Page 17 of Marble Hall Murders

Carrying the picture under one arm, Robert left the office and went into the gallery. Madame Dubois was on her own.

‘I’m driving to Antibes,’ he told her. He spoke in English. Madame Dubois was fluent in three languages and would have been offended if he had used his faltering French. ‘I’ll be back at half past twelve. I’m meeting my father for lunch.’

Madame Dubois glanced at her watch. ‘The traffic may be difficult,’ she sniffed. ‘All this construction! This new autoroute they are going to build …’

‘It’ll make life easier in the long run,’ Robert said.

‘It will destroy the region. You mark my words, Monsieur Robert. Hotels, apartments, new houses, motorways … One day there will be nothing left.’

Carrying the painting, Robert exited the gallery by the front door and crossed the square to where he had left his car. He did not notice the silver Peugeot 203 parked nearby, nor the driver, watching him intently through the front window. The man was alone in his car and as Robert emerged, he lifted a German-made Voigtländer 35 mm camera and adjusted the lens. The sun had clouded over and he wanted to be sure that the images would be as clearly defined as possible. He took several shots.

Satisfied, he placed the camera on the passenger seat beside him and waited until Robert had driven off.

Then he followed him.

*

The Pharmacie Lafayette was named after the street in which it was located, about a twenty-minute walk from the Place Masséna. It was a small, old-fashioned establishment in a narrow street hemmed in by flats that rose five storeys on each side, with a run-down café at one end and a family-run hotel at the other. The only other shop anywhere close was a grocery full of bottles and cartons that looked years out of date. The pharmacist who ran the shop and spent sevenhours a day behind the mahogany counter was a man called Hector Brunelle. He had inherited the business from his father. His wife nagged him. His children ignored him. This was all he had.

Approximately two hours after Robert Waysmith had left the art gallery, the door opened, jangling a bell on a metal spring, and an elderly man walked in. It would have been difficult to tell his age from his appearance. He was wearing sunglasses and a panama hat and moved slowly, supporting himself on a stick. There were tufts of white hair showing under the hat, and when he spoke, his voice gave away his advancing years. He was also a foreigner. His French was good but heavily accented. He was surely American. The man was wearing a crumpled pale blue suit that was a little too big for him. There was something else that Brunelle noticed: a smell, perhaps of surgical spirit.

‘Bonjour, monsieur.’ Brunelle spoke no language other than his own. Both his eyes had a cloudy, white sheen to them, evidence of cataracts. He gazed uncertainly at his customer. ‘Comment puis-je vous aider?’

‘I wish to buy two grams of aconitine,’ the man said. He used the French word,aconit. The pharmacist recognised it at once. If used very carefully, aconitine could act as a painkiller – for the relief of headaches or toothache, for example. Too large a dose, however, would simply kill.

‘I’m afraid I cannot help you, monsieur.’

‘You do not have any?’

‘I do. But you will require a prescription from a doctor. May I ask what it is for?’

The bell clanged a second time and another customercame in, a young woman wearing a light raincoat and clasping a handbag. She was evidently in a hurry and looked annoyed to find that she would have to wait.

‘I am a doctor,’ the man said and Brunelle nodded. That might explain the smell of surgical spirit. ‘I have a patient in Nice who is suffering from gout.’ As he spoke, he had taken out a document with his name, address and other details, dated and marked with official-looking red and blue stamps.

‘What age is your patient?’

‘He is in his fifties. An Englishman. I have prescribed the same medicine in the past.’ He was beginning to sound annoyed.

The woman, too, had been listening to all this with growing impatience and edged forward. ‘Pardon,’ she said. She addressed the customer in front of her. ‘Je suis un peu pressée.As-tu l’heure?’ Excuse me. I’m in a hurry. Do you have the time? She was obviously French.

The pharmacist was wearing a watch, but his eyes weren’t up to the task of reading it. The man who had introduced himself as a doctor answered for him. ‘Il est midi quinze, madame.’ Twelve fifteen.

With an apologetic glance, she addressed the pharmacist. ‘Je cherche le shampooing Dulsol.’

‘Je ne l’ai pas, madame …’

He didn’t have the brand she was looking for. The woman turned and left. Throughout all this, the man in the sunglasses had done his best to keep his face out of sight.

‘Two grams,monsieur le docteur?’ he said. ‘I can do this for you. But you will have to sign the register.’

‘Of course.’

The pharmacist put on a pair of glasses with thick lenses and perched them carefully on his nose. Then he unlocked a display cabinet and took out a small, sealed flask containing a white powder. He unscrewed the lid and carried it over to a set of scales. Meanwhile, the man who claimed to be a doctor laid a ten-franc note on the counter and watched, expressionless, as the poison was weighed out.

*

Thirty minutes later, Elmer Waysmith and his son were having lunch at a restaurant close to the gallery. Le Poisson d’Or was a typical bistro, cosy and unpretentious. It specialised in seafood but was set back from the Promenade des Anglais, with no view of the sea. This was one of the reasons Elmer liked it. As he often said, move it twenty steps further south and the prices would double and it would also be a lot more crowded. He liked the simplicity of the decor and the fact that the manager and waiters knew him well. They didn’t fuss around. For Elmer, lunch was just another part of the business day, even when he was eating with his son, and he wanted to get on with it.

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