The angel downstairs, p.1
The Angel Downstairs, page 1
THE ANGEL DOWNSTAIRS
Kathy Shuker
A Dechansay Bright Mystery
Copyright
Published by Shuker Publishing
Copyright © Kathy Shuker 2024
The moral right of Kathy Shuker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-9168930-4-7
This novel is written in UK English.
Cover design by Lawston Design
Cover artwork: Place du Tertre, Paris, by the author
Other titles by Kathy Shuker:
That Still and Whispering Place
Deep Water, Thin Ice
Silent Faces, Painted Ghosts
The Silence before Thunder
Dechansay Bright Mysteries:
A Crack in the Varnish
By a Hand Unknown
To find out more about Kathy and her work, please visit her website.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter23
About the Author
Prologue
Paris, December 1991
A dimming pink light filtered through the studio windows. It caressed the brushes, paints and mediums cluttering the tables, glinted sleepily off a glass jar and a palette knife and gave a rosy hue to a primed white canvas drying against the wall.
Oblivious to the charm of the crepuscular light, Eric stepped back from the easel where he was working and sighed heavily, eyeing up his progress with a critical eye. It wasn’t going well and he hated these short winter days. Before long he’d have to put the lights on and it wouldn’t be the same. Whatever the manufacturers might claim, no light bulb quite replicated natural light – not to his eyes anyway. Especially when he couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong with the damn painting.
He tossed his brush on the table nearby in irritation, stretched his shoulders back and ran his hands through his thinning hair as he eyed up his canvas resentfully.
As if his employer’s restive movement had given him permission to talk, Mark, the senior of Eric’s two studio assistants, looked across and cleared his throat.
‘Angélique has been a long time,’ he remarked.
Angélique was the junior studio assistant. She had been sent out to get brioches, preferably chocolate. When work wasn’t going well, Eric often had a sudden craving for a chocolate brioche. Then, when he got engrossed again, he promptly forgot about it.
‘Hm?’ he said now, dragging his eyes away from the canvas. Mark was English but spoke French pretty fluently. Even so, his accent sometimes made him hard to understand. Eric, whose English was very good, often thought he’d follow him better if he spoke in his native tongue.
‘Angélique,’ repeated Mark. ‘She’s been gone ages. How long does it take to find a brioche in Paris?’
Eric glanced at the big clock on the wall, pointlessly, because, immersed in his work, he had no idea what time it had been when the girl left.
‘It’s probably the Christmas crowds,’ he offered, and shrugged. ‘It’s getting crazy out there now.’
As if to emphasise the point, the sound of a police siren wailed in at them through the open window as the car tried to negotiate its way through the traffic on the Boulevard de Port Royal a couple of blocks away.
Eric frowned, glared accusingly at the window then turned his attention back to the painting. Neither of them spoke again till the phone rang some twenty minutes later.
‘It’s for you,’ said Mark, handing Eric the handset with a strange look. ‘It’s the police.’
‘The police? For me?’
*
Angélique’s body was stretched out at the bottom of a short run of steps which ran down to a recently abandoned basement restaurant at the end of a nearby street. Apparently a couple of Eric’s business cards had been found on her but nothing that could identify her, so the police had rung Eric in an effort to establish who she was. She had been covered with a blanket but the police officer in charge told his second in command to pull the top down so Eric could see her face.
‘You know this woman?’ demanded the officer.
Eric couldn’t speak, both chilled and magnetised by what he saw. The girl’s face was heavily bruised on one side which only accentuated the extreme pallor of her skin; she looked like a waxwork. Her sweatshirt, marked in places with paint and pastel, was now soaked in blood as was her jacket. He cleared his throat and swallowed.
‘She’s my studio assistant: Angélique Paumier.’ He paused and swallowed again. He felt slightly sick. ‘She’d just popped out for… to do some shopping. I… Sorry, I’m shocked. What happened to her?’
The police officer raised his eyebrows as though the answer was self-evident.
‘She’s been mugged. Maybe she tried to fight back. She’s been stabbed. It was a senseless and savage attack. There’s no purse on her, nothing. Just your cards in her pocket.’
‘My cards,’ muttered Eric, his eyes still glued on the body as the junior officer replaced the blanket. ‘Yes, yes, I see. My cards.’ He pulled his gaze away and looked round, wild-eyed. ‘But all this for a few francs?’ He spread his arms in disbelief. ‘She can’t have had anything much to steal. I can’t understand why…’
‘So she works for you?’ The officer picked up the plastic bag which now held Eric’s business cards and read one of them again through it. ‘Eric Dechansay. You’re an artist, I see. Did she live with you?’
As if every artist slept with the girls he worked with, thought Eric. That’s what everyone thought, wasn’t it? Not that he never had, obviously, but Angélique had been little more than a child. He glanced back down at the shrouded shape. Look at her: such a slight thing. He felt another wave of sickness.
‘Monsieur?’ prompted the officer. ‘She lived with you?’
Eric forced himself to concentrate. ‘Non, non, she had a flat which she shared with another girl.’
‘I see. Do you have the address? Is there a relative we could contact?’ He was direct and business-like. Professional. Eric tried to pull himself together.
‘I’ve got her address back at the studio. I think her parents live somewhere near Fontainebleau. Her flatmate might know.’
‘If you’d like to go back to your studio then…’ The officer glanced at the business card again. ‘…we’ll come and see you shortly, see where she worked, find out more about her.’ And you too, his tone implied.
Eric nodded and moved away, ducking under the yellow and black police tape, escaping. Was he being implicated in some way with this dreadful event? The police always made him nervous.
A crowd had gathered to gawp ghoulishly at the covered body and the comings and goings of the police and the forensic investigators. As Eric picked his way through the press of bodies, several pairs of eyes followed him with undisguised curiosity. It wasn’t until he was free of them and able to turn for home that he saw the man standing on the corner, motionless, looking his way. Looking directly at him.
Their eyes met and Eric felt his heart skip a beat. There was something horribly familiar about the man, especially those black eyes, boring into him. Eric remembered those eyes; it was like seeing a ghost. Bad memories playing tricks on him.
Eric turned his head resolutely away and walked briskly back to the studio. At the time he was too disturbed to see any connection between the man and Angélique’s death.
That would come later.
Chapter 1
Paris, March 23rd 1992
It was just past mid-day when Natalie turned up at her father’s address on a bustling back street in the Latin Quarter. The old double wooden doors, their varnish peeling, were closed, a blank, anonymous entrance squeezed in between a tabac and an electrical goods shop. She ignored the intercom and the security keypad on the wall, turned the handle on the right-hand door and slipped inside. The doors were never locked anyway.
Immediately the noise of the city fell away. The archway supporting the apartments above led her to a rectangular courtyard, paved with small stone slabs. Two four-storey blocks faced each other and looked out on casual seating, stone troughs and an array of ceramic pots where greenery and flowers enjoyed the weak spring sunshine. The wall at the far end of the courtyard was blind and covered with Virginia creeper. The apartments behind her only looked towards the street. The courtyard was private and secluded, a vestige of a forgotten old Paris, hiding behind a façade of modern buildings.
The clunk of the gate brought an elderly woman into the doorway of one of the ground-floor flats to her left. She peered at Natalie, expressionless.
‘Bonjour Madame Février,’ Natalie called out. The old woman nodded and disappeared again.
There were six dwellings here: three small ground floor apartments and three larger ones occupying the upper floors. Eric Dechansay, Natalie’s father, occupied part of the ground floor and all the upper floors of the block to the right. It was both his home and his studio. Once upon a time these had been convent buildings but they had been reused and remodelled many times over. A successful and well-known figurative painter, Eric had bought his block cheaply years ago when it fell into disrepair and he had slowly adapted it again to suit his needs, renting out one small flat at ground level and using the rest of the space himself. It was a good size by Paris standards; he’d done well for himself.
Natalie walked to his door at the far end of the block and let herself in, passing the storerooms and utility area on the ground floor and climbing the stairs to the studio. She paused by the door at the top and put a hand to her forehead. She felt fragile and her head ached; she wished she’d moved more slowly.
She pushed the door open and went in.
‘Salut,’ said a bright voice to her left. It was Florence, the young studio assistant who had replaced poor Angélique. Beyond her, Mark, the more senior one, fixed Natalie with a warning gaze.
Natalie glanced across to where her father worked on the other side of the studio. Normally a genial man, he did not like his work being interrupted. And maybe it wasn’t going well today.
The studio took up the entirety of the first floor. Opened up to make a large, bright space, it had four large windows looking out onto the courtyard below and, in the middle, a low dais for a model. A number of work tables were dotted around the room. Against one wall in the corner a kitchenette had been installed next to a small cloakroom.
On the dais stood Jeanne, Eric’s occasional model and current lover. Today she was dressed, wearing a silk taffeta, high-necked dress in a rich midnight blue, a colour which contrasted strikingly with her amber hair, neatly coiled high on her head. Her body faced a half-turn away, but she was looking over her shoulder towards the artist, chin raised, an enigmatic expression on her face, at once disdainful and yet vulnerable. In her hand she held a single white rose pressed ardently against her chest. She was a good model; her father had often said so. And he was staring at her intently now, as if trying to understand exactly what she was made of.
Then, as Natalie looked at her, Jeanne winked and Eric immediately turned. He looked at Natalie a long moment before appearing to register who she was.
‘Natalie. I didn’t hear you arrive.’
‘Is this a bad time?’ She walked over to join him and they embraced. ‘Am I disturbing you Papa?’
‘Yes, yes, you are.’ He frowned, looking back at Jeanne and then at his canvas. He squeezed Natalie’s shoulder. ‘Leave me alone for a bit, will you, Nat? Go upstairs and I’ll join you later.’
‘Where did you find the rose – in March?’
‘This is Paris. If you know the right people to ask…’ He lightly shrugged one shoulder then waved her away dismissively. ‘Now go.’
Natalie wandered away but didn’t go upstairs. She had spent the first few years of her life living here until her parents divorced and she still found a certain magic in fingering the art materials and props arrayed everywhere around Eric’s studio: palettes and brushes, tubes and bottles, charcoal and pastels and oily rags. And props, loads of props. And then there was that smell: oil paint and white spirit. Unmistakeable. Part of her father.
She watched Mark starting the underpainting on a primed canvas on which Eric had already marked out his composition. Mark had been a studio assistant for two years already and was slowly progressing to more responsible tasks; he was even allowed to paint backgrounds sometimes – with Eric’s supervision of course. Her father wasn’t good at delegating.
Natalie walked to the window and looked down into the courtyard. Her father’s eccentric neighbour Violette Février, wrapped in a huge cardigan, was now sitting having her lunch at the little table outside her flat. The sound of piano music drifted up from the flat Eric rented out below.
‘You’ve been through my things again, haven’t you?’
Natalie turned to see Mark standing by a chest of drawers, one angry finger pointed at Florence.
‘No, of course not. What do you keep in there that’s so important anyway?’
‘I think you already know. And they’re my things, my materials and my art work. My personal stuff too. You’ve got your own cupboard. Stay out of mine.’
‘I haven’t touched it.’
‘There’s a tube of cobalt blue missing.’
‘So? It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘For God’s sake,’ shouted Eric. ‘Will the two of you stop it? How can I concentrate with you bickering like six-year-olds?’
‘Are you sure about the cobalt?’ remarked Jeanne mildly. ‘Maybe you used it Mark, and forgot. Is there anything else missing?’
‘Stop moving, Jeanne,’ Eric protested. ‘You keep fidgeting.’
Jeanne promptly left her pose and walked across to him. Beneath the long, elegant dress she was barefoot on the boarded floor. She studied the painting a moment then sniffed, leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
‘I’m fidgeting because I’m getting tired and you’re taking forever. Anyway, I need a pee and a coffee.’
Eric threw his brush down in a fit of temperament. ‘Fine, fine. If no-one can concentrate, let’s take a break.’ He looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘In fact, since Nat’s here, let’s make it a lunch break.’
Jeanne walked away, already undoing the fastenings of her dress. She stepped behind a folding wooden screen where her own clothes had been tossed in a pile.
Natalie came back to her father’s side.
‘Can we go out for lunch? I need to talk.’
‘Talk?’ Eric frowned. ‘We can have lunch upstairs and talk there. I’m working, Nat.’
The first floor was given over to sleeping accommodation and a bathroom but the top floor housed a kitchen and an open-plan eating and living space with a small balcony. There was a tiny cloakroom up there too. Eric insisted that they eat before any talking. He liked his food and objected to being distracted from it. They sat either side of a big oak table eating dried ham with crusty bread and salad.
When they’d finished, Natalie cleared the table while he made coffee.
‘Maman is driving me mad,’ she said, leaning against the kitchen unit and facing him.
‘Why, what’s she doing?’
‘What she’s always doing: criticising, interfering, giving advice I don’t want. I mean, I’m twenty-four now. I think it’s time I had my own place. Don’t you think so?’
‘I thought you were planning to rent somewhere with Philippe?’
‘Not any more. I finished with him. It’s over.’
Eric watched her face. ‘Why?’
‘We had a row. I mean a serious row.’
‘About what?’
‘Everything. It kind of snowballed.’ She shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about it. ‘Anyway the thing is, Papa, apartments are so expensive to rent. Nice ones anyway. And the restaurant doesn’t pay a lot. I thought if you could see your way to giving me a helping hand I’d manage to find something. Just to start me off, I mean.’
He blew out impatiently between pursed lips. ‘Ciel, Natalie. I’ve given you so much money over the years and it just disappears: clothes, holidays, nights out and I don’t know what. You never save. How do you manage to spend it all? You’ve got to learn to budget. And I’ve said before: you could get a better paid job than a restaurant. What about trying the big hotels?’ He poured the coffee into two small cups and handed her one. ‘I’m not made of money. I have expenses too you know.’
‘I know,’ she said peevishly, ‘like white roses for your models.’
‘Don’t be childish. That’s my work. The work that you are so keen to profit from.’
Chastened, Natalie fell silent. Eric led the way through to the salon and sat on one of the two sofas which faced each other across a low cherrywood table.
Natalie sat on the other, pouting. ‘But I like my job. It’s a smart restaurant with a cocktail bar and music. You know that. It’s special. A hotel wouldn’t be much fun.’ She brightened. ‘Perhaps I could come and stay here with you for a while instead?’
