“Did he fancy her?”
“Fellow already has a fiancée, from what I gathered.”
“It sounds as if he barely knew Susan White. What did he have on her?”
“It’s what he heard,” Custine said. “You know what these buildings are like—walls like rice paper. He would always know if she was home: she couldn’t move around without the floorboards creaking.”
“That’s all?”
“No. He heard noises, strange sounds,” Custine said, “like someone playing the same note very quietly on a flute or recorder, over and over again.”
Floyd scratched his scalp. “Blanchard said he never heard her playing any music at all, not on the radio or on that old phonograph. But he did mention noises.”
“Agreed. And you think he’d have noticed if she kept an instrument in her room, wouldn’t you?”
“So it wasn’t an instrument. What else could it have been?” Floyd mused.
“Whatever it was must have been coming through the wireless. The way the student described it, the notes sounded rather like code. He heard long notes and short notes, and sometimes he was aware of repetition, as if a particular message was being repeated.”
For the first time that morning, Floyd felt the onset of something approaching alertness. “Like Morse code, you mean?”
“Draw your own conclusions. Of course, the student didn’t have the presence of mind actually to record any of these sounds as he heard them. It wasn’t until she died that he thought anything of it, and even then he didn’t attach any particular importance to it.”
“No?”
“He’s been studying for three years, renting almost a dozen different rooms in the process. He says he’d be hard pressed to think of a single neighbour who didn’t have at least one strange habit. After a while, he said, you learn to stop dwelling on such things. He admitted to me that he was fond of gargling mouthwash, and that at least one of his fellow tenants had commented that this was rather an odd thing to do at two in the morning.”
Floyd finished off his bread and coffee. “We’ll need to get back into her room, examine it thoroughly this time.”
“I’m sure Blanchard will be happy to oblige if he feels it’s in the interests of the case.”
“Maybe.” Floyd stood up, scratching his chin and making a mental note to shave before leaving the building. “But I’d prefer to keep a lid on this for now. I don’t want him getting all excited over the possibility that she might have been a spy.”
Custine looked at him with a knowing twinkle in his eye. “But you’re considering it, aren’t you? You’re at least toying with the possibility?”
“Let’s stick to concrete evidence, meaning eyewitnesses. What about the other tenants? Get anything from them?”
“Nothing useful. One fellow reported seeing an odd little girl hanging around the place on the day of the accident.”
“Odd in what way?”
“Said the child looked rather sickly.”
“Well, then,” Floyd said with a flourish of one hand, “round up the usual sickly children. Case closed.” But nagging at the back of his mind was the memory of the girl who had been coming out of Blanchard’s building when they had arrived the evening before. “There couldn’t really be a connection, could there?”
“The fellow was just trying to be helpful,” Custine said defensively. “At least the tenants all have your card now, and everyone I spoke to promised to get in touch if anything jogs their memories. No one knew anything about a sister.” He set about buttering himself another slice of bread. “Well, that’s my news. Your turn.”
The Mathis slid through thick Thursday-morning traffic, ankle-deep water hissing around the wheels where the overloaded drains had backed up and overflowed on to the street. The rain had finally eased and the sun was glinting fitfully off wet stonework and the fluted iron columns of street lamps; gleaming off statues and the Art Nouveau signs guarding the entrances to the Métro. Floyd loved Paris like this. Through his blurred and slitted eyes the city looked like an oil painting that needed a few more days to dry.
“So about Greta,” Custine said, from the passenger seat. “You can’t put it off for ever, Floyd. We had a deal.”
“What deal?”
“That I’d tell you about my interviews, and you’d tell me about Greta.”
Floyd’s knuckles tightened on the wheel. “She isn’t back for good. She won’t be rejoining the band.”
“And there’s no hope of talking her into it?”
“None at all.”
“Then why is she back, if it isn’t to torment you with what might have been? She’s cruel, our imperious little Fräulein, but she isn’t that cruel.”
“Her aunt’s dying,” Floyd said. “She wants to be with her until the end. That’s part of it, anyway.”
“And the rest?”
Floyd hesitated, on the verge of telling Custine to mind his own business. But Custine deserved better than that—his future was at stake here just as much as Floyd’s. He just didn’t realise it yet. “She’s not going back to the touring band either.”
“Fell out with them?”
“Seems not, just didn’t feel they were going anywhere, and that she wouldn’t be either if she stayed with them. So she got an idea into her head.”
“She’s going solo?”
Floyd shook his head. “More ambitious than that. Television.” He said the word like an obscenity. “She wants to be part of it.”
“Can’t blame the girl,” Custine replied, shrugging. “She’s got the talent, and she’s definitely got the looks. Good for her, I say. Why aren’t you cheering her on?”
Floyd steered the car past a hole in the road where some overall-clad workmen were swapping jokes but showing no other sign of activity. “Because she’s talking about television in America,” he said. “In Los Angeles, of course.”
Custine said nothing for a few blocks. Floyd drove on in silence, half-imagining that he could hear the grinding of his partner’s mental gears as he worked out the implications. Finally they slowed for a set of traffic lights.
“She’s asked you to go with her, hasn’t she?” Custine guessed.
“Not exactly asked,” Floyd said. “More like delivered an ultimatum. If I go with her, there’s a chance for us to be together. She said we could see how it works out. If I don’t, she walks out of my life and I’ll never hear from her again.”
They moved off again as the traffic light changed. “That’s quite an ultimatum,” Custine said. “Understandable from her point of view, though—it would be useful to have a burly American boyfriend around to fend off the sharks.”
“I’m French.”
“You’re French when it suits you. You pass as American just as easily when that suits you.”
“I can’t go. I have a life here. I have a business. I have a business partner who depends on me for his livelihood.”
“You sound like someone trying very hard to convince himself of something. Would you care for my opinion?”
“Something tells me I’m going to get it anyway.”
“You should go with her. Take the boat or plane or whatever to America. Look after her in Hollywood, or wherever it is that these television people have their empire. Give it two years. If it hasn’t worked out, Greta will still be able to make a good living back here.”
“And me?”
“If she makes a good living, maybe you won’t have to worry about earning one.”
“I don’t know, André.”
Custine thumped the dashboard in frustration. “What have you got to lose? We may have a case at this moment, but most of the time we barely have two centimes to rub together. It’s all excitement now, but if this murder investigation doesn’t pan out, we’ll be back exactly where we were this time yesterday: knocking on a lot of doors in the Marais. Except we won’t have a double bass.”