Cold Winter in Bordeaux Read Online Free PDF

Nothing.’
    ‘Miriam didn’t recognise the name.’
    ‘And why should she? We never spoke of Ephraim. Nobody did. We expunged him. He left the family, so the family chose to forget him. It was easy, he wasn’t memorable. So I can tell you nothing. Drink your brandy, superintendent, and tell me in turn if you have news of young Léon and your son?’
    ‘Sadly, I can’t.’ Lannes picked up his glass and said, ‘Your health.’
    ‘My health? That is good. In Spain they say “salud y pesetas!” That is better, yes? A good boy, Léon, but doomed. So: we are all doomed. He loves your son, I think, but your son doesn’t know that, does he?’
    ‘No, I don’t think he does,’ Lannes said.
     

VI
    Lannes had had René collect the photographs of the dead woman. He spread them out on his desk. There were more than twenty of them. In most she was well, even stylishly, dressed. You might read a look of disdain on her face. Lannes was wary of such interpretation. He had known too many whose appearance and manner bore little relation to their character and behaviour. There were five portraits of her in the nude. Young René had found these in a locked drawer of her desk and had been embarrassed when he presented them to Lannes. The earliest showed her as a young girl; she was lying on her belly on a chaise-longue with her heels in the air and she was looking over her right shoulder at the camera; her lips were open but the expression on her face was grave rather than inviting. In another, taken perhaps in her twenties, she was sitting astride a chair and her chin was resting on its back as if the chair was a horse she was riding. The tip of her tongue protruded from the corner of her mouth. Two others showed her sitting on the floor with her arms wrapped round her knees. She was smiling in the first, looking fixedly at the camera in the other, taken some years later. In the fifth she was lying on a bed. Her hair had fallen over her eyes, a feather shawl was draped over her breasts and her hand lay between her legs.
    ‘She certainly fancied herself,’ Moncerre said. ‘Don’t know that I do.’
    ‘And there were no photographs of anyone else in the apartment?’
    ‘Not that we’ve found,’ René said.
    ‘Anything else of interest?’
    ‘Her bankbook. Regular sums paid in, some of them quite large. Always in cash. Music teaching must be more profitable than I’d have thought.’
    ‘Interesting. Either of you get anything from the pupils you’ve spoken to?’
    ‘Nothing at all,’ Moncerre said. ‘They say she was a good teacher, but strict. It doesn’t surprise me’ – he picked up a photograph – ‘that she was strict. Probably enjoyed rapping their knuckles with a ruler when they played a wrong note. She looks a proper bitch if you ask me.’
    ‘Two of the mothers wouldn’t let me speak to their daughters,’ René said. ‘It would upset them, apparently, because they had been so fond of Madame Peniel and were distressed by the news of her death. I must say’ – René pushed a lock of hair off his forehead – ‘that surprised me. None of the other girls claimed to like her, though they all said she was a good teacher and they had learnt a lot from her even if they didn’t enjoy their lessons.’
    Lannes said, ‘I’ll speak myself to the mothers who wouldn’t let you question their daughters.’
    He told them what Anne-Marie had said.
    ‘This is getting interesting,’ Moncerre said. ‘But the set-up, the champagne and the cigar smoke. You can’t wish away evidence like that.’
    ‘It’s evidence, certainly, but the importance of evidence depends on how you read it.’
    ‘If I understand you, chief,’ René said, ‘you suspect that she was procuring girls for perverts who like them young.’
    ‘I like that,’ Moncerre said, ‘and so one of the fathers knocks her off.’
    Lannes said, ‘I’ve only one sentence to go on, and Anne-Marie’s reaction. It’s no more than a possibility