The Art of Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

obvious one for a cop.
    “ Yes.” Alexis
nodded.
    She stared out the window for a while,
sniffling, her body wracked by the need to breathe and spasms of
grief.
    Finally she answered.
    “ Yes, it was only locked
sometimes. There were things he needed in there.”
    “ What do you mean,
sometimes?” Henri was right on it.
    “ It’s been years, but when
he went on a trip or somewhere.” Alexis’ explanation made humble
sense.
    It was typical human
behaviour.
    “ Was Monsieur Duval
despondent about something? Did he appear troubled lately? How were
things going for him?”
    “ Monsieur Duval was
murdered.” Everyone’s jaw dropped and they all turned to stare at
Hermione, who sat with jaws clenched, endlessly twisting her soaked
handkerchief, and glaring at the police while refusing to look at
anyone else or any other thing around her.
    “ What makes you say that?”
Gilles did not contradict her, as people said the damnedest things
in this state, but he spoke reasonably enough.
    His tone said it all.
    “ He wasn’t that sort of a
man.” Her anger was another state of grief he was not unfamiliar
with.
    Yvonne had a stony look on her face.
She appeared in a trance. It was merely one kind of grief, in his
experience. One phase of it, anyway. The other woman was trying to
force him to believe. It was like she hadn’t heard it.
    Was it just emotion? A state of denial,
or did the Fontaine woman really know or suspect something? There
was nothing careful or studied about her attitude or body language.
At that particular moment, he had no doubt she believed it
implicitly. Rene had been keeping this little surprise up his
sleeve.
    “ Yes.” Gilles spoke
pleasantly, nodding at Henri to take notes.
    The statements weren’t much to go on
either way, at least not so far.
    “ I was wondering about that.
What sort of a man was he?”
    Predictably enough, this brought fresh
tears from Yvonne, a glare from Hermione, and a shrug from Jules.
Alexis looked into his eyes and nodded in agreement. The driver
stared out the window.
    “ She is right, Inspector. He
really wasn’t the sort.”
    “ What makes you say that,
Monsieur Ferrauld?”
    Alexis took a deep breath.
    “ Theodore Duval was a
self-made man. He was born with nothing. He survived Verdun. Surely
you must have some idea of what that means.”
    Jules nodded vigorously in
agreement.
    “ That is exactly
right.”
    Gilles nodded, having been there
himself, one of the lucky few to receive a superficial wound in the
last stages of the battle. He still had a scar on the outer part of
his right leg, just above the knee, from a machine gun
bullet.
    “ Yes. I was
there.”
    “ Well, Monsieur Duval
struggled to make something of himself, and fought every day of his
life to achieve what he has…what he did.”
    “ Yes, I see.”
    Henri scrawled more notes.
    Whether or not it was a suicide, the
personality of the victim was crucial to understanding the results
or events of their life, and their death, at least in his own
opinion.
    It was one of Gilles Maintenon’s little
pet theories, one borne out by time and experience. They all had
their methods, and it was by no means as cut-and-dried as all of
that, but it was at least something to go on.
    “ Inspector?” Henri stood by
the coffee carafe on the service cart.
    “ Yes, thank you, Henri.
Perhaps a glass of water first?”
    Madame beckoned to the maid, who left
the room.
    Gilles felt in his pocket for the
bottle of narcotic pain pills provided by Dr. Etienne.
    His jaw ached as if all the fiends of
hell were pounding away on tiny chisels with miniature
sledge-hammers. He sorely missed Andre Levain, whose perspective
was always valuable. Levain knew Gilles better than he knew
himself, or so it seemed at times.
    Perhaps that was the real problem with
Henri—he wasn’t Levain.
     
    ***
     
    Having taken over a small room
furnished with a desk and a few chairs, a private study on the
second floor that had book shelves