‘I – I couldn’t get through. Her mobile wasn’t charged.’
‘Why didn’t you go round?’
‘I don’t know. I was confused.’
‘You were in a funk. Is this what you told the police – that Malveen went to find Harry?’
‘I told them exactly what happened.’
‘And I’ll tell you, Alexis. You came round to me to save your skin. You knew you’d be number one suspect. The lover always is. You needed a cast-iron alibi and I was it. You’re an absolute shit, Alexis. A self centred, selfish little shit!’
‘Okay, smarty boots. Engage the brain. I spent ten years banged up in the City. I lived with a very demanding woman. But believe it or not, I was faithful to her. I am about to go and run a vinyard and I’m not daft, I know it won’t be a picnic. So Paris for me was supposed to be playtime. I wasn’t to know Malveen would turn up and turn it into a nightmare.’
Alexis shuddered. ‘The police say I can leave Paris. So I’m off to Corbières. And, listen, Helene, you’ve been very good to me. I won’t forget.’
Neither will I, Alexis. I certainly won’t forget.
*
Helene stormed across the busy main road and plunged into the maze of streets that led to her quartier. It was not yet nine, but these days, some people drank all day, despite Jean-Paul’s assertion that the police rounded them all up. One man, in his early thirties, had a bag of bottles at his feet and was watching her from a shop doorway.
Helene sensed menace. She, who had assured Jean-Paul that she always felt safe in Paris, now felt seriously under threat.
He was large. She had no idea if he had a weapon. She knew she should back away, cross the road, but it was blocked with traffic. Would any of them come and help her? No.
Her instincts had been right. The man made a grab for her. His complexion was like rare beef and horseradish. He smelt sour, of drink and urine.
Helene used the only weapons at her command. The fire in her eyes and the volume of her voice. She rarely raised her voice, but when she did, it was a belter. She wasn’t a redhead for nothing.
‘Laissez-moi!’ she screamed. ‘Leave me alone!’
Astounded, he let her go.
Indignant, she walked away. Fast. Thinking, well there you are. Takes one person who’s been drinking and in extremis, to recognise another. It’s what happens, that bestial recognition, as if we were two belligerent animals in a field of restive cattle.
And then – oh God. I really am turning into a Jean Rhys character.
*
Ten minutes later, she was safely in the snug. Yes, Odile had learned everything. More than most, in fact, because as it happened, the police captain was a friend.
There was a warrant out for Malveen’s arrest. The concierge had been on duty, and had let Malveen into the building. The police theory was that she had sat on the stairs, in the dark, waiting for Angeline to come up in the lift, and as Angeline opened her front door, Malveen had jumped her.
The murder weapon had not been found. But evidently, Angeline had put up one hell of a fight. She had managed to pull out a handful of Malveen’s hair. The forensic team had established a 100% DNA match with one of her dresses Alexis had been made to take to the police station.
‘If the concierge was there, you’d have thought she’d have heard screaming,’ Helene said.
‘No. After she let Malveen in, she went out.’
‘I wonder where Malveen is hiding?’ Her voice rose. ‘She’s not here at the hotel, is she?’
‘No, no. And the night she stayed here, she told me nothing. Just asked me to tint her hair. But she’ll have stolen a fast car and headed east. Somehow, she’ll end up in St. Petersburg.’
‘But she’ll be extradited.’
‘My friend in the police says there is no extradition treaty between Russia and France. And Malveen is a Russian citizen.’
‘This was murder! Cold blooded murder. Presumably they do have jails in St Petersburg?’ Gold-plated probably, from what Alexis had told her about the place.
‘Malveen’s father,’ Odile was saying, ‘is not only stinking rich. He is very senior in the Justice Department.’
And of course, Alexis had said, she was apple of Daddy’s eye.
‘It was terrible what happened,’ Odile said, ‘and one would not wish it. But Angeline, you know, she was not popular. She had no girlfriends. We did not like her, because she would not help anyone.’
‘When I fell on the floor at the laverie, she helped me.’
‘Only because you were in her way.’
‘I must get along,’ Helene said. Marc would be wondering where she was. She had to admit, it was a soothing feeling having someone to go home to. Particularly tonight.
Odile came with her to the door. ‘Last time I saw Alexis, he was just leaving here. I don’t know where Angeline was.’
I do, thought Helene. She was tottering down the fire escape.
‘We ran into that girl you call Gymslip. Looking quite different, very pretty, in a rose-printed dress. She had her son with her. About five. And afterwards, Alexis said, Cute kid, wasn’t he? Looked a bit like me.’
Would her ex-lover ever grow up, Helene wondered.
Helene was home just before Marc. He threw his bag down.
‘Train was late. Filthy carriage –‘
Filthy temper, Helene realised.
‘I should have taken the car.’
‘I didn’t know you had a car.’
‘Of course I’ve got a car! I have to travel outside Paris. How do you think I get there!’ Then he went on, a little more calmly, ‘Listen, this Angeline business. I got your message. That you found her. What happened? Was she ill?’
‘She was dead. Murdered. Knife.’
‘Christ. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. And really, I’d rather not talk about it. I mean, it was one hell of a shock, but I never really knew her.’
‘Even so, dead is dead. And you were on your own. Who did it? Have they any idea?’
Helene went to make black coffee. Marc didn’t know Angeline, he didn’t know Malveen and he’d never met Harry. Best to leave it.
‘Did your mother like her present?’ The stationery.
‘Yes. Said it was very thoughtful. And gave me a look that said, who helped you choose this?’
Why, the non-existant girlfriend, smiled Helene. ‘Did you make a speech?’
‘Sure. Not a problem. I do it at work all the time.’
‘Did your mother make a speech?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It was her BIRTHDAY. Her role was to receive.’
To Helene this brought to mind the late Queen Mother, waving graciously outside Clarence House while the junior princesses collected the bouquets and handed them to footmen.
Marc, eyeing her gulping down black coffee, demanded, ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘Just at Odile’s.’ Clearly this was not the evening to watch the Doris Day video. ‘Do you want something to eat?’
‘No. Thanks. I’m going to turn in. Busy day tomorrow. Lots to catch up on. Haven’t been in the office for two days.’
Helene heard the bedroom door close. She was in the kitchen, comparing recipes for fish pie when she heard the door open again, and sensed Marc watching her. She turned towards him, and something hit her in the face.
As the missile fell to the floor, she saw it was a pair of black Calvin Klein underpants.
‘They were in the bed!’ Marc raged. ‘They’re certainly not mine. Who have you had in there?’
Oh Alexis, can you ever be trusted, anywhere? Helene dropped the boxers in the bin. Bad move, because it attracted Marc’s attention to the bottle on the floor.
‘And you’ve got through a whole bottle of vodka. What the fuck’s been going on?’
Helene tried to edit it down. ‘It was just someone I used to know. Nothing happened. He just stayed over.’ And what’s it to you, Marc Cordier?
‘Just stayed
over? Where does he live?’
‘Saint Germain.’
‘Oh, miles away!’
‘He was stressed. His sister had just got married. He had to give her away.’
‘This sister. Is this the mad Malveen you’ve told me about?’
Helene nodded.
‘Who in God’s name would want to marry her? You may as well tell me the whole story. If you don’t, I’ll get it out of Valerie Laverie.’
Who would have heard it from Odile. Accepting there was no hiding place, Helene started from Alexis at her door, and cut to her on his sofa, hearing about the cage. She left out the bit about the mobile cross and moved on to Angeline, the warm bed, Malveen screaming off to confront her.
‘So,’ Marc was summing up, ‘Alexis and Angeline were lovers.’
‘He says she seduced him.’ Helene didn’t believe this. Obviously, Alexis had tried it on, and she hadn’t said no.
‘But why,’ Marc pursued, ‘was Malveen so jealous of her brother’s girlfriend?’
‘Oh. Well. He wasn’t – I mean, he was her half brother. And he and Malveen, they were having a thing –‘
‘For Christ’s sake!’ Marc exploded. ‘I go away for four days. I come back and there’s been a totally bonkers wedding, the bride bolted in a cage spitting dog food at her husband, then there’s a murder, everyone screwing everyone else –‘
‘I didn’t –‘
‘You were in the thick of it, Helene. Right in the fucking middle.’ Marc was still blocking the kitchen doorway. ‘All I can say is, you’ve got some bloody peculiar friends.’
‘You can talk. What about Ripping Velcro?’ The latest fanzine pics featured the four of them on the toilet.
‘That’s just an act,’ Marc insisted. ‘Did my father know you were hanging out with these desperate characters?’
‘Your father didn’t own me.’
‘He paid all your bills.’
This was getting nasty. ‘He was my friend. I could talk to him about anything. Anything. Now get out of my way. I’m going to bed.’
With the light out, Helene lay extremely still. You’ll have to watch it, she told herself. You haven’t signed a contract for this apartment, any more than you did with Jean-Paul. Marc could kick you out.
She felt herself boiling up again. Well if he does, so what? I’ll go and stay at Odile’s. Everyone else does.
In the morning, she heard a clunk on her bedside table. Kept her eyes shut.
‘Brought you some tea,’ Marc’s voice was a rasp. ‘Sorry about last night. Think I’m coming down with something. Throat like sandpaper.’
Not surprising, Helene considered, the way you were ranting on. She had never seen him like that before.
She sat up. He was dressed, ready for work. She gave him some soluble aspirin. ‘Keep gargling. You might be lucky.’
He wasn’t. It developed into flu. Against her advice, he staggered off to work every day, returning to be dosed up with honey, hot toddies and paracetamol. But by Thursday night it had gone to his chest. He was coughing all night. To Helene, back on the sofa, he sounded like a herd of hippos.
‘You are not going to work,’ she instructed him, first thing. ‘I’m going to find some medicine. If it doesn’t work, we’ll get you to a doctor.’
The pharmacie wasn’t open yet. But Valerie Laverie was. The dog was gay in a pink summer bow.
‘Is it a dry cough or a coughing- up cough?’ Valerie mimed it.
‘Coughing- up,’ Helene mimed back. ‘Horrible.’
Valerie disappeared into the back of the laundry and came back with the cough mixture. ‘It doesn’t taste nice. But it will work.’
Back at the apartment, Helene fed Marc the required two teaspoonfuls, and while he was croaking ugh, ugh, she pulled what she trusted would be her master stroke.
‘We’re going to get some of this on you.’
‘What is it?’ he said weakly.
‘Vick. Menthol. My sister sent it. She’s convinced I can’t get anything in France except Chanel bath gel.’
As she spoke, Helene was rapidly unbuttoning the top of his Swiss cotton pyjamas. He was too exhausted to protest. She was able to dollop on the Vick and work it, through the auburn fur, into his chest. At last, she was getting to touch him.
She could have stayed there, sitting on the bed, caressing him, all morning. She wondered what would happen if she caressed him somewhere else. But she forced herself to get up and open his cupboard.
‘I should take that top off,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘The Vick might stain. I’ll find you a T-shirt.’
Then she went to the kitchen and made the very best medicine. Chicken soup.
*
Any progress? Signalled Elodie’s eyes at the Sunday lunch table.
Helene eased the neck of her puff-sleeved red top that had already received a disapproving sniff from her guest. Too girly! Now Helene semaphored that she was cheesed off. The chicken soup and Valerie’s cough mixture had worked so well that Helene had not had the opportunity to repeat her star performance with the Vick. Marc had slept most of Friday and Saturday, emerging from the shower-room once more in his pyjamas. Helene was back to square one.
Tucking into the fish pie, Elodie pronounced it very good.
‘I did the spuds,’ Marc said.
‘It’s a Delia,’ Helene said.
Elodie frowned. ‘A what?’
‘Elodie,’ laughed Helene, ‘you must be the last person on the planet who doesn’t know that Delia Smith taught the British nation how to cook.’
‘Oh no, you are quite wrong, mon ange. The British chef de cuisine was a woman called Mrs Beeton.’
‘Yes, but her food used to involve fourteen eggs and a jugged hare. In fact, one of her recipes starts off, First catch your hare. Delia tells you what to do with leftovers.’
Elodie looked offended. ‘Oh you English! A leftover is something called a rissole, non?’
After the fish pie, the conversation turned once again to the question of A Job for Helene. There was more urgency now, of course, following the tragedy of Angeline.
Aware that she must not continue to rubbish all the suggestions Marc and Elodie had put up through the weeks, Helene tried a pre-emptive strike. ‘What I thought was to go and give Odile a hand. Changing the sheets and cleaning the room. Before the guests arrive. That way, I wouldn’t have to meet them and I wouldn’t have to be nice to them.’
‘No, Helene,’ said Marc. ‘I have a better idea.’
He saw her smile. ‘Anything amusing in that?’
She finished her wine. She couldn’t tell him that ‘I have a better idea,’ was exactly what Jean-Paul had said, when she was reluctantly proposing to go to East Anglia for Christmas, and he then invited her to Paris.
Marc leaned forward. ‘You could come and work for me.’
Helene even knew the French for what he did. Cabinet d’Etudes.
‘Market research,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I could be very helpful. My only experience is when you’re in the high street and there’s a woman with a clipboard asking if you’d come and answer questions about linoleum. You tell her you don’t know anything about lino and she says but at the end you get a free box of chocolates, so you go with her, tell a load of lies and when you get home you find the chocolates taste of boiled wool.’
‘Okay,’ laughed Marc, ‘let me tell you. Things have moved on since then.’
Chapter Fifteen
Tippety-tup, tuppety-tup went Helene in her black patent high-heels, past the exclusive shops in the avenue Montaigne.
‘Bonjour, Madame,’ said the buffalo-sized security man, his massive hands grappling with the door.
‘Good afternoon,’ Helene said in frosty English, thrusting at him her pink parasol. ‘Deal with that, would you? Thank you so much.’
Then she glided in, and looked around, getting her bearings.
Helene was wearing her black silk Lanvin suit, Jean-Paul’s pearls and her
Hermes scarf knotted round her Chanel bag. Anywhere else in Paris, she would have felt confidently the epitome of chic. Here, she just felt a right prat.
The shop was not called a shop. It was a Concept Fashion Hub. Clothes were not called clothes. They were ‘pieces.’ These pieces were not put on hangers and hung on rails. No, they were ‘exhibited’, thrown over perspex chairs or spread on the floor, as if it were a magazine fashion shoot.
Suddenly, an assistant pounced, with her colleague effecting a pincer movement at the door, cutting off the retreat. The girls were wearing white kimonos, obviously by some Japanese designer so trendy only four people in the world had ever heard of him. The ‘pieces’ were cleverly tailored to emphasise the slender proportions of the girls. Helene hated both of the girls on sight. They were so twiglike, they made the real, the gorgeous Twiggy look gross.
One of them had her hair in a snood. The other had a braid wrapped high on her forehead. How on earth did they do it? What if they were like Gymslip, with a child to get home from school at lunchtime and domestic shopping to do? Then there was the metro, the jostling crowds, pushing commuters, skateboarders, the wind. Yet here these girls were, absolutely immaculate.
As Helene began to explain what she wanted, Snood struck a dancer’s pose. Palms up and turned out legs. Helene felt a welcome spurt of superiority a she observed the girl’s shoes. White pumps with navy toes. The failsafe footwear for women with big feet.
‘So to go with the lime green skirt,’ Helene went on, ‘I thought I’d team it with this.’
From her bag she produced a hideous orange T-shirt, bought that morning.
‘You want,’ enquired Braid, ‘you want to put orange with lime green?’
‘Oh yes! I want the total, edgy, fashion experience!’
By now, Helene was getting into her stride. Secure enough to take in more of her surroundings. On the wall was a surreal clock, with the numbers in the wrong places and upside down. There was a rocking horse – only it wasn’t a horse, it was a lamb. Quite sweet, Helene thought. Then – she couldn’t believe it – on a marble plinth sat a glass case containing Jean-Paul’s owl. That bloody owl!
The Price of Love Page 19