Chapter Six
The mistral only lasted for twenty-four hours, mercifully; the wind had dropped by the time Mathilde woke the next morning after a restless night, plagued by dreams of some unspecified horror waiting for her in the railway cottage.
Her indignation of the previous day had ebbed away, leaving in its place a nagging doubt that she’d encouraged Pierre down a dangerous path and alerted Rambert’s suspicions.
She dressed quickly and ran into the kitchen, wanting to find her cousin, but Renée told her he’d already left; he hadn’t said where he was going.
The fluttering anxiety in Mathilde’s stomach intensified, but she had to hurry or she’d have been late for work.
Kissing Louis on the head, she grabbed a slice of bread from the table and ran downstairs to set off for the vineyard.
Joining the main road, she was alarmed to pass a police car turning into her street.
Don’t worry, they’re not coming for you, she told herself, although she lowered her head to avoid catching anyone’s eye.
Pulling her bicycle to the side of the road, she looked back to see the car drive on to the garage forecourt and two gendarmes climb out.
And now her heart was pounding in earnest. Should she go back to support Renée?
Yet Pierre wasn’t at home and his wife was completely innocent, whereas Mathilde had secrets to hide.
She told herself the police were probably just calling about tyre rationing or the latest parking regulations from Vichy.
Soon after she arrived at the vineyard, out of breath, the telephone rang on her desk. It was the stationmaster, wanting to talk to Monsieur Piquemal. After a short conversation, Piquemal replaced the receiver, raising his eyebrows at Mathilde.
‘Apparently our wine isn’t being loaded on to the train; he’s received orders to hold it back and wants to know how long for. I told him the shipment has nothing to do with me anymore. Herr Weber’s the man to call, wherever he is.’
‘I wonder what the problem could be,’ she said, her voice strained.
Piquemal turned to Rambert, who’d come to eavesdrop on the conversation. ‘Do you know anything about this, Emile?’
‘Haven’t a clue,’ he replied jauntily, ‘and don’t have the time to waste wondering. I’ll be out in the top field if you need me. We’ve a day’s work to catch up on.’
He was whistling as he left, slapping the secateurs against his thigh, and turned back in the doorway to glance at Mathilde with an expression that made her blood run cold. Her back prickled with a cold sweat and a dozen different scenarios ran through her head.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Monsieur Piquemal asked. ‘You’ve turned rather pale.’
‘I didn’t sleep well last night,’ Mathilde replied. ‘I might just step outside for a breath of air, if you don’t mind.’
Think, she told herself, driving her fingernails into her palms as she stood in the bright, clear air.
Was she imagining things? But there was danger afoot, she knew it, and she had to warn Pierre – unless she was the one they were looking for.
Just as that thought occurred to her, another police car (or maybe it was the same one) turned into the drive leading down to the vineyard, and she saw Emile Rambert wave, and hurry across the field to meet it.
The trap was closing. Her bicycle was propped nearby but she had no chance of getting away on that.
In an instant, she’d made up her mind, dashed into the office and snatched up the key to the little gazogène motorcycle Piquemal kept for puttering around the vineyard.
‘I’ll be back in a second,’ she called and he nodded, already absorbed in sharpening a pair of shears.
She kicked the motorcycle into life, rode it around the side of the house and through the orchard and then she was off along the side of the field, keeping close to the hedgerow with her hair flying back in the breeze and the blood thrumming in her ears.
She would cut across country before rejoining the road that led – where else?
– to the signalman’s cottage. The motorcycle coughed and bucketed as she urged it along, crouched low over the handlebars, before it finally ground to a halt a couple of kilometres away from the abandoned house.
She wheeled the machine into a thicket of trees beside a roadside shrine to the Virgin Mary, concealed it as best she could for the time being and continued on foot, running until she thought her chest would burst and she had to slow to a lurching, wheezing trot.
The cottage was empty, although the tarpaulin had clearly been disturbed since her previous visit and a cloth bag lay on the table that she could swear hadn’t been there before.
Mathilde checked her watch. The Paris train was due to pass by in less than an hour, no doubt loaded with police rather than wine; all she could do was follow the route Pierre and his comrade had taken the other day and hope to find him in time.
Abandoning any attempt at subterfuge, she crashed through the overgrown bracken and brambles.
The hedges rose high on either side until, as she turned a corner, the path broadened out, the undergrowth to her right fell away and she found herself looking down on a stretch of the railway line.
From this vantage point, she could see the track below curving through a short tunnel cut into the hillside, and a man crouching at the mouth of this tunnel, intent on his work.
He would have had no idea that further up the line, two policemen were walking swiftly towards him from the other direction, and neither would they have seen him – not yet.
‘Pierre, run!’ Mathilde yelled, but the breeze snatched her words away.
A narrower path, scarcely more than a hoofprint wide, zigzagged down the hillside.
She took it headlong, crashing from bush to bush, until she half fell into the opening at the bottom of the cutting, and now the track was above her so she was looking up at Pierre, maybe fifty metres away, his curved back silhouetted against the light.
‘Pierre!’ she shouted again. And this time he heard her and jumped to his feet, and she spotted the gun he’d drawn. Their eyes met for a moment before he became aware of the men running towards him and whirled around.
Mathilde was already scrambling up the slope, slipping and sliding on scree, as the first shot rang out.
She saw Pierre fall, and seconds later heard another volley of shots as she reached the top of the bank and raced towards his body.
He lay on his back, eyes wide open but seeing nothing.
Flinging herself to the ground, she gathered him into her arms and rocked him to and fro like a mother comforting her baby, his warm cheek pressed against hers.
‘You killed him!’ she screamed at the first gendarme to reach her. ‘Murderer!’
And then her arms were seized, she was hauled to her feet, and it was all over.
Pierre was dead, and she was responsible; that thought ran through Mathilde’s head on an endless loop.
Why hadn’t she kept her stupid mouth shut?
She had alerted Emile Rambert’s suspicions when he was looking for a way to take revenge on both her and Pierre, and then she had led Pierre straight into the trap Rambert had laid.
Yet who could have imagined the consequences would be so disastrous?
She couldn’t tell which of the gendarmes had fired the fatal shot but they were both guilty in her eyes and she regarded them with loathing.
She was bundled into a car and driven back to the police station in town, where her details were taken before she was locked in a cell to await further questioning.
The policeman who escorted her there looked vaguely familiar, and she suddenly realised where she’d seen him before: he’d recently brought a motorcycle to the garage for new tyres.
He was a burly, broad-shouldered man with blond hair cut so short you could see his pink scalp through it, and he already had the beginnings of a pot belly, though he couldn’t have been more than thirty.
Pierre had clapped him on the back and called him by name. No wonder he wouldn’t meet her eye now.
‘It’s André, isn’t it?’ she said, before he could leave. ‘Why did Pierre have to be killed? He isn’t the enemy.’
The man shrugged. ‘Sabotage, wasn’t it? He was armed – he must have been aware of the risk.’
Mathilde glared at him. ‘To kill him in cold blood, though. You were friends, weren’t you?’
‘Orders are orders,’ he replied brusquely.
‘And what about his family? You know he has a child, and another on the way.’
‘Then he should have thought about them before he took a gun and set those charges.’ Yet André looked uncomfortable.
‘His wife had nothing to do with this,’ Mathilde said. ‘She had no idea what Pierre was up to, and that’s the God’s honest truth.’
‘Doesn’t make any difference. They’ll bring her in anyway. Renée will have turned a blind eye to what was going on so they’ll jail her for that.’
‘You know her too?’ Mathilde asked.
‘We were at school together, the three of us,’ he replied. ‘But as you can see, we’ve taken different paths.’
Mathilde stared at the policeman. Beneath the bluster, she could sense his unease. ‘Isn’t there something you can do?’ she asked. ‘Surely you could speak up for Renée? Who’s going to look after Louis if his mother is arrested?’
‘That’s not my problem. Now keep quiet and behave yourself or it’ll be the worse for you.’ André turned to leave.
‘Wait.’ Mathilde grabbed him by the arm. ‘Pierre was a good person and so is Renée; you must realise that. I bet you were friends when you were kids. Can’t you at least let me see her? A favour, for old times’ sake. What harm could it do? I just want to tell her I was with him when he died.’
‘More than my job’s worth.’ André shook off her grip.
‘Please,’ she begged, as he slammed the cell door shut. ‘Just for a few minutes?’ But there was no reply.