by Kim Wright
His hesitation on the last name struck Rayley as odd, even in this moment when so many other things were striking him as well. For the woman had turned to him and offered her gloved hand. Had murmured “Detective…” as if it were a glorious word. Why would Graham not know her last name? She was connected to important people, married to a man who apparently had strong ties to the Exposition, and besides, Graham seemed to know everyone in Paris.
Otis had finished. Eiffel stepped back to the podium for a few final remarks, the sort that even Rayley could understand. “A new France,” he had bellowed, evidently a scripted finale, for in the moment when he uttered the final word, champagne corks had gone flying from every corner of the room. Within seconds, frothing glasses were being set up on bars and waiters were stepping forward with trays of food. Someone, Rayley thought, with that parenthetical part of his mind that was still working, has gone to great expense and trouble for this evening. Someone is very determined to ensure that all goes well.
“Would you like champagne?” Graham offered.
“Champagne is always nice,” said Isabel, and Rayley nodded. Graham left them in search of glasses and, at least for the moment, the two stood alone, an island in the sea of bustling, chattering Parisians.
“We’ve met before,” she said, her voice so soft he was forced to lean in to catch the words.
“In a way. You sketched me. On the Rue Clairaut.”
“And did I capture you?”
There were many things he could have said in response to such a provocative verb, but what he chose was the truth. “I looked sad.”
She exhaled softly, turned away. She had been flirting, he realized belatedly. She had meant the remark in a sort of playful jest and he had failed to respond in kind, had crushed her gaiety as surely as rose petals beneath a man’s shoes. But no, this made no sense. She would not flirt with him. Not here, in this crowded room with her husband so close by. Not anywhere, if the truth be told. Not ever.
“I thought you were French,” he blurted out.
“You overheard me with Armand? It’s a natural enough mistake, I suppose. But I assure you, Detective, that despite all appearances I am as English as a woman can possibly be. Devonshire cream poured into a champagne flute.” She laughed. Angels and fountains and music…. those ridiculous things men say about a woman’s laughter. They all came stampeding over Rayley like a herd of bison down the Champs-Elysees. And then she was leaning toward him, her voice a whisper in his ear, her breath evident and warm and the gesture so intimate that Rayley feared for a moment his knees might give way. “So are you disappointed?”
Before he could answer the wretched Graham was back upon them, clutching three champagne classes in a most awkward fashion and bearing fresh news.
“Guess what I’ve just heard,” he said, lining the glasses carefully along a small mantle, sloshing a little as he did so.
“Neither of us is good at guessing,” Isabel said, reaching for a glass. “It’s against the detective’s training and I gave up the habit as a girl.”
“They’re letting us go up.”
Rayley had no idea what he meant but Isabel’s attention snapped to the boy in an instant. “Up the tower?”
Graham nodded. “They want to prove it’s working, at least the elevators to the base, so they’ve invited the press to tour. That way they can be sure that we shall cast the word far and wide that at sunrise on May 9 the tower will be operable.”
Isabel smiled, once again that private little catlike smile. “They wish to proclaim this even to the English?”
Graham was practically dancing. “Especially to the English. And here’s the plum, the absolute plum. We can invite guests. Will you go with me?”
“You” is a strangely ineffectual word, Rayley had often thought, one of the few failures of his most serviceable language. Because Graham’s invitation was vague, possibly directed to both him and Isabel, possibly to just one of them. But Isabel seemed less troubled by his intent, for she downed her champagne with a single broad gulp and said “I couldn’t refuse the chance to ascend the tower before anyone else, even though I’m still not entirely sure why they would allow you to bring guests.”
“It’s a privilege of the press,” Graham said. “They test everything new on us and if it breaks, they count the casualties as an acceptable loss.”
Isabel laughed.
“So you’re in?” Graham said, looking from one to the other. “Shall we meet at the base of the tower Saturday morning, 6 AM? Sorry for the appallingly early hour but we need to be out of the way before the workmen arrive. You’ll join us, won’t you, Abrams? Think of it. The chance to see all of Paris lying silent at your feet.”
“Of course he’s in,” Isabel said. “He’s with Scotland Yard and thus fears nothing. Oh, I knew I was right to come across the room to talk to the two of you. It was sheer homesickness at first, I’ll confess. A desire to speak in my natural tongue. But I think I also knew that something good would come of the chance to be again with my own kind.”
“Expatriates make strange bedfellows,” Graham said with a chuckle. “I doubt that back in London any of us would consider the other two our own kind. But here in Paris…”
“But here in Paris…” Isabel said, reaching for a second glass of champagne, the one intended for Rayley. “Here in Paris we are but three fish out of water and thus the best of friends. And now it appears we are off on a great adventure.”
“Your husband won’t mind?”
Rayley regretted the words the moment he said them. Graham looked at him with such exasperation that he all but rolled his eyes. I must seem like a stuffy old fool, Rayley thought. A prude and a Puritan, a pensioner taking his two grandchildren on holiday.
“I’m quite sure he would mind if he knew,” Isabel said. “Oh dear. Are we running low on champagne?”
“Not for long,” Graham said, turning to gallop back toward the bar. He shot Rayley a final glance that suggested he should try to do a little better this time, so Rayley swallowed his next question, which was “How on earth can a man not know if his wife leaves the house before 6 AM?”
Isabel was gazing at him quietly. “You are coming with me, aren’t you?”
A shift from “us” to “me” but no indication of what it might mean. Rayley nodded. “Might I ask you something?”
“Please do.”
“That day in the café…How did you know I was British?”
She laughed. “By the way you spoke French.”
An hour later Rayley found himself packed into an overcrowded coach with a half-dozen French policemen of varying ranks crammed in around him. Their voices were giddy from free drink, and for once he didn’t mind that he understood not a word of what they were saying. He sat in silence, going over the evening again and again in his mind. The improbability of it all.
Did he want to climb the tower? Most emphatically not.
Would he climb it?
Yes. If he could climb it with her.
The coach was slowing down on the street where his boarding house stood and Rayley made a move to push to his feet. He knew from a rather humiliating past experience that the police coach would not completely stop, but merely slow, and that he would be expected to leap out at his doorstep. He dug into his pocket for the key to the front door and his fingers grazed the latest letter from Trevor Welles, a letter that had arrived that morning and that he had not yet had the chance to read.
He pulled the envelope out, squinted at it in the irregular glow of the streetlight. Trevor had scribbled something on the back of envelope, evidently a last minute thought. The coach slowed. Rayley jumped, landing lightly on his feet, and waved goodbye at the coach from which no one waved back. He turned the envelope over in his hand, squinted at Trevor’s characteristic scrawl.
A single sentence. A question.
Did the maid scream?
CHAPTER FOUR
Paris
April 19
10:20
AM
“Look through the report very carefully,” Rayley said to his translator, a nondescript young man named Carle. “I want to know if there was anything on the maid’s hands.”
Carle obediently flipped through the papers. “It says they were clean, Sir.”
“I know. But does ‘clean’ mean that there was nothing of interest on her hands or nothing at all?”
Carle looked at him with the flat expression of a man who is not paid to be curious.
“The report says the officer who originally examined her was Denis Rubois,” Rayley said. “Go and ask him. She was in the process of helping to prepare dinner when the murderer entered, so it seems there would be some residue from her efforts. Flour or butter or blood, strings from a bean, juice from an apple. Something.”
Carle nodded and left the room, and Rayley picked up the papers on his desk, frowning once again at the line where the investigating officer had described the maid’s hands. “Propre et blanc comme la neige.” The small translation book he carried in his pocket informed him that the officer had described the maid’s hands as not merely “clean” but “clean and white as the snow.” The sort of linguistic extravagance the French were known for, but perhaps a clue as well, for his time at the Yard had taught Rayley that sometimes the absence of something could be as telling as its presence.
They were bringing the maid back in for another round of questioning this afternoon, along with the family housekeeper, and Rayley had been invited to witness the interrogation. If his hosts expected him to sit quietly in the corner, merely observing, they would be disappointed. The scribbled question on the back of Trevor’s last letter had set Rayley’s mind in motion, propelling his thoughts in the very direction Trevor had no doubt intended.
The maid didn’t scream. This much at least was clear. She did not claim to have screamed in her first interview and no one in the crowded household claimed to have heard her. There were two possible explanations for why she would have responded to the presence of an armed intruder with silence. Perhaps the girl was simply not a screamer by nature, even when frightened or startled. Some people went mute in times of crisis. Or, as Trevor’s question seemed to imply, perhaps she did not scream because she was not surprised to find the man in the kitchen.
He had his list of questions at the ready and, judging upon the speed with which Carle normally performed tasks, it would doubtless take him an hour to find Rubois and complete his humble mission. In the meantime, Rayley could return to the other pile of papers on his desk, the ones he had taken care to conceal even from the disinterested eyes of Carle. Ever since he had learned he would be ascending the Eiffel Tower, Rayley had been scouring the records room of the police station for everything he could find on the mechanics of elevators. He’d understood scarcely ten percent of what he’d read and the paltry information he had managed to glean had reassured him not a whit.
Most of the journalistic stories involving elevators were actually descriptions of the far more interesting subject of elevator accidents. Rayley had found at least a dozen newspaper accounts of the ghastly demise of the Baroness de Schack at the Grand Hotel a decade earlier. As the Baron and Baroness had been leaving their suite – which had been merely situated on the second floor, there’s the rub – the Baron had walked down the steps but the Baroness had opted to summon the elevator, which she shared with the operator and another nameless employee of the hotel. For reasons which all the newspaper articles had failed to make clear to Rayley, the elevator elected not to descend as expected, but rather to rise with an alarming speed to the top floor of the hotel, where it struck a beam and them plummeted like a stone, dropping the Baroness and her two companions to a bloody death. The accident had made all the major papers in Europe, and Rayley would daresay those in most of the world, both because of the titled status of the deceased and the particular horrors of death by cerebral congestion. The reputation of the Grand Hotel had been tarnished for years.
So it was quite clear that elevators were infernal contraptions even when merely going up and down, but Rayley could not shake off the memory of Graham’s casual remark about the additional problems facing the engineers for the Tower. These elevators had to rise diagonally. It seemed an utterly unnatural movement and the fact that the French had brought in the Americans to help accomplish the feat did nothing to settle Rayley’s nerves. He knew all too well the dangers inherent in moving a thought from English into French and back, where a man could sincerely believe himself to be ordering lamb and instead be brought a bowl of turtle soup. Engineering directions translated by someone like Carle was an appalling thought.
Speaking of which, the man abruptly appeared back at the door, causing Rayley to shuffle his papers guiltily.
“He said her hands were completely clean, Sir. As if they had just been washed.”
“And no one found that odd?”
“That a kitchen maid would wash her hands?” Carle asked, with an ironic lift of an eyebrow, as if to imply such cleanliness might be a rare thing in England but certainly not in France.
“That she would stop to wash them in the middle of a murder investigation,” Rayley said impatiently. “Never mind. I’ll save the rest of my questions for the interview.”
The maid and housekeeper were already seated in the interrogation room when Rayley arrived, perched on two wooden chairs which were positioned opposite the seven identical wooden chairs which held the officers. It gave the impression that the women were facing a firing squad, an arrangement no doubt designed to intimidate suspects into full compliance and witnesses into full disclosure. Judging by the terrified looks on the women’s faces, the stratagem would undoubtedly work yet again.
He made his way to the center of the front row and lowered himself decisively into the only empty seat, waving Carle over to the corner. Rayley’s presence on the front line of the interrogation seemed to startle the officers, just as he intended. And he further seized the advantage by asking, “Might I go first?”
Without waiting for an answer, or even the translation of his question, Rayley turned toward the housekeeper and said “I apologize for the inconvenience of having to use an interpreter, Ma’am, but I am a guest in your beautiful city and regrettably unskilled in your language.” Carle’s translation earned Rayley back a cautious nod from the woman, who had a simple country face. Something in her manner gave Rayley a flutter of optimism.
“Was the night of the murder, by chance, an evening that Mr. Martin normally had at leisure?”
Carle repeated the question. The woman looked surprised, then nodded.
“Then why was he in the kitchen?”
A peppering of French, then Carle said “The master of the house brought home a business associate for dinner unexpectedly. The lady of the house asked the cook, Mr. Martin, if he would agree to stay and prepare the meal, then take his leisure on the following evening. He agreed.”
“And if there had been no unexpected visitor, what would have happened? I suppose what I’m asking is, how would the family typically dine on the cook’s night off?”
The officer in the chair beside Rayley pointedly shifted his weight and the others began to exchange glances. Their shock at having the interrogation usurped and their mannerly restraint in the face of what seemed to be utterly trivial questions would only last so long. Rayley knew he would have to focus his thoughts very carefully.
“She says,” Carle reported, “that the family would either dine out on such an evening or the maid Jeanne Marie would prepare a light meal of stew or soup.”
“Ah, just as a family would manage the situation in London,” Rayley said, with what he hoped was a winning smile. He was torn between his need to charm the housekeeper and his need to get on with the questioning before the French had him dragged from the room. “So normally on a Monday night, Jeanne Marie would have been in the kitchen alone?”
The officer beside him stilled and gave Rayley a little sidelong glance. At least someone sees
where I’m going with this, Rayley thought, as the woman listened to Carle’s latest question and then nodded.
“And in London,” Rayley went on, “the cook’s night off is also the night that certain kitchen housekeeping tasks are performed. The most thorough scrub of the week, the cleaning of the silver, that sort of thing. Might I assume it works the same way in a Parisian home? That anyone familiar with the household routine would have expected Monday night to yield a kitchen full of silver and a young girl alone in the room?”
One of the advantages of having to wait for the circuit of translations was that Rayley had plenty of time to observe the faces of the two women in front of him. The housekeeper was maintaining her slightly quizzical frown, as if surprised to find herself in the presence of what appeared to be an English clairvoyant. But at the mention of the household silver, the maid Jeanne Marie had jerked upright in her chair and gone, Rayley observed with some satisfaction, blanc comme la neige. She was very young and remarkably ugly, but he supposed neither of these things precluded her from having a lover. Or from plotting with that lover to steal from the very household that employed her.