The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker Read Free Book Online Page A

this group here are the Pleiades. Where was this found?’
    ‘It was pinned to the noticeboard in the kitchen. It’s not the original. That was clearer and some of the stars were highlighted.’
    ‘Do the Swiss still have this chart?’
    ‘God knows.’
    ‘Find out. I want a colour photograph. As clear and detailed as possible. The original would be better. And it’s only going to rot in a box if the Swiss have wound up their investigation.’
    ‘There was a full moon on the night they died,’ ventured Schweigen, alarmed by this astrological development. ‘How will this chart help?’
    ‘We can’t assume that they were all killed off in Switzerland. More of them may be out there. And this chart may tell us if and when the next departure is due to take place. And it may also tell us where they think they’re going.’
    She peered again at the faces of the dead, framed as portraits, with their names, ages, professions, next of kin listed below, but now she was looking for something unambiguous, a face she expected to find.
    ‘One of them must spend all his time peering down a telescope or looking at charts on his computer. Which one is the astronomer? Or the astrophysicist?’
    Schweigen flicked over the pages in the file, unhesitating.
    ‘This one. And he’s the man who didn’t take the poison. He was shot.’
    Anton Laval, aged 56 , born Lyon, senior researcher with the CNRS at Grenoble, often featured as one of the consulting scientists in the popular late summer television programme, La Nuit des Étoiles. The Judge studied the calm handsome face for some time. If she recognised him, she gave no sign.
    ‘Maybe that’s our Professor,’ said Schweigen. ‘On the other hand at least twelve of them were Professors.’
    ‘It says here he wasn’t married. Who was registered as his next of kin?’
    ‘One sister. I saw her yesterday.’ The Judge raised her darkened eyes to his face, her mouth remained inscrutable. ‘She lives about eighty kilometres to the north-east of here, a huge domaine, beyond Nîmes. She was still distraught with grief when I asked about her brother. I had to stop and wait while she pulled herself together. She couldn’t tell me much. No more than she gave to my colleagues last year, just after the event. They were asking very silly questions though. Did he have any enemies? Who might want to shoot him? There were nearly seventy other people lying dead all around him. It looked like he was just following the fashion.’
    ‘And as far as the secret sect is concerned she seemed to think it quite extraordinary that he could believe in anything to the point of sacrificial martyrdom. She’s the devout Catholic and he’s the sceptic. Or that’s more or less what I gathered. She’s in the local curé’s pocket. She kept saying how much she missed her brother, but she’s absolutely convinced that she will see him again and that they will be reunited. I thought she was a bit mad.’
    ‘She’s a widow, but she always kept her nom de jeune fille because she runs the estate. She’s on that list. Marie-Cécile Laval.’
    *  *  *
     
    But five years earlier neither Schweigen nor the Judge had suspected Madame Marie-Cécile Laval of being a member of the Faith. She cooperated willingly with the investigation, talked frankly about her brother, unfailingly loving in everything she said. Her unflinching tenderness seemed odd. When someone commits suicide the reaction of disbelief is usually followed by rage against the person who has so brutally slammed the door and gone. Madame Laval’s gentle, emotional forgiveness disarmed her interrogators. She opened her house to them, handed over her brother’s papers, presented a countenance of such cultivated intelligence that all suspicion faded.
    Schweigen always remembered Madame Laval as he had first seen her, surrounded by beautiful eighteenth-century furniture, gilded mirrors with dusty Cupids, a cabinet inlaid with rosewood and