‘Well, no.’ His tone implied it was an odd suggestion. ‘It’s not as if I was expected, after all. Our reservations didn’t start till Friday. And one doesn’t usually check into hotels at breakfast time, Emily love. Not when the tourist season’s over with, and rooms are easy to come by. I figured there was no real hurry, so I parked the car and went to find this chap who’d written to me.’
‘Didier Muret.’
‘That’s right. How did you …?’
‘Just go on. I presume you found him?’
‘Yes. He wasn’t at home, but his neighbour said I should look down by the river. Said he’d gone out with his niece to—’
‘Feed the ducks,’ I finished calmly.
‘Yes.’ He sent me a faintly irritated, sideways glance before continuing. ‘Anyhow, I found him, but it didn’t take me long to figure out he’d got it all wrong, somehow. He didn’t read English, you see, he’d only seen the journal article in someone else’s house, and read the title: Isabelle’s Lost Treasure – I guess one could translate that easily enough – and so he’d written to me. Only it wasn’t Isabelle of Angoulême he was interested in, it was—’
‘—another Isabelle. I know.’
Harry’s eyes narrowed on my face. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell the story.’
The gypsy laughed, a soft laugh, at my shoulder, and hitched a second chair up to the bedside next to mine. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘she has been well occupied, this past week. She might have found you on her own, without my help.’
‘No doubt.’ My cousin’s voice was dry.
‘I only know,’ I said in self-defence, ‘that Didier Muret was after diamonds. A stash of diamonds, hidden at the end of the last war by a girl named Isabelle. I’d assumed he found what he was looking for, only …’ I paused, frowning. ‘Only if he had, he wouldn’t have needed you.’
‘Well, I can’t have been much use to him, as it was,’ Harry confessed. ‘He kept asking me about the tunnels under the Clos des Cloches, and I hadn’t a clue. He’d said, in his letter, that he had information to give to me, but it certainly felt the other way around. Still, I felt bad about it – not being able to help him, I mean. I even rang your father, from a public call box.’
‘But he wasn’t home.’
‘How the devil do you know that?’
‘He rang back, wanting to know why you called. I confess, I was rather curious myself.’
‘Well, no great mystery. Your father’s got a network strung through Europe that would put our Secret Service men to shame, you know. I thought he might know someone who knew someone who could be of some assistance to this Didier fellow.’
‘But you left the hotel’s number on Daddy’s answering machine.’
‘I thought I’d be in the hotel by lunchtime, didn’t I?’ he told me, patiently. ‘Only Didier Muret insisted that I lunch with him, and he seemed so damned disappointed by the treasure mix-up that I couldn’t very well refuse. So I went back to his house, had a drink.’ He flashed his old familiar smile. ‘A few drinks, actually. I tried to cheer him up. And then, before I knew it, there it was suppertime, and I offered to go and get a take-away for the two of us. And on the way back, with my pizza,’ he told me, ‘I got this.’
He tilted his head to one side, showing me a patch of bruising that spread darkly underneath the fair hair just behind his ear.
I stared. ‘He hit you?’
‘No.’ My cousin smiled. ‘It’s rather complicated, actually, I’d better let Jean tell it.’
The gypsy leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. It was odd, I thought, to be sitting here so calmly with a man that I’d been trying to avoid these past few days. A man I’d suspected of murder. His voice, when he spoke, was coarse but musical, his English remarkably good. ‘That night,’ he said, ‘the night Monsieur Muret was killed, I am walking with Bruno,’ his dark eyes glanced downwards, at the little dog, ‘and I see that the door to Muret’s garden, it is open. This is luck, I think. Muret, he keeps much whisky in the house, and the street is very dark there.’ His shrug was casual, as though thieving were a wholly respectable pastime. ‘So Bruno and I, we go into the yard, but before we are in the house we hear voices. Loud voices. I look in the window, and I see the two of them arguing. So I wait. I watch. Muret and the other, they go upstairs. Muret is very angry. Then …’ He made a violent gesture with a hand across his throat. It was quite ugly. ‘Muret he falls, and I see that he is dead. The other man, he sees this too. He comes out of the house, out the back door, into the garden where it is very dark. He does not see Bruno and me – we hide up by the wall – but your cousin,’ he paused, and smiled at Harry. ‘Your cousin, he comes at that moment through the garden door, with his pizza.’
‘Bad timing,’ Harry admitted.
‘There is a little light from the house. And so the killer, he looks at your cousin. Your cousin, he looks at the killer. And—’ Again a telling movement of the hand. ‘He is badly hurt, your cousin. He says to me: “Hotel de France”, and so I try to help him there, but when we turn the corner I see the car, the killer’s car, and so I bring your cousin to my family, where he will be safe.’