The phone on his desk rang and he snatched the receiver. ‘Oui.’ He spoke rapidly in French so that Bannerman could not follow what he said. Then he hung up and studied Bannerman before rising and extending his hand. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘I am Inspector Georges du Maurier of the Judicial Police. Homicide.’ His handshake was dry and firm. He sat down again and considered his next words carefully.’
‘Shortly after ten o’clock this morning,’ he began, ‘a passer-by in the Rue de Pavie heard a child screaming in the house at number twenty-four. He rang the bell several times and knocked repeatedly on the door but no-one came to open it and the child continued screaming. The gentleman concerned called the Gendarmerie from a telephone at the Residence Ambiorix at the end of the street. Two uniformed officers forced entry to the house and found an eleven-year-old girl screaming hysterically in the back room on the ground floor. In the study there were two bodies. Timothy Slater, a journalist, had been shot through the heart. Robert Gryffe, a Junior Minister of the British Government was shot through the forehead. There were two guns. One belonged to Monsieur Gryffe. It was lying beside him and bore his finger prints. We have been unable to trace the origin of the second gun as yet, but it was found in Monsieur Slater’s right hand which was folded in beneath his body. There were no signs of a forced entry into the house, no traces of a third party, except of course for the child. Conclusion?’ He paused and then answered himself. ‘They killed each other. On the surface, everything points to it. Trajectory of the bullets, position of the bodies, prints on the guns.’
Bannerman sat in stunned silence. He had thought himself prepared for anything, but not this. For the first time for many hours he was no longer aware of the places where he hurt. He remembered Slater’s file of cuttings on Gryffe, the tension between the two men at the party the night before. He leaned forward. ‘Then your case is closed?’
For the first time, du Maurier smiled. ‘At present we are treating both as suspicious deaths.’
‘And?’ Du Maurier raised his eyebrows but said nothing, waiting for Bannerman. ‘You said everything points to them killing each other... on the surface.’
The Inspector’s smile broadened. ‘Yes, there are other factors to be considered.’ Now Bannerman waited as du Maurier lit a cigarette. ‘Apart from the three or four clear prints on the gun Monsieur Slater was holding, the gun is clean. There are no other prints, no smudges. But more importantly Monsieur Slater, it would appear, was left-handed. It is very unlikely that he would be able to place a shot so accurately with his right hand.’ The smile was gone now, and he drew distractedly on his cigarette. ‘Also, the bullet that killed Monsieur Slater entered the heart centrally. Monsieur Gryffe, we discover, has owned a gun for many years but has never had any formal training in its use. A remarkable piece of shooting for two untrained men. And we must also consider that each shot would have been instantly fatal, so that unless they were fired at precisely the same instant the man who shot first would have survived. In addition we found a suitcase in a cupboard off the study. It contained two hundred and fifty thousand American dollars in used notes. And, of course, there was the attack of your own person in Monsieur Slater’s flat within an hour of the shooting, and whatever was taken from the safe, if anything.’
Bannerman frowned. ‘Murder?’
‘Ah, well, none of these things, either in themselves, or collectively, is conclusive. But they do raise the question.’
Bannerman tried to sort it all out in his mind through a haze of pain and fatigue. None of it seemed to make sense. ‘What about the child, Tania?’
Du Maurier pulled thoughtfully at the whiskers growing from his nostrils and stared into the darkness beyond the ring of light from the anglepoise. In the silence both men heard the soft slapping of the sleet against the window. At length the policeman turned his gaze on Bannerman and Bannerman wondered at his openness. ‘The child was only brought under control finally by the use of sedatives,’ du Maurier said. ‘We brought in the girl who normally looks after her...’
‘Sally.’
‘Yes, and one of the teachers from the child’s school. We tried to question her, but as you might imagine it was hopeless. She was sufficiently drugged to keep her calm, but she was totally withdrawn. There was no communication. We provided her with a pencil and pad in the hope that she might be able to write something, anything. But she refused even to take the pencil.’ He stopped and fumbled for another cigarette. ‘We left her alone in the room for, I would say, no more than half an hour while we had a brief conference. That was late this afternoon. We discussed the case with our police psychiatrist. He told us there was no hope of ever learning from the girl what had happened. He, in fact, suspected that the trauma of whatever it was she saw will probably have done irreparable damage to her mental state. Set her back years. It was decided that meantime she should be taken to a residential hospital for mentally handicapped children on the outskirts of Brussels, at least until her future is decided. The teacher from her school went back to fetch her and interrupted the child in the middle of this...’ He reached into his pocket and drew out a folded sheet of white paper. He held it out for Bannerman, and the reporter took it and opened it out.
It was a drawing. There was no shading in it. It was a line drawing whose perspective gave it depth. In the foreground the figure of a thin man in a long, heavy coat, was coming through a doorway. There were scribblings on the wall in the foreground that seemed to form a pattern. Perhaps wallpaper. Through the door, and behind the central figure, you could see a large stone or marble fireplace, part of an armchair, a framed picture on the wall with the sketch outline of a head. The drawing was strangely fine and yet distorted as you might see something through a fisheye lens — or a disturbed mind. There was something sinister in the foreground figure. It seemed to be stepping right out of the page. But most striking, was the man’s lack of facial detail. There was only the vague outline of the head and ears. Everything else was so finely observed, detail that you would not have thought a child capable of retaining, never mind reproducing. Bannerman was drawn by it, fascinated, confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
Du Maurier lit a third cigarette from his second one and blew a jet of smoke at the anglepoise. ‘The picture on the wall in the background,’ he said, ‘represents a head-and-shoulders portrait, a Rubens copy that hangs above a marble fireplace in Monsieur Gryffe’s house in the Rue de Pavie. If you stand in the cloakroom in the hall and look through the open door into the back room you can see almost exactly what the child has represented in the drawing, including part of the armchair. The scribblings on the foreground wall seem to represent the patterned paper in the hall. The drawing is uncannily accurate. I have just returned from the house after checking on it.’
Bannerman thought about it for a few moments. ‘And the face of the man?’
Du Maurier bowed his head. ‘Yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘If our meeting had lasted only a few minutes longer the child might have had time to complete the face. But she was interrupted before she had finished and nothing would make her go on. As you can see, almost everything else is so detailed. Buttons, pockets, hands. The girl, Sally, told us that the child often begins her drawings with an outline and then works inwards.’
Bannerman looked at the drawing again. It was hard to believe that it had come from the hand of an eleven-year-old. He looked up to find du Maurier watching him. ‘And who does the figure represent?’ he asked.