The Copyart Murders Read online

  ‘Hold him,’ Sauveur replied, already rushing down into the cabin to gather his bag. ‘I’m on my way.’

  As he started his car, Sauveur thought that there was always something so disappointing about holidays: the failed realisation of longed-for happiness.

  III

  Blake was all for life experiences, but his list of things to do before he turned thirty did not include his being stuck in a police cell. He was meant to be having lunch with Birna in a matter of hours and before then he needed to sleep, shower, shave, and if he could stomach it, eat. Obviously, he’d got a bit carried away last night.

  He remembered lying under the swimming stars, thinking about what had felt like deep, important issues. Recently, he had purchased a second-hand philosophy book entitled Man is the Measure, which he had read in the hot afternoons in Piégon. It was published in the 1970s, and had genuine yellow pages and coffee stains. He had read the book with an earnestness that would have been painful, had he anyone to share the details with. He had learnt, for example, that some primitive life forms cheat death by reproducing through fission – they just keep on dividing. He imagined himself separating continuously, with versions of Blake Knox leading lives in Sydney, London and France.

  He often felt like he needed more than one life. And that wasn’t just when he was dreaming about Birna instead of Elizabeth. Take his writing difficulties, for example. Simply put, he was trying to write a crime novel but he had so very little experience with death. Blake had heard of crime writers who had worked in police forces or in forensics. He had spent his time at the chalk face and was more used to bodies full of hormones than expired gases. He had thought that a night amongst the departed might help him to write with more authenticity. Indeed, after a night in the cemetery, images of murder were literally pulsating in his head.

  He recalled being in Finnegan’s, chatting with the Irish publican.

  ‘I’ve met someone very interesting… from a small volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic.’

  ‘That’d be Iceland, then,’ Aiden had responded. ‘I thought you were married?’

  ‘Engaged,’ Blake replied.

  ‘Amounts to the same thing. A promise is a promise.’

  A pair of English backpackers arrived and Blake began to chat with them about football and cricket and the virtues of exotic women (he’d defended the English, somewhat perversely). Later still, when they were drinking Irish whisky, he told them about his upcoming novel, and – his party trick – started reciting phrases he had memorised from his favourite authors.

  ‘“Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?”’ Blake slurred. ‘That’s Calvino,’ he added.

  ‘Right,’ one of his companions quipped. ‘You forgot “and the beers we drink.”’

  When he left the bar, Aiden called out after him: ‘Careful getting home, Plato.’

  Only Blake hadn’t gone home. He walked past his car and entered the cemetery. It was not quite pitch black inside, with the shadowy light of a quarter-moon adding quirky shapes to the neat squares of the tombstones. If he had been more sober he would have felt very uneasy, but Blake was dogged in his drunkenness. His sleeping a night in the cemetery was no doubt helped by the fact that he stumbled on a tree root (he remembered this now, in the cool of the police cell) and fell awkwardly and heavily, knocking himself out in the process. When he came to, he stood in a wobbly sort of way and searched for a spot to rest. A smooth marble surface beckoned; he quickly cleared it of scratchy flowers and a cumbersome picture frame.

  He slept heavily, somehow still hearing footsteps, scurrying rats, faraway voices. His dreams (if they were dreams) were vaguely troubling, but by dawn he was in the midst of an erotic scene, with Birna undressing until he was shaken awake.

  The sound of the bolt being drawn interrupted his thoughts. At last, he thought, they have come to release me.

  But it was Agent Flague, demanding his clothes, and passing him a neatly folded outfit to put on in their place. It was a white jumpsuit, contemporary in design as far as these things go, but a size too small for Blake’s long limbs.

  IV

  Sauveur drove steadily, scanning ahead to avoid the large trucks that merged into the middle and sometimes the fast lanes, blocking traffic and forcing drivers to brake quickly. He was listening to John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things, a recording he never tired of. Soprano sax for the end of a holiday. The day was hot, and despite his willingness to be back in Vaison-la-Romaine, he already missed the gentle lap of the water on the hull of his boat, the light breeze at dusk. He thought about Karin lying beside him last night, her eyes firmly shut, her expression set. He wondered if he should call her this evening. Then he tried to put the awkwardness out of his mind.

  There were other things to think about: his family, for instance. His daughter, Julie, was currently backpacking with a girlfriend in South-East Asia. Her last postcard had come from Borneo and showed a picture of Mount Kinabalu. She had climbed to the summit with a guide who spoke no French and little English, and who wandered off periodically. Julie was an attractive girl with her mother’s dark hair and ease of manner. Now she was talking about trying to find some work in Australia. He wondered just how long this world trip was going to take. His son, Alain, was in Paris, doing a work placement as part of his engineering degree. Sauveur admired the independence his children displayed; he just wished he saw more of them.

  Like himself, the dead artist had lived alone.

  According to Benjamin, who had attended the funeral, Genet’s ex-wife and two children had arrived a day before the service and stayed in a hotel in Vaison-la-Romaine, returning to Paris on Thursday, 5 July. Benjamin described her as polite but distant, seemingly genuine in her private grief. They would need to interview her if he was opening a murder investigation.

  He wondered what sort of a man Genet had been. He remembered reading an article about Genet in a magazine, something concerning his disagreement with the academy, explained by the journalist in terms of the debate about abstraction versus figuration. The details had escaped him. Art was one of the things he had left to his wife, as if it were enough for him to know a bit about writing and music and for her to cover architecture and art. Wasn’t that how most couples lived?

  Sauveur parked his car under a plane tree outside the station, stretched, took a pair of leather shoes from the boot and strode up the stairs to the entrance. Henri looked up from his spot at the front desk and welcomed him back. Sauveur asked after his wife, who had just had their third baby. Inside the central office, he found Benjamin packing some clothing into an evidence box. Officer Mazello looked up from the desk where she was working and smiled.

  ‘Bonjour, Benjamin. Salut, Faby,’ he said.

  ‘Bonjour, Inspecteur! How was your holiday?’

  Sauveur shrugged and said, ‘So-so.’

  ‘There’s a preliminary report on your desk, with photographs and a summary of the autopsy findings,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘Good,’ replied Sauveur, stepping into his office and opening the shutters. ‘Tell me about the Australian.’

  Blake Knox was a twenty-seven year old visitor to France; he was from a coastal town near Sydney but lived in London. He was temporarily lodged in the same village Genet had lived; he was a schoolteacher by profession; he had answered vaguely as to his recent whereabouts and nocturnal activities. He was an outsider in a village in which the only crime in the last twenty years had been the occasional break-and-enter into under-used holiday homes, and a boundary dispute between two local vineyard owners, which had turned nasty. The pocketbook that had been on Knox’s person at the time of his arrest was hard to decipher but contained a number of references to a murder in Piégon. These were written in English.

  ‘I will talk with the procureur in Orange,’ Sauveur said. ‘Under the garde à vue, we can keep him for twenty-four hours. He was drunk when you brought him in? That gives us another three hours. We have until ten tomorrow to do an initial investigation.’

  Sauveur looked at Benjamin. He was wearing a new suit and his hair was cut short. He looked like someone who had just received a promotion. ‘You have enjoyed handling things in my absence?’

  ‘I’m glad you are back,’ Benjamin replied, flushing slightly. ‘At first it just looked like a natural death, though there were some suspicious circumstances. When this gets out, there will be the press to deal with. Michel Genet was known well enough to stir interest.’

  ‘Drive out to Knox’s address in Piégon and take a look around,’ Sauveur replied. ‘See if you can get any word on him from the locals, but don’t raise any alarm. If anyone asks, say he’s had a bump to the head and is sobering up in a cell while we try to get a hold of his relatives.

  ‘In the meantime, I’ll read through the autopsy report and what I can of his notebook. We’ll interview Monsieur Knox together as soon as you get back.’

  When Benjamin left, Sauveur changed from his holiday jeans and T-shirt into a business shirt and a pair of trousers he kept on a coat hanger on his office door. He made a coffee, put on his reading glasses and sat down at his desk. There was work to do, and yes, he liked that very much.

  V

  On the first page of his notebook, Blake had written a dedication to go on the appropriate page of his novel when it appeared in print. After “To Elizabeth”, he had initially written “hub of my wheel”, then “star of my night sky”, before settling on ”heart’s echo”. It was fitting that he started his novel with a reference to Elizabeth. She was his compass, his point of difference from all the drifting Australians who temporarily called London home. She had given him emotional stability, a network of friends, a better wardrobe. He was no longer
just flotsam on the Thames.

  They had met one night in February the previous year, at a performance of Patrick Marber’s Closer at the Lyric Theatre. He had caught just a glimpse of her before the lights dimmed and had noted her short, dark hair and graceful neck. She cultivated a deliberately androgynous look but was pretty enough to manage it well. The scene on stage was about a would-be writer named Dan. He was in a hospital ward with a young woman who had been hit by a car. She was a dangerous girl, but Dan felt protective towards her and they had started a relationship. The complication came in the form of a photographer named Anna – a successful and intelligent woman more Dan’s own age.

  Stories of chance meetings had emboldened Blake, who approached Elizabeth at the intermission. She had accepted his offer of a drink and smiled at him most promisingly. ‘An Australian!’ she said after he handed her a glass of “sparkling” (his accent came out strongly on certain words). ‘I’ve just been defending a bouncer from Melbourne. You’re not in that line of work, I can see.’

  ‘I’m a writer,’ he replied, standing a little straighter, ‘when I’m not teaching.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, raising her left eyebrow. ‘Just like in the play?’

  Blake hadn’t published a word beyond some music reviews in his university newspaper, but that didn’t stop him from holding forth. It wasn’t exactly a lie – it was more like a self-description he had adopted, as some men will describe themselves as “fishermen” or “hunters”, pastimes rather than occupations. It was also true that it sounded impressive when talking to girls in pubs or theatre bars. It went down better than “teacher”, certainly.

  Her business card had read Elizabeth Louise Bodley, Hobson Chambers. ‘Hobson Chambers,’ he had repeated, as if he had heard of them.

  At the time, Elizabeth was seeing a magazine editor, a Cambridge graduate with a clipped accent and an MG. Blake didn’t feel he had much of a chance, but there was something between them. They met for coffee a few times with the excuse of talking about books and gradually, the shadowy figure of the magazine editor was talked of no more. One spring day, on a picnic rug on the Cliffs of Dover, love had blossomed.

  ‘And to think that Gloucester and Edgar were here on this very spot!’ he’d said.

  ‘Shut up with your Shakespeare,’ she replied. For once in his life, Blake seized the moment.

  She was a wonderful kisser. She tasted so much better than his previous girlfriends — particularly the last one, whose lips were flavoured by cigarettes and Jack Daniels.

  In the next few weeks, his emotions had soared and fallen as Elizabeth ended things with her boyfriend and then seemingly hesitated. One rainy night, when Blake was full of doubt and checking the prices of flights back to Sydney, Elizabeth knocked on his door, a dripping beauty with an overnight bag. That was the start of their relationship proper. Not that Blake ever forgot his adversary. He secretly wondered why Elizabeth had given him up for a teacher (and very occasional writer) whose only worldly possessions were an acoustic guitar, a mustard-coloured sleeping bag, and an ever-expanding collection of paperbacks.

  He couldn’t remember exactly when they started talking about moving in together, but it was definitely on the cards when he proposed in a fit of vertigo on top of the London Eye. ‘Down the track a bit,’ he added, after pronouncing the fateful phrase. He was kneeling awkwardly, and had to return to his seat when the carriage moved.

  ‘You know I’m Australian…’

  ‘I had noticed, Blake.’

  ‘…and hardly perfect.’

  She laughed and said, ‘I know what you’re like and I love you for it. You just need some help to become the person you want to be. Yes, I’ll marry you!’

  There was an improvement streak in Elizabeth. Blake often felt like a house that needed some handy work to realise its market potential.

  They had decided on a lengthy engagement. Elizabeth needed to put her career first, before any wedding plans began to dominate their time. ‘In the meantime, I’ll write a book,’ Blake promised himself, ‘because everyone likes an author. Even Elizabeth’s parents would be impressed.’

  Elizabeth’s parents were very accepting of him but spoke in such a posh manner that Blake could never feel comfortable around them. His wide jeans felt too grubby for their fine furniture and he kept stumbling between Australian and English pronunciations of such words as yogurt (“yo“ or “yho“?) at the breakfast table. He wondered what they’d make of his father’s tradesman’s manner and his mother’s equally down-to-earth way of putting things. The thought of marriage as a coming together of families scared the shit out of him.

  The decision to come to France alone was really about Blake taking his writing seriously. He knew that if he continued to teach in London and live with Elizabeth and her busy social life, he’d never get started. Besides, he was heartily sick of disinterested students and figured that if he didn’t have a go at writing now, he’d never manage it. He’d had his last day at the end of the summer half-term and had arranged for his stay in France to commence the following week.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right without me?’ he asked Elizabeth on the platform at Waterloo. ‘Because I could just cancel my ticket and scribble at home.’

  ‘And write what? Death by Procrastination?’ she replied.

  By the time the train had reached the Channel Tunnel, Blake spotted a belle femme and was writing about her on his laptop in a document he entitled “Women I’ll Never Meet Because of Elizabeth”. He was beginning a new phase in his life. The humdrum and occasional indignity of his teaching days was over. He really was a writer, on his way to the South of France, and who could tell what would happen next.

  VI

  Sauveur was reading through the Australian’s black notebook. The handwriting was small, sometimes smudged, and he had an odd way of running vowels into consonants so that certain words became quite unreadable. The result of this was that Sauveur kept pausing to peruse his dictionary. On the second page, dated 31 May, he read the following paragraph:

  The train sped through the Loire valley, and Will Hartley saw green fields and scattered villages and old stone barns, all under a clear, blue sky. He was reading a book, a typical airport crime novel in which a serial killer was working his way through a set of beautiful women and the detective was herself straying into danger. He thought of his wife Sarah, back in London, walking home alone to their flat every evening, missing (he hoped) his spring-like smile.

  A line was drawn through the middle of the text. On the next page he read:

  Read about surrounding towns yesterday afternoon, sitting in the garden in Piégon. Decided to visit Orange – this is where I am now, sitting now in the ancient Roman amphitheatre. Thinking that it will be the setting for Will’s meeting with Celia. Perhaps at a concert here – might be a good occasion to experience myself! Also need to research some ideas for the crime story. AND buy a car – it was quite a journey to get here by bus etc.

  Feeling a bit lonely here but don’t wish to grumble – I did choose the ‘isolated cottage in Provence’. Complaining that it is too quiet would be like going into the jungle and then whingeing about the mud and leeches. Or climbing onto a glacier and griping about the cold air. Both things I have done before of course – the experience and the complaining.

  Sauveur looked up from the notebook as Benjamin strode into his office. It wasn’t much more than an hour since they had last spoken.

  ‘He knows Genet and he’s been seeing the girl who cleans his house,’ Benjamin said. ‘I’ve been speaking to Monsieur Louis Penne who runs the local café. Here’s the photo of Birna Aronsdóttir that we found in Knox’s wallet. She’s the one who discovered the body.’

  Sauveur studied the picture closely. ‘Attractive and aware of it,’ he said. His daughter had passed through a phase like that in her teenage years. ‘There’s something about her in his notebook. Seems to be notes for a novel Knox is writing. The title is here on the first page. Death in Piégon.’

  ‘You might want to see this too, Inspecteur. I had a quick look at Knox’s car, which he pointed out to me this morning. There was a laptop computer under the front seat. I thought I would bring it here for safe-keeping.’