The Corpse with the Silver Tongue Read online

  So, the good news came first. Then came the inevitable bad news.

  While not being in a position to specify, the “boss-officer” made it clear that we had all been exposed to the same toxin at the party, and that this toxin had, in all likelihood, killed our host. I could have told them that! He added gravely that, until more was known about the exact cause of Alistair’s demise, I wasn’t to leave Nice, nor would any other members of our group be allowed to do so, as we were all “persons of interest in a case of an unexplained death.” I gave them my contact details and was “requested” to attend the police station the next morning at 11:00 AM for an interview. As they left me there on my gurney, I thought to myself, What a great way to start a long weekend in the south of France!

  Mind you, if I’d known then just how much worse it was going to get, I might have seen being poisoned and becoming a murder suspect as high spots.

  Friday Night

  AFTER A LITTLE NAP, I was wide awake. You know, the sort of “wide awake” that means you’re quite certain sleep is beyond your grasp. All I could do was try to ignore the buzzing machine next to me, and try not to worry about what poison I might have been served at dinner. Not easy.

  My watch told me it was two o’clock in the morning. Nice is nine hours ahead of Vancouver, so it was only five o’clock in the afternoon there—a great time to get hold of people. My cell phone was in my purse, which was jammed beneath my body, but there were signs all over the walls making it clear that I shouldn’t use it, even if I could have managed to get hold of it. Besides . . . who would I call? My mind leapt to Bud. He would be the one to talk to at a time like this.

  For a couple of years Bud Anderson had been the head of Vancouver’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, or Mr. I-HIT, as he liked to call himself. I’d been working with him over the past twelve months or so as a “sometimes consultant.” Bud would call me if he thought I might be able to help his team, and I’d profile a victim to help gain an understanding of their life or life patterns. He’d recently taken on a Big New Job. He was setting up a unit to work out the way that gangs and organized crime worked in Vancouver, across Canada, and internationally. All very hush, hush.

  I liked Bud and his patient, supportive wife Jan, but I hadn’t seen much of them since he’d been promoted—or “given the Gangbusters job,” as he put it. A dinner plan cancelled here, a coffee date postponed there. I missed the way he seemed to understand me, and how he supported my not always favorably viewed expertise. I also missed how much Jan spoiled me when I was with them—almost as much as they both spoiled their tubby black lab, Marty. I always got the “human treats,” as she called them, lovely little nibbles made of chocolate and Rice Krispies.

  As I squirmed to get more comfortable on the unyielding gurney, I wished I could hear Bud’s calm, confident, commanding voice. He’d help me gain some perspective. But calling him would have to wait.

  Generally speaking, I’m a “rule observer”: the one and only time I ever parked in a disabled parking spot, I got towed—typical for me. Both my upbringing and my natural defense mechanisms have led me to try to not break the rules, if at all possible.

  So I was on my own. What to do until I was unhooked and released? I resigned myself to reliving the events that had brought me to this situation.

  Frankly, I shouldn’t have been anywhere near Nice, let alone rolled up in a blanket having cheated death. My dear, but annoying, colleague Frank “I’m not afraid of mountain biking down Blackcomb Mountain at the age of sixty” McGregor, our Faculty’s specialist in internet crime, had fallen off his stupid bike and broken his stupid collarbone and his even stupider right leg. So I had been “volunteered” by my Head of Department to fly to Nice to present daredevil Frank’s paper at the symposium. Of course, at the time, I’d jumped at the chance of an all-expenses paid break in the south of France. I mean—who wouldn’t?

  “We’ll cover your classes, Cait, and you can represent Frank and the Faculty. You’ll fly out tonight, and arrive in Nice on Thursday. Frank’s paper is due for presentation just before lunch on Friday. The University of Vancouver will be proud of you—I know you’ll do a good job. You only have to formally present the paper and be prepared to answer some very general questions about Frank’s methodology. You can read the briefing papers on the airplane. You’ll have a marvellous time.”

  Those had been the words from my boss that had sent me home on a cloud of dreamy expectations to hurriedly pack and rush off to Vancouver International Airport to undertake the twenty-hour journey. Two changes of airplanes later, I finally emerged from Nice’s airport bleary-eyed, heavily rumpled, and ready to savor all that the Cote d’Azur had to offer. After a good nap and a bit of a wash and brush up, that is.

  If Frank hadn’t gone mountain biking, and if I hadn’t been chosen to replace him, I’d never have been sitting at that bar sipping a glass of wine in the warmth of the May sunshine when Alistair walked by. I wouldn’t have been poisoned, or have been there when Alistair died. Clearly, it was all Frank’s fault. At last—I had someone to blame!

  Oh dear . . . poor Frank. He was probably feeling even more uncomfortable than I was at that moment: it can’t be easy being almost totally immobile down one whole side of your body. For six to eight weeks, they’d said. They also say it does one good to think of someone who’s worse off than oneself. Even though I’d been poisoned and was now a suspect in an unexplained death, Frank certainly fit the bill of someone worse off than me. As was Alistair. After all, whatever I might have thought of him—and none of those thoughts were good—he was dead. And that’s about as bad as it gets.

  I was back to Alistair again.

  Alistair Townsend: I had hated him in life, and I suspected I was going to hate him even more in death. He’d screwed up a part of my life . . . well, okay, just a few years of it, while I’d worked for him. The advertising agency world has always been a pretty cut-throat business, but Alistair was much more of an “I’ll find someone else to stab you in the back” type of operator. People had their careers ruined, they’d lost jobs and seen their marriages dissolve into chaos, and some had lost their homes and businesses . . . all because Alistair wanted to have everything work out to his advantage, and because he had knowledge about people that they didn’t want him to share, so they did his dirty work for him. I’d been told at the time, by someone who had firsthand knowledge of such things, that more than one Alcoholics Anonymous group in London’s Soho, the heart of ad-agency-land, had members courtesy of Alistair’s machinations. And I, along with others I’d known back in those distant days, suspected that he was linked to at least two suicides—indirectly, of course.

  Let’s be honest, the world was unquestionably better off without Alistair Townsend. As I lay wriggling in my blanket I wondered if he’d “retired” from the ad agency world but had maintained his interest in “secret brokering.” That sort of habit is hard to break—and a skill set it must be difficult to put aside. Boy, thinking of it that way made Alistair sound like a character from one of Chuck Damcott’s secret agent books. I wondered if that was why they’d become friends. Maybe Chuck was using Alistair as a model for a forthcoming tome. Maybe the world wasn’t rid of the man after all—maybe he would be immortalized in print. I shuddered at the thought.

  The policeman hadn’t been very illuminating when he told me we’d all been affected by the same toxin. Had we all been victims of an intentional poisoner, or of an accidental one? Had we breathed in the toxin? Eaten it? Drunk it? Touched it? There’d been ample opportunity for all those alternatives. And he’d said nothing. Maybe they didn’t know. Yet.

  I began to seriously consider whether Alistair might have continued in his old ways, even while living his new life in France. After all, someone had poisoned him . . . me . . . all of us . . . Or maybe I was jumping the gun and we were all exposed to the same toxin by accident.

  Some psychologists are very science oriented, while others stay mainly out of the l
ab and concentrate on the observations they can make, and the lessons they can learn, in the real world. I’ve never liked dissection or mathematics very much, so I guess I’m an example of the type of psychologist who believes that understanding human beings is as much of an art as it is a science. Why people do what they do is what fascinates and drives me. And why they might have become a victim has turned out to be my main area of focus.

  While I’m no scientist, I know that tests take time: a lot longer than the thirty seconds they take on all those TV shows. Sometimes they take days. Given the number of times they’d stuck a needle into me and drawn blood, I was pretty sure that the hospital’s pathologists would have their work cut out for quite some time before they knew exactly what had happened to me, or the rest of group.

  Or maybe they did know already, and the policeman was holding back the information. If so, why would he do that? To keep us all off guard, I suspect.

  My thoughts went back to Bud Anderson in Vancouver. I had a feeling that by the time I got out of the hospital Bud would be fast asleep and snuggled up to Jan and Marty (yes, they even have a set of steps to allow him to waddle up onto the bed). I’d have to wait, and then wait some more, until I could talk to anyone I knew or trusted. Bugger!

  In the meantime, there was no reason why I couldn’t still treat this as though it were a “proper” case. The way that I’d done for Bud in the past, and the way that I teach my students to do it.

  The victim (let’s call him that for now), Alistair Townsend: rich, relatively unhealthy, retired (from work at least), and living in the lap of luxury on the Cote d’Azur. If what I knew about him from his past was anything to go by, then he’d have accumulated a few enemies here, in his new life. Those people who worked at his snail farm, for a start: imagine showing up and telling the French how to farm snails! Then there was the swimming pool issue: I’d have to find out more about that. If Alistair had been the moving force behind digging up the gardens at the Palais to install a swimming pool, it might not just be the oldtimers Madelaine and Gerard who were against it; there could be dozens of other residents who didn’t like the idea. Promising. And what on earth was his wife bleating on about when she said that a Celtic collar had been stolen? No one had mentioned such a thing at dinner, at least, not within my hearing. Or had they?

  Maybe I should start by trying to work my way back through everything that had happened that evening, in detail. Maybe I’d missed some clues.

  One of the great things about having what most people call a photographic memory is that I can sit quietly and recall certain things, or events, in detail. Now, being a psychologist I know that there’s no such thing as a photographic memory, and that even the proper term, “eidetic memory,” has not been “proven” to the satisfaction of many scientists. To be honest, I certainly cannot explain what I can do, nor, frankly, do I want to. I mean, can you imagine being studied and tested for years and years like a rat in a laboratory? Terrible. And that’s what they do if you claim to have a special memory. Me? I use what I can do, but certainly don’t advertise the fact that I can do it, nor do I mention it at all if I can avoid it.

  I’ve always been able to recall things in an unusual way. As a child I thought that everyone could remember things the way I did. I used to get quite cross in school when a teacher would ask me to explain why I was contradicting something they said or did. I quickly found out that you get a detention for answers like “Because you said something/did something different two weeks ago.” It can certainly be a curse (everyone’s seen things in life they wish they could forget), but it can be useful. If used with care.

  They say that hindsight is 20/20, but I’ve learned, to my cost, that my ability is far from perfect. If I haven’t seen or heard something, of course I can’t recall it; and those things I have heard and seen sometimes get a bit jumbled up. The human mind cannot help but make associations and links that might seem illogical, but which come from somewhere deep inside our psyche. I have to be careful with the “knowledge” that I have, because it might be something I have misremembered, or which I have imbued with my own values or judgements. That’s why I’m fascinated by the reasons humans do what they do. The human mind is a wonderful thing—imprecise, complex, often inexplicable. I love the idea that a lifetime of studying it will never allow me to know everything. Though the thought that I might know nothing does alarm me!

  One thing I have learned, however, is that focusing sooner rather than later on recalling things I’ve experienced helps me recall them more accurately. I decided to give it a go. I couldn’t sit totally upright, due to my “attachments,” nor could I lay down properly, nor wiggle my ample rear until it was comfy; I had little else to do but lay as I was. I screwed up my eyes to the point where everything goes fuzzy and started to hum softly (I don’t know why that helps, but it does). If anyone had seen me lying there like that, they might have sought the attention of a doctor on my behalf, but I was still all alone, and even the distant clattering of efficient activity had fallen away. I could do my thing in private.

  This time I would question everything. There might have been a look that was significant, a conversation that dripped with new meaning. This was my chance to ferret out possible clues to what had happened. I forced myself to revisit that evening, and experience it as though it were happening again . . . the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and even my thoughts and feelings at the time . . . I would go back . . .

  Friday Evening—Redux

  THE CAB STOPS OUTSIDE THE tall, black wrought-iron gates. The driver is cross that he has to wait while I get out to push the little button to announce my arrival. Apartment 33. I push, and Alistair’s crackly voice asks, “Who is it?”

  “It’s me, Cait Morgan,” I shout. Even as I announce my presence, I acknowledge what I’m feeling: I hate being here, but I want to be thought of as a good person.

  “Come to the front door and buzz again.” Alistair is abrupt. The intercom squeals as his voice cuts out. I want to run away. Alistair is a horrible person.

  The gates begin to open, soundlessly, and I jump back into the cab. We drive into the delightful, lush garden that sits in front of the fabulous Belle Epoque building. The pea-gravel crunches beneath the wheels. I like that noise. I have always liked that noise. The tall palms provide shade to the front facade, which is magnificent: plaster moldings, pilasters and curving iron balustrades adorn the front of the tall, shuttered windows that fill all six stories. The entire building is painted a rich cream. Yellow and cream awnings stretch out to offer shade to the apartments where dove grey shutters have been thrown open.

  I pay the cab driver and climb the wide stone steps to the huge front door of frosted glass encased in more black wrought iron. I can feel the dead heat of the early evening sun on my back. I press number 33. Immediately the door buzzes and the lock releases. I walk into to the cool, cream and grey entrance hall. It smells of wax polish and moist soil. That’s a very curious thing to smell indoors. The ceiling soars twenty feet above me. Palms in massive pots look glossy, well-tended and welcoming. Now I understand smelling soil. Ahead of me there’s a winding stone staircase, but to the left there’s a cage-like elevator. Just like the ones in the French movies. I love these things—redolent of romance and stolen moments of passion. I pull open the ironwork door and slide back the concertina inner gate. Pushing the button for the third floor, I feel the elevator jerk as it stirs to life. There’s a slight smell of oil.

  As I emerge onto the third level I see only one door. Dark, heavy wood. It opens slowly, and first Alistair’s head, then large body, appears. I walk toward him, crossing cool marble, my heart sinking at his beaming smile. I sense a hug from those open arms. Oh no, he’s going to suck me in and suffocate me in his folds of flesh! He’s wearing a pink and white striped shirt and white linen pants. His clothes are tight on his flabby body. I’m caught with three revolting, wet kisses: left cheek, right cheek, left again. Oh YUK! Shoot me now!

  “T
hree kisses in Nice! What! What!” he shouts into my still-close ear. He smells strongly of heavy, sickly cologne. I cannot vomit on this man! On his shoulders I can see specks of dandruff from his carefully styled, thinning, more-salt-than-pepper hair. “Come in, come in! You’re bang on time.”

  I step into a small area with a coat rack, telephone table, and hat stand. Ahead of me I can see into a tiny kitchen with blue ceramic tiles and white everything else, beyond which glows the searing light of the sun on a stone patio. To my right is a bathroom, to my left the open expanse of a sitting room. Alistair’s arm, still resting heavily on my shoulders, steers me toward the sitting room. Impressive. Dark wood floor; cream walls, ceiling and paintwork; grey shutters; creamy wicker furniture, cream upholstery and a large cream-painted dining table; subtle yet impersonal artwork is strategically placed both high and low on the massive walls; small tables are laden with Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, and Japanese trinkets. Whoever planned this decor, it wasn’t the people who live here—professional job.

  Two stories high, the room’s windows must be fifteen feet tall; there are six of them, all with their shutters open and their gay striped awnings opened out. Four at the front of the building offer a magnificent view over the garden, to the Old Town and the sea beyond; the two on the right offer views of the curve of the Baie des Anges, out toward the airport a few miles away and the pretty buildings that nestle in the shadow of this wonderful old building. The smell of incense hangs in the air, mixed with cigar smoke, polish, and garlic. It smells bizarrely pleasant.