The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Read online

  At Angoulême they changed trains.

  She blamed herself for marrying him.

  A week later, the vineyards around Cognac sprang into leaf and an Englishman called Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes. Less than two months down the line, once the vines had been pruned and tied back, an Australian beat the Englishman’s record, but by the time the summer sun was swelling the grapes on the hillsides, the Englishman had once again reclaimed his crown in Vancouver, Little Mo’s tennis career was cut short by a riding accident and a pair of Italians were the first climbers to reach the peak of K2. These things seemed to excite everyone except Marie-Claude, but it didn’t matter, because she kept herself busy making the house nice for Luc.

  It was pleasantly located in the old quarter, halfway between the chateau and the covered market, where the streets were narrow, hilly, twisting and cobbled, and the houses built of thick stone to keep them cool in summer, retain heat in the winter, and with fireplaces large enough to secrete a small army. But an old man had lived alone here for the past twenty years and she was damned if she’d be accused of leaving her husband to a place which looked (and smelled) like a pig-sty.

  A week’s scrub with carbolic transformed it no end, but the shutters could use a coat or three of paint and although she’d considered returning to Paris in August, the weather was perfect for strolls along the tow-path, and whilst Marie-Claude knew of lots of people who didn’t bother with curtains and just used the shutters, Luc worked so hard that the very least he deserved, if he wasn’t to have a decent dinner waiting on the table, was to be able to pore over his paperwork in a house that was cosy. One or two rooms, that was all. Bedroom. Salon. Enough to lend a bit of warmth and character where it mattered the most.

  By the time workers had been drafted in for the harvest and Pope Pius X had been canonized, the Algerians had started a guerrilla war against their French protectors, “This Ole House” was on everyone’s lips and Marie-Claude had run up another pair of drapes, this time for the kitchen, and accepted the offer of part-time work in an upmarket dress shop.

  “I’ll be late tonight,” Luc announced one lunchtime, as he washed his hands in the sink. Close by, the bells of St Léger pealed merrily. “The proprietor of one of the smaller Cognac houses has been murdered.”

  Marie-Claude laid the cassoulet on the table and lifted the lid. “Good.”

  “Good?” He chuckled as he sniffed appreciatively through the steam. “Some poor woman has been battered over the head and all you can say is good?”

  “Not good that she’s dead.” She heaped his plate. “Good that you’ve got some proper detective work to do at last.”

  All he’d been called upon to investigate over the past five months had been robbery, the inevitable smuggling and once, right at the beginning, an art theft that turned out to be a simple insurance fraud. Luc was a first-rate detective and at last this would give him something to sink his teeth into. In fact, with such a high-profile case demanding his attention, Marie-Claude doubted he’d notice she’d left, although she might as well wait until the warm weather ended. Paris was desperately wet in October.

  “Marie-Claude, this duck is delicious.”

  It was the market, she explained, scraping out the dish for him. So close it made shopping each day easy, and you could buy the freshest produce without it having been hanging around in a vans for several days as it made its way slowly up country. Luc shot a covetous glance at the second pot on the stove.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Certainly not!” Tomorrow she was planning coq au vin. “I made that for Suzette next door. Her husband died last year from an accident in the boiler room in one of the distilleries down on the quay, so with three small children and no work, I thought it might help.”

  “That’s very generous.”

  “Nonsense. We can easily afford one extra duck. My job, your pay rise—”

  “No hat bills, no theatre tickets.” He wiped both cassoulet and smile from his mouth with a serviette. “Do you miss them, Marie-Claude? Honestly?”

  “If you’ve finished, I need to get back to the shop,” she said briskly. “Madame Garreau’s visiting her mother and I’m all on my own this afternoon.” She scraped the bones into the bin while he brewed the coffee. “So who died, then?”

  “A woman by the name of Martine Montaud—”

  “Madame Montaud?” She wiped her hands on the dishcloth and set out a plate of palmiers still warm from the oven. “Handsome, late forties, with dark hair?”

  “You know her?”

  “As one would expect of the owner of a cognac house, she was one of Madame Garreau’s best customers.” Marie-Claude sat on the table and began swinging her legs. “Very elegant lady,” she said. “Exquisitely made up, hands neatly manicured and I wouldn’t like her hairdresser’s bill, I can tell you.” She sighed. “I shall miss her coming in, though,” she added. “She never took offence when I told her what didn’t suit her—”

  “Marie-Claude, that’s the reason Madame Garreau adores you. You give her clientele an honest appraisal and you don’t hold back. People respect that.”

  She wondered how he could possibly know her employer’s opinion. As far as she knew, Luc had never met Madame Garreau, but that was beside the point. No woman wants to be told lilac suits her when it makes her look bland, any more than being sold the concept that wide stripes will flatter her hips. Especially Madame Montaud, who invariably left the shop hundreds of francs lighter, but every inch looking the successful businesswoman she was.

  “She never struck me the type to get herself murdered,” Marie-Claude said, sipping her coffee. “Well, not bashed on the head, anyway. It seems so . . . vulgar.”

  “You’d have preferred she was strangled?”

  She shot him a look to say that wasn’t funny. “Who killed her, do you have any idea?”

  “Everything points to the cellar master,” he said sadly. “Like that art theft back in May, there’s very little detective work involved in this case, – oh, and talking of art, I suppose you know Matisse is dead?”

  “Cellar master? Luc, the cellar master of a cognac house is just one step below God. He’s not just responsible for the blend, he oversees the whole process of distillation from beginning to end, he even chooses the oak trees from which the barrels are made that will store his precious cognac, for heaven’s sake!”

  “And you know this because . . .?”

  “Suzette. I told you. Her husband died in a boiler room fire.” She brushed a curl out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “We spend a lot of time talking when she picks up the kids.”

  “You babysit?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. It gives her chance to do a typing course and – hein. The point is, you’re looking at the wrong person, Luc. The cellar master couldn’t possibly have clonked Madame Montaud on the head. That wouldn’t have been his style, either.”

  “Ah. You’d have preferred he strangled her?”

  “That wasn’t funny the first time, and besides! What motive would he have for killing his employer?”

  “Something sexual probably, it usually is.” Luc shrugged as he reached for the last pastry. “Money or sex lies at the root of most murders, plus his were the only fingerprints that we lifted and I found one of her ear-rings in his bed—”

  “It was so obvious, you searched his house?”

  “Not exactly.” He leaned his weight against the back of the chair and folded his arms over his chest. “But because her body was found in the cellars, I conducted a thorough search of the entire factory, including the distillery, which happens to have a small room sectioned off that serves as the cellar master’s bedroom.”

  “Only from November until March, when distillation takes place around the clock and he needs to be on hand night and day.”

  “Suzette?”

  “Suzette.”

  “Hmm.” He scratched his chin. “Well, if you know so much about the cognac process and y
ou don’t believe my suspect is the killer, why don’t you go up there and tell me who is?”

  Marie-Claude jumped down from the table. “I’ll need a cardigan.”

  “What about the shop?” he called up the stairs, and look! it proved the acoustics in this house were rubbish. It sounded for all the world as though he was laughing.

  “What about the shop?” she called back, reaching for her green hat with the feathers. “They’re rich, these women. They can afford to wait a while longer.”

  Poor Madame Montaud could not.

  The Domaine de Montaud lay on the north side of Cognac, protected by woodlands and snug inside a bend in the river. For almost two thousand years, its sun-kissed slopes had gazed over the valley of the Charente and the hills that unfolded beyond, but the acidic soil and low alcohol content played havoc with the wine’s conservation and so, in the seventeenth century, foreign merchants hit upon the idea of importing it in spirit form and diluting it on arrival. Because of the double distillation process involved, the Dutch named this spirit brandwijn – burnt wine – which had the added advantage of being cheaper to ship. But no matter how economical the costs of transport, when recession hits, luxury goods are the first to suffer. Huge stocks of brandy piled up in the cellars. Things were not looking good.

  Until local producers noticed that their spirit not only improved with age, it tasted even better drunk neat . . .

  But as cognac was born, so evolved a world of secrets and magic. In each dark saturated cellar, the cellar master became sorcerer, blending smooth with mellow, amber with gold, elegance with subtlety, to produce a unique and individual range of cognacs, from the youngest, at under five years, to prestigious reserves that had been maturing in oak casks for decades.

  Marie-Claude had imagined such sorcerers to be sober, unsmiling, aloof and dull. Undertakers in different suits. If they were, Alexandre Baret broke the mould.

  “Enchanté, madame.”

  Any other time and the eyes behind the spectacles would be twinkling flirtatiously. The crows’ feet either side said so. But today they only viewed the inspector’s assistant with mistrust, and were clouded with something else, too. Guilt? Grief? Fear? Marie-Claude couldn’t say but, following him through the shadowy barrel-lined chambers, their walls black from evaporation, she felt prickles rise on her scalp. With its rigorously controlled temperature, light rationed to brief and rare visits, the okay tang to the air, it was like walking through a cathedral. That same air of reverence. Humility. Silence. Tranquillity. The taking of life here seemed sacrilegious.

  “I have informed the workforce that this area is out of bounds until further notice,” Monsieur Baret said, studiously avoiding the outline of a body chalked on the flagstone floor. “But in any case, only a handful of employees have access, and I assure you it is quite impossible to enter without the necessary keys. Indeed,” he added dryly, “one would stand a better chance breaking into the Banque de France.”

  “You don’t think this could be a robbery turned sour, then?” Marie-Claude’s voice echoed softly. “After all, there are hundreds of migrants in the vineyards right now, breaking their backs to bring in the harvest.”

  Alexandre Baret watched dust motes dance in the air over the spot where every trace of his employer’s blood had been scrubbed clean. “No, madame, I do not think that.”

  “You’re not exactly helping your case,” she said, and behind her heard Luc grind his teeth.

  “Why?” The cellar master swung round sharply to face him. “Am I under suspicion, inspector?”

  Marie-Claude was acutely conscious that her husband didn’t look at her when he replied. “Madame Montaud was found with just one emerald cluster in her left ear,” he said mildly. “An identical cluster was found in your bed next to the still.”

  Monsieur Baret said nothing, but his eyes flickered, she noticed, as he opened the door from the cellars. Perhaps it was nothing more than passing from darkness into the light.

  “I cannot explain that,” he said at length. “But if you are suggesting—” he indicated the cramped sleeping quarters partitioned off with nothing more than wood and glass “—I’m sorry, inspector, you are mistaken.”

  Marie-Claude opened the door and peered in. There was just about enough room for the bed and a small chest of drawers. The blankets did not look very clean.

  “The night watchman confirms that you have been leaving very late. Past midnight on several occasions.”

  “I did not conduct an affair down here with Madame Montaud,” Baret insisted, “that’s simply too sordid to contemplate, I am a married man. And the notion that I killed her – pff! What possible motive would I have?”

  Luc drew a carbon copy from his breast pocket. Reading upside down, Marie-Claude saw that the letter bore yesterday’s date, was addressed to the cellar master and had been typewritten.

  “This was on top of the paperwork in Madame Montaud’s desk,” Luc said. “The desk, incidentally, that we were only able to open with the key that was found in her pocket.”

  Baret took the proffered letter and, as he read, the colour drained from his face. His jaw tightened. “I-I have never seen this before.”

  Marie-Claude didn’t get the chance to read every last word before it disappeared back inside Luc’s pocket, but the gist was enough. In the most civil of terms, Martine Montaud was dismissing her cellar master.

  “Is it, do you think, too sordid to contemplate?” Luc asked, once they were alone in the distillery. “Tall, fifty, and with that thick thatch of dark hair, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that the earring of the widowed and lonely Martine would end up in his bed.”

  “Not this bed,” Marie-Claude said, sending clouds of dust into the air as she tried to pull the curtains and found the hooks had rusted solid.

  “Wouldn’t the risk of discovery have been the spice, though? Two educated, articulate, respected people fired by the danger of being caught in the act?”

  “If there’s any danger, it comes from fleas, not ruined reputations,” she said, prodding the unsheeted mattress. “And anyway, who said she was lonely?”

  When Madame Montaud tried on clothes in the shop, those were not sensible foundations garments she’d been wearing underneath!

  “Who else has a key to the distillery and cellars?” she asked.

  “No one who doesn’t have a cast iron alibi.”

  “While Monsieur Baret . . .?”

  “Claims he went for a walk, and if you believe that, you believe anything.” Luc ran his hand over the ticking on the bolster. “You know, Marie-Claude, just because they’re both polite, refined individuals, it doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy the occasional foray into degeneracy.”

  She considered the new baby doll pyjamas that were all the rage at the moment. Both she and Luc agreed that these were the most depraved and decadent garments that had ever been invented, and indeed they’d considered them so depraved and decadent that they ripped them off no less than three times last Saturday night.

  “So you’re saying Alexandre met with Martine last night, as usual. They came down here, as usual, made love in his seedy little camp bed, as usual, where she lost an earring in the heat of their passion . . . then fired him?”

  “No,” he said, leaning his hip against the chest of drawers. “That’s what the evidence is saying. Not me.”

  Marie-Claude threw her hands in the air. “Luc Brosset, you are the most impossible man on God’s earth! If you suspected all along that this was a set-up, for heaven’s sake why didn’t you just come straight out with it and tell me you wanted my help?”

  “That’s funny,” he said. “I thought that was exactly what I had done.”

  Centuries had come and gone, but the method of distilling cognac hadn’t changed. The still itself, the alambic, was made of gleaming red copper and, with its swan neck, long pipes and balloon shape resembled more a giant oriental hookah than a boiler. For nearly four months of the year, once the grapes had been
pressed and their precious juice extracted, these three pieces of apparatus would be working night and day to produce the first distillation, the brouillis, before undergoing its distinctive second boiling. Only after that could the “heads” and “tails” be separated from the clear “heart” of the spirit that would eventually mature into cognac.

  During these four months, though, the cellar master would virtually live next to his alambic while, outside, the town would grow warm from so many boilers pumping round the clock, the air would become impregnated with the sweet smell of brandy, and the characteristic black on the buildings would deepen, a symbol of status and pride. Incredibly, a tenth of the cognac was lost to evaporation, a contribution known as the angels’ share. Marie-Claude wondered whether Madame Montaud would be able to distinguish her own cognac from where she sat on her cloud. And how silly to get misty-eyed over someone she hardly knew!

  “The way she was killed,” Luc said, “hit on the back of the head with a marble bust of the founder that took pride of place next to the alambic, that suggests the crime wasn’t premeditated.”

  Marie-Claude thought about the key in her pocket. The fact that Alexandre’s were the only fingerprints. The way nobody else here had access.

  “It suggests an earring coming off when she fell,” he continued, “and the killer taking the opportunity to implicate someone else.”

  She wondered what the gem-smith who made Madame Montaud’s jewellery would have to say about such odds.

  “Or,” she said, “it’s a double-bluff designed to look that way.”

  Luc spiked his hands through his hair. “You mean Baret planned it from the outset, then left clumsy clues that pointed directly to him, leading us to think they had been planted?”

  “If it was a spur-of-the-moment act, why didn’t he plead crime passionel straight away? Cellar masters are respected all over France, Luc, and think about it. Sex, rejection, dismissal? Any one of these things are enough to make a man feel emasculated and strike out in the heat of anger, yet here we have three stacked on top of each other. Alexandre Baret could have thrown up his hands and admitted his crime, and even the worst advocate in the country would have had him walking away a free man.”