Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006

Distilling the Truth by Marilyn Todd

Copyright © 2006 Marilyn Todd

Art by Allen Davis

Marilyn Todd’s name will forever be linked in most readers’ minds with Ancient Rome. Her twelfth book in the series whose protagonist, Claudia Seferius, solves mysteries while plying her trade as a wine merchant was published in January. (See Sour Grapes/Severn House.) In this short story, however, Ms. Todd chooses for her setting Cognac, France, the town in which she recently settled, and a time in the not too distant past.

The instant Marie-Claude’s husband told her that he’d compiled a dossier detailing the chief inspector’s corruption, complete with dates, names, and times, then placed the file personally in the hands of the commissioner, she knew it was all over. No wonder he waited until he’d finished his tartiflette to tell her what he’d done. She’d have thrown the damned dish on the floor and to hell with dinner, and he could have whistled for his île flottante as well. As it was, she didn’t hear him out. What on earth was the point of lengthy explanations?

“You’re a fool, Luc. No one likes a whistle-blower.”

“I didn’t join the police to be popular.”

“It’s the end of your career, you know that? They won’t keep you on in Paris after this!”

“Blackmail, extortion, what was I supposed to do, Marie-Claude?” He laid down Le Figaro and turned his gaze to her. “For years, Picard has been preying on the very people he was meant to protect. I couldn’t simply turn aside.”

“And I’m sure the commissioner shook your hand and thanked you warmly for your efforts.”

One side of Luc’s face twisted uncomfortably. “Not exactly, no.”

“You see? No one likes a whistle-blower. They’d rather close ranks and have a bastard in their midst than admit to one bad apple, and you already know my feelings about the commissioner.”

Like when they were invited over to dinner and she overheard him talking to her husband in his study when she went to find the bathroom.

“Your wife is truculent, selfish, and a pain in the cul, Luc—”

The rest was drowned by children’s laughter upstairs, but who cared? That was the last time she’d eat at that pig’s house, she told Luc, and if her husband felt bad about making excuses when future invitations arrived, then so much the better. She wanted nothing to do with a man who insulted her, and it wouldn’t have hurt Luc to have stuck up for her, either.

“—couldn’t agree more, sir—”

Truculent and selfish, her cul. She pushed her thick curls back from her face. She had married too young, that was the trouble, and to a man ten years older than herself at that. Admittedly, after six years Luc was no less handsome and his back was as strong, but that type of love can’t sustain a marriage indefinitely. And when he wasn’t working all the hours le bon Dieu sent, he had his head stuck in a file or wanted to talk politics, and not even French politics, either. Honestly! Who cared whether rich diamond deposits had been found in Siberia or how many communists this Senator Mc-Whatever-His-Name accused in the American State Department? What was going to actually change people’s lives were things like the new television transmissions that were now coming out in colour, not some piece of paper signed by Egypt and Britain over a canal in Suez that Luc insisted was going to have far-reaching consequences. But however exasperated Marie-Claude got with her husband, she’d never once known him to lose his temper.

Not even when, a mere fortnight after Luc delivered his sanctimonious dossier, the commissioner transferred him to Cognac.

“You’ll like the South,” Luc said confidently, as their train pulled away. “Twice as much sunshine, warmer summers, better winters—”

“Better theatres, Luc? Will they have better street cafés and shops? Will they get subtitled versions of On the Waterfront, do you think?” By all accounts, it was set to scoop an Oscar. “Will they have better parks? Better gardens? Women in peignoirs leaning over the balconies, calling obscenities to men in the street?”

He looked at her beneath lowered lids as the train chugged through the forests of Rambouillet. “You never liked Montmartre.”

“It had life,” she retorted. “It had character and substance, it was always noisy, colourful, constantly changing—”

Marie-Claude broke off. Why was she referring to these things in the past tense? For heaven’s sake, it wasn’t as though she wasn’t going back! No, no, once she’d seen Luc settled in (she owed him that) she would start a new life. A new life with a man who appreciated art, the cinema, fashion, and fun. Someone who liked dancing, for sure!

“I’ll bet they’ve never heard of Perry Como in Cognac.”

“You can probably count yourself lucky if they’ve heard of Bing Crosby,” he murmured behind his guidebook. “But this is promotion, Marie-Claude. We’re lucky to get it. Do you want to look through this, by the way?”

Marie-Claude shook her head. She’d seen enough of those vines and flat-bottomed boats from upside down, thank you.

“We’ll be able to afford a house of our own instead of a poky apartment on the fifth floor where you can hear everything that happens next-door. We’re close to the seaside, and I’ll bet the air’s better, too.”

There was nothing wrong with the air in the Rue du Roc, she wanted to say, but his nose was back in the pamphlet and, as Orleans rumbled past, she stroked the hat in her lap. Such a jaunty little number, as well. Très Audrey Hepburn, with just a dash of Ava Gardner. She sighed and closed her eyes. By the time she got a chance to wear it again, it would either have too many feathers or too few, and who would be seen dead wearing green for next season? At Tours, the only other couple in the carriage got off and an old woman with a runny nose got in.

“Amazing,” Luc said, turning the page of his paper to avoid creasing it. “It says here construction’s under way on the St. Lawrence Seaway that’ll allow deep-draught ships direct access to the rich industrials of the Great Lakes. Direct access. Can you imagine?”

Marie-Claude switched off. Her husband was clever, conscientious, honourable, but dull. Handsome, rugged, muscular, and tall, yet he lacked passion where it really counted. And now, it seemed, he was a failure into the bargain.

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 pigsty.

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 towpath, 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 canonised, 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. Leger 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 vans for several days as it made its way slowly upcountry. 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 raise—”

“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 a 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 earrings 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 process for making cognac and you 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 awhile 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, vineyards had covered its sun-kissed slopes, which gazed over the valley of the Charente and the hills that unfolded beyond, but its acidic soil produced a wine whose low alcohol content played havoc with its 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 the rigorously controlled temperature, light rationed to brief and rare visits, the oaky tang to the air, it was like walking through a cathedral. That same air of reverence. Humility. Silence. Tranquility. 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, Marie-Claude 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 a 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 foundation 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 can 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 pajamas 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 setup, 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 it underwent 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 passionnel straightaway? Cellar masters are respected all over France, Luc, and think about it. Sex, rejection, dismissal? Any one of these things is 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.”

She stared up at the shining copper works and saw Madame Montaud holding up two evening dresses, the navy blue and the green. What discount will you give me, Madame Garreau, if I take both? I see. Well, thank you for your time, but I think I’ll drive into Angoulême and see— Why, yes, Madame Garreau. Ten percent would be perfectly acceptable. But shall we say twelve?

“Madame Montaud was elegant, successful, she drove a hard bargain, but by all accounts she was fair. While a man who blends cognac that not only his successor won’t see sold but his successor, either, is a man who is patient, clever, and selfless.”

Luc scratched his head. “Are you saying he did or he didn’t?”

Marie-Claude straightened her hat in the boiler’s reflection. “It’s late,” she said. “I have to get back to the shop.”

“Some joint,” she murmured as they snubbed the distillery’s access road in favour of the broad sweep of the drive in front of the main house.

“Twelve bedrooms, five wings, and ceilings so high you can house a giraffe in each room, should you so desire,” Luc said. “And to prove how handsomely this business pays, the house is surrounded by seventeen hectares of beautiful but totally unproductive parkland.”

“If you think I’d live there, you’re mistaken,” Marie-Claude said. “Look at the number of windows for a start. And the height of them! I’d spend all my day washing them.”

“You’d have people to do that for you.”

“I would not,” she protested.

What? Strangers trooping all over her house, snooping all over her business?

“Some people might envy the rich for their lifestyle,” she said firmly. “Not me. Madame Montaud may have been successful, but the poor woman was a martyr to the business, she barely took a day off, and look at that sister of hers. Dresses like Grace Kelly, but never gets a chance to breathe, much less be her own person. No privacy, not even a house to call her own; she and her husband still live at the Domaine. And when her husband accompanies her to Madame Garreau’s shop, as he invariably does, the place stinks of stale wine and cigars for simply hours.”

“Oh? And what do I stink of?”

“Nutmeg and citron and cool mountain forests,” she said, and his eyes weren’t just green, they crinkled at the corners and were flecked with red, grey, and brown, and his mouth twisted sideways when he smiled. With his thick mop of dark hair and square practical hands, she was glad Luc would have no trouble finding a new wife once she’d gone.

“Hmm.”

He stuffed his square practical hands in his pockets and whistled “Mambo Italiano” under his breath as they sauntered past the bustling vineyards down the hill towards the river. Since the Domaine was only a fifteen-minute walk from the house, they hadn’t bothered with the car, and Marie-Claude was wrong about the cardigan. She hadn’t needed it at all.

“I don’t suppose this sudden obligation to duty has anything to do with the sister?” he asked after working his way through “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Smile,” and “Hernando’s Hideaway.”

“Madame Montaud wasn’t having an affair with her cellar master,” Marie-Claude said, wondering at what point her arm had become linked with his. “She ordered far too many evening gowns for an illicit liaison.”

More likely she was being courted discreetly, preferring to wait and see how things developed before going public with the relationship.

“Loose women aren’t taken seriously in business,” she pronounced. “But her sister, Madame Delaville, now that’s a different story.”

Husband reeking of stale booze and smoke, choosing all her clothes? She’d lost count of the number of times she’d seen him sitting in Madame Garreau’s plush armchair, squat and potbellied like a cocky little toad, while his wife paraded in unflattering suits with slow and mechanical precision.

“Natalie Delaville is a woman of loose moral standards?”

“Exactly the opposite,” Marie-Claude said, turning the key in the shop. “Her husband has the word bully all but etched on his forehead, but the more I think about it, the more I remember that her chin hasn’t drooped quite so much lately, there’s been colour in her pale cheeks, and miracle of miracles, Madame Delaville actually called in half a dozen times on her own over the past month. I want to look up what she — voilà!”

“Well?” Luc held out his hands in exasperation. “Are you going to tell me what the little mouse bought?”

“Certainly not.” Such matters were private! “But I can tell you that the dresses were feminine and flattering, and I can tell you whose account they were charged to, as well.” She shot her husband a sideways glance. “Alexandre Baret.”

“All right...” Luc rubbed his jaw in thought. “But is this actually getting us anywhere?”

“It explains his unease and reluctance to provide an alibi.”

“Because he was protecting Natalie Delaville.”

“Absolutely.” She locked the door and tested the catch. “Now all we have to do is prove how that bitch killed Martine.”

“Metamorphosis is a wonderful thing,” Luc observed, stretching his pace to match hers. “One minute she’s a mouse, the next she’s a bitch — what? What have I said?”

“Honestly!” Marie-Claude stopped outside the baker’s and shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know where you get your ideas, sometimes! Not Madame Delaville, Luc. She didn’t kill Madame Montaud.”

It was Madame Baret, of course. Alexandre’s wife.

“And she killed the wrong woman.”

As the hills slowly turned to russet and gold and the French populace finally came to terms with defeat in Indochina, the Empire State Building had been eclipsed as the world’s tallest structure, civilization was facing extinction from something called Rock and Roll, and Luc had been proved right about Suez, especially in light of that botched attempt on the Egyptian president’s life.

“By the way, Marie-Claude, I received a letter from the commissioner this morning.”

More and more these days Luc had taken to joining her on walks along the towpath, although sometimes their route took them through the town hall park or onto the islands, where they would take a picnic providing they wrapped up warm.

“He writes that he has finally rounded up everyone involved in the blackmail and extortion ring. Some seven police officers are awaiting trial, he says, and commends me for a job well done.”

“That the letter?” Marie-Claude tossed it into the Charente, where a squadron of ducks came steaming in, mistaking it for a bread roll. “You know my opinion of the commissioner.”

“For the life of me, I can’t imagine why.”

“He said I was truculent, selfish, and a pain in the cul.”

Luc laughed. “Well, if you overheard that much, you’d have also heard him qualify his statement by adding that you were spirited, funny, and I was lucky to have you.”

Couldn’t agree more, sir, Luc had replied, and damn those horrid children upstairs for drowning out the commissioner’s words.

“He congratulated me on the Montaud murder, as well.” Luc stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Being a high-profile case, I suppose word found its way back to his desk, but what I’m getting to is that he ended by saying that, now the corruption ring’s been wrapped up and my life is no longer in danger, there’s a job for me in Paris, should we want it.”

“You never told me your life was threatened!”

“Hell hath no fury like a chief inspector jailed. So then. Do we? Want that job, I mean.”

“It might have been high-profile, but it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, Luc.”

All those late nights in the distillery, indeed! I did not conduct an affair down here with Madame Montaud, the cellar master had insisted, that’s simply too sordid to contemplate. Quite right. It may have been his employer’s sister he’d been carrying on with, not his employer, but he wouldn’t have dreamt of taking the delicate, browbeaten Natalie to the distillery had it not been the only place where they could meet and not be either seen or overheard. His office was too close to the main works. They dared not be seen in public. So they either sat down there, talking long into the night, or they sneaked off in his car to plan their new life together, and what a lot of planning there was. For all that cellar masters are handsomely paid and live in grand houses, they still don’t live like the Montauds! There would be no majestic mansion for Natalie once she left Delaville. No parklands, no servants, no prestigious balls. Alexandre had wanted her to be one hundred percent sure before making the leap. He knew there would be no going back.

For her part, of course, Madame Baret hadn’t believed for a second that her husband had been required to work late.

In the way of deceived wives everywhere, she followed him, saw the lights in the distillery, knew about the bed, heard him whispering on the telephone in the hall. She’d had no trouble tracing the number to the Domaine and knew immediately who he was carrying on with. (Who else was there, for goodness’ sake? Hardly that pale, downtrodden sister!) So, again in the way of deceived wives everywhere, she hoped and then prayed the affair would blow over. Until the day she overheard him talking about their new life together...

From that moment on, revenge was all that consumed her. Revenge on the woman who had destroyed her life. Revenge on the man who discarded her.

“The marble bust might look like the instrument of a crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment decision, grabbing the first object to hand,” Marie-Claude said as they paused to watch the churning waters of the millrace merge with the stately river. “But equally it smacked of a squeamish reluctance to be facing the victim.”

A uniquely feminine approach to murder. As was the cold-blooded planning.

“It was easy enough to get a set of her husband’s keys cut.”

“One of the locksmiths confirmed it straightaway, but as evidence it was still far from conclusive.”

“No, but it all mounted up.” She kicked the fallen leaves as she walked. Alder, willow, and poplar. “Madame Baret’s mistake was planting the desk key in Martine’s pocket.”

Good heavens, women as elegant as Madame Montaud don’t use pockets! They tuck such things away tidily in their Chanel handbags, which meant someone had used that key to get into her desk and replaced it in a hurry. And if it wasn’t to take something out, then it must be to put something in.

A quick check of the keys proved that the letter had been typed on the Barets’ private typewriter, not in the office at the Domaine, but it had been a clever move on Madame Baret’s part. If the head of a cognac house wanted rid of their cellar master, this would not be made public knowledge. A gentleman’s agreement between the two parties, however bitter underneath, would not show on the surface. Both had too much invested in the business to jeopardise their reputations.

“She was smart about fingerprints, too.”

Taking care the only ones lifted were her husband’s, and who would think anything odd about seeing a lady of quality going round in evening gloves?

Whatever excuse she’d used to lure Madame Montaud down to the cellars, she must have thought it was her lucky day when Martine agreed so easily. But then, of course, she didn’t know she was setting a trap for the wrong woman.

“Too smart about the fingerprints,” Luc said. They had stopped to watch one of the wooden, flat-bottomed gabarres pass through the lock, laden with casks lashed with ropes. “That was one of the things that bothered me from the outset. That if Martine Montaud was exerting so much passion in the cellar master’s quarters, why weren’t hers there, too?”

“She misjudged the calibre of Madame Montaud’s jewellery, as well.”

How cold must her heart have been as she stood over the corpse, unscrewing the emerald cluster? Extracting the key from Martine’s handbag, placing the letter of dismissal in her desk, replacing the key in Martine’s pocket, then walking out as if nothing had happened, secure in the knowledge that her husband would not plead crime passionel. Why should he, after all? The man was innocent.

“Never mind Madame Baret,” Luc said. “Just tell me whether we want that job in Paris.”

Marie-Claude watched the gabarre sail round the bend and disappear from sight. Above, the sun shone through the falling leaves and blackbirds foraged in the litter. Next week Dial M for Murder would be running back to back with Rear Window and in subtitles, plus she still hadn’t finished those curtains for the bathroom, the cellar really needed a new blind, the old one was a disgrace, the bedroom could use fresh wallpaper, ditto the salon now she came to think about it, and she’d promised Madame Garreau two more days a week with the winter collection.

“Maybe when the rains come,” Marie-Claude said slowly.

Besides, she wasn’t sure Luc was quite ready to live alone yet.