Not until he was back downstairs did the significance of what he’d just seen dawn on him. Unlike the attic storeroom, the rest of the house was much too clean after having been closed up for months. Someone had been inside, someone he wanted to talk to. Unless whoever it was had been hired to clean up by the owners, get the rooms in order for them before they returned, which of course was possible. Mazarelle would have to find out who this English family was and how to get in touch with them.
On the way to his car, the inspector heard a tractor working in the field behind the house. It wasn’t until he got closer that he recognized Chambouvard. The last time he’d seen him was when he was questioning Georgette at their farmhouse across the road and her father suddenly appeared bitching about flics being nosy. Yet he was the one who knew all about the time Ali Sedak left L’Ermitage the night of the murders. A real busybody, Monsieur Chambouvard. What the hell was he doing over here? Could he have been the one snooping at the window just now?
Recalling his previous meeting with the farmer, the inspector was inclined to skimp on the charm even more than he usually did with men. He snapped out his hand like a matador’s red flag—confident in himself rather than any uniform—and Chambouvard hit the brakes.
“What is it
now
?” he asked, exasperated. “More questions?”
“What are you doing on this side of the road?”
“Trying to work, if you’d let me.”
“This isn’t part of your farm too, is it?”
“A
servitude,
” Chambouvard explained. “The land belongs to the house, but the hay back here belongs to me. I have the right to cut it early every summer for my animals. And that’s the way it’s going to stay no matter what foreigner owns the property.”
Mazarelle asked the owner’s name.
“McAllister.” It was obvious that he didn’t like the man. “English.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
The farmer glanced sourly down at the inspector from his tractor seat and shrugged.
“Have you seen anyone going in or out of the house recently?”
“That house is none of my business.”
Mazarelle suspected Chambouvard knew what was going on in every acre in the neighborhood.
“Where does McAllister live in England?”
“Ask my wife. Maybe she knows. I have no time for nonsense. I’m busy. And now let me get back to my work.”
A real pain in the ass. His wife, on the other hand, was glad to see the inspector when he knocked on her door, and she promptly expressed relief that he had the Arab in jail. Madame Chambouvard
didn’t like that he’d been working so close to her daughter at L’Ermitage. She never trusted the fellow.
“Only a suspect, madame,” Mazarelle reminded her, and asked if she knew how he might get in touch with McAllister.
The farmer’s wife was happy to oblige. She didn’t share her husband’s attitude about the Englishman at all. After hunting among her important papers in the bureau drawer, she found what she was looking for. A page torn from a telephone notepad that said Hôtel Gambetta, Bergerac. The name written on it was Neil McAllister with an address and phone number in London.
Mazarelle quickly took the information down. “One thing more,” he said, standing at the front door. “Did Georgette ever do any house cleaning for the McAllisters?”
“Oh no!
Jamais
de
la
vie!
Chambouvard wouldn’t hear of it.”
Returning to his office, Mazarelle placed his call to London. The key question he had for McAllister was whether anyone had been using his house in Taziac. He was sure the Englishman must know all about the murders next door. Who didn’t know? The story had been in newspapers all over Europe. Perhaps that was why the family was delaying their return, preferring to wait until the police had their man. They weren’t the only ones.
The phone rang a few times and a man’s voice answered, but before Mazarelle could tell McAllister what he wanted he was instructed to leave his message after the beep. The message was simple. It was urgent that he call Inspector Paul Mazarelle at the Commissariat de Police in Bergerac, France, as soon as he got home.
32
SEDAK INDICTED
T
he Hôtel Fleuri was so empty, so peaceful, so quiet that Molly had her first decent night’s sleep since arriving in France. She didn’t even hear the clanging of the church bell across the square. Her shoulders ached where she’d hit the car when the tattooed son of a bitch pushed her. Otherwise she felt fine. Hungry enough for waffles, bacon, and eggs but glad to settle for the
petit
déjeuner
downstairs.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
The frail teenage girl who’d helped with their bags when they arrived brought her a pitcher of coffee and a small basket of croissants. They were hot, flaky, and delicious with butter and apricot jam. Molly was finishing her breakfast when Monsieur Favier came over, looking smug as a lottery winner. He was actually smiling. As he placed a copy of that morning’s
Sud
Ouest
in front of her, his stubby index finger tapped the headline that read “Sedak Indicted in Taziac Murders.”
“You see, mademoiselle!
Le
surineur.
It was the Arab after all.”
The lead article on the front page was by Jacques Gaudin, the reporter who had interviewed Molly. In addition to several lesser crimes, the investigating magistrate was charging Ali Sedak with acts of barbarism and all four killings. Gaudin sketched in the details of the crimes and noted that the handyman admitted being the last to see one of the victims alive. Sedak was soon to be moved to the Maison d’Arrêt in Périgueux to await trial.
“I knew it!” trumpeted Favier. “I knew he did it.”
All he knew, she thought, was that once they had their murderer,
the tourists would be back and his business would return to normal. Getting up, Molly pointed out, “He hasn’t been tried yet.”
Favier didn’t like that.
After breakfast, Molly drove up to Bergerac, eager to speak to Ali Sedak before they put him in prison. She had to park a few blocks away from the commissariat because the entrance was cordoned off. Opposite the building, noisy Front National demonstrators were gathering for a protest rally as reporters and cameramen covered the scene. There were bloodthirsty shouts of “Kill the Arab bastard!” and “Send him home in a box!” One of the signs read “Bring back the guillotine—the only tree that always bears fruit.”
It was the nearest thing to a lynch mob Molly had ever seen. The way she felt, they might have been after her. Though she was wearing dark glasses, Molly realized that her picture had been in the papers. She was far from invisible. Without waiting for the heavy truck traffic to stop, Molly raced across the boulevard Chanzy to the Hôtel de Police.
“What’s going on?” she asked Mazarelle.
He explained that they were expecting René Arnaud any minute, the local darling of the extreme right. Arnaud couldn’t resist an opportunity like this. The FN had planned a big demonstration against the indicted murderer.
Molly said, “I’d like to hear Ali Sedak’s side of the story. May I see him?”
Why not? Mazarelle thought. It was worth one last try before their prisoner was taken to Périgueux. Let her talk to him—the daughter of two of the victims, a beautiful, young, sympathetic American woman, eager to hear anything he had to say. It might be just what it would take to make him want to clear his conscience, unburden his heart. Who knows? Perhaps if the stick doesn’t work, the carrot will. He gave her half an hour.
Molly was waiting in the interrogation room when Bandu brought in Ali Sedak. They’d removed his handcuffs the night before, and for the first time he’d been able to snatch a few hours sleep. The inspector
had told Bandu to leave a couple of cigs and wait outside. Molly eyed his hands, the nails bitten to the quick, the match shaking as he lit up. He sucked in the smoke as if he couldn’t get enough, then began to cough violently. She found it almost impossible to believe that this cowardly wife beater, this small, wretched man—his face, after a few days in a windowless cell, as pinched and pale as city snow—had by himself killed her father and mother, let alone all four of them.
No sooner had Molly told him who she was than he swore that he never killed her parents, swore he never killed anyone. But the police wouldn’t believe him, nobody would. The inspector had the wrong man. Ali said he’d confessed to nothing, he was innocent. He went on and on in this vein, demanding to be set free, demanding a lawyer, demanding to see his wife.
Molly told him that she’d met his wife. Thérèse had been trying to visit him and would probably be allowed to once they moved him to Périgueux. Molly said that she’d also seen their baby and congratulated him on his son, called him a beautiful child.
Ali’s face softened, the color seeped back into his cheeks. “How is he?”
“Fine. He seems fine.”
Ali lit his second cigarette with the burning tip of his first. Then a long drag and he began to complain again. They’d refused to let him see his wife, his child, a lawyer, anyone. Ever since they brought him here they’d been mistreating him. Locked in a cinder block coffin with nothing to do, no one to talk to except when they took him out for questioning or brought him a cold sandwich. And how could he sleep in handcuffs on that wooden slab with the light always in his eyes and them watching him all the time? They were torturing him.
“You feel dirty, tired, humiliated,” he said hoarsely, his voice cracking. “They won’t even let me wash.”
How often had Molly found that wife beaters—not unlike alcoholics—were rank sentimentalists, predisposed to slathering themselves with thick gobs of self-pity. She’d more sympathy for the drunks. So she told him there was one thing she didn’t understand. How come there was so much evidence against him if he was innocent?
“Coincidences, that’s all. What else could it be?”
His question hung in the air like a vaguely unpleasant smell. “Unless …” He looked toward the door to make sure it was closed and lowered his voice so that only she could hear. “Unless the flics are trying to frame me.”
“Tell me about the night of the murders.” As she reached for a hanky from her bag, she turned on her tape recorder.
Ali was so eager to win her over that his story fairly gushed out of him. It was nothing that Molly hadn’t heard before. She gave him a skeptical look. “The police say you were the last one to see Schuyler Phillips alive. Is that true?”
“No, no, no, no.” Ali’s head thrashed back and forth.
“Calm down. I’m listening.”
“They’re twisting what I said. He was alive when I left.”
“Okay, fine. I understand. Then you drove home with your bad back and went right to sleep an hour or so before midnight. Didn’t wake up again until the next morning. Is that the way it happened?”
“Yes, yes. I mean no.”
Molly moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I’m trying, but you’re not making things easy for me.”
“The telephone rang in the middle of the night. It woke me, but I didn’t get out of bed and, as far as I know, neither did Thérèse. A wrong number. They must have hung up.”
“Did the phone ring again a little later?”
“If it did I didn’t hear it. Ask Thérèse—maybe she heard something.”
“I’ll do that.”
From outside in the street, shouts and cheers and the martial beat of drums erupted as if a tumbrel had arrived to cart him off.
Ali turned in alarm to his visitor. “What’s that?”
Molly guessed that René Arnaud had arrived. “I don’t know,” she told him, shrugging. She mentioned having seen demonstrators across the street when she drove up.
His face collapsed. Shoulders trembling, Ali began to rock back and forth. “They think I’m the murderer,” he cried. “Nobody believes me. Nobody.” He banged his head on the table in desperation and might have done himself some real damage if Bandu hadn’t rushed in and dragged him away.
The first thing the inspector asked when she came out was, “Did he tell you anything?”
“He says he’s innocent.”
“And do you believe him?”
Molly hesitated. “Yes, I do.”
“Really? Despite the evidence against him and his history of violence?”
“That’s right. Because at the time the killer was using his victims’ credit cards to withdraw their money from the ATM machines, Ali was at home.”
“How do you know that?”
“He said that the phone in his house woke him up. And his wife, who thought he was asleep at the time, independently confirmed the first call at about one a.m. You can probably check it out with the telephone company.”
“We have. That still doesn’t mean he was there at that time. The two of them could easily have cooked up an alibi.”
Molly knew he was right. And the phone calls alone would hardly stand up in court as exculpatory evidence, but she felt certain this wasn’t a case of collusion between husband and wife.
“You’ve got the wrong man, Inspector.”
“We’ll see.”
Much to her annoyance, Mazarelle seemed convinced. “What exactly is
that
supposed to mean?”
“Merely that the calls you speak of were both made on your friend Monsieur Phillips’s cell phone, which we found in Ali’s car trunk.” Molly appeared so stricken by the news that the inspector almost felt sorry for her. “I’m afraid, Mademoiselle Reece, you have too trusting a heart.”
It wasn’t her heart Molly was worried about but her head. She realized that she was probably right about Ali being innocent, but for the wrong reason. He himself had given her the clue. Her problem was that she’d largely dismissed it as guilty, self-serving bunk. He was being set up by somebody. Oh, maybe not the police, as he claimed, but somebody was out to frame him. It had to be something like that. But Molly wasn’t about to tell Mazarelle what she suspected. She had plenty of other reasons to doubt Ali’s guilt.
“I just can’t believe a guy his size could have handled four people by himself. Even if he killed Schuyler before the other three returned from the restaurant, he still had to tie up my parents and Ann Marie, and then carry them to different rooms in the house. No, I don’t think so. He may be a batterer, a druggie, a small-time pusher and thief, but that doesn’t make him a quadruple murderer. Not the shaken little man I just saw. Even without heels, I’m taller than he is. The only way he could have killed them is if he had an accomplice.”