Deadly Slipper (3 page)

Julian regarded her doubtfully, eyebrows jacked up to the top of his head. “How could you be so sure? There must have been thousands of tourists with cameras like that coming through the Dordogne in the past—what did you say?—nineteen years.”

Mara hesitated, then gave him her proof: “There were initials written on the inside of the case.
B.D.
Beatrice Dunn.”

“Ah.”

She set the ice pack aside, swung her feet to the ground, and sat facing him squarely. “But that wasn’t all. Needless to say, I bought the camera. After I got it home, I found there was still film in it! I didn’t try to have the film developed myself. I didn’t want to risk a commercial lab. After all, it might be evidence, and the film was bound to be in a fragile state. I took everything to the police in Périgueux. They weren’t very interested in reopening a missing person case nearly two decades old. However, I finally persuaded them to examine the film and have it processed in their lab.”

“And these,” he surmised grimly, “were the photos you showed me?”

She nodded. “It was a roll of thirty-six, intact, although in pretty bad condition, as you saw.”

“Well, did the police at least try to trace the camera? What about fingerprints?”

“There were residual prints on the film, but they were too deteriorated to be analyzed. The police did try to trace the camera but got no further than I had. The
brocanteur
in Villeréal could only say that it had
come from a clear-out of someone else’s stock, an old junk dealer named la Camelote who died last year. The police kept the negatives but gave me back the camera and a copy of the prints. They aren’t willing to take it further.”

Julian grunted. “I suppose to them it’s an old incident. Cold file.”

“That’s right. Most of them weren’t even around when it happened. However, there’s one man I’ve had contact with on and off. Lieutenant La Pouge. He’s retired now, but he actually worked on Bedie’s case. I looked him up again. He wasn’t very encouraging, though. He dismissed the initials as coincidence and said the photos could have been taken by anyone who’d done the usual tourist circuit and who liked wildflowers.”

“He may have had a point.”

“But that’s just it,” Mara cried, her frustration breaking through. “That was the most important part. Once I found out what the flowers were, I realized that was the link.
Bedie, you see, loved orchids!
She was what you’d call an orchid freak.”

“I see,” said Julian. He thought a moment and then nodded his comprehension. “Sure. Orchid fever. Gets in your blood. With some people it’s an obsession, especially the tropicals. Fanciers spend big money on them. The field varieties you get around here are free but, for my taste, just as addictive. I know a Dutchman who hikes around France every spring with a donkey, just orchid hunting. His wife
remains in Amsterdam. I’m not even sure they’re still on speaking terms.”

“Well, I’d say Bedie was obsessed. I tried to explain the importance of this to the police. I got nowhere. And that was when he thought of you.”

“Who?”

“Lieutenant La Pouge. He’d heard you were something of a local authority.”

“Oh well!” Julian lounged back in his chair.

“So, you see, I thought if you could help me …” She locked her gaze on his. “Julian, I’m not only convinced these photos were taken by my sister, I believe that somehow they’re a clue to where she was before … before whatever happened to her.”

He looked startled, almost aghast. “But they’re just photographs of flowers. There’s nothing in them that could indicate—”

“Maybe not directly. But I was hoping they could serve as a—a kind of signpost…”

She trailed off, not saying to where, but she could see him thinking it: a shallow grave?

“Please,” she said after a long silence, “these photos are the only lead I have. Won’t you have another look at them?”

There were thirty-four of them, each numbered on the back in order of exposure. Julian sat down next to Mara on the sofa and laid them out in a line on the coffee table. He put his glasses on and scanned the array. As he had noted before, all showed some degree of damage, streaks and staining, as if by light or moisture. Not surprising if they really had been taken by Mara’s sister, with the camera lying about god knows where for nineteen years. It was a bloody miracle that the film had survived at all.

He was able to identify most of the flowers easily: dainty Helleborines; pink, conical Pyramidals; frilly Lady Orchids; white Butterflies. The final frames were the hardest to make out. They had suffered the greatest deterioration because they had formed the overlying tail of the film.

“What do you think?” Mara asked.

He sighed. “Well, I’ll say this much. Whoever took these—your sister—knew something about orchids and had some experience documenting floral material. Look, each one’s been photographed at least twice, once up close as a full-plant shot, showing the flower and the leaf base. That’s important for identification. And then again from a few meters back to show the growing environment. For example”—he
picked out a portrait of a compact spire of creamy florets lightly tinged with maroon—“this is
Aceras anthropophorum
, Man Orchid, so called because the labellum is shaped like a little man.”

He saw that he had lost her, so he explained: “Orchids have three petals, surrounded by three sepals. The sepals are like—like a kind of cup holding the petals in place, you might say. One of the distinctive features of orchids is that the middle petal, the labellum or lip, is specialized, sometimes in fantastic ways.”

He jumped up to fetch his botanist’s loupe and held it out to her. “Here, see for yourself. The photo’s got some bad patches on it, but you can just see that the labellum of the Man Orchid has four prongs, like arms and legs, with the sepals closing over the top to form a little head.”

Obediently she peered through the lens.

He went on. “Now, the close-up is fine, but it’s not that informative. All you get is the flower. So it’s the habitat shot that’s going to be the most useful for what you want.” He pointed to the next photograph in line. “This is a middle-distance shot of the same plant. Here you can see that it’s part of a scattered stand of Man Orchids, growing on a patch of rocky, sloping ground. So this tells us we’re looking at, say, an eroded hillside, which would account for the lay of the land and the stones at the surface.”

He skipped to a view of a grassy field awash in purple blooms. “Or this one. These are some kind of Marsh Orchids, which only grow in wetlands. So this
has got to be a water meadow. The dark line there is probably a stream, and you can make out a wood in the background. This is an identifiable place. Of course, exactly where is the problem.”

He continued scanning slowly, pausing with a grunt of approval over a portrait of a single brownish-yellow sprig.
“Neottia nidus-avis.
Bird’s-nest Orchid.” The grunt changed to a low whistle when he saw the companion photo. What he had initially dismissed as a badly stained exposure now proved to be a view of an extensive carpet of the plants. How big he couldn’t exactly tell, because the plants filled the entire frame.

“Nice,” he muttered admiringly. “A bloody great stand of them. Certainly bigger than anything I’ve seen.”

Mara peered through the lens at a swarm of pale, fleshy specimens. “Those are orchids? They look like some kind of fungus.”

“In fact,” he nodded, “they live on fungi, and they’re that browny-yellow color because they have no chlorophyll, no green in them at all. It’s their matted roots that give them their name. Bird’s-nests aren’t that uncommon around here, but a big colony like this is extremely rare. Again, the problem is finding the location. If it even still exists,” he added doubtfully.

He pored lengthily over the remaining photos. Suddenly, through the staining and speckling, he saw something that made him stiffen.

“My god!” he uttered.

“What?”

He grabbed the loupe from her to squint intently at a flower. It was taken in close-up, a startling plant bearing what looked like a deep-pink, swollen median lip flanked by two long, thin, spiraling, dark-purple petals. A blackish-purple dorsal sepal, arching forward like a hood, gave the flower an almost sinister appearance. Unfortunately, the picture was so badly damaged that he couldn’t tell if he was truly seeing a slipper-shaped labellum.

“If I didn’t know better”—he sprang up and carried the photo to where he could study it under better light—“I’d say it was some kind of
Cypripedium.”

Mara frowned. “What’s that?”

He was at his shelves, pulling down reference books.

“Cypripedium?
The French have various names for it—
Sabot de Vénus
, Venus’s Shoe.
Sabot de la Vierge
, Virgin’s Shoe.” He thumbed rapidly through
Delforge’s Orchids of Britain & Europe.
“In English we call it Lady’s Slipper. The only known Western European species is
Cypripedium calceolus.”
He flipped through a few pages and came over to show her a picture of a handsome flower bearing a bright-yellow slipper flanked by two twisted maroon side petals and backed by sepals of the same hue. “Here. The color and shape of the one in your photo are different, but it’s definitely in the same genus. I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen the like of it, and certainly not around here.

“The problem is,” he went on, more to himself than to Mara, “it’s impossible.
Cypripedium
doesn’t grow in the Dordogne. In fact, it’s been wiped out in most places in Europe because of picking and habitat destruction.

“It’s got to be the photo that’s misleading me.” He scowled irritably at the blackened print, slammed Delforge shut and plunged into Landwehr’s double volumes on wild orchids of France and Europe. A serious orchidologist, he was sorely tempted to put the matter of Mara’s missing sister entirely aside, itching as he was to pin down an identification. But there was only the single portrait of this tantalizing flower, and it was the last shot. Filming had stopped before the end of the roll. From what he could tell, the final couple of frames had not been exposed. He stood for a long moment, lost in thought.

Mara’s voice brought him back. “If it’s not a Lady’s Slipper, what is it?”

He shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

It was a question he would have gladly given everything he owned to answer.

•

They were sharing an omelet, the only food Julian had to offer. The bread was day-old, but the eggs were fresh, bought that morning from Madame Léon next door, the shells in fact still crotted with dung and feathers. He also had a decent bottle of Pécharmant on tap and a bit of chèvre, from another neighbor (Edith’s putative owner), who made, in
Julian’s opinion, the finest goat cheese in the region, smooth and mild, not rank and gritty like some.

Julian had finally coaxed the fire to life. They ate companionably before it. Edith, released from captivity, lay dreaming on the hearthrug. Mara, with her ankle propped up again, was in less pain now and looking better. Julian was aware of the way she sipped her wine, the rim of the glass pressed against her lower lip, the flickering flames glowing in her dark eyes, lending color to her cheeks.

“Julian, I need to know,” Mara said. “Am I asking the impossible?”

He hesitated and then answered, “Yes. Apart from this”—he tapped the photo of the mystery
Cypripedium
—“most of these orchids are pretty widespread throughout the Dordogne. Even the Bird’s-nest could potentially grow in any forested glade. This makes pinning down an exact location pretty hard. Also, although you have the sequence of exposures, there’s no way of telling if your sister took all of these pictures within the space of a few hours—say, on a walk—or over several days. If she took them all in one go, that would simplify things because it would limit their range to a given area, whatever she could do on foot, assuming she was on foot. You could then try to find places where all of these flowers grow together and use the photos to create a sort of continuity—”

Mara cut in eagerly, “That was exactly my idea. I thought, if somehow I could find a starting point, I
could use the photos as a kind of—of map to retrace her steps.”

“But what”—he had to point out the other possibility—“if they were taken at different times? That means they were also probably taken in different places. Look, the lighting in this photo of Beynac Castle is dull, the road and stonework look wet. But the flowers were shot in dry, sunny conditions. That suggests that these were taken at different times, on different days and possibly in different locations.”

“Or that it rained in the morning and cleared up in the afternoon. The weather in these parts can be very changeable, everyone knows that.” She was not prepared to accept his complications. She fixed him with an obstinate regard accentuated by the set of her pointed chin.

He shook his head. “You also have the problem of this.” He returned to the Lady’s Slipper. “If this really is a
Cypripedium
, it’s very doubtful it was taken anywhere around here at all.”

“But Beynac Castle shows that the photos were taken locally.”

“However, not necessarily the orchids, or at least not all the orchids. Your sister could have begun the roll in the Dordogne and finished off in—in the Gorges of the Tarn, for all I know.”

“But I found the camera in Villeréal,” she objected. “That’s no more than thirty kilometers away.”

Julian shrugged. “Junk travels.”

Then he gave her the coup de grâce. “The real difficulty is that you’re hoping to follow your sister’s footsteps using floral landmarks of nineteen years ago. A lot could have happened in that time, Mara. Orchids are extremely vulnerable to changes in their environments. Their propagation patterns could have shifted. Their habitat could have been destroyed. You could be looking for something that no longer exists.”

She was silent for a long moment, taking this in.

“All right,” she said doggedly. “What about this?” She held up the photo they had so far ignored. The pigeon house. It was a distance shot, taken from an elevated point: a round stone tower, some fourteen meters high, with a rough, gray conical roof. It stood by itself, surrounded by poplars, at the bottom of a soggy-looking field. The specific features of the structure were hard to make out because of a large patch of speckling covering much of the print, but it appeared to have at least one window, a low door, and numerous holes for the entry and egress of birds.