“If you think I’d live there, you’re mistaken,” Marie-Claude said. “Look at the number of windows for a start. And the height of them! I’d spend all my day washing them.”
“You’d have people to do that for you.”
“I would not,” she protested.
What? Strangers trooping all over her house, snooping all over her business?
“Some people might envy the rich for their lifestyle,” she said firmly. “Not me. Madame Montaud may have been successful, but the poor woman was a martyr to the business, she barely took a day off, and look at that sister of hers. Dresses like Grace Kelly, but never gets a chance to breathe, much less be her own person. No privacy, not even a house to call her own; she and her husband still live at the Domaine. And when her husband accompanies her to Madame Garreau’s shop, as he invariably does, the place stinks of stale wine and cigars for simply hours.”
“Oh? And what do I stink of?”
“Nutmeg and citron and cool mountain forests,” she said, and his eyes weren’t just green, they crinkled at the corners and were flecked with red, grey, and brown, and his mouth twisted sideways when he smiled. With his thick mop of dark hair and square practical hands, she was glad Luc would have no trouble finding a new wife once she’d gone.
“Hmm.”
He stuffed his square practical hands in his pockets and whistled “Mambo Italiano” under his breath as they sauntered past the bustling vineyards down the hill towards the river. Since the Domaine was only a fifteen-minute walk from the house, they hadn’t bothered with the car, and Marie-Claude was wrong about the cardigan. She hadn’t needed it at all.
“I don’t suppose this sudden obligation to duty has anything to do with the sister?” he asked after working his way through “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Smile,” and “Hernando’s Hideaway.”
“Madame Montaud wasn’t having an affair with her cellar master,” Marie-Claude said, wondering at what point her arm had become linked with his. “She ordered far too many evening gowns for an illicit liaison.”
More likely she was being courted discreetly, preferring to wait and see how things developed before going public with the relationship.
“Loose women aren’t taken seriously in business,” she pronounced. “But her sister, Madame Delaville, now that’s a different story.”
Husband reeking of stale booze and smoke, choosing all her clothes? She’d lost count of the number of times she’d seen him sitting in Madame Garreau’s plush armchair, squat and potbellied like a cocky little toad, while his wife paraded in unflattering suits with slow and mechanical precision.
“Natalie Delaville is a woman of loose moral standards?”
“Exactly the opposite,” Marie-Claude said, turning the key in the shop. “Her husband has the word bully all but etched on his forehead, but the more I think about it, the more I remember that her chin hasn’t drooped quite so much lately, there’s been colour in her pale cheeks, and miracle of miracles, Madame Delaville actually called in half a dozen times on her own over the past month. I want to look up what she — voilà!”
“Well?” Luc held out his hands in exasperation. “Are you going to tell me what the little mouse bought?”
“Certainly not.” Such matters were private! “But I can tell you that the dresses were feminine and flattering, and I can tell you whose account they were charged to, as well.” She shot her husband a sideways glance. “Alexandre Baret.”
“All right...” Luc rubbed his jaw in thought. “But is this actually getting us anywhere?”
“It explains his unease and reluctance to provide an alibi.”
“Because he was protecting Natalie Delaville.”
“Absolutely.” She locked the door and tested the catch. “Now all we have to do is prove how that bitch killed Martine.”
“Metamorphosis is a wonderful thing,” Luc observed, stretching his pace to match hers. “One minute she’s a mouse, the next she’s a bitch — what? What have I said?”
“Honestly!” Marie-Claude stopped outside the baker’s and shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know where you get your ideas, sometimes! Not Madame Delaville, Luc. She didn’t kill Madame Montaud.”
It was Madame Baret, of course. Alexandre’s wife.
“And she killed the wrong woman.”
As the hills slowly turned to russet and gold and the French populace finally came to terms with defeat in Indochina, the Empire State Building had been eclipsed as the world’s tallest structure, civilization was facing extinction from something called Rock and Roll, and Luc had been proved right about Suez, especially in light of that botched attempt on the Egyptian president’s life.
“By the way, Marie-Claude, I received a letter from the commissioner this morning.”
More and more these days Luc had taken to joining her on walks along the towpath, although sometimes their route took them through the town hall park or onto the islands, where they would take a picnic providing they wrapped up warm.
“He writes that he has finally rounded up everyone involved in the blackmail and extortion ring. Some seven police officers are awaiting trial, he says, and commends me for a job well done.”
“That the letter?” Marie-Claude tossed it into the Charente, where a squadron of ducks came steaming in, mistaking it for a bread roll. “You know my opinion of the commissioner.”
“For the life of me, I can’t imagine why.”
“He said I was truculent, selfish, and a pain in the cul.”
Luc laughed. “Well, if you overheard that much, you’d have also heard him qualify his statement by adding that you were spirited, funny, and I was lucky to have you.”
Couldn’t agree more, sir, Luc had replied, and damn those horrid children upstairs for drowning out the commissioner’s words.
“He congratulated me on the Montaud murder, as well.” Luc stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Being a high-profile case, I suppose word found its way back to his desk, but what I’m getting to is that he ended by saying that, now the corruption ring’s been wrapped up and my life is no longer in danger, there’s a job for me in Paris, should we want it.”
“You never told me your life was threatened!”
“Hell hath no fury like a chief inspector jailed. So then. Do we? Want that job, I mean.”
“It might have been high-profile, but it wasn’t exactly brain surgery, Luc.”
All those late nights in the distillery, indeed! I did not conduct an affair down here with Madame Montaud, the cellar master had insisted, that’s simply too sordid to contemplate. Quite right. It may have been his employer’s sister he’d been carrying on with, not his employer, but he wouldn’t have dreamt of taking the delicate, browbeaten Natalie to the distillery had it not been the only place where they could meet and not be either seen or overheard. His office was too close to the main works. They dared not be seen in public. So they either sat down there, talking long into the night, or they sneaked off in his car to plan their new life together, and what a lot of planning there was. For all that cellar masters are handsomely paid and live in grand houses, they still don’t live like the Montauds! There would be no majestic mansion for Natalie once she left Delaville. No parklands, no servants, no prestigious balls. Alexandre had wanted her to be one hundred percent sure before making the leap. He knew there would be no going back.
For her part, of course, Madame Baret hadn’t believed for a second that her husband had been required to work late.
In the way of deceived wives everywhere, she followed him, saw the lights in the distillery, knew about the bed, heard him whispering on the telephone in the hall. She’d had no trouble tracing the number to the Domaine and knew immediately who he was carrying on with. (Who else was there, for goodness’ sake? Hardly that pale, downtrodden sister!) So, again in the way of deceived wives everywhere, she hoped and then prayed the affair would blow over. Until the day she overheard him talking about their new life together...