Chapter 33

Fen and James walked down the Rue de Seine, in the opposite direction to the river and towards the église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Parisians in their Sunday best nodded to them as they walked along and seeing them so neatly turned out made Fen pause in front of one of the shop windows to quickly check that her hastily done victory rolls were still in place and her lipstick was just so. I probably won’t be troubling the catwalks of Paris’s fashion houses, she thought to herself, but I’ll do.

The side streets around the church were older in style and without the grand Haussman architecture it felt more like they were in a rural town, such as the one in Burgundy they’d recently come from. The roads were narrow and turned suddenly around blind corners, so much so that it was hard to imagine the great boulevards only a hundred or so yards away.

James guided them both through the labyrinth and arrived at an archway that was barred by double doors. Unlike the ones that led into Rose’s apartment building, these were curved to match the stone arch above them and had a single small door cut into one of them. It was this door that James pounded with his fist to announce their arrival.

‘That’s odd,’ James remarked. ‘I passed Gervais on the road last night as I was leaving your apartment and he said he’d be in this morning. There’s a car he’s working on for some Italian chap; he said he’d be under the bonnet all day and sprucing up the paintwork. “Working all hours on a Sunday, for an Italian!” he’d moaned.’

‘An Italian chap? Perhaps Henri was right about gangsters?’

Fen didn’t mind the pause too much. She and James had been idly chatting as they’d walked to the garage and she hadn’t had the chance to think properly about what questions she might pose Gervais. Blurting out ‘are you a blackmailer?’ probably wasn’t going to cut the mustard, but it was what she so desperately wanted to know.

James pounded on the door again and called out Gervais’s name.

‘This is very odd,’ he finally conceded. It looked as though he was about to try ramming the door with his shoulder, until Fen reached over and turned the handle on the smaller cut-out door. It opened with ease and she raised an eyebrow at James. ‘Fine, fine,’ he muttered, but his eyes suggested that he saw the funny side to the situation too.

Once inside, with the door softly clicked behind them, Fen realised that the arch would have originally led to the stables of a coaching inn or similar, but now the familiar smell of engine grease and fuel suggested that this was a garage for motorcars. It reminded her of the tractor shed on Mrs B’s farm, damp and earthy but spiced with the smell of petrol and oil.

James found a light switch and Fen’s eyes confirmed what her nose had guessed. It was a fully functioning mechanic’s set-up, with metal shelves of gasoline cans, spare parts and boxes of fuses and spanners, wrenches and wires. There was a pit in the floor, and above it a hydraulic ramp, upon which was a smart black car that looked new and in excellent condition, except for the spray of bullet holes that peppered the paintwork.

Fen pointed at them and James nodded, he’d seen them too. Behind the car there were piles of tyres and beyond them more double doors. The smell of white spirit and oil also reminded Fen of Rose’s apartment and she was just about to point out that fact, as well as comment on the rather interesting addition to the car’s paintwork, when James gave a cry of shock.

‘Fen, stand back.’ He placed his hands on her shoulders and tried to turn her around to face the car again, but it was too late. There, in a small office area, which was crudely made from old window frames atop cinder blocks, was Gervais. Despite James’s efforts, Fen had already seen the pool of congealed blood on the floor by where his shattered head had fallen and above it the splatter of red across the wall, crudely vandalising the pictures of showgirls from the Moulin Rouge that were adorning it.

Fen held her hand up to her mouth and stood there silently. She knew she had to collect her thoughts pretty darned quick if she was going to be of any use to James, but the sight of the body, its blood and other unspeakable matter was truly shocking.

‘We should call the p…police,’ James stuttered slightly, but his voice strengthened as he asked, ‘Who would do this? This is…well, this is an execution.’

Fen shuddered and wanted very much to stop looking at the body of Gervais crumpled onto the floor, his knees bent beneath him as if he had been shot in a firing line. Just like Arthur…

She covered her eyes with her hands and shook her head to try and dislodge the image in her head. ‘James, this can’t be a coincidence, it just can’t be.’

‘I only saw him…He seemed so full of life…’ James’s sentence just faded away.

‘James, I’m so sorry.’ Fen turned away, finally, from the dead body and looked at her friend. They both stood there in silence for a few moments more, taking in the fact that another body was now lying in front of them.

‘So, you don’t think this is a coincidence?’ James was the first to speak, his voice steadier now.

Fen took a deep breath. ‘No. How can it be?’

‘Well, in that we only have Henri’s word that Gervais was blackmailing Rose.’ James looked up at the shiny black car on the ramp. ‘Perhaps it’s a gang thing after all and that Italian chap didn’t like the look of the bill for the paint repairs?’

‘James, be serious.’

‘I am. It’s far more likely that Gervais had got himself involved with some sort of criminal gang than started blackmailing Rose, don’t you think?’

‘I understand what you’re saying, but…two bodies, one so soon after the other? Both connected to the Louvre and artworks in some way, even if Gervais wasn’t blackmailing Rose.’ Fen thought for a second. ‘And, personally, I’m inclined to believe Henri and say that he was. Look, James, this is going to sound terribly callous, but once you’ve phoned the police, we should spend the time before they arrive searching this place for clues.’

‘No three down then yet?’

‘Well, he was it – so no, not any more. But we might at least find something that could tell us who did this to him.’

‘Fine. I’ll call, and you can start with those drawers.’ James nodded to a filing cabinet in the office, which thankfully hadn’t been splashed with any blood from Gervais’s grizzly end.

Fen thought the desk might yield some clues, too, as to what Gervais might have been up to, but she felt understandably squeamish about disturbing the remains of what lay on top of the papers there. One piece of paper, partially hidden under a telephone exchange directory, caught her eye though. Fen waited for James to finish his telephone call and pointed it out to him.

James had a cursory glance at the manifest, holding it between finger and thumb in his left hand.

‘Do you see what I see?’ Fen asked him.

‘A lot of crates of paintings going to the Jeu de Paumes?’

‘And to Valreas Co auctioneers, by the looks of it.’ Fen thought back to meeting Valentine Valreas at the party the night before. He had known Rose, too, and was perhaps another connection between the murders.

James handed back the manifest to Fen. ‘Well, Henri and Rose told us that the Nazis liked to auction off the art the Führer didn’t want back in Germany, so your new friend Valentine must have been the auctioneer they used.’

Fen frowned and looked at the papers. ‘It’s something else. I don’t know, maybe what isn’t here is as important as what is.’

‘What do you mean?’

Fen shook her head. ‘I don’t know, something Joseph said about the codes being the proof. This list doesn’t have any of Rose’s code on it. And look, the paintings are listed…a Cezanne, a Degas…It’s terrible, isn’t it. Those poor families, robbed and then murdered most likely. No wonder Rose and Henri were doing their utmost to restore what they could to the rightful owners, or their heirs at least. Could this have been what Gervais was blackmailing them for?’

James shrugged his shoulders. He slipped the manifest into a plain envelope he found in the filing cabinet and the two of them carried on their search.

The garage was filthy, but that hadn’t surprised Fen much and, in fact, rooting around the spare parts and cans of oil and lubricant had been a good distraction from the two rather gruesome murders that had happened so close together. All this one needs is a whiff of ylang-ylang, Fen thought to herself as she recoiled from a particularly potent jar of turpentine.

‘Ah,’ James was still at the filing cabinet, coping better it seemed with searching the area closest to the dead body.

‘What is it?’ Fen asked, hoping she wouldn’t have to come too close to see.

‘More lists. Manifests, itineraries, that sort of thing. Hmmm.’ James picked up a document and read it through before reading it aloud to Fen. ‘Invoice to Monsieur M. Lazard, for transporting three crates of paintings to Valreas Co Auctioneers, Paris.’

‘He knew Lazard, of course,’ Fen stated. ‘Antoine told us that.’

‘And by the looks of some of these chits, he knew the Germans just as well, and Henri Renaud, too. Here, look at this invoice: for transporting one marble bust and three oil paintings to Strasbourg – five hundred francs.’

‘Crikey, that’s a tidy sum. He certainly had his finger in quite a few pies.’ Fen looked up at the black motorcar with its decoration of bullet holes. ‘Do you think these were done at the same time?’

James looked up from the filing cabinet and across to the car. He thought about it. ‘No. It looks like Gervais was killed with a single gunshot to the forehead. That’s a machine gun, like you see in the films.’

‘James…’ Something clicked into place in her head and Fen suddenly pointed to the papers James was holding. ‘I think we might have our answer.’

‘About who killed him?’

‘No, as to whether he was the blackmailer. Look at the piece of paper you’re holding. It’s the same colour as the letter Rose received – blue! And that one has his handwriting on it, does it?’

James looked at the handwritten note towards the bottom of the bundle of paperwork he was holding. He was quiet for a while.

‘It’s his handwriting all right,’ he said quietly, and exhaled. Then he looked at Fen. ‘Looks like you might have been right about him being the blackmailer after all.’

By the time the police arrived, Fen and James had decided they had unearthed all they could about Gervais – they’d found inventories and itineraries, logbooks and manifests…basically all the paperwork you’d expect from a lorry driver-turned-mechanic. Before they’d even had a chance to show what they’d found, including the manifests, to the gendarmes, the officer in charge had declared this a murder between underworld gangs and questioned James intently about what he might know regarding Gervais’ various contacts and where they could find his brother.

Fen decided at that point that their own findings would only muddy the waters and slipped the envelope containing the manifests, the example of Gervais’s handwriting and the invoice to Michel Lazard into her bag.

After what seemed like hours of waiting around and questioning, the police finally allowed them to leave. Having to wait so long for them to finish questioning James did have one advantage though. As he was stating time and again that he was nothing to do with Gervais’s underworld dealings and just a new friend, Fen had eavesdropped on the police surgeon’s dictation to his assistant.

Turns out they hadn’t stumbled on a recently deceased body at all, and poor Gervais had been lying in his own blood in the cold, dark, stench of the garage since eleven o’clock the night before.

‘Now don’t think I’m trying to encourage you into bad habits,’ James said as they finally ducked through the small door out into the daylight, ‘but I think I need a strong drink.’

‘I’m not going to argue there.’ Fen pulled her lightweight trench coat around her, suddenly quite chilled from the cool of the garage and most likely from the shock of finding another dead body. She shivered and then had to admit that the warmth of James’s arm, which had slipped around her shoulders, was not unwelcome at all.