The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (67 page)

Amateur! He was opening the briefcase on his lap and she had absolutely no doubt what kind of message he was about to produce from it. There were all kinds of thoughts running through her head,
questions of whether she’d been double-crossed, and if so, by whom, questions of who he was working for and whether she’d have to move on, but there was something more immediate, an
instinctive reflex that would never leave her.

She picked the phone up off the desk and threw it hard. It cracked him on the head with a clatter, and then a further clatter as the briefcase and the gun inside it fell onto the floor. He was
dazed for only a second, but she was around the desk before he came up for air and she was pulling the telephone cord tight around his neck.

“Who sent you?”

His arms flailed, trying to strike her a body blow but unable to find her where she stood directly behind him.

“Who sent you?”

He tried another approach, trying to pull her own hands off, then trying to get his fingers under the cord, desperately tearing at his neck, drawing blood with his fingernails. He wouldn’t
talk; he was at least that professional. She yanked up the tension an extra notch, and the flailing of the arms gave way to a more convulsive movement through his entire body. She had to use all
her strength to keep him in the seat, but she couldn’t resist leaning down, whispering breathlessly into his ear.

“You know that song about Jeffers? It’s a celebration. See, Jeffers was a diamond trader, and he was English!”

She couldn’t get the phone working again, even after she’d disentangled it from his body. She took her cell phone and dialled. When Lambert picked up she said, “Someone came
after me. I’ll need removals.”

“Someone from the North?”

“No, he claimed to be one of us.”

“Name?”

“Patrick Jeffers. Passport backs that up.” She looked at the passport she’d retrieved from his jacket. He certainly had the right look.

“Jeffers? There has to be a mistake. Let me just check something.” She could hear Lambert tapping away on his computer keyboard. He was as much an old timer as she was and always hit
the keys like they belonged on a manual typewriter. ‘Liz, Patrick Jeffers is on his first assignment, but he’s in Damascus; he’s a Middle East specialist.”

She looked at the throttled body, slumped in the chair like a drunk, and now that she thought of it, he hadn’t seemed to recognize the name of Robinson Jeffers, and surely he would have
done, as surely as she knew who Robbie Burns was.

“Well, I hope he’s doing better than the Jeffers in front of me now.”

Lambert laughed. She liked Lambert; he had a good sense of humour. People didn’t need to look much in this game, but a sense of humour was an absolute must.

Marilyn Todd

The instant Marie-Claude’s husband told her that he’d compiled a dossier detailing the Chief Inspector’s corruption complete with dates, names and times, then
placed the file personally in the hands of the Commissioner, she knew it was all over. No wonder he waited until he’d finished his
tartiflette
to tell her what he’d done.
She’d have thrown the damned dish on the floor and to hell with dinner, and he could have whistled for his
île flottante
as well. As it was, she didn’t hear him out. What
on earth was the point of lengthy explanations?

“You’re a fool, Luc. No one likes a whistle blower.”

“I didn’t join the police to be popular.”

“It’s the end of your career, you know that? They won’t keep you on in Paris after this!”

“Blackmail, extortion, what was I supposed to do, Marie-Claude?” He laid down
Le Figaro
and turned his gaze to her. “For years, Picard has been preying on the very
people he was meant to protect. I couldn’t simply turn aside.”

“And I’m sure the Commissioner shook your hand and thanked you warmly for your efforts.”

One side of Luc’s face twisted uncomfortably. “Not exactly, no.”

“You see? No one likes a whistle-blower. They’d rather close ranks and have a bastard in their midst than admit to one bad apple, and you already know my feelings about the
Commissioner.”

Like when they were invited over to dinner and she overheard him talking to her husband in his study when she went to find the bathroom.

“Your wife is truculent, selfish and a pain in the
cul
, Luc—”

The rest was drowned by children’s laughter upstairs, but who cared? That’s the last time she’d eat at that pig’s house, she told Luc, and if her husband felt bad about
making excuses when future invitations arrived, then so much the better. She wanted nothing to do with a man who insulted her, and it wouldn’t have hurt Luc to have stuck up for her,
either.

“ – couldn’t agree more, sir—”

Truculent and selfish, her
cul.
She pushed her thick curls back from her face. She had married too young, that was the trouble, and to a man ten years older than herself at that.
Admittedly, after six years Luc was no less handsome and his back was as strong, but that type of love can’t sustain a marriage indefinitely. And when he wasn’t working all the hours
le bon Dieu
sent, he had his head stuck in a file or wanted to talk politics, and not even French politics, either. Honestly! Who cared whether rich diamond deposits had been found in
Siberia or how many communists this Senator Mc-Whatever-His-Name accused in the American State Department? What was going to actually change people’s lives were things like the new television
transmissions that were now coming out in colour, not some piece of paper signed by Egypt and Britain over a canal in Suez that Luc insisted was going to have far-reaching consequences. But however
exasperated Marie-Claude got with her husband, she’d never once known him to lose his temper.

Not even when, a mere fortnight after delivering his sanctimonious dossier, the Commissioner transferred him to Cognac.

“You’ll like the South,” Luc said confidently, as their train pulled away. “Twice as much sunshine, warmer summers, better winters—”

“Better theatres, Luc? Will they have better street cafes and shops? Will they get subtitled versions of ‘On the Waterfront’, do you think?” By all accounts, it was set
to scoop an Oscar. “Will they have better parks? Better gardens? Women in
peignoirs
leaning over the balconies, calling obscenities to men in the street?”

He looked at her beneath lowered lids as the train chugged through the forests of Rambouillet. “You never liked Montmartre.”

“It had life,” she retorted. “It had character and substance, it was always noisy, colourful, constantly changing—”

Marie-Claude broke off. Why was she referring to these things in the past tense? For heaven’s sake, it wasn’t as though she wasn’t going back! No, no, once she’d seen Luc
settled in (she owed him that) she would start a new life. A new life with a man who appreciated art, the cinema, fashion and fun. Someone who liked dancing, for sure!

“I’ll bet they’ve never heard of Perry Como in Cognac.”

“You can probably count yourself lucky if they’ve heard of Bing Crosby,” he murmured behind his guide book. “But this is promotion, Marie-Claude. We’re lucky to get
it. Do you want to look through this, by the way?”

Marie-Claude shook her head. She’d seen enough of those military vines and flat-bottomed boats from upside down, thank you.

“We’ll be able to afford a house of our own, instead of a poky apartment on the fifth floor where you can hear everything that happens next door. We’re close to the seaside,
and I’ll bet the air’s better, too.”

There was nothing wrong with the air in the Rue de Roc, she wanted to say, but his nose was back in the pamphlet and, as Orleans rumbled past, she stroked the hat in her lap. Such a jaunty
little number, as well.
Très
Audrey Hepburn with just a dash of Ava Gardner. She sighed and closed her eyes. By the time she got the chance to wear it again, it would either have too
many feathers or too few, and who would be seen dead wearing green for next season? At Tours, the only other couple in the carriage got off and an old woman with a runny nose got in.

“Amazing,” Luc said, turning the page of his paper to avoid creasing. “It says here construction’s underway on the St Lawrence Seaway that’ll allow deep-draught
ships direct access to the rich industrials of the Great Lakes. Direct access. Can you imagine?”

Marie-Claude switched off. Her husband was clever, conscientious, honourable, but dull. Handsome, rugged, muscular and tall, yet he lacked passion where it really counted. And now, it seemed, he
was a failure into the bargain.

At Angoulême they changed trains.

She blamed herself for marrying him.

A week later, the vineyards around Cognac sprang into leaf and an Englishman called Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes. Less than two months down the line, once the
vines had been pruned and tied back, an Australian beat the Englishman’s record, but by the time the summer sun was swelling the grapes on the hillsides, the Englishman had once again
reclaimed his crown in Vancouver, Little Mo’s tennis career was cut short by a riding accident and a pair of Italians were the first climbers to reach the peak of K2. These things seemed to
excite everyone except Marie-Claude, but it didn’t matter, because she kept herself busy making the house nice for Luc.

It was pleasantly located in the old quarter, halfway between the chateau and the covered market, where the streets were narrow, hilly, twisting and cobbled, and the houses built of thick stone
to keep them cool in summer, retain heat in the winter, and with fireplaces large enough to secrete a small army. But an old man had lived alone here for the past twenty years and she was damned if
she’d be accused of leaving her husband to a place which looked (and smelled) like a pig-sty.

A week’s scrub with carbolic transformed it no end, but the shutters could use a coat or three of paint and although she’d considered returning to Paris in August, the weather was
perfect for strolls along the tow-path, and whilst Marie-Claude knew of lots of people who didn’t bother with curtains and just used the shutters, Luc worked so hard that the very least he
deserved, if he wasn’t to have a decent dinner waiting on the table, was to be able to pore over his paperwork in a house that was cosy. One or two rooms, that was all. Bedroom.
Salon.
Enough to lend a bit of warmth and character where it mattered the most.

By the time workers had been drafted in for the harvest and Pope Pius X had been canonized, the Algerians had started a guerrilla war against their French protectors, “This Ole
House” was on everyone’s lips and Marie-Claude had run up another pair of drapes, this time for the kitchen, and accepted the offer of part-time work in an upmarket dress shop.

“I’ll be late tonight,” Luc announced one lunchtime, as he washed his hands in the sink. Close by, the bells of St Léger pealed merrily. “The proprietor of one of
the smaller Cognac houses has been murdered.”

Marie-Claude laid the
cassoulet
on the table and lifted the lid. “Good.”

“Good?” He chuckled as he sniffed appreciatively through the steam. “Some poor woman has been battered over the head and all you can say is good?”

“Not good that she’s dead.” She heaped his plate. “Good that you’ve got some proper detective work to do at last.”

All he’d been called upon to investigate over the past five months had been robbery, the inevitable smuggling and once, right at the beginning, an art theft that turned out to be a simple
insurance fraud. Luc was a first-rate detective and at last this would give him something to sink his teeth into. In fact, with such a high-profile case demanding his attention, Marie-Claude
doubted he’d notice she’d left, although she might as well wait until the warm weather ended. Paris was desperately wet in October.

“Marie-Claude, this duck is delicious.”

It was the market, she explained, scraping out the dish for him. So close it made shopping each day easy, and you could buy the freshest produce without it having been hanging around in a vans
for several days as it made its way slowly up country. Luc shot a covetous glance at the second pot on the stove.

“Tomorrow?”

“Certainly not!” Tomorrow she was planning
coq au vin.
“I made that for Suzette next door. Her husband died last year from an accident in the boiler room in one of the
distilleries down on the quay, so with three small children and no work, I thought it might help.”

“That’s very generous.”

“Nonsense. We can easily afford one extra duck. My job, your pay rise—”

“No hat bills, no theatre tickets.” He wiped both
cassoulet
and smile from his mouth with a serviette. “Do you miss them, Marie-Claude? Honestly?”

“If you’ve finished, I need to get back to the shop,” she said briskly. “Madame Garreau’s visiting her mother and I’m all on my own this afternoon.” She
scraped the bones into the bin while he brewed the coffee. “So who died, then?”

“A woman by the name of Martine Montaud—”

“Madame Montaud?” She wiped her hands on the dishcloth and set out a plate of
palmiers
still warm from the oven. “Handsome, late forties, with dark hair?”

“You know her?”

“As one would expect of the owner of a cognac house, she was one of Madame Garreau’s best customers.” Marie-Claude sat on the table and began swinging her legs. “Very
elegant lady,” she said. “Exquisitely made up, hands neatly manicured and I wouldn’t like
her
hairdresser’s bill, I can tell you.” She sighed. “I shall
miss her coming in, though,” she added. “She never took offence when I told her what didn’t suit her—”

“Marie-Claude, that’s the reason Madame Garreau adores you. You give her clientele an honest appraisal and you don’t hold back. People respect that.”

She wondered how he could possibly know her employer’s opinion. As far as she knew, Luc had never met Madame Garreau, but that was beside the point. No woman wants to be told lilac suits
her when it makes her look bland, any more than being sold the concept that wide stripes will flatter her hips. Especially Madame Montaud, who invariably left the shop hundreds of francs lighter,
but every inch looking the successful businesswoman she was.