Chapter 44

Pandemonium reigned for what seemed like minutes, though it must have only been a second or so. Fen tried to get her bearings in the dark, while nursing her eardrum that must have been only inches away from the crack of the pistol shots that had rung out among them. Trust Henri to have drawn his blackout blinds before his meeting with Lazard – the privacy they had afforded them then was now cloaking the gallery in darkness.

Ears ringing, but eyes growing more accustomed to the dark, she felt her way along the wall, feeling the cool of the painted plaster under her fingers until she found a light switch. Click. The room was illuminated again and the scene that met her was one of utter horror. Henri had been gunned down where he had stood, his blood, and who knew what else, spread across the pristine white of the gallery wall behind him.

Lazard was on his knees, collapsed to the floor from his chair, but alive and unhurt, while Antoine was clutching his ears. He must have been inches from the shooter too. James was on the floor, but gradually coming up to standing. Fen offered him her hand and he was just about upright, shaking his head as if to dislodge something from his ears too, when Fen heard Joseph Bernheim shout out.

‘Magda! Where is she?’

‘Simone…’ James looked around. Both of the women were gone and Fen realised that the chill breeze that was blowing a few damp autumn leaves into the gallery came from the open doorway.

‘Quick, James!’ Fen pulled him along with her and they left the gallery behind them, running down the colonnade.

‘Look, there!’ James had spotted two bodies lying on the ground at the end of the passage. In a few seconds, they were there with them, James strides ahead of Fen by now. She slowed as she saw him pull Simone off Magda, loosening the young model’s grip from around the older woman’s throat.

‘I’d have been paid more if you’d died with your parents,’ Simone was hissing at Magda.

‘Simone!’ James pulled her fully off Magda and held her against one of the columns.

‘Magda, oh Magda, are you all right?’ Fen fell to her knees beside her friend and, seconds later, Joseph was there too, comforting his wife. ‘What happened?’

Through gasps of breath, Magda explained that she’d seen Simone fire the gun, her face lit briefly by the torch, and had run out of the gallery after her. By dashing after her into the late-afternoon drizzle and tripping Simone up, Magda had thwarted the killer.

Thoughts started falling into place and Fen spoke them out loud, as much to get it clear in her own head as to help the others piece it together. ‘Simone, I was wrong, you’re the murderer, aren’t you? And The Chameleon!’

Simone struggled against James’s arm, which was still holding her securely against the pillar. ‘James, why won’t you defend me? Why are you letting her accuse me like this?’

James just shook his head. ‘Fen,’ he said, his voice a little croaky. ‘Carry on.’

Fen nodded, stood up and then looked back at Simone. ‘I wasn’t wrong about Henri though, was I? Except he wasn’t actually the murderer. You are. You were his weapon.’

Simone rolled her eyes and then raised her eyebrows, inviting Fen to continue, if she dared. She did.

‘You’ve told me enough times that you would do anything not to be poor again. How much was he paying you?’ Fen’s question was met with silence. ‘I see,’ she realised. ‘It wasn’t money. Ah…the apartment. You hardly seemed shocked at all when I said he’d agreed that we could stay on. You knew all the time that the apartment, and everything in it, would be your pay cheque.’

Simone struggled against James, but it was him, rather than Fen this time, who told her to stay still.

Fen continued to join the clues she’d noticed over the last few days together. ‘Tipper doesn’t bark at you. And Henri knew you had the stomach to kill, you were in the Resistance after all and had led many a Nazi officer to their death.’

‘But Rose wasn’t killed with a gun,’ James took over, adding in his own thoughts to Fen’s deductions.

‘No…’ Fen agreed. ‘Mid-afternoon in a residential area…the weapon had to be quieter than that. Or more improvised perhaps. The countess’s cat, Tsarina, got in a pickle over Tipper’s barking at exactly the time we know that Joseph was calling to see Rose. You were already back in the apartment with her, though. And as soon as you heard him yapping, you knew you had to kill Rose quickly and quietly as whoever was approaching would more than likely let themselves in.’

‘Did Rose not think it odd that Simone was home from work?’ Magda had recovered her voice, though was still huddled on the ground in the arms of her husband.

Fen nodded and looked back at Simone. ‘Possibly, though I don’t think she suspected Simone at all. Your employer, on the other hand….’ Fen paused, and rubbed her temples to help her think.

‘What is it? James asked.

‘Just something Christian said about you, Simone, that you were always “popping out to see James”, though it wasn’t so much James as murder you had on your mind those times, wasn’t it? Anyway, you had the perfect opportunity to get as close as you needed to drive that paintbrush through Rose’s throat without her even suspecting, right up until it was far too late.’

Simone just snorted in a derisory way and Fen felt that, far from denying the murder, she was almost itching to add in her own details.

Fen carried on while the stage was hers. ‘You then hid in your bedroom, hoping that the visitor would go away, and luckily for you Joseph barely poked his nose in.’

‘I thought I’d heard voices…I should have searched the apartment,’ Joseph lamented but was quickly and kindly shushed by his wife. They were hugging each other tightly, Joseph’s hand caressing the side of her neck where Simone had tried to strangle her.

‘No one could blame you for leaving in a hurry,’ Fen assured him, then turned once again to Simone. ‘And to make it look like a burglary, you stole some of the paintings…And no doubt if we search your room now, we might find Rose’s jewels too, do you think? I’m betting those pearl earrings you were wearing the other night weren’t actually a gift.’

Simone closed her eyes and was breathing heavily through her nose, like a racehorse at the gate. James released his grip a bit and merely held her now by the wrists. He looked at her as he posed the question. ‘Sold some of them, the paintings I mean, for a quick buck? Fen, what did the man at the kiosk say when you asked him about the Delance?’

‘He was cagey about where it had come from all right…“it was a young man, I think, but it was hard to see”.’ Fen thought back. ‘Simone, you said yourself you use fashion like a disguise. And I know how nifty you are with a needle and thread…James, your missing shirt!’

‘Dear Lord, was that you, Simone?’

‘Paired with some old trousers and a cap from Rose’s portrait props, you could pass as a young man, just about.’ Fen squinted at Simone.

‘It was easy enough to find a cap and trousers. I missed that nice string of pearls you found down the side of that saggy old armchair though.’ Simone raised one eyebrow in defiance.

James turned his back and Fen didn’t want to assume, but she thought she might have seen him wipe his face with his sleeve. Simone currently had a lot to answer for and Fen carried on with the interrogation.

‘Henri then told you to murder Gervais, didn’t he?’

‘He said it would be the last one,’ she wore the expression of an employee forced to do a double shift. ‘And then he would let me be.’

‘What was his aim? Were we right in thinking he’d stolen the paintings?’

‘Yes,’ Simone confirmed. ‘He was never as passionate about returning all the stolen artwork to the Jewish families as Rose was. He just hated to see such beautiful pieces be taken away and used as nothing more than decor by plump German hausfraus. He hated that they cared nothing about the art and only wanted to know the value. He sold some and planned on keeping others, a retirement gift to himself, I suppose.’ She laughed. It was a hollow sound.

‘And Gervais had worked out that something was amiss?’ Fen asked her.

‘Yes, he’d noticed the manifests were different. More paintings going to the auction house than there should be. He’d been blackmailing them both, but once Rose was dead, he had approached Henri with a deal. One hundred thousand francs or he’d—’

‘Go to the authorities?’ Fen interrupted.

‘No, don’t make me laugh,’ Simone smirked. ‘Henri is the authorities. Or as good as, with his connections. No, Gervais threatened something much worse. The Mob.’

‘Blimey,’ Fen took a step back and looked at Simone.

‘I was sent to kill him as—’

‘As you’d learnt to shoot in the Resistance?’ Fen finished her sentence for her.

‘Henri had recruited me back in the early years of the war. I was trained, among other women like Catherine, but in the end, I was used more as a lure to fool Nazi officers.’

‘I know, you told me,’ Fen bit her lip as she thought. ‘And I bet Gervais would have been more than happy to see you that night in his garage.’

‘I left you just before ten o’clock,’ James said, looking at the beautiful young model, still held loosely by her wrists.

‘And I wasn’t back from the Louvre party until almost midnight, leaving Henri there, so he couldn’t have done it.’ Fen tutted to herself, then added, ‘Plenty of time for you to commit a murder, though.’

‘The hard part was getting lover boy here to leave me alone that night. I did quite a good job, though, I think, of putting you off. “James, you do love me, don’t you?” “James, I think we should marry”.’ Simone pouted at James in the same way she must have done that night. He looked disgusted and, if he wasn’t holding her captive, Fen was sure he would rather have been anywhere else but in her presence. Poor James, she thought, the ultimate lion tamer.

The sound of sirens filled the air and Fen knew her time for questioning Simone would soon be gone. Antoine Arnault and Michel Lazard had made it out of the gallery now, both looking pale and obviously in shock. Fen thought it might only be minutes before her own adrenalin gave out and she too would start taking on board what they’d all witnessed in that room.

‘Just one more question, Simone?’ Fen asked. ‘Before they take you away.’

Simone looked at her and shrugged.

‘Was it worth it, just for the apartment?’

‘You think I only killed for that place? Once married, I would be in houses far more splendid.’ She nodded towards James. ‘But what Henri knew about me could have ruined any chance I had of becoming a rich man’s wife. More than that, he could have had me executed.’

‘For being a traitor…Surely if he knew you were The Chameleon, he would have turned you in long ago.’

‘But he did know. He knew all too well. And he kept that knowledge, curated it like one of his paintings, ready to use when he needed it. He knew what lengths I’d gone to during the war to catch those SS officers. Sometimes they took more than just a wink to get down an alleyway. He said to me, “No English gentleman will marry a French slut” and said he would tell James, or Frederick, or John, or Jeremy…’

James shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t have mattered.’ His voice was low and barely audible. ‘But betraying your friends and murdering Rose, that is unforgivable.’

Simone didn’t have the chance to reply as the gendarmes reached them and after a quick discussion with the stricken Magda and protective Joseph picked up the young model under the armpits and carried her back down the passageway to the waiting motor.