’t matter. With any luck he’d find everything he needed in the room.

He hurried past the doors to the dining room, glancing briefly inside to assure himself that he hadn’t been spotted. The hum of conversation and the clatter of cutlery on crockery swiftly receded as he made his way up the main staircase to the third floor.

Room 312 turned out to be at the far end of the corridor, a corner room with views over the sea and to the west, both served by balconies, Tom knew. The Italian had obviously decided to treat himself.

Tom knocked softly and pressed his ear to the door to be sure.

The Italian’s failure to show up for breakfast would be noted but was unlikely to arouse any undue suspicion for now. The maids wouldn’t be round to clean the rooms until the guests had taken to the beach, which meant plenty of time for a thorough search.

The moment Tom let himself into the room he realized he was wrong. A quick survey revealed that the Italian had lied to him. He wasn’t on his own, and his travelling companion appeared to be a woman. Her diaphanous pale blue peignoir lay discarded on the unmade bed next to a wide-brimmed raffia sun hat, and her cosmetics were spread out on the dressing table.

He was going to have to move fast, very fast.

Pulling on his doeskin driving gloves, he started with the writing desk, tugging out the empty drawers and checking that nothing was taped to their undersides. Both bedside cabinets were also empty, although there was a German novel resting on one of them beside a glass of water and a pair of ladies’ reading glasses. He checked the first few pages of the book for a dedication, a name, but it obviously hadn’t been a gift.

There was nothing under the bed, and the drawers of the dressing table were stuffed with women’s underwear, brassieres, stockings and so on. Like the novel, the cosmetics were German, although the perfume was French – Feu-Follet by Roger & Gallet. It was hardly the scent of a young woman, and together with the reading glasses suggested someone further along in years than her Italian companion.

A search of the chest of drawers only added to his confusion. Buried beneath some neatly folded men’s socks was a shagreen box containing three pairs of solid gold cufflinks, bone collar stiffeners, a diamond-set money clip, a pearl tie pin, and some silver and onyx dress studs. It didn’t make sense. Who carried such costly accessories with them on a mission of murder? And why so many pairs of socks?

The long drawer below contained some summer shirts in a variety of colours and materials. Tom opened one up. It had above-elbow sleeves and was cut to fit a tall man of some considerable girth, whereas the Italian had been short and compact.

He was still struggling to make sense of this when he heard footsteps outside in the corridor. It was probably a guest returning to one of the other rooms, but he folded the shirt as quickly and neatly as possible and silently slid the drawer shut.

He was right to have anticipated the worst. Someone was now at the door, ferreting for a key in a bag.

His eyes darted around the room. The bathroom was out of the question, as was the built-in wardrobe; he had no idea what lay behind its louvred doors. The key was turning in the lock as he slid noiselessly beneath the bed.

It was a woman – wide navy blue cotton slacks breaking on tan leather sandals. She made straight for the desk, not bothering to take a seat. He heard her pick up the telephone receiver and dial a three-digit number. It was a while before she spoke.

‘Where are you?’ she asked in German. This was clearly for her own benefit, because she hung up almost in the same breath.

She skirted the bed, making for the wardrobe. Tom shifted to get a better view, ready to withdraw suddenly if she turned round. Her blonde hair was done in a youthful wave and she had a trim figure, but the hands which now removed a man’s jacket from a hanger were those of a middle-aged woman. She pulled a key from the hip pocket of the jacket – a key attached to an oval metal fob, just like the one that Tom held tightly clenched in his fist.

This was the last he saw of her. He slunk back as she turned, fearing for a moment that she’d spotted him. She hadn’t, though. She made straight for the door and left the room.

He was up and after her in an instant, pausing at the door, listening to her footfalls receding down the corridor. Chancing a quick glance outside, he saw her turn down the main staircase. Easing the door shut behind him, he set off in silent pursuit.

Her destination was a first-floor room towards the front of the hotel, almost directly above the main entrance. In terms of location (and cost, no doubt) it couldn’t have been more different from the one they’d just left. She knocked furtively on the door. When no one responded she let herself in with the key.

Tom approached just close enough to read the number on the door: 104. Everything told him this was the Italian’s room, and the urge to gain entry to it right now, to force some answers from the woman, was almost overwhelming. Cold common sense prevailed, though. He mustn’t do anything to link himself to the dead man. He knew the rules. He had to remain anonymous, faceless, nameless, at all times. Besides, an idea about the real nature of the woman’s role in this affair was beginning to take shape in his head, and he needed to test the hypothesis first.

Olivier, the hotel manager, was making conversation with an elderly couple at their table in the dining room, but the moment he saw Tom enter he made his excuses and hurried over, beaming.

‘Mr Nash . . .’

He pumped Tom’s hand.

‘After five years, I think you can call me Tom, don’t you?’

‘I’m on duty.’

‘You spend far too much time on duty, Olivier.’

‘What can I say?’ shrugged Olivier, an ironic twinkle in his eye. ‘I’m a consummate professional.’

‘Then find me a table on the terrace for breakfast.’

‘Find it yourself, connard,’ Olivier fired back, and they both laughed.

They hadn’t seen each other for a couple of weeks, not since Tom had strolled down to the hotel with his book for a quick dinner, only to end up staggering home in the early hours of the morning after a marathon, and rather drunken, bout of Bezique. They would probably have played right through till daybreak if Olivier’s wife, Nadine, hadn’t searched them out in the bar in her nightdress and summoned her husband to bed.

Tom opted for the terrace because he suspected Olivier would come and sit with him, and he knew that the guests were obliged to pass across it when making for the beach below. He selected a table near the head of the wide steps which ran down the bluff to the sand, turning his chair to admire the view while waiting for Olivier to return with his coffee and the two fried eggs he didn’t really want.

He almost never dropped by for breakfast, and he’d thought it wise to play up the occasion: the final meal of the condemned man, condemned for the next few weeks to a string of house guests and other friends in need of near-continuous nourishment and entertainment. This was the still before the storm, and he couldn’t exactly mark it with a solitary café au lait, hence the eggs. He had passed up the offer of a fried slice of pork belly to go with them. The eggs were bad enough, the mere thought of them threatening to unravel the tight knot of nausea which had been sitting low down in his belly for the past few hours.

He felt bad lying to Olivier, but he could hardly tell him the truth: that he’d killed one of his hotel guests, the man in Room 104, and that the young Italian now lay trussed up in tarpaulin on the sea bed somewhere over there.

He squinted out to sea, trying to identify the spot. He realized, with a stab of self-reproach, that he should have thought twice before dumping the body where he had. The exact location might not be visible from where he was sitting, but it certainly would be from the villa, whose terracotta roof tiles he could see poking above the pines on the headland around to his left. As long as he lived in Villa Martel he would have a direct line of sight, a constant reminder of his actions.

He should have gone east towards Cavalaire, around the corner: out of sight, out of mind. He rarely sailed that way, whereas he was always beating to and from the islands. He saw himself as an elderly man sitting hunched at the helm, an arthritic hand on the tiller, still tensing and falling silent every time he passed over the watery grave.

This vision of his dotage was, he reflected miserably, the very best he could hope for. It assumed that he would still be around to see out his declining years in Le Rayol; it supposed that he would come through the current situation unscathed, and that having done so, Le Rayol and the simple life he’d carved out for himself here would not have been irredeemably tainted. It relied on a lot of things, none of which he could guarantee, or even reasonably hope for.

He was stirred from his maudlin trance by a voice behind him.

‘What are you thinking?’

It was Olivier with a tray.