City of Light (City of Mystery) (5 page)

“Would you like
champagne?” Graham offered.

“Champagne is always
nice,” said Isabel, and Rayley nodded. Graham left them in search of glasses
and, at least for the moment, the two stood alone, an island in the sea of
bustling, chattering Parisians.

“We’ve met before,”
she said, her voice so soft he was forced to lean in to catch the words.

“In a way.  You
sketched me. On the Rue Clairaut.”

“And did I capture
you?”

There were many
things he could have said in response to such a provocative verb, but what he
chose was the truth. “I looked sad.”

She exhaled softly,
turned away.  She had been flirting, he realized belatedly.  She had meant the
remark in a sort of playful jest and he had failed to respond in kind, had
crushed her gaiety as surely as rose petals beneath a man’s shoes.  But no,
this made no sense.  She would not flirt with him.  Not here, in this crowded
room with her husband so close by.  Not anywhere, if the truth be told.  Not
ever.

“I thought you were
French,” he blurted out.

“You overheard me
with Armand?  It’s a natural enough mistake, I suppose.  But I assure you,
Detective, that despite all appearances I am as English as a woman can possibly
be.  Devonshire cream poured into a champagne flute.”  She laughed.  Angels and
fountains and music…. those ridiculous things men say about a woman’s laughter.
 They all came stampeding over Rayley like a herd of bison down the Champs-Elysees.
And then she was leaning toward him, her voice a whisper in his ear, her breath
evident and warm and the gesture so intimate that Rayley feared for a moment
his knees might give way. “So are you disappointed?”

Before he could
answer the wretched Graham was back upon them, clutching three champagne classes
in a most awkward fashion and bearing fresh news.

“Guess what I’ve
just heard,” he said, lining the glasses carefully along a small mantle,
sloshing a little as he did so.

“Neither of us is
good at guessing,” Isabel said, reaching for a glass. “It’s against the detective’s
training and I gave up the habit as a girl.”

“They’re letting us
go up.”

Rayley had no idea
what he meant but Isabel’s attention snapped to the boy in an instant. “Up the
tower?”

Graham nodded. “They
want to prove it’s working, at least the elevators to the base, so they’ve
invited the press to tour.  That way they can be sure that we shall cast the
word far and wide that at sunrise on May 9 the tower will be operable.”

Isabel smiled, once
again that private little catlike smile. “They wish to proclaim this even to the
English?”

Graham was
practically dancing. “Especially to the English.  And here’s the plum, the
absolute plum.  We can invite guests. Will you go with me?”

“You” is a strangely
ineffectual word, Rayley had often thought, one of the few failures of his most
serviceable language.  Because Graham’s invitation was vague, possibly directed
to both him and Isabel, possibly to just one of them.  But Isabel seemed less
troubled by his intent, for she downed her champagne with a single broad gulp
and said “I couldn’t refuse the chance to ascend the tower before anyone else,
even though I’m still not entirely sure why they would allow you to bring
guests.”

“It’s a privilege of
the press,” Graham said.  “They test everything new on us and if it breaks, they
count the casualties as an acceptable loss.”

Isabel laughed.    

“So you’re in?”
Graham said, looking from one to the other. “Shall we meet at the base of the
tower Saturday morning, 6 AM?  Sorry for the appallingly early hour but we need
to be out of the way before the workmen arrive.  You’ll join us, won’t you,
Abrams?  Think of it.  The chance to see all of Paris lying silent at your
feet.”

“Of course he’s in,”
Isabel said.  “He’s with Scotland Yard and thus fears nothing.  Oh, I knew I
was right to come across the room to talk to the two of you.  It was sheer
homesickness at first, I’ll confess.  A desire to speak in my natural tongue. 
But I think I also knew that something good would come of the chance to be
again with my own kind.”

“Expatriates make
strange bedfellows,” Graham said with a chuckle.  “I doubt that back in London
any of us would consider the other two our own kind.  But here in Paris…”

“But here in Paris…”
Isabel said, reaching for a second glass of champagne, the one intended for
Rayley. “Here in Paris we are but three fish out of water and thus the best of
friends. And now it appears we are off on a great adventure.”

“Your husband won’t
mind?” 

Rayley regretted the
words the moment he said them.  Graham looked at him with such exasperation
that he all but rolled his eyes.  I must seem like a stuffy old fool, Rayley
thought.  A prude and a Puritan, a pensioner taking his two grandchildren on
holiday. 

“I’m quite sure he
would mind if he knew,” Isabel said. “Oh dear. Are we running low on
champagne?”

“Not for long,”
Graham said, turning to gallop back toward the bar.  He shot Rayley a final
glance that suggested he should try to do a little better this time, so Rayley
swallowed his next question, which was “How on earth can a man not know if his
wife leaves the house before 6 AM?”

Isabel was gazing at
him quietly.  “You are coming with me, aren’t you?”

A shift from “us” to
“me” but no indication of what it might mean.  Rayley nodded. “Might I ask you
something?”

“Please do.”

“That day in the
café…How did you know I was British?”

She laughed.  “By
the way you spoke French.”

An hour later Rayley
found himself packed into an overcrowded coach with a half-dozen French
policemen of varying ranks crammed in around him.  Their voices were giddy from
free drink, and for once he didn’t mind that he understood not a word of what
they were saying.   He sat in silence, going over the evening again and again
in his mind.  The improbability of it all.

Did he want to climb
the tower?  Most emphatically not. 

Would he climb it?

Yes. If he could
climb it with her.

The coach was
slowing down on the street where his boarding house stood and Rayley made a
move to push to his feet. He knew from a rather humiliating past experience
that the police coach would not completely stop, but merely slow, and that he
would be expected to leap out at his doorstep.  He dug into his pocket for the
key to the front door and his fingers grazed the latest letter from Trevor
Welles, a letter that had arrived that morning and that he had not yet had the
chance to read. 

He pulled the
envelope out, squinted at it in the irregular glow of the streetlight.  Trevor
had scribbled something on the back of envelope, evidently a last minute
thought.  The coach slowed.  Rayley jumped, landing lightly on his feet, and waved
goodbye at the coach from which no one waved back.  He turned the envelope over
in his hand, squinted at Trevor’s characteristic scrawl.

A single sentence. 
A question.

Did the maid scream? 

CHAPTER FOUR

Paris

April 19

10:20 AM

“Look through the
report very carefully,” Rayley said to his translator, a nondescript young man
named Carle.  “I want to know if there was anything on the maid’s hands.”

Carle obediently
flipped through the papers. “It says they were clean, Sir.”

“I know.  But does
‘clean’ mean that there was nothing of interest on her hands or nothing at
all?”

Carle looked at him
with the flat expression of a man who is not paid to be curious. 

“The report says the
officer who originally examined her was Denis Rubois,” Rayley said. “Go and ask
him. She was in the process of helping to prepare dinner when the murderer
entered, so it seems there would be some residue from her efforts.  Flour or
butter or blood, strings from a bean, juice from an apple. Something.”

Carle nodded and left
the room, and Rayley picked up the papers on his desk, frowning once again at
the line where the investigating officer had described the maid’s hands. 
“Propre et blanc comme la neige.”  The small translation book he carried in his
pocket informed him that the officer had described the maid’s hands as not
merely “clean” but “clean and white as the snow.”  The sort of linguistic
extravagance the French were known for, but perhaps a clue as well, for his
time at the Yard had taught Rayley that sometimes the absence of something
could be as telling as its presence.

They were bringing
the maid back in for another round of questioning this afternoon, along with
the family housekeeper, and Rayley had been invited to witness the
interrogation.  If his hosts expected him to sit quietly in the corner, merely
observing, they would be disappointed.  The scribbled question on the back of Trevor’s
last letter had set Rayley’s mind in motion, propelling his thoughts in the very
direction Trevor had no doubt intended.

The maid didn’t
scream. This much at least was clear.  She did not claim to have screamed in
her first interview and no one in the crowded household claimed to have heard
her.  There were two possible explanations for why she would have responded to
the presence of an armed intruder with silence.  Perhaps the girl was simply
not a screamer by nature, even when frightened or startled.  Some people went
mute in times of crisis.  Or, as Trevor’s question seemed to imply, perhaps she
did not scream because she was not surprised to find the man in the kitchen.

He had his list of
questions at the ready and, judging upon the speed with which Carle normally
performed tasks, it would doubtless take him an hour to find Rubois and
complete his humble mission.  In the meantime, Rayley could return to the other
pile of papers on his desk, the ones he had taken care to conceal even from the
uninterested eyes of Carle.  Ever since he had learned he would be ascending
the Eiffel Tower, Rayley had been scouring the records room of the police
station for everything he could find on the mechanics of elevators. He’d
understood scarcely ten percent of what he’d read and the paltry information he
had managed to glean had reassured him not a whit.  

Most of the
journalistic stories involving elevators were actually descriptions of the far
more interesting subject of elevator accidents.   Rayley had found at least a
dozen newspaper accounts of the ghastly demise of the Baroness de Schack at the
Grand Hotel a decade earlier.  As the Baron and Baroness had been leaving their
suite – which had been merely situated on the second floor, there’s the rub –
the Baron had walked down the steps but the Baroness had opted to summon the
elevator, which she shared with the operator and another nameless employee of
the hotel.  For reasons which all the newspaper articles had failed to make
clear to Rayley, the elevator elected not to descend as expected, but rather to
rise with an alarming speed to the top floor of the hotel, where it struck a
beam and them plummeted like a stone, dropping the Baroness and her two
companions to a bloody death.   The accident had made all the major papers in
Europe, and Rayley would daresay those in most of the world, both because of
the titled status of the deceased and the particular horrors of death by cerebral
congestion.  The reputation of the Grand Hotel had been tarnished for years.

So it was quite
clear that elevators were infernal contraptions even when merely going up and
down, but Rayley could not shake off the memory of Graham’s casual remark about
the additional problems facing the engineers for the Tower. These elevators had
to rise diagonally.  It seemed an utterly unnatural movement and the fact that
the French had brought in the Americans to help accomplish the feat did nothing
to settle Rayley’s nerves.  He knew all too well the dangers inherent in moving
a thought from English into French and back, where a man could sincerely believe
himself to be ordering lamb and instead be brought a bowl of turtle soup.  Engineering
directions translated by someone like Carle was an appalling thought. 

Speaking of which,
the man abruptly appeared back at the door, causing Rayley to shuffle his
papers guiltily.  

“He said her hands
were completely clean, Sir.  As if they had just been washed.”

“And no one found
that odd?”

“That a kitchen maid
would wash her hands?” Carle asked, with an ironic lift of an eyebrow, as if to
imply such cleanliness might be a rare thing in England but certainly not in
France.

“That she would stop
to wash them in the middle of a murder investigation,” Rayley said impatiently.
“Never mind.  I’ll save the rest of my questions for the interview.”

The maid and
housekeeper were already seated in the interrogation room when Rayley arrived,
perched on two wooden chairs which were positioned opposite the seven identical
wooden chairs which held the officers.  It gave the impression that the women
were facing a firing squad, an arrangement no doubt designed to intimidate suspects
into full compliance and witnesses into full disclosure. Judging by the
terrified looks on the women’s faces, the stratagem would undoubtedly work yet
again.