Another Sun (2 page)

“You’re sure it’s the old convict?”

“Good evidence, monsieur le procureur. I think we can be sure.”

“Hearsay is not evidence.” The procureur’s smile was bland.

“You want me to bring him in?”

The procureur nodded; his thoughts were elsewhere. “I can entrust the enquiry to
Juge
Laveaud.” The floodlights caught his smile and revealed large, stained teeth. “Let’s see what she can make of it.”

“She’s an intelligent woman.”

“No doubt. Intelligent and ambitious.”

“My God, it hurts.”

Trousseau smiled from behind his small desk. His long fingers lay on the keyboard of the old typewriter. “Somebody’s thrown a curse on you,
madame le juge
.”

The skin on the back of Anne Marie’s left hand and fingers was swollen with white weals. She could feel the heat of friction as she rubbed. “Who hates me, Monsieur Trousseau? I haven’t been here long enough.”

“You’re white—that’s enough to get yourself hated.”

There was a sink in the corner of the office. She got up and turned on the tap, then held her hand beneath the cold water. She rubbed again. “Must be something I’ve eaten. I never had an allergy before coming to this country.”

The water had a numbing effect. She let it run for over a minute. Trousseau started to type.

Anne Marie looked out of the window. She liked her office—little more than a cupboard, just big enough for her desk and the
greffier
’s, a couple of filing cabinets, a floor of polished mahogany and a small sink. It was at the top of the Palais de Justice and the gentle winds came through the open shutters and pushed against the billowing lace curtains. Lace from Chantilly that she had bought in Paris before sailing out to the Caribbean. As the
water continued to run, the pain ebbed and became a dull sense of heat. Anne Marie leaned against the sink and looked out over the vivid red of the corrugated roofs of the nearby bank and the old Chamber of Commerce. Ship masts, bare without their sails, rocked with the movement of the green sea within the small port.

Pointe-à-Pitre.

Along the quayside, only a few meters from the schooners and the rust-stained ferry for Marie-Galante, the stalls bustled with their early morning commerce: jars of hair pomade from Liverpool, ground corn from Suriname, anthuriums from Martinique, good-luck aerosols from Puerto Rico. Sitting on cardboard boxes, the fat smuggler women from Dominica had laid out contraband brassieres and minuscule knickers for children. And in the distance, standing out in clear relief against the sky, the Souffrière. The mountain range filled the horizon and the volcano, with all the intricate detail of its eroded flanks, its gullies and its tropical vegetation, rose up above everything else until its summit was lost in a dark crown of clouds.

“Get somebody to cast a spell for you,” Trousseau said, pointing at her hand. “A spell against the curse.”

“These curtains are dirty. They need changing.”

“I know an old man—a
gadézaffé
—part Indian, part Carib—who lives down at Trois-Rivières. He knows all the remedies. He’ll cure you.”

Anne Marie turned off the tap.

“He also does sacrifices.”

With a handkerchief, she made a tight bandage around her left hand. Then she returned to her desk.

“A letter for you, madame le juge.”

She took the letter—it was from Papa—and placed it in her handbag. “What’s on the agenda for today, Monsieur Trousseau?”

“The old people know about these things. They had their own medicine—the Caribs and the Arawaks—long before Christopher Columbus set foot on this island.” He added, disparagingly, “Christopher Columbus and the white men.”

Anne Marie looked at the chipped varnish on her damp fingers. “The agenda for today, Monsieur Trousseau?”

“We’re booked for the seven thirty flight for the Saintes tomorrow.”

“The Saintes?”

“The girl who smothered her baby.”

“And today, Monsieur Trousseau?”

He pulled the day-to-day calendar from behind the typewriter.

“Lafitte will be here soon—in about ten minutes.”

“Which dossier, Monsieur Trousseau?”

“The Calais killing.” He pointed to a folder on her desk. “It’s all there—Lafitte brought it round last night.”

Anne Marie picked up the beige folder.

The cover, made of cardboard and cloth, with a loose buckle, smelled of glue.
Calais, Septembre, 1980
, had been typed on the label. Above it in neat printing,
Ministère de la Justice, Département de la Guadeloupe
.

“The old man says he’s innocent,” she said.

“What proof is there against him?”

“The accusations of a few villagers. He’d been making threats against Raymond Calais. The gendarmerie found the cartridge on the scene of the crime—twelve bore. Then yesterday they found the gun.”

“Where?”

“Buried, madame le juge. A hunting gun. A pre-war model, probably an Idéale. Buried about two hundred meters from where the old man sleeps. He denies ever having hidden his gun, but that’s where the gendarmes found it—in a field where he keeps his goats. It had been wiped clean of all prints and wrapped in an oily cloth. Then put in a plastic bag.” Trousseau paused. “His name is engraved on the butt.”

“His name?”

“Hégésippe Bray.” Trousseau frowned, his dark eyes watching Anne Marie’s fingers as she started to scratch again at her left hand. “He harbored a grudge against Calais. Hégésippe Bray
claims a lot of Sainte Marthe, the Calais estate, belongs to him by right. As it is, he’s been living in a hut on the edge of the estate.”

“When did he get back?”

“Get back, madame le juge?”

“From French Guyana. When did Bray get back to Guadeloupe?”

“Last Christmas. Calais—with his racing horses as well as a couple of villas—generously agreed to let Bray have the hut. No water, no electricity—just a dilapidated hut on the edge of the estate.”

“The Sainte Marthe plantation?”

Trousseau nodded, “Forty years in equatorial America can’t have done Hégésippe Bray’s brain much good. That and rum.” He tapped his temple. “When Bray came back, he hung around the shacks where they sell cheap liquor, and once he’d had a few glasses of rum, he’d start to make threats.”

“Against Calais?”

“Threatened to kill him.”

“Why?”

Trousseau nodded toward the dossier. “Calais’ father had sold at least ten hectares to Bray—and Hégésippe Bray maintains that in his absence, Calais took everything for himself.”

Anne Marie squeezed her hand. “Paraffin tests?”

“Positive.” A shrug. “Bray admits to having used his gun that morning.”

“Why?”

“To kill a goat with scab. He owns several goats—and a garden, where he grows tomatoes. And yams and string beans.”

“A revenge killing?”

Trousseau shrugged again. “You’ll find everything in the dossier. Lafitte’s been very thorough, as usual.”

Trousseau returned to his typing and Anne Marie opened the file. She glanced through several pages. Twice she nodded. Looking up, she was surprised to see the door open.

“Lafitte’s outside, madame le juge.”

She took a fifty-franc note from her handbag, “I’d like to have a
better look at the dossier before seeing Lafitte. Perhaps you could get some sandwiches—and something to drink.”

Trousseau stood up.

“And see if you can get something from the chemists—something to stop this itching.”

“Why was he sent to French Guyana?”

“He murdered his wife.”

“Why?”

“He thought she was a
soucougnan
.”

“A what?”

“A voodoo witch.”

“So he killed her?”

Lafitte nodded. He was a few years older than her. His skin had taken a slightly yellow tint, with the wrinkles of years spent in the tropics. Yet he remained boyish in appearance. The sandy hair was short and brushed back. He spoke with the hint of a northern accent—from Roubaix or Lille. He had entered the police after a brief career as a professional cyclist. In his spare time, he captained a cycling team.

“How old is Bray now?” she asked.

“Nearly eighty-three.” He pointed to the desk. “Madame le juge, it’s all there in the dossier.”

“I’d rather you tell me,” Anne Marie said honestly; it was always a good policy to flatter a man’s professional pride.

“There hasn’t been time to check through all the archives. The trial was in Basse-Terre in 1940, and most of the records were
destroyed in the fire of ’55. Yesterday I saw his half sister—she wasn’t too helpful.”

“Where did Bray grow up?”

“He was illegitimate.” Lafitte leaned forward and opened the file. “Never knew his father. His mother worked on the Calais estate—first in the fields and then later in the main house. She was a Carib and that is where he got his looks from.”

“What looks?”

“The thin nose and those high cheekbones—they’re Carib rather than African features.”

“Who is this sister you mention, Monsieur Lafitte?”

“Half sister,” he corrected. “A retired school teacher. Twelve years younger than him. She says it was Bray who helped toward her education. She passed her
certificat d’études
, and she got to be headmistress in a school at Pointe-Noire.”

Anne Marie nodded and looked at her hand.

“Now lives in Morne-à-l’Eau with her son. They were responsible for getting the old man back from South America.”

“How did they know he was still alive?”

“When he was deported, she sent letters but never got a reply. Then later she made enquiries and wrote to the Ministry of Justice in Paris. This was after the war, about the time they were shipping home the last of the convicts, and she wanted to know for certain Hégésippe Bray was dead.”

“Well?”

“Paris replied that he’d died of malaria in 1946.”

The lace curtain danced with the wind; somewhere along the docks a car hooted angrily.

Lafitte continued, “Salvation Army found him. They thought he had syphilis—it was endemic among the convicts. They picked him up, lying on the banks of one of the canals in Cayenne. Local people’d seen him around for some time, scavenging in the dustbins, hanging around the restaurants and the bars near the Place Grenoble. Probably came in from the country—there
are still ex-convicts living among the Indians in the rain forest. Bray would beg for a few coins from the children on their way to school. A few francs to buy tafia.”

Anne Marie raised an eyebrow.

“Cheap rum—made from molasses. Should have killed him years ago. But once the Salvation Army got him to the hospital where they could wash and clean him up and give him regular meals—food and not just alcohol—his memory came back. The Salvation Army’s used to these cases. Arabs, West Indians as well as the Europeans—dross from all over the French Empire, ex-convicts who’d landed up Guyana. Deportation effectively destroyed most of them. Even once they’d done their time, they had to stay on and do an equal number of years in French Guyana. The hope was they’d help the economy.”

“When were the penal settlements abolished?”

“At the end of the war but before French Guyana became an overseas
département
in 1946. There was nothing for the ex-convicts to do. They weren’t allowed to own land or set up shop or have a business. Most drifted into petty crime. Either that or working as a domestic in the house of one of the prison officers. And working at virtually slave labor rates.”

“They weren’t sent back to France?”

Lafitte looked at the ceiling. “The bill to do away with deportation was voted before the war—because there was growing pressure in France. In the press.”

“Albert Londres?”

“Madame, why do you want me to tell you when you know about these things?”

Of course she knew about these things. At magistrate school she had specialized in punishment and recidivism. She gave him a friendly smile. “Continue, please, Monsieur Lafitte.”

“Newspaper articles shocked the public—at a time between the wars when there was a growth of interest in the colonies. The penal settlements in French Guyana would probably have been done away with by the time Hégésippe Bray was sent there if it
hadn’t been for the war. French Guyana—like Martinique and Guadeloupe—came under the control of the Vichy government. So it was there—Devil’s Island and the Moroni—the collaborationists sent all their political undesirables—Gaullists and Communists. Useful because it was out of the way.”

“Bray wasn’t a political prisoner.”

“A murderer, but the court decided there were extenuating circumstances. So he was condemned to seven years in French Guyana.
La guillotine sèche
. Dry guillotine. No dripping knife edge and a lot slower—but just as effective.”

“Why wasn’t Bray sent back here? After the abolition of the
bagne
?”

“Like everyone else he was offered a free passage back to France. He’d been to France during the Great War and had almost died of flu there. He didn’t want to go back—he wanted to return to Guadeloupe. For that, he says, there was no arrangement. He had no money.”

“Strange.”

“And perhaps he was ashamed.”

“He could have contacted his sister.”

“Half sister.” Lafitte shrugged. “Possibly he didn’t want to.”

“He owned land in Guadeloupe.”

The door opened and Trousseau entered carrying a couple of sandwiches wrapped in brown paper. Without a word, he set the sandwiches and two bottles of Pepsi Cola on Anne Marie’s desk.

“And your ointment, madame le juge.” A green box with a red cross that Trousseau placed before her.

Anne Marie turned back to face Lafitte. “What do you know about Hégésippe Bray’s past?”

“We’ve telexed to Paris,” Lafitte said.

“I’m quite sure you’re following up all the lines of investigation with your habitual thoroughness,” Anne Marie said. “Please tell what you know about Bray’s past. What did the half sister tell you?”

Lafitte stared at the dossier that he had opened on his knees.
“His mother died when he was in France. During the first war, when he was a soldier in the infantry. He was sent to the front where he ended up building the road that carried arms and men to Verdun. Verdun was under siege from the Germans.”