Death Has Deep Roots by Michael Gilbert

 

This is my second read by Michael Gilbert and this is even better than the first. The novel centers on the murder trial of Victoria Lamartine, a French woman now living in London.  She was part of the French Resistance and trained to murder German soldiers--and admits to having killed one using a very specific method: holding an extremely sharp and long kitchen knife in the left hand, blade up, then forcefully shoving the blade right under the victim's right rib cage, up through the liver, the lung, and into the heart.  The person loses blood so quickly they don't have time to scream or fight and, since you are only going through soft tissue, a motivated child could accomplish the task.  And, it turns out, Major Eric Thoseby, an English soldier who during the war specialized in transferring funds to strategically useful branches of the French resistance, moving English spies into France to acquire information about the German occupation, and moving important French figures out of France away from the reach of Germans, was killed by someone using precisely this method. Worse, it was Lamartine who was found with Thoseby's dead body just minutes after he was killed. The police do not believe her story, that she is innocent and desperately wanted Thoseby alive, particularly after she admits that she knew Thoseby in France. She is arrested and charged with murder.  Her defense lawyer insists that her best chance is to admit guilt and claim that she was provoked because she was mentally unhinged (the equivalent of manslaughter in the US) so at worst, she would get 20 or 30 years in prison. But at least she wouldn't get death. Given that her past is both heroic and tragic, the lawyer insists the jury would go easy on her. But she claims she is innocent and demands a new attorney. The only one who will take the case is Noel Rumbold who is partnered with his father, and who specializes in contract law. Both father and son agree to take the case after interviewing Ms. Lamartine because they both (to their own amazement) decide they believe her. Unfortunately for them and her, given the facts, they decide that their only chance of winning is not merely to argue that she did not kill Major Thoseby but to prove who did--and if they don't come up with the killer and a really plausible motive, they are sunk.

So if Lamartine did not kill Thoseby, who did?  The key to the whole puzzle (implied by the title of the book) goes back to events that took place during the war, when Lamartine worked at a farm (but really a resistance cell called a 'Maquis') in the rural parts of northern France. She claims that a Captain Wells, a British  soldier and agent in their secret service, arrived at the farm and stayed there for three weeks while he gathered intelligence. During that time, Wells and Lamartine fell in love and she she became pregnant. One day she was sent on an errand to another Maquis and found the whole placed abandoned (extremely suspicious).  She came back to her farm and discovered everyone either dead or gone. The only possible conclusion is that someone betrayed them. She hid in the woods with the hope of making her way to another village where she could contact other resistance cells but within a few hours she was arrested by the Germans and sent to a work camp. She gave birth to a son but conditions were so brutal in the camp that the boy died very young--hence the horrific past that would play on jury sympathies. Who wouldn't get a bit stabby if they had been through all that?

Years go by, the war ends, she applied for residency in England. Mr. Sainte--the head of the neighboring Maquis (the one abandoned just minutes before the Germans arrived)--opened a hotel and hired Ms. Lamartine along with a few others who were part of the resistance. And then Lamartine makes a fateful decision: she decides that she must find Wells. She is certain Wells is alive (she has "a feeling") and, since Thoseby was his only contact in the military, she wants Thoseby to find Wells. She writes Thoseby a letter. Then another. Then another. Thoseby digs around and then tells Lamartine that the only reasonable conclusion is, given the complete absence of any record of Wells after the day the Germans took over the farm and killed or imprisoned everyone, that Wells was killed too: if he had been taken prisoner, Germans would have kept records; if he had escaped and fled to another part of France, he would have communicated with Thoseby when he had the chance; if he had "turned" and worked for Germany, they would have told the English; if he had fled to eastern Europe, they would have heard about him through their contacts there. Yet, Thoseby is not satisfied with the story he tells Lamartine: Thoseby knows that Wells had stitched into his uniform dozens of bars of gold worth a small fortune that he was to turn over to the Maquis. What happened to the gold? 

Because Lamartine switched attorneys the court delays her trial and grants her lawyers eight days to build their case.  So, they divvy up the tasks: Rumbold the Younger sets off to France to see if he can find out anything that was not included in the British files on Wells, Wells's mission and the disastrous events of that day when the Germans "discovered" them. Rumbold the Elder stays in London and does what he can to drag out the early days of the trial to give their team time to find out ANYTHING that will save Lamartine's bacon.  Major McCann, a friend of Rumbold's from the military (a brusk, no-nonsense Scottish person--they're always like that in English novels: when you need someone to threaten thugs, call in a Scottish friend) heads to where Wells spent his early years to find out anything about his schooling, work experiences, former relationships.  If Wells is alive, maybe he contacted someone. Any name, any address will give them something to work with.  

With our players in place (and us only about 30 pages into the book), Gilbert develops the story masterfully: each chapter centers on one member of our team and we discover along with them, Lamartine's backstory, Wells's backstory, and the secrets of that suspiciously lucky Maquis cell. Most of Rumbold the Elder's chapters are transcripts of witness testimony along with the questioning by the prosecution and cross examination by the defense. Central to the prosecution case is that the four other people in the hotel at the time of Thoseby's murder were all in sight of each other at the time of death and so establish for each mutually supporting air tight alibis. But none are what they claim and soon we discover that they are working together and all their testimony is a tissue of whoppers. But why? Well, that's what we have to find out.  And we do in a typically climactic way with gasping jurors, members of the press stampeding out of the court to get their stories to their editors in time for the next edition, and plenty of fainting, weeping and whooping all around.

And what about Wells?  Let's just say that (a) he, not Lamartine, is the real center of the story and (b) her "feelings" aren't as reliable as she claims they are.