Night Train to Paris

by Fliss Chester

  ‘Did Rose not think it odd that Simone was home from work?’ Magda had recovered her voice, though was still huddled on the ground in the arms of her husband.

  Fen nodded and looked back at Simone. ‘Possibly, though I don’t think she suspected Simone at all. Your employer, on the other hand….’ Fen paused, and rubbed her temples to help her think.

  ‘What is it? James asked.

  ‘Just something Christian said about you, Simone, that you were always “popping out to see James”, though it wasn’t so much James as murder you had on your mind those times, wasn’t it? Anyway, you had the perfect opportunity to get as close as you needed to drive that paintbrush through Rose’s throat without her even suspecting, right up until it was far too late.’

  Simone just snorted in a derisory way and Fen felt that, far from denying the murder, she was almost itching to add in her own details.

  Fen carried on while the stage was hers. ‘You then hid in your bedroom, hoping that the visitor would go away, and luckily for you Joseph barely poked his nose in.’

  ‘I thought I’d heard voices… I should have searched the apartment,’ Joseph lamented but was quickly and kindly shushed by his wife. They were hugging each other tightly, Joseph’s hand caressing the side of her neck where Simone had tried to strangle her.

  ‘No one could blame you for leaving in a hurry,’ Fen assured him, then turned once again to Simone. ‘And to make it look like a burglary, you stole some of the paintings… And no doubt if we search your room now, we might find Rose’s jewels too, do you think? I’m betting those pearl earrings you were wearing the other night weren’t actually a gift.’

  Simone closed her eyes and was breathing heavily through her nose, like a racehorse at the gate. James released his grip a bit and merely held her now by the wrists. He looked at her as he posed the question. ‘Sold some of them, the paintings I mean, for a quick buck? Fen, what did the man at the kiosk say when you asked him about the Delance?’

  ‘He was cagey about where it had come from all right… “it was a young man, I think, but it was hard to see”.’ Fen thought back. ‘Simone, you said yourself you use fashion like a disguise. And I know how nifty you are with a needle and thread… James, your missing shirt!’

  ‘Dear Lord, was that you, Simone?’

  ‘Paired with some old trousers and a cap from Rose’s portrait props, you could pass as a young man, just about.’ Fen squinted at Simone.

  ‘It was easy enough to find a cap and trousers. I missed that nice string of pearls you found down the side of that saggy old armchair though.’ Simone raised one eyebrow in defiance.

  James turned his back and Fen didn’t want to assume, but she thought she might have seen him wipe his face with his sleeve. Simone currently had a lot to answer for and Fen carried on with the interrogation.

  ‘Henri then told you to murder Gervais, didn’t he?’

  ‘He said it would be the last one,’ she wore the expression of an employee forced to do a double shift. ‘And then he would let me be.’

  ‘What was his aim? Were we right in thinking he’d stolen the paintings?’

  ‘Yes,’ Simone confirmed. ‘He was never as passionate about returning all the stolen artwork to the Jewish families as Rose was. He just hated to see such beautiful pieces be taken away and used as nothing more than decor by plump German hausfraus. He hated that they cared nothing about the art and only wanted to know the value. He sold some and planned on keeping others, a retirement gift to himself, I suppose.’ She laughed. It was a hollow sound.

  ‘And Gervais had worked out that something was amiss?’ Fen asked her.

  ‘Yes, he’d noticed the manifests were different. More paintings going to the auction house than there should be. He’d been blackmailing them both, but once Rose was dead, he had approached Henri with a deal. One hundred thousand francs or he’d—’

  ‘Go to the authorities?’ Fen interrupted.

  ‘No, don’t make me laugh,’ Simone smirked. ‘Henri is the authorities. Or as good as, with his connections. No, Gervais threatened something much worse. The Mob.’

  ‘Blimey,’ Fen took a step back and looked at Simone.

  ‘I was sent to kill him as—’

  ‘As you’d learnt to shoot in the Resistance?’ Fen finished her sentence for her.

  ‘Henri had recruited me back in the early years of the war. I was trained, among other women like Catherine, but in the end, I was used more as a lure to fool Nazi officers.’

  ‘I know, you told me,’ Fen bit her lip as she thought. ‘And I bet Gervais would have been more than happy to see you that night in his garage.’

  ‘I left you just before ten o’clock,’ James said, looking at the beautiful young model, still held loosely by her wrists.

  ‘And I wasn’t back from the Louvre party until almost midnight, leaving Henri there, so he couldn’t have done it.’ Fen tutted to herself, then added, ‘Plenty of time for you to commit a murder, though.’

  ‘The hard part was getting lover boy here to leave me alone that night. I did quite a good job, though, I think, of putting you off. “James, you do love me, don’t you?” “James, I think we should marry”.’ Simone pouted at James in the same way she must have done that night. He looked disgusted and, if he wasn’t holding her captive, Fen was sure he would rather have been anywhere else but in her presence. Poor James, she thought, the ultimate lion tamer.

  The sound of sirens filled the air and Fen knew her time for questioning Simone would soon be gone. Antoine Arnault and Michel Lazard had made it out of the gallery now, both looking pale and obviously in shock. Fen thought it might only be minutes before her own adrenalin gave out and she too would start taking on board what they’d all witnessed in that room.

  ‘Just one more question, Simone?’ Fen asked. ‘Before they take you away.’

  Simone looked at her and shrugged.

  ‘Was it worth it, just for the apartment?’

  ‘You think I only killed for that place? Once married, I would be in houses far more splendid.’ She nodded towards James. ‘But what Henri knew about me could have ruined any chance I had of becoming a rich man’s wife. More than that, he could have had me executed.’

  ‘For being a traitor… Surely if he knew you were The Chameleon, he would have turned you in long ago.’

  ‘But he did know. He knew all too well. And he kept that knowledge, curated it like one of his paintings, ready to use when he needed it. He knew what lengths I’d gone to during the war to catch those SS officers. Sometimes they took more than just a wink to get down an alleyway. He said to me, “No English gentleman will marry a French slut” and said he would tell James, or Frederick, or John, or Jeremy…’

  James shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t have mattered.’ His voice was low and barely audible. ‘But betraying your friends and murdering Rose, that is unforgivable.’

  Simone didn’t have the chance to reply as the gendarmes reached them and after a quick discussion with the stricken Magda and protective Joseph picked up the young model under the armpits and carried her back down the passageway to the waiting motor.

  Forty-Five

  Fen poured the steaming tea from the pot and passed the teacups around. Magda was sitting elegantly on the chaise longue in Rose’s apartment and Joseph was next to her, Magda’s bandaged leg raised up on his lap. She’d taken quite a tumble when she’d tripped up Simone and it had done her ankle in something rotten. James, who had been exceedingly downcast since Simone had been revealed as the murderer, sat on the saggiest of the armchairs, with Tipper curled up on his lap, nibbling at his sleeve.

  Fen sat down opposite him on the other chair and blew over her cup. ‘Reverted to the mint concoction, I’m afraid. It seems you might be inheriting this place with the cupboards rather bare.’

  ‘We are just grateful to Rose, and Monsieur Blanquer, for gifting it to us,’ Joseph said, as he rubbed his wife’s back.

  The four of them were
gathered in the studio, having paid their respects at Rose’s grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery. She had been buried close to the Jewish graves, a nod to the families that she had died trying to help.

  A few days before the funeral, Monsieur Blanquer, Rose’s solicitor, had come to the apartment and interpreted her will, now that the main beneficiary, Henri Renaud, was dead.

  ‘She had willed it to Henri, in its entirety, but she had acknowledged that both of them might have been exec…cuted by the Nazis if they had been c…caught.’ Blanquer had explained to them all over a cup of proper tea, made with the last few leaves Fen had foraged in the tea caddy. ‘But she made provision that in the event of Henri pre-deceasing her – and I feel that his recent death c…can be treated in that manner legally – that her estate should go towards helping those families who have lost everything. As her solicitor, I am happy to will the Bernheims the apartment and then we will decide later how the c…contents should be sold to provide monies for other families on hard times.’

  The news had been greeted with tears of joy from Magda, and a very warm handshake from Joseph. Even James had smiled, his first for a few days. Fen couldn’t have been happier with the solicitor’s news and had thanked him profusely as she’d shown him out.

  And so now the four of them were taking tea again, even if it was of the mint variety, and deciding how next to proceed.

  ‘We can’t thank you enough, Fenella,’ Magda said, as she held her teacup up to her lips.

  ‘I can’t accept your gratitude, Magda, I feel like I’ve failed you all, and Rose in particular.’

  ‘How so?’ Magda asked and Joseph raised a questioning eyebrow too. ‘You got her justice and even found two of Joseph’s parents’ paintings for us.’

  Fen nodded. She had had the idea that Lazard, being the man Henri had been meeting that night she’d followed him, might have been the fence Henri had used to sell some of the paintings he had stolen. Lazard had accepted Fen’s deal of her silence about his part in illegally selling paintings in exchange for the whereabouts of the stolen art. He handed five paintings over to her, having not had a chance to find buyers yet. They had been discovered, oddly enough, in the hotel room next door to James’s and he had helped her carry them back to the apartment, just a few blocks away.

  The problem was, apart from the Gainsborough and a Cezanne, which Fen knew belonged to the Bernheims, she couldn’t work out who the other pictures belonged to. There was a sketch by Matisse, a study of boats in the water by Signac and even a small bronze figurine by Rodin. She felt very uneasy about sitting on these valuable artworks and just wished that she could work out to whom they belonged.

  Fen looked over to where the two other brown paper–wrapped canvases were, and the small statuette. ‘How can we decipher those codes on them if we don’t know how Rose did it?’

  ‘We can ask around the community,’ Magda ventured, ‘we may find that families have proof from old photographs that they owned those lovely pieces.’

  ‘We can, and I can’t think of better people than you two to do that,’ Fen agreed. ‘But what about Rose’s mission? She wanted all of the art restored. Without her code, we can’t even start to carry on her work, let along finish it for her. Those American chaps are finding more hidey-holes full of stolen art all the time, we have to be able to prove who they belong to.’

  ‘Where would she have hidden it?’ James asked, and Fen looked over to him, glad he was at least taking part in the conversation. She had been so worried about him after Simone was arrested, and had tried to talk to him, but he had refused to be drawn on the matter.

  ‘Where indeed,’ Fen thought out loud. ‘The fact that she even used a code means she loved a puzzle at heart.’

  ‘Didn’t she mention something about puzzles, Fenella, when we first met?’ Magda shifted her ankle slightly and sat up more on the chaise. Fen looked at her, as if studying her face would help her conjure up the memories of that first meeting.

  ‘You’re right… what was it she said… “The Impressionists were the finest puzzlers” or something.’

  ‘Yes!’ Magda looked more animated than Fen had ever seen her. Joseph and James suddenly looked a little more alert, too. ‘Remember we all laughed about the pink splodges being a face.’

  ‘And how if you look at something differently, you can work out how it was made…’ Fen pushed herself out of the armchair and held her finger up. ‘Hold that thought…’ She went to the wall between the windows and unhooked the small Impressionist painting from where it had been rehung on the wall.

  ‘Good thing I bought it for Simone…’ James’s voice almost cracked when he mentioned her name, and Fen squeezed his shoulder as she passed by him on the way back to her chair, painting in hand.

  ‘I saw Rose once, correcting its position on the wall.’ Fen felt around the edges of the painting where the brown backing paper was loosely taped to the frame. ‘Aha…’ She picked a corner of the framer’s tape free and carefully unpeeled it from the frame and backing paper. ‘That was easy,’ she told the others, ‘perhaps a little too easy. I think this tape has been removed and restuck more than once.’

  Fen held the painting up and tipped it on its side so that anything hiding within would fall out from the untaped edge. And, sure enough, there appeared on her lap an envelope. Fen carefully put the painting down beside her chair and held the envelope up for the others to see.

  ‘Go on then, open it.’

  Fen quickly opened the envelope to find two discs of card within it.

  ‘What is it?’ Magda asked. Fen handed them to her and she passed them onto Joseph, who saw what they had seen: just two circles of brown card, one slightly smaller than the other, both with the alphabet listed around the edge of the circles.

  ‘One of the circles has the alphabet in the right order…’ Joseph noticed.

  ‘… And one will be in random order.’ James completed his sentence. He held his hand out and Joseph passed the discs to him. He looked at them and smiled to himself then told the others what he was thinking. ‘This is a classic Alberti cipher.’

  ‘Alberti?’ Fen questioned.

  ‘Leon Battista Alberti. A Renaissance architect. You should know that from your art lessons, Fen.’ He looked up at her and she was pleased to finally see something of a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Of course,’ Fen shook her head. ‘How apt for an artist to use a cipher created by another artist.’

  ‘He designed Santa Maria Novella in Florence,’ Magda offered, but Joseph shushed her gently and asked James to carry on.

  ‘He did indeed, Magda,’ James agreed with her. ‘He was also a linguist and cryptographer. We had a short cryptography lesson during our SOE training. The smaller disc sits on the larger one – easy enough to see how that works. Each letter on the disc then translates to one on the other one. The only problem is knowing where to place the smaller disc, which letter is the key.’

  ‘Well, we know that.’ Fen blurted out and got up again and fetched the Cezanne painting from where it had been sitting since the Bernheims had gratefully received it. ‘Here, look. We know that EWJGZWON spells Bernheim. So you just have to spin it around to match B on the normal alphabet circle to E on the random one.’

  James did just that and, sure enough, each letter of Bernheim matched up with the code chalked on the back of the painting.

  ‘You’ve done it!’ Joseph almost jumped up, but his wife’s leg on his lap curtailed his celebrations. Instead, he clapped his hands together, but his excitement was infectious and soon all four of them were laughing and clapping, just so pleased to have finally found the cipher and have broken the code.

  A few minutes later and they had decoded EWJWGYUG, which was chalked quite faintly on the base of the statuette, to Berenson, and then worked out that the Rensteins had owned the Matisse and Signac.

  ‘She always said the Impressionists were the best puzzlers all right,’ Fen remarked, holding the cipher in her hand. ‘But I
think Rose might have been right up there with the best puzzlers of the lot!’

  Epilogue

  Hotel de Lille, Paris

  October 1945

  Dear Kitty (and Mrs B & Dilys),

  Your letter cheered me up no end, thank you! I must say, Paris hasn’t been quite as expected, what with Rose’s murder and James being devastated by the fact that he was growing rather attached to the murderess. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m home, if an invitation stands to come and bed down with you three at the farm?

  I just wish James could have such good friends as I have to help him through his grief at the moment. Thank you for looking into his family circs for me, I had no inkling that he’d been through so much. Well, that’s not true – I had an inkling… he said he’d lost someone special when I first met him and told him about Arthur, and just recently he was so quick to throw his lot in with the first pretty girl who showed an interest. Finding out she was a cold-blooded killer – and double agent! – was a bit of blow for the poor chap. I think I’m starting to understand him now; he’s noble all right, and not just in a born-with-a-silver-spoon type way. I’ll keep an eye out for him, though; it’s what Arthur would have wanted.

  Good luck with the winter beet, ladies, and don’t let Mr Travers name a cow after me like he did last time. One Fenella the Friesian is quite enough! Oh, and Kitty, here’s one more clue to keep you busy til I see you again. This flower floated up, we hear (4). Hint: I think she’s looking down on me now and hopefully laughing through her cigarette smoke.