“You mean she was unfaithful to Henri? I don’t believe it.”
“I never said she was unfaithful to him. Only that we were in love. We planned to marry after his death. But then, with my sick mother still alive and needing to go into a private nursing home soon, it was a question of finding enough money for everything. Your... your gift was providential.”
“And generous enough as first agreed. So why are you now being so damned greedy? It won’t work, you know,” I pressed, but aware already that we were his hostages.
It was clear now that we had played into Boulanger’s hands by exposing our scam to him in the first place. It must have offered the perfect fulfillment to his wildest dream. And if he shopped us to the insurance company, it was Helen and I who’d go to gaol, not him. He was clean, and we’d never be able to prove differently.
“We are all greedy, monsieur,” he replied in the tone of a sage philosopher.
“But Michelle—” He seemed to have forgotten her — and her complicity.
“Is greedier than anyone,” he broke in primly, as if he regretted her weakness.
“But she’s involved in the insurance fraud, too.”
He outwardly winced at the word fraud, the hypocrite, before he responded. “Only because you took advantage of her simplicity, monsieur, and the plight of her poor sick husband, now dead. Any court, in England or France, would sympathise with her position. Especially if she confessed to everything and appeared as a witness for the prosecution.”
So he had it all figured. “Except, if you shop me and my wife, you’ll lose the money. All of it. The lot.” I said, increasingly convinced that he wasn’t really expecting to get ninety percent of it, that his demand was just an opening gambit. He had to be ready to negotiate. The question was, should I play ball with him, or simply call his bluff? “If I shop you, monsieur, you’ll go to prison,” he uttered flatly, but, as I knew, accurately.
“Nonsense. We’d just be fined and made to give the money back.” Only I wished I could believe my own words. “Tell you what, Pierre,” I continued, “disappointed as I am in you, and my wife will be more so, I’m ready to offer you another... hundred thousand pounds. But that’s absolutely as far as I’ll go. So you can take it or leave it. It’s that or nothing. And remember, if you report us to the authorities, and even if Michelle does witness against us, she’ll even have to give back the money she’s already got from us.” I was not absolutely sure of my ground on that either. Since the first hundred thousand had been paid before we had the insurance payout, it was technically nothing to do with the scam. Even so, it seemed a telling threat.
Boulanger shrugged his shoulders prior, possibly, to challenging the supposition. Except that was the very moment when he’d suddenly had to brake the car hard. He had been travelling too fast again on the approach to a traffic roundabout, and the braking counted for nothing in view of what he did next. Briefly disorientated, he’d followed habit and swung the car right, instead of left. The road had seemed empty, but not once we were driving on it in the wrong direction.
The driver of the articulated truck did his best, but he still hit us broadside. Boulanger was killed outright.
I was still in hospital at the end of two weeks, but mending fast by then. My injuries had been multiple, but not permanent or disabling. I had also been fully conscious when they pulled me from the wreckage, and capable soon afterwards of concocting a story explaining who I was and why I was in England. I identified myself as Henri Rabut, and explained that I had come over from France to collect my wife, Michelle, who was staying in a rented cottage close to Boddlestone with her friend, Mrs. Helen Talbot, whose husband they had both been nursing up to the time of his recent death. Since Mrs. Talbot had not been in any state to be left alone so soon after her bereavement, and since the cottage was small and I hadn’t wished to intrude on a widow’s grief, I had been staying at a local hotel. About my presence in Boulanger’s car, I said he was an old friend on holiday in England and that we had arranged to lunch together.
Of course, it had been urgently necessary to deal with Michelle. In the new circumstances, I didn’t believe she would have the nerve to persist with Boulanger’s blackmail plan on her own, but I had to be sure. Happily, I was right. I confronted her with his admitted perfidy as soon as she and Helen came to the hospital. Helen was profoundly shocked, and Michelle broke down in tears of shame and embarrassment — which to outside observers passed for tears of joy at her “husband’s” survival. Even so, it was as well for our general credibility that this scene took place in a small four-bedded hospital ward, in which I was the only patient that day. Michelle showed surprisingly little grief over Boulanger’s death. It seemed that there had not been much true affection between them — he had simply been using her as he had used us. She more or less threw herself on our mercy, saying that he’d forced her to go along with his disloyal plan against her will. Then she begged us still to give her the second hundred thousand and to let her go back to her birthplace near Lyons. It was significant that, according to her, Boulanger had only declared his love for her, and proposed marriage, the week after he had engineered the Rabuts’ involvement in the insurance scam.
The unhappy woman now planned to buy a farm to work with her brother and his family. She volunteered that she would still cooperate willingly over the divorce, putting proceedings in hand in France immediately. We had already discovered that a “quickee” divorce was as simple there as it was in England or America. Since, by this time, the money we had agreed to pay Michelle would be in her bank account next day, the simplest and smartest thing to do was to pack her off to France straightaway. Indeed, for her to go back by herself, leaving her putative husband-to-be cared for by another woman, would provide useful grounds for the divorce.
So poor misguided Boulanger got his deserts, and a happy ending seemed to be in store for the rest of us.
It was at the end of my third week in hospital that the police came to see me again. At first I assumed the visit was to clarify points in my first statement about the accident, until I realised that these were a different type of police — plainclothes officers, not uniformed, three of them in all, and one of them French. Helen was with them, looking miserable.
My mistake had been in interrupting Boulanger in the car when he was saying it would not be in my interests if he dropped dead — which, of course, is exactly what the wretched man did a split second later. He had pretty certainly been about to inform me that he’d left a letter with a Bordeaux lawyer to be handed to the police if he died suddenly in suspicious circumstances — showing that he trusted me a good deal less than I had always trusted him.
It had been ten days before the lawyer, hearing of Boulanger’s demise, and the manner of it, had decided to take what, on lawyerly consideration, seemed to him the proper action. After that, things had moved fast, with the French and British police and the insurance company working in friendly cooperation.
I was right about one thing. After getting all their money back, the British insurance company decided not to press charges. They didn’t want the case advertised because it would have made them look stupid or careless, or both. After investigation, the police also dropped the idea that I could somehow have been responsible for taking Boulanger’s life — which I clearly couldn’t have been, not without putting my own life in equal danger. Even so, the Crown Prosecutor put me on trial for impersonating a dead person, with criminal intent. Helen and Michelle were charged with complicity.
The hearing took place in England. Michelle was acquitted because her lawyer claimed she had been a grieving widow callously led astray. She’d had to return the second hundred thousand pounds to the insurance company, of course, but she had kept the first one, and there was no legal way of making her give that back to us. We’d hoped she might have shared it with us at least, but it had already been invested in that family farm, or her brother swore it had been, and he was a hard and unsympathetic man who overruled her as easily as Boulanger had done.