“You told all this to the police?” Floyd asked.
“I did, but they dismissed it. They told me that I had imagined the whole incident, or imagined that the first suitcase was heavier than the second.”
Floyd made a careful note, certain—without quite being able to say why—that this was an important observation. “And is this the ‘evidence’ of foul play you mentioned on the telephone?”
“No,” Blanchard said. “That is something else entirely. Two or three weeks before her death, Mademoiselle White’s manner changed. She stopped coming to the races, stopped visiting these rooms, and spent more and more time away from her own apartment. On the few occasions when we passed each other on the stairs, she seemed distracted.”
“Did you check out her rooms?”
Blanchard hesitated a moment before nodding in answer to Floyd’s question. “She had stopped acquiring books and magazines. A great many remained in the apartment, but I saw no sign that they were being added to or relocated elsewhere.”
Floyd glanced at Custine. “All right. Something must have been on her mind. I have a theory. You want to hear it?”
“Am I paying for this? We haven’t discussed terms.”
“We’ll come to that if we come to it. I think Mademoiselle White had a lover. She must have met someone in the last three weeks before she died.” Floyd observed Blanchard, wondering how much of this he really wanted to know. “She’d been spending time with you—innocently, I know—but suddenly her new boyfriend wanted her all to himself. No more trips to the races, no more cosy chats up here.”
Blanchard seemed to weigh the matter. “And the matter of the books?”
“Just a guess, but maybe she suddenly had other things to do than hang around bookstores and newsagents. She lost interest in stocking her library, so there was no need to keep on shipping trunks back to Dakota.”
“That’s a lot of supposition,” Blanchard said, “based on a rather striking absence of evidence.”
“I said it was a theory, not a watertight case.” Floyd took out a toothpick and started chewing on it. “All I’m saying is, there might be less to this than meets the eye.”
“And the matter of her death?”
“The fall might still have been an accident.”
“I am convinced she was pushed.” Blanchard reached under his chair and produced a tin box printed all over with a scratched tartan pattern, a photograph of a Highland terrier on the lid. “This, perhaps, will convince you.”
Floyd took the tin. “I really need to watch my figure.”
“Open it, please.”
Floyd prised the lid off with his fingernails. Inside was a bundle of assorted documents and papers, held together with a single rubber band.
“You’d better explain the significance of this,” Floyd said, nonplussed.
“Less than a week before she died, Mademoiselle White knocked on my door. She died on the twentieth; this would have been around the fifteenth or sixteenth. I let her in. She was still flustered, still distracted, but now at least she was ready to talk to me. The first thing she did was apologise for her rudeness during the preceding fortnight, and tell me how much she missed the horses. She also gave me that box.”
Floyd slipped free the elastic band surrounding the papers and let them spill into his lap. “What else did she tell you?”
“Only that she might have to leave Paris in a hurry, and that I was to look after the box if she did not return for it.”
Floyd glanced through the papers. There were travel documents, receipts, maps, newspaper clippings. There was a pencil sketch, carefully annotated, of something circular that he didn’t recognise. There was a postcard: a sun-faded photograph of Notre Dame. Floyd flipped it over and saw that the card had been written and stamped, but never sent. The handwriting was neat and girlish, with exaggerated loops and curlicues. It was addressed to someone called Mr. Caliskan, who lived in Tanglewood, Dakota.
“You mind if I read this?”
“Go ahead, Monsieur Floyd.”
The first part of the message talked about how the woman was planning to spend the afternoon shopping, looking for some silver jewellery, but that she might have to change her plans if the weather turned to rain. The words “silver” and “rain” had been neatly underlined. This struck Floyd momentarily as odd, before he remembered an elderly aunt who had been in the habit of underlining key words in the letters she sent him. The postcard was signed “from Susan’: Floyd speculated that it had been intended for an uncle or grandfather rather than a lover or close friend.
He opened one of the maps, spreading it wide. He had expected a tourist map of Paris, or at the very least of France, but this was a small-scale map of the whole of Western Europe, from Kaliningrad in the north to Bucharest in the south, from Paris in the west to Odessa in the east. A circle had been inked around Paris and another around Berlin, and the two circles were linked by a perfectly straight line in the same ink. Another circle enclosed Milan, which was in turn connected back to Paris by another line. The effect was the creation of an approximate “L” shape, with Paris at the corner of the “L” and Berlin at the end of the longest side. Marked in neat lettering above the lines were two figures: “875” above the Paris-Berlin axis and “625” along that between Paris and Milan. Floyd speculated that these were the distances between the cities, in kilometres rather than miles.
He scratched at the ink with his fingernail, satisfying himself that it was not part of the original printed design. He had no idea what the markings meant, but he speculated that Susan White might have been planning the next leg of her journey, and had been measuring the respective distances between Paris and the two other cities before deciding which to opt for. But what kind of tourist needed to know such distances so precisely? Trains and even aeroplanes did not follow straight-line routes, given the real and political geography of Europe. But perhaps that detail had escaped her.
Floyd folded the map, and then leafed through the rest of the paperwork. There was a typed letter in German from someone called Altfeld, on thick letterhead paper printed with a company insignia for a heavy-manufacturing concern named Kaspar Metals. The address was somewhere in Berlin, and the letter appeared to be in reply to an earlier query Susan White had sent. Beyond that, Floyd’s faltering German wasn’t up to the task of translation.
“These don’t look much like love letters,” Floyd said.
“She gave me one other instruction,” Blanchard said, “in the event that she did not return. She said that her sister might come looking for her. If she did, I was to pass on the box to her.”
“She was worried about something,” Floyd said. “That much we can agree on.”
“You’re still not convinced that she might have been killed deliberately? Shouldn’t you be keen to take on a murder case? I will pay you for your time. If you find no evidence that she was murdered, then I will accept your judgement.”
“I don’t want to waste your money or my time,” Floyd said. Custine cast him a sidelong glance, as if questioning his sanity.
“I am authorising you to waste it.”
Floyd stuffed the documents back into the tin. “Why don’t you just hold on to this and see if the sister shows up?”
“Because every day that passes is a day longer since she died.”
“All due respect, monsieur, but this really isn’t something you need concern yourself with.”
“I think it is very much my concern.”
“What did the police make of the box?” Custine asked.
“I showed it to them, but of course they weren’t interested. As I said, entirely too unimaginative.”
“You think she might have been a spy,” Floyd guessed.