“What is that?”
Eulalie glanced at the box. “Captain Chocko’s Fudgemallow Delight.”
“You’re not going to eat it?”
“Of course I’m going to eat it. What else would I do with it? It’s delicious and nutritious. Besides, it’s fortified with nine vitamins and iron.”
She tapped the box to show him.
“Eulalie,” he said earnestly. “That’s meaningless. That is just a slogan invented by marketers to create the illusion that this is a health food. Basically, it’s pure sugar. I don’t think you should eat it.”
Eulalie stopped pouring when the cereal in her bowl had reached iceberg proportions. Then she tipped creamy milk over it.
“It’s delicious,” she repeated. “You should try some.”
He repressed a shudder.
“Just coffee for me, thanks. I’ll stop off at Roots and Shoots on my way into the station for fruit salad and an omelet.”
“Your loss.”
“Tell me what happened while I was gone. You mentioned a hypnotist in your texts?”
Eulalie sat opposite him.
“That’s right. Her name is Dr. Hassanda Abo. Mrs. Belfast put me onto her. Apparently, she used to consult to the police department before your charming predecessor fired her.”
“There was someone by that name on our books. The previous chief cancelled her contract because he considered her services to be unnecessary.”
“The previous chief didn’t know what he was talking about. According to Mrs. B. she’s an excellent trauma counsellor, and a whizz at preparing witnesses for trial. I was very impressed with her. You’d be lucky if you could get her to come back. She’d be an asset to the department.”
Chief Macgregor took out his phone and made a note of the recommendation. She knew he would follow it up.
As the level of coffee in the pot sank lower, Eulalie told him what had happened over the past two days.
He listened as he always did, quietly and with full attention. Every now and then, a flicker of puzzlement would cross his face. Eulalie knew this was because he was struggling to understand the motivation behind a particular action or the emotional nuances at play. But he didn’t interrupt.
“You say he had a muscular build and smelled of recent sweat?”
Eulalie nodded.
“That lends weight to his being an athlete rather than an administrator.”
“Or he could have picked the shirt up in a charity shop,” she said.
“We have to play the odds. At the moment they are pointing towards some kind of Olympic connection. When are you and your grandmother going to visit the offices of the committee?”
“This morning. We want to go during office hours. Not too early and not too late, so as not to draw attention to ourselves. I don’t want this guy knowing we’re on his trail just yet.”
“If he still lives on Prince William Island, he will know by now that we found your mother’s body. It has been all over the media. If he lives overseas, he probably won’t. It wasn’t a big enough story to move beyond the island.”
“In the digital age, all news is international news. But I know what you mean. Unless he is actively monitoring Prince William Island news, he wouldn’t know about it.”
Chief Macgregor rinsed his coffee mug and put it in the dishwasher.
“Thanks for coffee. I have a full day of meetings. The governor wants a report-back on my time with the Mauritian and Madagascan authorities. I’ll check my texts regularly in case you need me. If it’s an emergency, tell my secretary to come in and interrupt me.”
“Secretary? Have you replaced Mrs. Belfast at last?”
“No, we’re still using temps. This week her name is Penny.”
He was halfway out the door when she stopped him.
“Hey, you forgot something.”
“What?”
“My goodbye kiss.”
A familiar look of bafflement came over his face.
“Is that what we do now? Is that the convention?”
“It is. No leaving without a goodbye kiss.”
He walked back to the kitchen and bent solemnly to kiss her.
“What happens if kissing you makes me want to go back to bed with you?” he asked. “That’s not a professional start to the day.”
Eulalie patted his cheek. “Occupational hazard.”
An hour later, she was still smiling.
Eulalie and Mrs. Belfast were in a cab on their way to Angel’s Place. Mrs. Belfast had expressed herself more than willing to ride on the back of the Vespa, but Eulalie vetoed this idea and called a cab instead.
The taxi pulled up outside Angel’s Place and Angel came running out. She was dressed to the nines in a linen skirt suit in shades of aqua, with a coordinating purse and navy heels. She was wearing her pearls, so she meant business. She only put them on when she wanted to give her confidence a boost.
“You look like a lady who lunches,” said Eulalie.
Angel kissed her and Mrs. Belfast on both cheeks. “And so I am, chérie. I look like the kind of person that receptionists find it difficult to say no to.”
“Are we likely to be dealing with a receptionist? I thought the place was unoccupied between seasons.”
“I’ve been phoning around. It seems the governor’s office recently approved funding to keep the Olympic committee going throughout the off season. It’s just one receptionist and an administrator, but it means the place won’t be empty.”
Eulalie slid the partition between the driver’s section and the passenger section closed.
“What reason did you give for asking about committee matters now? Remember, the whole idea was not to tip this guy off.”
“Naturellement, I know this, ma petite. I said I’d had a good idea for fund-raising for the next Olympic season and wanted to get a head start on implementing it. They couldn’t have been more delighted.”
Mrs. Belfast turned the beam of her cats-eye glasses onto Angel. “But now you will have to come up with a real fundraising project, dear.”
“I know.” Angel’s shrug was Gallic. “It is not a problem. I have already thought of three ideas. Merely, I need to choose the best one.”
The cab took them to a Dockside address. The building was set well back from the harbor and wasn’t tall enough to command a striking view. It was typical of the quasi-governmental buildings of Prince William Island – functional, but low-rent.
“They’re on the second floor.” Angel waited as Eulalie paid the cabbie. “There is no elevator, so we will get to stretch our legs.”
The offices were exactly as pokey as the exterior of the building promised.
“I know it’s not much, but it is palatial compared to what we had before, which was little more than a prefabricated hut.”
Up on the second floor, Angel’s outfit and air of authority commanded instant respect from the receptionist.
“May I offer you some tea or coffee, Ms. de La Cour? Or for your associates?”
“Coffee, ladies?” asked Angel.
Eulalie and Mrs. Belfast shook their heads.
“We’re okay for now, Peggy, but we will let you know if we change our minds.”
Peggy introduced them to the office administrator – a man by the name of Olivier.
“It’s nice to have some life around here,” he said. “Peggy and I have had only each other to look at since the beginning of the year. We think it’s great that you’re getting a head start on funding initiatives for the next Games. How can we help? What do you need access to?”
Angel graciously permitted them to assist her.
“At this stage, we are doing contextual research into Sydney, Athens, and London. We want to look at which funding initiatives worked in those years and which didn’t. We are particularly interested in the delegations that attended the games from Prince William Island.”
Olivier nodded vigorously. “Would you prefer hard copies or soft copies of the files?”
“Hard copies, please. My granddaughter here will work on the Sydney file. Mrs. Belfast will work on Athens, and I will concentrate on London.”
“I’ll draw those for you right away.” He bustled off to the archive room. When he came back, the women had arranged themselves at empty desks. He handed files to each of them. Angel and Mrs. Belfast pretended to concentrate on theirs but kept sneaking glances at Eulalie who had the most interesting file – Sydney.
Trying to shut out their curiosity, Eulalie concentrated on what was in front of her.
Only five athletes had represented Prince William Island at the Sydney Olympic Games. One was a woman whose event was fencing. She had won a bronze medal in the women’s foil competition.
Eulalie put her profile to one side. It wasn’t a woman who had done this.
Then there was a man by the name of Laurent Task who was an archer. He had been eliminated in the so-called Round of Thirty-Three event. He went into the ‘possible’ pile.
An amateur boxer called Thashin Bapanda was next. He had been injured during the heats and forced to withdraw early.
Ron Coward was a decathlete who failed to win a medal at the Sydney Olympics but went on to get a bronze in the men’s decathlon in Athens.
Finally, there was Jules Chatel, who played table-tennis. He had been beaten by a South Korean opponent in the semifinals.
Archery, boxing, and the decathlon all required a great deal of upper body strength. Eulalie wasn’t about to rule out the table-tennis player either, or at least not until she had seen his photograph. Some table-tennis players had big shoulders.
She flipped through the file looking for a photograph of Thashin Bapanda. The man who had accosted her was white. She was almost sure of that. But the photograph of Bapanda was not conclusive. He was a light-skinned man of Indian descent. He was tall and well-built, and it was impossible to tell from the photograph whether he was the one.
None of the faces rang a bell. There was nothing familiar about any of them. She would have to see them in person to know whether they gave her any vibes.
Each athlete had been accompanied by his or her own coach. Their disciplines were too different to allow them to be coached by the same people. There had also been three administrators who had gone with the team to Sydney. Two were women and one was a man called Miles Strang. The only photograph of him was part of a group image. He was a small man with a narrow chest and skinny arms.
Eulalie put him in her discard pile.
She was just about to read on, when another group photograph caught her eye.
“Come and look at this,” she said to Angel and Mrs. Belfast. “Do you see what they’re wearing in this photograph?”
Chapter 11
The older women abandoned the files they were pretending to study and came over to Eulalie’s desk.
“Look,” she said. “This is a photograph taken at the airport just before the team flew to Sydney. You can see the five athletes in the middle along with two coaches and one of the administrators. What do you notice about the athletes?”
“They’re all wearing navy polo shirts with the Sydney logo on the breast pocket,” said Angel. “You think it was part of the athletes’ kit?”
“I can’t say for sure but look here.” Eulalie pointed at the photograph. “The coaches are wearing a similar polo shirt, but it clearly says ‘coach’ on it and has the five-ring Olympic logo on the pocket. The administrator has the five-ring logo on his chest, and the word ‘Staff’ on the pocket.”
“So, the shirt you saw must have belonged to an athlete.”
“Maybe.”
“What now?” asked Angel.
“I’m going to keep looking at photographs. I’ll see if I can find any instances of non-athletes wearing the shirt. I’ll also get as much information as I can on the athletes who went to Sydney that year. The male ones, that is. I think we can disregard the woman fencer.”
“What can we do, chérie?” asked Angel. “All we are doing is pretending to look at documents.”
“I need you to keep on doing that. It’s important that we don’t tip anyone off to the fact that it’s the Sydney games we’re interested in. I won’t be much longer.”
Angel and Mrs. Belfast returned reluctantly to their desks, and Eulalie plowed on.
It was clear that a number of family members and friends had gone along on the Sydney trip. The fencer, Sophie Webb, had been accompanied by her husband, Donovan Webb. Eulalie gave his photographs a hard look because he was well-built and clearly over six foot. But he had a shock of red hair and heavily freckled skin.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember the glimpse of the man’s arm that she had seen as he loomed over her. She was almost certain that she would have noticed ginger body hair, pale skin, and freckles. In her mind’s eye, the man had been almost hairless, with an even skin complexion and a slight tan.
She put Donovan Webb in the possible pile. It would be worth finding out what had happened to him since the Sydney games.
The archer, Laurent Task, had been accompanied by a fiancé who was labelled in photographs as Marie. The boxer, Thashin Bapanda, had been accompanied by both parents, who were labeled as Mr. and Mrs. Bapanda. The father was another well-built, tall man, and so earned himself a place in the possible pile. Eulalie wished she could tell from the photographs how old Thashin Bapanda was. She suspected he might have been too young to be the man who killed her mother twenty-eight years earlier.
The decathlete, Ron Coward, had been accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth, and the table tennis star, Jules Chatel had been unaccompanied. This earned him a mental flag in Eulalie’s mind, because in her experience men who killed were often loners. She had been in the business long enough to know that criminals in general, and killers in particular, came in all shapes and sizes, but the lone wolf would always attract her attention.
The Prince William Island delegation had been housed in a compound inside the Olympic Village. They seemed to have socialized together, possibly as a team-building exercise. There were only two dings against the team’s record by the end of the games. Laurent Task had been cited for drunk and disorderly conduct on the night of his defeat at the hands of the USA archery team. And Ron Coward’s wife Elizabeth had been caught shoplifting from a concession stand inside the Olympic Village. She had been released with a warning, after returning the stolen magazine.
Apart from that, the behavior of the team had been exemplary. The only medal winner that year had been Sophie Webb with her bronze for the women’s foil competition. Eulalie knew that the island’s medal count had been rising ever since, with the highest total of five medals having been attained by the team that went to the Rio games.
As someone who had never taken much interest in competitive sports, Eulalie had no idea how Olympic athletes would react to coming home without a medal to their names. Was it enough to have represented your country at such a prestigious event, or did that fade into insignificance beside the disappointment of not winning a medal? Would there have been resentment among the men against Sophie Webb for bringing home the only medal?
Eulalie’s encounter with the man in Finger Alley had taken place about eighteen months after the Sydney games. If that man had been an athlete, had he been young enough to get a second crack at the Olympics in Athens? Or had Sydney been his only hope?
Why did he pick on a fourteen-year-old girl? Had there been something about Fauve in particular that had triggered him, or had it been a crime of opportunity – with Fauve in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Eulalie realized she had reached the bottom of the file and was staring into space trying to process things in her mind. She blinked hard and picked up her phone to send a text to her grandmother.
Eulalie: Distract them.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Angel get to her feet and walk across the office to where the secretary and administrator were sitting.
“Peggy, ma chérie, I am looking
for the minutes of a committee meeting that was held three months before the Athens Olympic games. It seems to be missing from the file. I seem to remember we discussed a possible corporate donor that we were going to approach for funding. Do you think it might have been misfiled?”
Peggy pulled a face. “It probably was. The files are not in perfect order by any means.” She stood up. “I hardly know where to start looking.”
The administrator rose to his feet too. “There are boxes of unfiled papers in the archive room. We can help you look.”
They guided Angel into a back room.
As soon as they were gone, Eulalie spread out the papers from her possible pile and photographed them individually. Then she packed everything back into the file. A few minutes later, Angel came back into the room.
“Thank you so much, mes amis. I thought I would never find it.”
She was holding a piece of paper. She glanced at Eulalie, who nodded.
“I think that is all we need for today, Peggy. It is possible that we may be back in due course, but for now we are finished.”
They were ushered from the offices like honored guests.
“You could charm the birds from the trees,” Eulalie told Angel as they walked down the stairs.
Angel smiled. “It’s a gift.”
They dropped Angel back at the restaurant. Then Eulalie and Mrs. Belfast returned to the office in Bonaparte Avenue.
Eulalie had just settled down to start researching the five Sydney Olympians, and the people associated with them, when she got a text from Chief Macgregor.
Chief Macgregor: Come to Robson’s Field. We have another body.
Eulalie jumped up and slung her messenger bag across her shoulder.
“I’m heading out to Robson’s Field, Mrs. B. They’ve found another body.”
Mrs. Belfast made clucking sounds. “Oh, no. How sad. You go ahead, dear. I’ll look after the office.”
Eulalie rode her Vespa up to Lafayette Drive and turned left. As soon as she could, she took a side street down to Beach Road, which turned into the Coast Road – the main highway that spanned the east side of the island. She turned left again, to head north.
The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 2 Page 30