The green lion. Sophie stopped still. The words chimed like a bell, and she had a sudden, instinctive feeling that they were important. Acting on impulse, she grabbed one of the blank sheets of paper from the Professor’s desk. She did not want to take the little note, just in case the police noticed it was missing, but she could at least scribble down the words. She picked up the Professor’s fountain pen from where it was lying amidst the scattered paper, but the pen wouldn’t work.
She frowned and shook it cautiously, then tried again. The pen moved quite smoothly over the paper, as though the ink was flowing, but no words appeared on the page. She gently lifted the paper and examined it under the light: tilting it, she could see now that it was wet, but the ink appeared to be completely colourless. There was a curious smell in the air – light, sharp and fragrant.
She put down the pen, and turned to the sheaf of what she had thought was blank paper, lifting a sheet into the light and sniffing it experimentally. Sure enough, there was the same peculiar scent.
Tilly appeared in the study doorway. ‘I can’t find anything,’ she reported. ‘No drawers or cupboard opened and looted, no paintings torn out of frames – nothing that seems at all like a burglary. What about you? Did you find the safe?’
Sophie was still frowning at the Professor’s pen. ‘Come and look at this –’ she began.
But before she could even finish the sentence, there was a sound outside in the corridor. Rapid footsteps were approaching the Professor’s door. As quick as blinking, Sophie turned out the lamp, stuffing the sheaf of blank papers into the pocket of her jacket. She knew they must not be caught here, and her heart began to beat faster, but at the same time she was curious. Who could be coming to the Professor’s apartment? Surely it could not be the police at this time of the night?
She darted out of the study; Tilly was already gesturing frantically towards a hiding place she had found, behind a big bookcase in the sitting room. There came the sound of the door handle turning and then a stifled exclamation of surprise. They had not locked the door after themselves, and now whoever was coming in had not expected to find it open.
Sophie could feel Tilly’s fingers gripping her arm, but they both stood still behind the bookcase, as the door creaked quietly open. She heard one step of footsteps pad cautiously inside, and then another. She guessed from the way they walked that they were two men, and that they too did not want to be heard. The door closed softly behind them: one set of footsteps went forward into the room, murmuring something to the other in a low voice. She had been right: it was a man and, what was more, he was talking German. She couldn’t understand the words but she recognised the sound at once. Then there was another noise she recognised too, and this one made her turn cold all at once. It was the distinct metallic click of a revolver.
In the dark corner of the room, Sophie thought quickly. She did not want them to be caught by the French police, but being caught by stealthy German intruders with revolvers would be far worse. They would have to get out of here, and quickly. She held up a hand to Tilly, meaning wait, and then risked peering around the edge of the bookcase, and saw the silhouetted figures of two men examining the stain on the rug exactly as they had done themselves, though they had an electric torch that they were shining down on it.
Following almost precisely in her own footsteps, she saw the first man go towards the study and turn on the lamp in the green shade. But where was the second man? Had he followed his companion in the study, or was he looking in the Professor’s bedroom? Sophie could not be sure, but she knew they could not afford to hesitate. They’d have to grasp the opportunity to make their escape.
‘Now!’ she hissed to Tilly, and together they darted out from behind the bookcase, and made a swift dash for the door. Fast and long-legged, Tilly was there first and through the door in a minute: Sophie could hear her feet on the stairs. But before she could catch up, the second man seemed to materialise out of nowhere, flashing the electric torch in her eyes. He yelled out to his companion even as he struck out at her; dancing away, Sophie dodged the blow and the torch crashed to the floor, illuminating the man’s face for a moment with a bright beam of light, before it rolled under a table and went out.
In the dark she made another desperate leap for the door, but the man grabbed for her again. This time his fingers closed on her shoulder, wrenching her back. Yelping in pain, she reached desperately for something – anything – she could use as a weapon. Her grasping fingers closed over something cold and heavy on a side table, and without thinking twice, she grabbed it, and smashed it as hard as she could over the man’s head.
There was the splintering of glass and the slosh of liquid, and all at once everything seemed to be dark and wet. For one horrible moment, Sophie thought it was blood, but then a rich smell of fruit and spice filled the air, and she realised she had hit the man with a bottle of wine. He gasped and spluttered and scrabbled for her again blindly, but she spun away towards the door, and as she did so the cap came loose, slipping sideways, revealing the thick plait of fair hair she had tucked so carefully underneath it. As she did so, the first man had stormed out of the study towards them, the revolver clenched in his hand.
Time seemed to slow down. Sophie knew she should already be through the door and away down the stairs, but for a split second, she stopped short and stared.
She knew the man standing in front of her. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been in London, standing on the pavement outside Victoria station, wearing a grey jacket and a grey hat, staring after her cab. Ziegler’s spy – the grey man – was in Paris, and he was here, in Professor Blaxland’s apartment.
‘Sophie!’ Tilly shrieked from the stairwell.
One quick, flashing glimpse of the grey man, and then she was away again, down the stairs with Tilly beside her. She heard doors opening: the Professor’s former neighbours must have heard the crash, the yell, the running feet; there was no time to lose. They ran together, helter-skelter through the door, out into the courtyard, through the gate and out into the street again. Sophie clutched at her cap as she ran after Tilly towards the river, vanishing into the shadows like phantoms in the summer night.
PART IV
‘Papa and I have been exploring Paris – and what a delightful place it seems to be! We have seen everything – from the wonderful galleries of the Louvre to the banks of the Seine. We have dined in marvellous restaurants, walked in beautiful parks, visited theatres, and even explored the cobbled streets of Montmartre, where we sat outside the Café Monique watching all the people pass by for hours. My French is getting better every day, and I am beginning to feel that I am quite a Parisian lady. Really, I think I shall never want to leave!’
– From the diary of Alice Grayson
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Montmartre, Paris
‘There it is,’ murmured Sophie, bent over the pages of her mother’s diary. ‘The Café Monique. I knew I’d seen it in here somewhere!’
Sitting in the hotel suite over a breakfast of baguette and coffee, dressed in Miss Blaxland’s pale blue quilted satin dressing gown, she felt quite different from the girl who had run through the streets of Paris the night before. This morning, the only sign of her misadventure was her aching shoulder – still throbbing from where the grey man’s accomplice had wrenched it. Now she stretched out her arm, thinking that a hot bath would help her painful muscles, but she knew there wasn’t time for that. Seeing Ziegler’s spy at the Professor’s apartment had filled her with a new urgency. ‘I’ll go to Montmartre this morning,’ she declared.
But she might as well have spoken to the empty air. Tilly was paying her no attention whatsoever. Instead, she was carefully scrutinising the papers that Sophie had taken from the Professor’s apartment. Now she pushed the jam and butter aside, and spread the papers out on the table. ‘Well, it’s perfectly obvious what this is,’ she announced. ‘It’s invisible ink.’
‘Invisible ink ?’ repeated Sophie in astoni
shment.
‘You said that the Professor’s pen was full of a transparent liquid. I think it must have been an invisible ink he was using to keep his notes secret.’ Tilly lifted a sheet of paper and sniffed thoughtfully. ‘It’s sweet-ish and almost floral, like a perfume. I wonder what he could have used?’
‘I didn’t know such a thing as invisible ink existed,’ said Sophie in surprise.
‘It was the Ancient Greeks who first invented it,’ Tilly recalled. ‘They used a liquid made from the leaves of a particular plant. It looked colourless, but when you sprinkled ashes over the paper, the message would appear. There was another kind of ink they used too, made of crushed nuts. In that case, they used ferrous sulphate to reveal the message.’
‘Do you think the Professor might have used one of those inks?’ asked Sophie, remembering the book on Ancient Greek she’d seen in his office. ‘He probably knew all about them, given that his specialism was ancient languages.’
‘It’s certainly possible,’ said Tilly, without taking her eyes from the paper, which she was studying so closely it was barely an inch from the end of her nose. ‘But there are all kind of things it could be. I’ll need to test it to know for sure. It’s a shame you didn’t get the pen. It’d be much easier if there was a proper sample of the ink I could work with.’
‘I barely got out with the papers,’ said Sophie ruefully, rubbing her painful shoulder again.
Tilly got to her feet. ‘Well, I’m going to get to work,’ she said. ‘If I can work out what the ink was that the Professor used, we might be able to reveal the message, and see what the papers say.’ She began rummaging in the trunk for books, looking as though she was rather enjoying herself. ‘Why don’t you … er … go out and investigate something?’
Sophie grinned and took the hint. Half an hour later, wearing one of Miss Blaxland’s morning dresses, she was driving through the city once more, heading towards the eighteenth arrondissement. Leaving the grand tree-lined boulevards behind, the motor chugged heavily up narrow cobbled streets: past bakeries and bookshops, past a cheese shop and a parfumerie, its window glittering with tempting little glass bottles.
As they went, Sophie found her thoughts drifting back towards the grey man. One thing was certain, she thought: he and his companion had been as surprised to find them at the Professor’s apartment as she herself had been to see him. Could he have recognised her as the girl with the parasol at Victoria station? She could not be absolutely sure, but she thought not. If only her cap hadn’t slipped loose like that, and if only Tilly hadn’t called out her name! She hoped that in the chaos they would not have heard her, and even if they had, they would surely not associate a girl dressed in boy’s clothes named ‘Sophie’ with Miss Celia Blaxland, resident at the Grand Continental Hotel.
They drove along a steep little street snaking up the hill, past a confectioner’s with a gilded sign advertising CHOCOLATS, BON-BONS, CARAMELS, past a woman pushing a bicycle, past a pomme-frites seller, and onwards, towards the great dome of the Sacré Coeur basilica on the horizon, very white against a bright blue sky. The Chief had suspected that their enemies might be responsible for the Professor’s death, she remembered. After seeing Ziegler’s spy at the Professor’s apartment, she felt sure that he had been right. The motor stopped to let a tumult of schoolchildren cross the road, calling out to each other like a flock of noisy birds. If you do find evidence that Blaxland was murdered, you will likely be in danger … you must leave Paris, she remembered the Chief saying. But she had no definite evidence at all, did she? All she had was the rising suspicion that Ziegler’s men must be behind the Professor’s death, for why else would they have been creeping about secretly in his apartment?
The question was why Ziegler would want the Professor dead, she thought. Did he know the Professor was working for the Secret Service Bureau? That alone could not be enough reason to murder him, could it? And if the grey man and his companion had been responsible for the Professor’s death, why would they return to the scene of the crime? To try to cover their tracks, or perhaps to find something important that had been left behind? Perhaps they had been after the secret papers that Sophie had taken and given to Tilly to decipher? The thought of it made her shiver in spite of the pleasant sunshine.
The chauffeur had pulled to a halt beside the funicular railway that went up to Montmartre. She asked him to wait, and then joined the crowd of waiting people; but as the little train made its slow way up the hill, she found herself casting suspicious and uncertain glances over her shoulder at the people standing around her.
Dr Bernard had said Montmartre was ‘bohemian’ and Sophie had heard her art student friends say it was the artists’ quarter of Paris – home to painters, writers, musicians and poets. Her mother had described it in her diary as something like a country village on the edge of the city, but although Sophie could see traces of the place she had described – the windmills and vineyards – she soon realised it must have changed a great deal since her mother’s visit. Now it seemed to be a haunt for tourists, crowded with little restaurants, and ateliers where paintings of Paris scenes were available for sale. It was true that there were artists at work here and there on the narrow streets, but they looked more like enthusiastic amateurs with paintboxes than the dashing, unconventional painters Sophie had imagined. She passed two English ladies in straw hats, seated on camp-stools with sketchbooks in their laps, who would not have been in the least bit out of place in the Sinclair’s Ladies’ Lounge. A little further on, a tour group were exclaiming over the picturesque sight of a pink-and-white house thick with vines, whilst street-sellers offered photographs of famous Paris landmarks.
She looked at each café carefully as she walked, but saw no sign of the Café Monique anywhere. The day was growing warmer now, and with it Montmartre seemed to be coming slowly into life. She could hear a door slamming, the rattle of a bucket, the twittering of birds in a treetop, and the distant trill of someone singing. There was a delicious smell of onion soup and hot coffee. She went on, past a merchant pushing a barrow, past a curious little bric-a-brac shop and then a tiny art gallery, exhibiting bold paintings in shades of cobalt and violet, turquoise and vermillion, yellow and crimson pink. It was all so different from London, she thought. Even the air felt different: clear and golden and very warm on her back as she walked on, leaving the crowds behind her.
In a quiet square lined with chestnut trees, an old woman rested on a green bench, whilst sparrows pecked in the dirt at her feet. A man in a felt hat came up the hill towards her, leading a donkey: Sophie paused to ask him, ‘Où est la Café Monique, s’il vous plaît?’ and was rewarded by a vague gesture of a hand along another winding cobbled street.
Following it, she came at last to an old-fashioned house with peeling shutters, a wooden fence and a sun-bleached green awning. A few rustic tables had been arranged outside, under the shade of a tree. She looked around her, feeling rather surprised. She’d expected somewhere lively, where there would be lots of people to watch – or even to ask about the Professor – but this place seemed deserted, although the door stood open, and she could make out the words Café Monique painted in crude lettering on a whitewashed wall. Was this really the place that her mother had written about sitting outside, ‘watching all the people’, and the place that the urbane Professor had spent so much of his time?
Just then, a man came out of the door of the café, whistling a little tune. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, and a checked cloth was thrown over his shoulder, ready to polish glasses and wipe plates. ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ he said cheerfully to Sophie. ‘Asseyez-vous, s’il vous plaît. Qu’est-ce que vous voulez? Un café? Une tisane? ’
Unsure of quite what to do, Sophie took a seat in the dappled shade and ordered a lemonade. It felt very strange to be sitting there, all by herself in such a quiet corner of Paris, with no one else there but a black cat walking along a sun-warmed wall, swishing its long tail.
The waiter must
have noticed her staring around her curiously. ‘It is quiet now, but it will be busy later,’ he said with a knowing smile, as he presented her lemonade with a flourish. ‘You come back, you will see. All the artists come here. And the writers. We are famous for it!’ He puffed out his chest with pride. ‘M. Matisse. M. Picasso. Mme Laurencin. M. Modigliani. All of them come to Café Monique!’
Seeing an opportunity, Sophie spoke up: ‘Did you know an Englishman who used to come here?’ she asked him, as she dropped a few centimes into the saucer to pay the bill. ‘A Professor at the Sorbonne – Professor Blaxland?’
The waiter’s cheerful face suddenly fell. ‘Ah, the Professor, but of course! It was terrible, truly terrible, what happened to him. The times that we live in! He was a friend of yours, mademoiselle ?’
‘A relative,’ she explained.
Peril in Paris (Taylor and Rose Secret Agents) Page 11