He flicked his phone on and held it hovering in front of his brother and Madame Noiret.
‘The proof?’ The inspector shrugged. ‘Image dates can be tampered with by those who know the art. Yet that photograph,’ he pointed hard at the selfie with the Japanese girl which filled the screen, ‘is all the proof I need to show you were not in Paris on that Wednesday. See the museum in the background? See the posters there?’
At the entrance to the building, behind the two faces, was an array of exhibition posters.
‘The administration of French museums is most fastidious about respecting the dates of exhibitions it promotes. And this exhibition here,’ the inspector pointed closer at the screen ‘is a program I know to have concluded on Tuesday the 16th of September. It is inconceivable that the poster would still be exposed on the following day. This photograph is therefore irrefutable proof that the man in the photograph had all the time he needed to drive south in secrecy and ...’
Phillip Miller’s face was pale. The inspector took the phone from his suddenly limp hand.
‘... to use the cover of darkness to fiddle with the brakes of the car. Is that not the phrase you used just now, monsieur? Yet I made a point of not telling anyone here that this was precisely the method used by the murderer.’
Phillip Miller’s face paled to a ghostly white.
‘Salut to a brilliant piece of detective work,’ Inspector de Roque’s superior in the Bureau des Étrangers said after he had read the young Australian’s confession. ‘But tell me, how did you know with such certainty that this exhibition finished at the Pompidou last Tuesday?’
‘I didn’t,’ said de Roque. ‘It was nothing but a bluff.’
‘Casino tactics?’ The superior managed to look scandalised.
‘It was a chance I was forced to take,’ de Roque replied mildly. ‘You see, I was afraid my other evidence would be too circumstantial to flush him out.’
‘Other evidence?’ The superior thumbed quickly through de Roque’s report. ‘I saw no mention of other evidence here.’
‘In any case, it is probably gone by now. Madame Noiret strikes me as being the type who would destroy such evidence with great efficiency.’
The superior’s eyebrows shot up his forehead.
‘It was the mud on Phillip’s car,’ the inspector allowed himself a small smile. ‘Mud exactly the same colour as that on his brother’s car.’
‘So?’
‘It rained heavily here last week, remember? But only on Tuesday. If he had driven to the farm on Wednesday, his car would have been relatively clean.’
The superior poured Inspector de Roque another measure of malt whisky.
‘The Americans have an appropriate expression, do they not?’ he said as he topped his own glass.
The inspector smiled and nodded, raising his glass for a toast.
‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ he said in passably accented English.
Seventh Love
He ran his fingers through her hair.
‘You are my seventh love,’ he whispered gently. ‘My seventh heaven. The most special yet. You are my …’
His words faded to a hushed silence. She said nothing, made no sound. Not even the slightest echo of her last, sweet moan.
All he could hear was the wail of distant sirens and an eerie creak from the crumpled car body that trapped him against her. He held her tight in the metallic darkness, broken only by a flashing blue light.
He felt blood trickling down his arm. His love’s? His own? Both their blood together?
He buried his face in her hair and howled his pain.
The two police officers from the chase car jumped at the sound.
One peered cautiously into the wreck. As his torch flashed across the lone figure of a man trapped in the wreckage, he lowered his pistol with a sigh of relief. There was no immediate danger, but he would still wait for backup before going any closer to the suspect the tabloids called The Scalp Hunter.
Copyright © Garrett Russell 2020
Previous Publication
Dead Ringer Murder Under the Mangoes 1997 (CrimeWriters Queensland, Brisbane)
Hit the Silk Crime & Tide 1998 (CrimeWriters Queensland, Brisbane)
Slither Peril Under the Pandanus 1999 (CrimeWriters Queensland, Brisbane)
A Stack of Stories 2007 (Farr Books, Brisbane)
Double or Nothing Menace In the Mulga 2000 ((CrimeWriters Queensland, Brisbane)
CrimeWave 3 2000 (Burlington Press, Cambridge)
Mystery Magazine N0 452 2001 (Hayakawa, Tokyo)
Of Pearls and Swine Bad to the Bones 2002 (CrimeWriters Queensland, Brisbane)
Punch Drunk Bad to the Bones 2002 (CrimeWriters Queensland, Brisbane)
Seventh Love The Seventh Book of Sins 2008 (CrimeWriters Queensland, Brisbane)
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A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
ISBN: 978-0-6488726-2-7
COVER DESIGN: Kevin Goldwater
Murder by Sunshine Page 6