It was quite a while before Gabrielle came in, and when she did she was with a tall dark chap who I suppose you’d say was frightfully good-looking — not all that young, though, and probably putting on weight a bit if he hadn’t had his clothes cut so as to hide it. I couldn’t think to begin with how he came into the picture, but then I remembered her saying she was going to meet her husband somewhere on the way back from the Channel Islands. So obviously that’s who it was.
The headwaiter perked up like anything, because Gabrielle was looking tremendously swanny, and took them to a table outside on the terrace, with lots of flowers and candles and things. Her husband must have fixed it up in advance to make it all sort of romantic. You’d have thought he hadn’t seen her for months — he kept kissing her hand and looking into her eyes and generally being pretty soppy — but I suppose foreigners always carry on like that, specially Italians.
I could see that Gabrielle was in a bit of a tizz, though. She kept taking things out of her handbag and putting them down all over the place, as if there was something that ought to be there and wasn’t — the sort of thing you’re always doing but she usually isn’t — with a lot of hand-waving, and all the waiters gathering round trying to look helpful and sympathetic. I thought she must have lost her chequebook or her credit cards or something, but one of the waiters eventually got round to serving me and, according to him, it was her pen. I still didn’t think it was like her to make such a fuss, but I suppose it was the one she told me about that was a present from her husband, and she was in a flap in case he was miffed about it.
“Or do you suggest,” said Selena, regarding me with an expression not wholly sceptical and again refilling my teacup, “that it was because she remembered where she might have lost it?”
“But if she lost it,” said Julia, “in such dramatic circumstances as that would seem to imply, then surely she would have noticed long before she reached — where do we think all this happened?”
“It sounds to me,” said Ragwort, evidently making an unsuccessful effort to resist the sin of envy, “remarkably like Dourdan. It’s a charming little town between Paris and Chartres and during the Middle Ages was a favourite residence of the French royal family. There is an admirable hotel there named after Blanche of Castile, the mother, as of course you know, of the sainted Louis IX.”
I don’t say there’s any meal that I’d willingly go five hours in the boot of a Renault for, because actually there isn’t, but if there was, the one I had on Tuesday evening would probably be it. They gave me pancakes with bits of lobster in them and a sort of rabbit stew cooked with wine, and I started thinking that being an ace investigator wasn’t too bad after all.
There didn’t seem much risk of anyone going any further that night, so I nipped out to the reception desk and booked a room and got them to fix up a hired car for the next morning. I had to wave a lot of plastic of course — you can say what you like about credit cards leading people into debt, but they’re jolly useful when you haven’t got any money.
I wondered if I ought to leave a note for Gabrielle to warn her what was going on, but I thought there was too much risk of Wellieboots intercepting it. So I lurked around long enough to make sure she and her husband went upstairs before he did, in case he’d got any ideas about searching their room, and then I went to bed.
I couldn’t manage to get my paws on a telex machine, and if Henry says I ought to have rung Chambers first thing in the morning to say where I was, tell him that’s exactly the sort of fatheaded suggestion I’d expect him to make. Henry’s idea of first thing in the morning is nine-thirty, which is ten-thirty in France, and by then we’d all been on the road for more than an hour, heading for the south.
I was in a rather nifty little Peugeot, with the Mercedes ahead of me and Wellieboots tagging along behind in the Renault. I’d had this tremendously subtle idea of staying in front of him, so that he wouldn’t be suspicious about always seeing me in his rearview mirror. It meant he kept seeing me ahead of him of course, but you wouldn’t think of someone following you from the front, would you?
We were driving through one of those bits of France where the hills have vines growing all over them and the names on the signposts make you feel as if you’re driving through the wine list in a rather high-class restaurant. It makes you start thinking about lunch a lot sooner than you normally would — by twelve I was pretty peckish and by one I was simply ravenous. The signposts started featuring a town called Beaune, which somehow sounded as if it might have some nice restaurants, and I hoped we might be going there, but the Mercedes went straight past the turning. It stopped a bit further on, though, at a place with vineyards all round it and a roof made of pink tiles, which called itself the auberge de something or other.
It would have been a chance to have a quick word with Gabrielle before Wellieboots turned up, and afterwards I wished I’d taken it, but her husband still looked as if he was being a bit soppy, and I felt as if I’d sort of be barging in on a two’s-company situation. So I kept out of sight until they’d gone into the courtyard at the back, where the restaurant was. Then I went and sat in the bar, which looked out on the road, to watch for old Wellieboots.
The barman brought me the menu and a glass of blackcurrant juice — he was a youngish chap, slightly depressed-looking, as if he’d got problems or toothache or something — and reading the menu made me even hungrier. There was still no sign of old Wellieboots, and I couldn’t think what had happened to him — the Mercedes was parked in full view of the road, and not exactly what you’d call inconspicuous, so he’d have had to be pretty dim to miss it.
After a bit an oldish chap came along who seemed to be the owner and gave me some more blackcurrant juice and asked me what I’d like to eat. He was a red-faced, twinkly sort of chap, the kind you’d get to dress up in a red cloak and white whiskers for a Christmas party. Which would be a mistake, because if ever there was a chap who’d take any chance he got to chisel a starving two-year-old out of its last lollipop, it was this twinkly chap.
What gets me is that the two-faced old skuldug-gerer was so tremendously hospitable, saying what a privilege it was to have an English visitor and being sympathetic about my problems with lunch — viz whether to have the duck or the cassoulet with goose and how to make sure I’d got room for marrons glacé at the end.
When we started talking about what kind of wine I was going to drink, he twinkled like anything and said he’d got one or two things that were rather special and weren’t on the wine list. He wouldn’t offer them to everyone, he said, because there were some people a really fine vintage burgundy would simply be wasted on, but he could see I wasn’t one of them. So how about coming down to the cellar and tasting them, to see which I liked best?
It meant I had to stop watching out for old Wellieboots of course, but I’d more or less decided by then that he must have got lost somehow and wasn’t going to show up. I think the blackcurrant juice must have had something in it, because I’d started feeling slightly squiffy and trailing High Court judges didn’t seem as important as it had before.
So I followed him, absolutely like a lamb, along a passageway and through a trapdoor and down into the cellar.
There were a lot of bottles on racks with grilles over them and a cupboard with some glasses and a couple more bottles. He opened them both and poured me a glass from each of them, and I went on thinking how tremendously hospitable he was. Then he twinkled again and told me to take my time about tasting them while he want upstairs to see how things were going in the kitchen.