'What on earth's got into you?' she said. 'You suddenly look as though you wanted to hit somebody.'
'Don't let these puffy old eyes fool you.'
She came closer. 'They're not as puffy as I made out. And I'm really beginning to think that they don't fool me as much as you would like. Would you like me to break my dinner date?'
'Not on my account. I'm going early to bed. I've got a busy day tomorrow.'
She wasn't fooling me. I knew exactly what was in her mind, and had been ever since she had steamed open the letter on the yacht or wherever it was.
She was as anxious to see Max Ansermoz as I was. That didn't suit me. I wanted to see him first, and alone. In fact, I was already looking forward to it.
She said, 'I really want to come with you tomorrow.'
I said, 'I'm going alone. If you queer that I'll toss in this job — and then O'Dowda will get someone else, some fast slick operator who'll probably make a juicy story out of it afterwards for all the boys in the bar to laugh at. So keep away!'
Deep and warm inside me, heating up fast every moment, was a feeling that I didn't have very often, wouldn't wish for often, but which when it came just had to be obeyed. Somebody had to be hit… Oh, yes, somebody had to be hit hard and the name was clicking through my brain like a ticker tape. She knew, too, what was there. Slowly she put out a hand and gently nipped the cloth of my sleeve between two fingers.
'All right,' she said. 'I won't interfere… Poor Zelia.' She turned away to the door. Then, her fingers on the door handle, she turned and said, 'Do me a favour.'
'What?'
'Don't bother to be polite with him.'
She went. I gave her a few minutes, and then I called the desk. I wanted my bill made up. I was leaving right after dinner and would they send someone up to get my car key so that the Mercedes could be brought round for me. With any luck I might arrive at the châlet Bayard just about the time Max Ansermoz got Zelia's letter. One thing that I knew for sure I wasn't going to find at the Châlet Bayard was a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.
I left just after ten. There was a light drizzle falling and I could see no sign of Najib Alakwe being on the watch outside. If he had been I wasn't going to worry. In the Mercedes I was reasonably confident I could shake any tail.
St Bonnet was about twenty- or thirty-odd kilometres north of Gap, and my route was back along the road by which I had come down from Grenoble. From the map I worked out that it gave me something over seven hundred and fifty kilometres of driving. I had time on my hands and took things slowly.
I gave myself an hour's sleep, somewhere well south of Gap, and then drove on to Gap for an early breakfast, coffee laced with cognac and a couple of crisp croissants spread with apricot conserve. Fortified, I left Gap and drove up and over the Col Bayard, thinking that if I had a troubled life, the chevalier had had the edge on me, every head of his family for two centuries having fallen in battle, and he himself likewise in the end — to an arquebus ball, whatever that was. From the top of the pass I rolled down into St Bonnet and got directions for the Chalet Bayard. It was a small, rough road, doubling back out of the village along the course of the river for a while and then climbing steeply through pine and oak woods by way of a series of virages that made me keep my eyes strictly on the road and ignore the views.
It was a wooden-built chalet, fairly new, with pink-and-green shutters, and the roof barge-boards decorated with pink-and-green stripes. It stood to one side of a steep green alp, on a plateau about the size of a couple of tennis courts. There was no garden, just trees and scrub running either side of the rough drive and then spreading back from the house itself. There was a garage beyond the open space in front of the house. The doors were shut.
I parked the car close under the verandah which ran along the front of the house, and went up the steps. There were petunias and geraniums in flower-boxes all along the front of the verandah and the front door was wide open to show me a small hall of narrow, polished pine boards, the odd rug and a grandfather clock with a loud tick, announcing that it was five minutes past nine.
There was an iron bell-pull at the side of the door. I gave it a couple of jerks and way back in the house a bell clanged, loud enough to wake the dead. But it didn't wake anyone in the house. I tolled again and still no one came to answer it.
I went in. There were two doors off the hall. I tried them both. The first led down a corridor to the kitchen quarters. It was a neat bright kitchen and there were the remains of a breakfast on the table, and a ginger cat curled in a wicker chair. The cat eyed me for a moment, stood up, stretched its legs stiffly and then collapsed on to the cushion, rolled itself into a turban and ignored me.
I went back and tried the other door. It led into a large lounge which ran the full length of the far side of the house with a view across part of the alp and away beyond to the valley peaks and crests, some of them already smudged with a patchwork of snow. It was a good, big comfortable room, polished pine boards, skin rugs over them, two big settees, four large armchairs, a wide, circular table adzed out of oak and ornamented with a bowl of multicoloured dahlias that would have had Jimbo in ecstasies. In one corner was a desk, and against the false wall that made part of a staircase that ran up to an open gallery with doors along it, was a bookcase and a long sideboard with drinks, cigarette box and a pile of old newspapers. I lit a cigarette and went upstairs. There were three bedrooms, all the beds neatly made, and a bathroom. The sponge on the side of the bath was damp, and so was one of the toothbrushes and the cake of soap. I went down to the lounge and started a more detailed inspection. The bookcase was interesting. One shelf had as big a collection of cookery books as I had ever seen in half a dozen languages. If Max were the cookery expert he had something for a guest of any nationality. There were three shelves full of thrillers, French, English, American and German. It was nice to know that Max was multilingual. We wouldn't have difficulty communicating.
The desk was neat and tidy, and contained very little. It was clear that Max didn't care to leave any private papers lying around. There were some cancelled cheques, paid bills, most of them local, a list of shares and securities, some American, most French, which had been added to from time to time. He didn't seem to have sold any for there were no deletions. I didn't try to make out what they were worth. In one of the drawers was a pile of estate agents' leaflets and they were all concerned with restaurant and cafe properties as far apart as Paris and Marseilles. Another drawer held a 9-mm Browning pistol, the magazine full, and alongside it a box of ammunition and a spare magazine. I pocketed the lot as a safety precaution.
I went across to the window, admired the view, and wondered how long Max would be. My guess was that he had gone off for his morning constitutional. He was a neat orderly type, bed made before he left the house, not a speck of dust anywhere, ashtrays emptied. Neat and — normally — regular in his habits, fond of the culinary arts to the point of already owning, or contemplating owning, a restaurant or a cafe, kind to animals — the cat seemed well content — and with a nice touch of expertise in flower decoration as the bowl of dahlias testified. Turning from the window and looking at the flowers, I noticed something I had not seen before. Lying on this side of the bowl was an envelope.