Summer School at Labastide Read online

  SUMMER SCHOOL

  AT

  LABASTIDE

  a murder mystery

  by

  FRANCES MURRAY

  It was 1991, it was summer and there was a vicious war going on in the Balkans but in rural South Western France it was no more than a newspaper headline, easily forgotten, unless you had been badly wounded there, as Steven had been. It was a good place to recover and he could follow his bent and paint, for his long-time friend, Greg, ran a painting school in the village.

  Greg’s was a perfectly normal painting school, such as you find all over France and Italy: it was in a spectacular hill-village in the Cathar country, an ancient bastide or fortress. The weather was hot and sunny, just what one might expect at the time of year, though the village was not called Labastide-les-Orages for nothing. The scenery was magnificent and there was a subject for a painting whichever way you turned. However, there were people on the latest painting course who had come neither for the scenery, nor the experience…

  This one is for Judy and Fanny with grateful thanks for all their help and in Judy’s case

  in lieu of an unfinished patchwork quilt

  With love from FM

  CHAPTER LIST

  CHAPTER ONE 5

  CHAPTER TWO. 19

  CHAPTER THREE 35

  CHAPTER FOUR 56

  CHAPTER FIVE 70

  CHAPTER SIX 90

  CHAPTER SEVEN 109

  CHAPTER EIGHT 126

  CHAPTER NINE 143

  CHAPTER TEN 161

  CHAPTER ELEVEN 179

  CHAPTER TWELVE 202

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN 223

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN 242

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN 264

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN 280

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 296

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 313

  CHAPTER NINETEEN 330

  CHAPTER TWENTY 351

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE 367

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO 380

  OTHER BOOKS BY FRANCES MURRAY 398

  CHAPTER ONE

  Prelude

  The bus from Toulouse trundled to a halt in a lay-by under an overhanging cliff that wept green streaks on to the grass. Four hundred feet above, the bus-passengers could just make out the huge walls and dilapidated towers of an ancient castle. Those who could peered up and ooh-la-la-d.

  “It is Labastide-les-Orages,” announced the bus-driver and pulled the lever which opened the door, “a good place for those who wish to live on the edge of the world.”

  He heaved himself out to open the luggage compartment and produced a large battered soft-bag, an equally battered paint box and a folding easel

  “One comprehends,” he observed, “that M’sieu has the metier of an artist.”

  M’sieu had got down at his heels and was standing beside him, a small backpack in one hand and a shabby camera-bag slung over his shoulder. The driver squinted at the labels.

  Steven Tulliver, c/o Gregor McAllister,

  Labastide-les-Orages.

  “Toolliver?” the driver mispronounced and he was evidently surprised for he looked hard at the owner of the name. “These are yours? I could have sworn M’sieu was French.”

  “I am bâtard, me,” said Steven wearily, “half-French, half-English.”

  The driver looked up at the steep flight of steps which started to ascend the cliff face from the bus stop, weaving to and fro until they vanished behind clumps of elders.

  “But, M’sieu cannot carry all that up there. He is not well, evidently.”

  “One will come for me in a car,” M’sieu said. “I have telephoned. But it is kind of you to concern yourself.”

  The driver shrugged and heaved himself back into the bus. He had started that morning from Toulouse, showered, shaved and neatly uniformed. Now, his jacket lay crumpled on top of his peaked cap, his tie hung over the back of his seat and his shirt hung unbuttoned about him, revealing a comfortable paunch and a furry bosom on which nestled a hard-worked Christopher medal. Polished black shoes had been replaced by down-at-heel espadrilles. Steven, sitting behind him, had observed the gradual transformation during the long, hot journey from Toulouse and wondered whether the same occurred in reverse as the bus returned from Campmontfort to Toulouse.

  “Allez!” cried the driver bracingly and the door clapped shut. The bus roared away in a cloud of diesel fumes. Steven raised a hand and then sat down rather hurriedly on the soft-bag. Not for the first time that long hot morning, he cursed his weakness. The shell-splinter, ‘Serb, at a guess,’ he had heard the surgeon say cheerfully, as he extracted it from his back had shed a number of lesser splinters in its passage under his shoulder-blade and these had had to be traced and removed when he reached London. His back now resembled a map of the London Underground, so the nurse had told him, but the scars would fade. In time. However, not much of that time had passed and seven hundred miles in trains, with no sleeper available and an hour and half in a bus in the heat of July were not good for a convalescent. His head started to spin and he leaned forward, holding off the whirling black cloud that threatened to engulf him. He heard a car slow down and stop and raised his head from his knees, peering blearily at the wavering outline of a Deux Chevaux.

  “Mr. Tulliver?”

  The voice was female, not the precise highland accent of his friend Gregor. A pleasant voice, he thought muzzily, and peered at the shadow before him.

  “Steven?” it asked, more sharply.

  He had raised his head too soon and the blackness was threatening again. The shadow moved away. He could hear water splashing. A cold, wet sensation spread revivingly over his head and neck. It resolved itself into Greg’s painting rag, soaked in water from the trickle coming down the cliff and laid across his nape. The sun ceased to beat on his head, his heart ceased to hammer and at length he could look up. A tall thin figure was standing in front of him, holding up the elderly golf-umbrella, which Greg used when he was painting outdoors.

  “Mary Poppins?” he murmured.

  “If you are feeling better,” said the figure dryly, “get into the car, spit-spot, and let me get you into the cool and outside a cold drink as quickly as possible.”

  He obeyed, thankful for her arm about him, and waited while she piled his gear on to the back seat. She drove off with a jerk and a crunch of gears.

  “Haven’t driven for ages,” she admitted and looked at him briefly. He had his head back on the add-on head-rest and she could see that his face was a sallow grey. She frowned and negotiated the steep road, which had been cantilevered out from the side of the ridge and curved up steeply under the walls of the bastide. Through the sudden black shadow of the Vieille Porte she drove and turned left into the shady Rue des Deux Tours. She stopped outside the open cellar door of the Painting School and honked the horn twice.

  “What’s your name, Mary Poppins?” Steven asked without opening his eyes.

  “Jane,” she said.

  Lucie McAllister hurried out of the cellar, flushed, untidy and smiling.

  “Oh, I’ve been a-courtin’ Mary Jane,” Steven murmured.

  “On Ilkley Moor,” Jane returned as she leaned across him and pushed the window open, “Ba tat.”

  “Quoi?” enquired Lucie, wide-eyed. Her English was good, but not that good.

  “He’s not very well,” Jane said. “Just about passed out.”

  Lucie leaned into the window.

  “Oh, Steven, chéri!” she exclaimed.

  “It’s nothing much. I’m tired, that’s all. No sleeper. And it was so hot in the bus.”

  Lucie made one of her instant out-of-the-hat decisions.

  “The Hermitage,” she declared. “It’s cool, it faces north and no one need bother hi
m there when the others arrive. His own room faces the square and can be so noisy.”

  She turned to Jane.

  “Take him round there by the Esplanade and then he won’t have to go down those awful stairs in the White House. The boulistes won’t mind if you go right in, not if it’s Steven. They all know him and you can explain he’s sick. I’ll go across right away and bring...I’ll telephone Claudine.”

  “No!” said Steven emphatically and opened his eyes. “It’s just that I’m not out of hospital all that long and I’ve overdone things a bit. Claudine won’t thank you for hauling her out for nothing.”

  Lucie regarded his gaunt grey face doubtfully and then glanced at Jane who was preparing to reverse the car down to the gate. Jane nodded infinitesimally and Lucie hurried indoors to telephone.

  Jane’s French, if a little slow, was good. The boulistes hastened to shift the plank and undo the chain across the entrance to the playing area so that she could drive right to the door of the Hermitage. They abandoned their game and gathered about the car, exclaiming.

  “It is the young M’sieu Steven. How he is white as ashes. He is sick, him.”

  “It is the heat. The English do not accustom themselves to the heat.”

  “They hurry, they run, it does not serve.”

  “One may work all day in the heat,” said a fourth shaking the bald head burned to the colour of a ripe chestnut, which witnessed this claim, “but it is foolishness to hurry.”

  An old man, still massively built, his forearms like hams, opened Steven’s door, leaned in and gently drew him out.

  “There now, he has been hurt in the wars. This we have heard,” he said. “Lean on me, M’sieu Steven. I may be twice your age, me, but I am tough like a vine. Lean on me. Paco, bring the baggages.”

  Jane, seeing her help was unnecessary, went on ahead and opened the portes-fenêtres and waited for the little procession to come up the two shallow steps. The old man, Boudariès, eased Steven down onto the low bed and ordered Paco and the others to pile the soft-bag, the paint-box and the easel on the sofa. A crop-headed youth with a nose-ring brought in the camera-bag and the back-pack and set them down, looking anxiously at Steven. Jane set the fan going and took a bottle of Vittel out of the fridge. She gave Steven a misted glassful and he drank it down thankfully.

  “Eh bien,” nodded Boudariès, “soon you will be better. Rest now, my friend, sleep a little and at sundown you will be ready for a game of boules. But you are welcome home!”

  He motioned Paco and the others out of the room with a jerk of his grizzled head and stumped out after them to the interrupted game.

  The Hermitage was a converted cellar, once a byre, which had been carved out of the solid rock below the ancient ramparts of the bastide. It had served as a wine store to the house above it which was called the White House as it had briefly belonged to two Americans called White. The spacious cellar was now a self-contained apartment, with a shower-room, lavatory and tiny kitchen. There was a precipitous staircase up to the rest of the house but this was normally closed off by a bolted door because the stairs were dangerous to skull and limb, particularly skull, to anyone over five feet tall. Jane ducked up, shot the bolt and then set about refilling Steven’s glass. He promptly emptied it again.

  “Ask me,” she said, “half your trouble was dehydration. In this weather you should carry a bottle of water with you.”

  She poured out a third glassful and then set about removing Steven’s sandals and the damp and crumpled denim shirt.

  “No, leave that!” he protested but she succeeded in hauling it half off.

  “You’ll be better without.... my God!”

  “Does it look as bad as all that?” he asked wearily.

  She waited a moment to answer, making herself look closely at the network of red scar tissue.

  “No. It was just that I was not expecting it.”

  “One of the nurses said it looked like a map of the Underground.”

  “She had a point. But when you look closely you can see it is healing. Does it give you much trouble?”

  “Aches a bit.”

  She bundled up his shirt and put it in a plastic bag.

  “I’ll bung this in the machine. You seem to be in with the boulistes.”

  “They taught me to play. I’ve been coming here since before I was twenty,” he explained. “Greg and I were at Art School together.”

  “Oh, I know. Lucie’s told me about you. How you found the perfect place for Greg’s school, how you introduced them.”

  “Then I will have to hear about you before we’re quits.”

  Jane stiffened and turned away to haul a shirt out of the back-pack and hold it ready for him to put on.

  “Nothing to hear,” she said. “Kindergarten, boarding-school, job. Story of my life. No ventures in the imminent deadly breach, like some well-known war photographers.”

  He put his arms in the shirt.

  “You get nosy about other people’s dangers, you’re apt to share them.”

  “You let us share them vicariously. Perhaps that helps to prevent worse things. Knowing that there’s a chiel among them taking notes.”

  “Your Scots accent is the pits,” he said absently. “It’s a point of view. Some people are proud of their brutalities. They boast of them. Is that really all?”

  She looked puzzled for a second.

  “You mean about me? Yes. That’s all. A little talent, perhaps,” she added with a hint of bitterness.

  Steven was lying back against the pillows with his eyes closed but he half-opened them to watch her stowing away his belongings. She was tall, thin, almost gangling; long beautiful legs below the fashionable baggy shorts; her shoulders were wide, her bare arms slender. He could not see her face, only the delicate shape of her skull under the cropped dark hair which would curl when it was a little longer. A good head. He would like to draw it.

  “Depends what you think are assets,” he observed.

  The light which filtered through the lime trees outside into the cavern-like room was interrupted and Lucie came in at her customary trot, the mouse-coloured hair about her face having released itself from the clasp at her nape. Behind her came the comfortable plump form of Claudine Crété. She was the village doctor and had retired from a busy practice in Marseille to her birthplace. She described herself as semi-retired but as she was the only doctor for ten kilometers around she was kept busier than many younger doctors would care to be.

  “Eh, bien, young Steven, what’s amiss?”

  Steven groaned.

  “Nothing to signify. They shouldn’t have routed you out.”

  “Probably not. But as I am here I will look at you.”

  She hauled him into a sitting position and examined the scarred back, using a little torch. “I have a letter, you know. A letter in English from this London Hospital. I have not a word of English but Greg translated it. I understand that you have had a large shell-splinter removed from your back in Bosnia and numerous smaller ones at this hospital in London. Good. You are healing well, there is no sign of infection even after the rough and ready surgery you had on the spot. Good again.”

  “I told you,” Steven said wearily and lay back again.

  “But,” she went on and shook a finger at him, “you were lucky to survive the injury and the first operation, you must lift no weights for some months to come, you must not stand too long and you should rest. So, what do you do? Enfin, you travel a thousand kilometres by train and bus in mid-July. You are mad!”

  “They said I mustn’t drive for six weeks and I had to get.... I had to get here.”