The Night Gate

Chapter Thirty-One

It was nearly eleven by the time Enzo found himself standing on the covered landing outside Anny’s door, raising the wrought-iron knocker to rap three times. The sound of it rang out across the small square and the park, where the moon cast deep shadows over what had been intended as the last resting place of Karlheinz Wolff. Enzo glanced back down the stairs at the sound of feet shuffling in the darkness of the alley that ran back to the night gate from where Bauer had seen Anny emerge on to the terrace the night of the murder.

The door opened and the old lady stood wraithlike in the moonlight. Fully dressed, but shrunken somehow.

He said, ‘I hope you weren’t in bed.’

She gave him a weary smile. ‘Of course not. I’ve been expecting you.’ She turned and walked back through the kitchen towards the grand salon, and Enzo followed, shutting the door behind him.

Anny eased herself down into her habitual rocker by the dying embers of the fire and watched as he sat in the armchair from where he had listened to the story of her mother, and Paul Lange, and Wolff. And the Mona Lisa. She gave him a curious look. Her pupils were dilated, and her eyes seemed black.

‘You’ve been in the wars, monsieur.’ Her voice was slurred.

Enzo raised fingers to his bruised and battered face. A reflex response. He’d had time to wash and change. But his face, he knew, was still a mess. ‘You should see the other guy,’ he said grimly. But neither of them smiled. He took his phone from his pocket and set it to record, then reached across to place it on a side table. ‘I’m going to record our conversation. Unless you have any objection?’

She shrugged, but said nothing.

‘You killed him, Anny, didn’t you? Narcisse.’

But still she held her peace. Fixing him with those unnaturally dark eyes.

‘You made an appointment for him to come at seven-thirty. You threw the switch on the déjoncteur so that the house would be in darkness. You slashed his throat with a kitchen knife and left him lying on your kitchen floor. You knew that Bauer would arrive half an hour later. The door was unlocked. You figured there was a very good chance that he would come in, and in the dark stumble across Narcisse. You probably didn’t imagine he would slip and fall in the blood, but that only helped to serve your narrative. The fact that he then ran just embedded police suspicions that it was he who had killed Narcisse.’

She closed her eyes and said in a small voice, ‘That was very calculating of me.’

‘It was.’

She opened them again, but they seemed glazed now. ‘I have an alibi.’

He shook his head. ‘Bauer suspected you were doing some kind of deal with Narcisse, and came up the back way from the hotel. He was in the alley outside when you emerged from the side entrance and took the path up to the main road.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t expect your friend will hold out for very much longer. Unless, of course, she was in on it.’

Anny snorted. ‘Of course not! Stupid woman. When we set off in her car, I “remembered” at the top of the road that I had left my phone in the house. I got Marie-Christine to stop by the Auberge du Vieux Quercy rather than drive the whole way round again, and took the path from there back to the house. Told her I would only be a minute. Which is all it took.’

‘You could very easily have bumped into Bauer on your return to the house. He must already have been halfway up the hill by then.’

‘On such slender threads do the fate of all things hang, Monsieur Macleod. Timing is everything.’

‘So you killed Narcisse and went off for a nice dinner with your friend in Vayrac.’

‘That makes me sound very cold.’

Enzo nodded. ‘Yes, it does. A little like your father, perhaps?’ She flinched, and he sat staring at her for a long moment. ‘Do I have to do all the work here?’

‘It’s your job, isn’t it?’

‘It might be if someone was paying me.’ He paused. ‘So when you got back to the house and you and Marie-Christine “discovered” the body, you told her not to mention that you had gone back for your phone, in case the police thought you might have done it. But she must have had her doubts.’

‘I pay for her daughter’s education at university in Paris, monsieur. She wouldn’t have wanted to lose my patronage.’ She sighed then. ‘But, of course, she was always the weak link.’ She cast a resentful look at Enzo. ‘And then there was you. Sniffing around. Relentlessly. Forensically.’ The breath she drew seemed to tremble in her throat. ‘I’m too old to go to prison.’

‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you took a man’s life.’ Enzo was unable to find any sympathy for her. ‘Where is she?’ he said.

She looked surprised. ‘Who?’

‘The Mona Lisa. The copy.’

‘There is no copy.’

‘Then why did you kill Narcisse?’

She closed her eyes again, and her breathing seemed shallow. Feeble. And as if finally giving in she said, ‘My mother lost the man she loved, my father, to save the Mona Lisa. I could never have allowed her to fall into the hands of a trader in stolen Nazi art.’ Her head tipped forward, her chin settling on her breast and Enzo became suddenly alarmed. He leapt up and crossed to her chair.

‘Madame, are you alright?’ He knelt down and lifted her chin and her eyes flickered open for the briefest of moments.

‘A healthy overdose, monsieur, of those nice pink pills the doctor prescribed to help me sleep.’

Enzo stood up and hurried to the door. From the outside landing he shouted into the dark. ‘Capitaine, capitaine! Quickly.’

Arnaud and two of his men emerged from the shadows and ran up the steps to follow Enzo back into the house.

‘She’s taken an overdose,’ Enzo said. ‘We need an ambulance fast.’

Arnaud barked into his walkie-talkie and they tried to rouse her. But her eyes remained stubbornly shut, before she raised her head, and with her final breath whispered, ‘Too late, monsieur. Too late. For everything.’

By four in the morning, the moon was casting the shadows of the houses opposite across the tiny square below the park. Several police vehicles lined up in front of Anny’s house, casting blue flashing light on cold stone walls. When the ambulance had finally come, Anny was long dead, and they had removed her to languish in the mortuary of the hospital in Saint-Céré.

Enzo sat at the kitchen table, haunted by her tale of Georgette and the painting, and by the unfolding tragedy that had finally ended here tonight. He rubbed stinging eyes as masked gendarmes and forensics officers came and went, and turned as Arnaud came down from the upstairs bedrooms. ‘We’ve found it,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see?’

Enzo nodded and stood wearily to follow Arnaud back upstairs. At the door to Anny’s bedroom, a variety of Belgian Shepherd known as a Malinois was held on a short leash by his handler, a rubber ball in his mouth, the reward for success.

The bed had been moved and floorboards lifted to reveal a hiding place beneath them, a space between the rafters, around eighty centimetres by sixty. Lined by leatherette and fireproof paper, it was a perfect fit for concealing the Mona Lisa. But it was not a painting that the Malinois had sniffed out. Wrapped in a bin bag, it was the plastic apron Anny had worn to slash the throat of Narcisse, and the kitchen knife with which she had done it. Concealed there in haste before she hurried off to dinner with Marie-Christine in Vayrac.

Enzo was disappointed. ‘No sign of the painting?’

Arnaud appeared surprised. ‘Did you think there would be?’

Enzo shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’

‘And you still think it exists? This copy of the Mona Lisa?’

‘Yes.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘A lot of people have died because of it, capitaine. Lange, Wolff, Narcisse, Bauer. And now Anny herself.’

‘So where is it?’

‘I have no idea.’ He nodded towards the hiding place beneath the floorboards. ‘But I think it was probably here until the day that Narcisse and Bauer came knocking.’

Arnaud sighed and scratched his head. ‘And the person who chased you through the village the other night, and fished you out of the river? Are you any the wiser about who that might have been?’

Enzo lifted a framed family photograph from Anny’s bedside table and regarded it grimly. ‘Yes, capitaine. I think I am.’