I remembered this house, from my first foray up the path last Monday – the day I’d felt I was being followed. I’d felt afraid, outside this house. I remembered the barbed wire, and the leaning door, and the barking dog and the sound of the wind. How differently might things have turned out, I wondered, if I had knocked at the door of the house that day, instead of running? Had I found Harry then, we might be safely home in England, he and I, while the Chinon police dealt with Armand Valcourt and left Victor Belliveau alone. And Paul would be fasting with his brother, observing the holy day of Yom Kippur.
Hindsight, I thought, was like a punishment, remorseless in its clarity and painfully unable to change what had gone before.
Turning from the house, I pressed on down the path towards the château, which I knew lay some ten minutes’ walk away, although I couldn’t see it from here.
Since I’d first gone into the tunnel after the gypsy earlier that evening, the wind had shifted subtly and the clouds were drifting in to catch the brilliance of the sinking sun. The air was cold and singing past my ears. A strand of hair whipped stinging in my eyes, blinding me for a moment until I could push it back and blink the tears away. I tucked my chin into my collar, dug my hands deeper in the pockets of Paul’s red jacket, and hurried on.
The path wound round and down and up again, past caves and staring houses that hunched shoulder to shoulder to watch me scurry by. And then the houses blended to a single wall that guided me along the rising slope towards the narrow, soaring clock tower at the château’s gate. I bustled upwards, feeling the now-familiar burning of my laboured lungs, and glanced at my wristwatch to check the time.
Surprisingly, the walk had taken less than ten minutes – it was just past seven, which meant that, even though Harry and Danielle had started first, I was likely to arrive at the meeting place ahead of them, considering my cousin wasn’t moving at top speed and was moving in the dark, on top of that. I slowed my pace a little, to ease the pressure on my pounding heart.
And then my heart, quite suddenly, seemed not to beat at all.
Ahead of me, almost at the very spot where Paul had fallen yesterday, a man was sitting on the low stone wall. He sat with body angled forward, elbows braced on knees, head bent to contemplate his loose-linked fingers. He was frowning.
Behind the pensive figure of Armand Valcourt, the château cast a stark and stretching shadow on the smooth deserted pavement. Deserted now, but not for long. At any moment now my cousin and his gypsy nurse would shuffle up the steps from the dank tunnel, and walk through that door just there … just there …
My gaze swung past Armand’s bent shoulders to the cliff face further up the road. Fighting back the rising tide of panic, I struggled to reassure myself. There was a gap between the boards, so Jean had said, a gap that one could look through, to make sure the way was safe. Oh, dear God, let them have the sense to look, I prayed, in the fervent way that non-believers pray, when they hope to be proved wrong.
I wasn’t the least bit worried, at that moment, for my own safety. Armand might be a killer, but he hadn’t struck me as a psychopath. He must have suspected, from the very first, that I was somehow linked to Harry, to the man who’d seen him leaving the scene of Didier Muret’s murder. He’d seen Harry’s face, after all; any fool would have noticed the resemblance between my cousin and myself. And Armand Valcourt was no fool.
And yet, he’d always been a perfect gentleman. He didn’t know I knew, I thought – that was the key. And as long as I kept up a normal front I doubted he would try to harm me now. After all, I reasoned, there was no way Armand could know that I’d just come from seeing Harry, not unless I told him myself, and I was hardly about to do that. I could just tell him I’d been walking on the cliff path – hardly a suspicious activity – and he’d have no cause to think anything had changed between us. No, he wouldn’t harm me, I decided, steadying my lurching pulse with a concerted effort.
But if he came face to face with Harry, now, and Harry barely able to stand up straight, let alone defend himself …
A crowd of tourists would have made the roadway safe, but it was suppertime and no one was about, not even a straggling student or a local resident – not one soul, just as it had been the afternoon before. I flicked another watchful glance towards the door set in the cliff face, and squared my shoulders. History, Harry always said, went round and round, repeating – but the tragedy of yesterday would not be replayed tonight, not while I had the power left to stop it. Forming a smile that felt natural upon my face, I took a bold step forward, and another.
He was so deep in contemplation that he didn’t hear my footsteps drawing closer, and when I finally spoke to him his head came up with a startled jerk.
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ was what I said. What thoughts did killers think, in private?
He turned towards me, no longer frowning, his preoccupied expression fading to a warmer look of welcome. ‘My thoughts aren’t worth a penny,’ he said evenly, in French. ‘You’ve been walking? By yourself?’
‘Just as far as the chapelle.’
‘The Chapelle Sainte Radegonde?’ His eyebrows lifted a degree. ‘It’s not the safest walk, that, for a woman on her own.’
‘Quite safe in daylight, I should think.’ So many things, I thought, were safe by daylight. Even talking to murderers. Or at least, that’s what I hoped. Mind you, there wasn’t that much daylight left, and I was running out of time to think of some way to make Armand Valcourt move from where he sat, leaving the way clear for Harry to get down to the police.