I glanced again at the two young officers. They didn’t look disgruntled, but appearances meant nothing. One of them was walking back towards the second patrol car. ‘But surely,’ I said, frowning, ‘if they called the poor man down from Paris, they’d be pleased to have him here.’
‘Well, that’s just it, darling. They didn’t call him down. He was already here, at his country house … where did he say it was, Jim, do you remember? Oh well, anyway, it’s near Chinon. And he heard about Paul’s accident, and thought he’d see if he could be of any help. It’s because of him,’ she told me, ‘that they started the investigation. Or at least, that’s what I hear.’
I didn’t think to question where she’d heard it. Women like Garland Whitaker always seemed able to tap into the local grapevine with shocking efficiency, unhindered by barriers of language and culture. She’d been kept well occupied, this morning. ‘This Prieur man,’ she went on, having fortified herself with a sip of her unsatisfactory Manhattan, ‘was the fellow who came to drag away poor Thierry, for questioning.’
Her husband smiled. ‘Come on now, honey, I’d hardly call that dragging. The man was pretty polite about it, from what I could see.’
‘Well,’ Garland sniffed, ‘Thierry didn’t want to go, you could tell. And anyhow, my point was that since Mr Prieur was the one who came for Thierry, I’d have thought that he’d be busy right now asking Thierry questions, but it looks as though he’s found some other person now … look, just who is that, I wonder?’
She meant the middle-aged man climbing from the rear of the second patrol car, straightening his back with a motion that spoke of weariness and apprehension. I could have told her, from that distance, who the man was. I could have said: ‘That’s Victor Belliveau. He’s a poet, quite a famous poet, and he lives just up the river.’ It might have been my own distaste for gossip that kept me silent, or the fact that it satisfied me knowing and not telling her, denying her that bit of information. Whatever the reason, I said nothing.
‘He must be somebody.’ Garland lifted her chin like a hound sniffing the quarry’s elusive scent. ‘A suspect, maybe, do you think? Really, it’s just so exciting, to be in the middle of a murder case.’
‘If it was murder.’ Her husband took the rational point of view. ‘In which case, we’re probably all under suspicion. Even you.’
She looked vaguely surprised at the thought. ‘Me? Oh, I don’t think so, darling.’ The four men had moved off now, out of sight, along the rue Voltaire. Deprived of her entertainment, Garland sighed and turned round again in her chair, facing me across the table. She was drawing breath to speak when voices raised in argument came filtering down through the feathery branches of the acacias, from an open hotel window. The voices spoke neither English nor French, and so I didn’t understand a word of what they said, but the passionate delivery promised some fresh scandal, and Garland tipped her head appreciatively. ‘That sounds like the young couple that just arrived. The ones that Gabrielle put into the boys’ room – and Thierry isn’t going to like that, I can tell you, there’ll be feathers flying when he finds out what she’s done. But like I said to Jim, it’s just a room, and you can’t keep shrines when you’re supposed to be making a profit.’ She paused, and listened to a few more lines of unintelligible arguing, and clucked her tongue. ‘Such a shame, they were a cute couple. Swedes, I think she said. On honeymoon. I wonder what she’s mad about.’
I rather suspected she was giving the poor chap the devil on my account, demanding to know why some other woman had come knocking at the door, but I kept my suspicions to myself. Fortunately, Garland Whitaker wasn’t seeking my opinion.
‘Maybe it’s the room that’s unlucky,’ she mused. ‘Maybe Thierry was right after all, about that French girl killing herself in that room at the end of the war. You know, we only have Monsieur Chamond’s word for it that there isn’t a ghost. I think …’ A glimpse of movement through the windows of the hotel bar interrupted her train of thought. I twisted round and saw, as Garland did, the tall proud figure of the Swedish woman, seating herself at the deserted bar with an indignant flip of her long pale hair. Garland’s eyes grew predatory. ‘Will you excuse me for a minute? I think I need to freshen up my drink.’
She bustled off, clutching her empty glass with purpose. Across the table, Jim Whitaker’s gaze held kind apology. ‘She can’t help it,’ he said. ‘It fascinates her, other people’s lives.’
I summoned up a smile for him. They were very different, Jim and Garland. I’d rarely met a couple so ill-matched. The stray thought made me look again towards the open window of the room beside my own, where the honeymooning husband was presumably now sitting by himself.
‘She’s wrong about the room, you know,’ I said, remembering what François had told me earlier about his luckless sister. ‘Isabelle didn’t kill herself there. In fact, I don’t believe she killed herself at all.’
‘I know.’ He lifted his drink, slowly. ‘She died of cancer in Savannah, Georgia, twenty years ago.’ Above the glass, his eyes swung calmly round to lock with mine. ‘She was my mother.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
See that there be no traitors in your camp:
‘It made a nice enough story,’ said Jim Whitaker, ‘in the bar, the other night. And it was accurate, for the most part – all except the ending. Hans may have died at the end of the war, but Isabelle …’ He shook his head. ‘She wanted to, she thought about it, but she couldn’t bring herself to offend God any more than she had already. So she did the next best thing. She married my father.’