“A rifle. It’s in the boot of my car—if someone wants to go and fetch it.”
At the bottom of the stairs, Azaïs turned, and Anne Marie thought he was going toward the reception desk.
“I need to get home, Monsieur Azaïs. My husband’s waiting for me.”
“You needn’t worry about your husband.”
The woman with the cut cheek—the wound now caked with dry blood—watched Azaïs’ movement. The policeman sitting beside her continued to stare at his shoes.
“Careful, madame le juge.” Dr. Bouton held her arm gently but firmly.
Azaïs turned left and they went down the stairs and through a couple of swing doors. The smell of detergent was stronger than the smell of Dr. Bouton’s peppermints. Azaïs turned on the light. A short corridor, sawdust on the floor. The sound of scurrying legs—perhaps mice or perhaps cockroaches—moving at the approach of humans.
“It wasn’t Bray’s gun that killed Raymond Calais. He had his own twenty-two bore—a rifle he bought recently.” She spoke toward Azaïs’ back.
He did not turn. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the padlock on a door of packing-case wood.
“The Indian stole it.” Her voice was unnaturally high. “Which proves that Hégésippe Bray was innocent.”
“I wonder if you can identify this for me?” Azaïs turned on a wall switch and stepped back to let Anne Marie enter. The neon tube began to flicker until it gave off a cold, insistent light that illuminated a small, dusty room. “You didn’t recognize it on the beach at Gosier.”
Of course she could identify it. And even if she could not, the top coat of blue paint had been peeled away from the side of the metal trunk and there stood revealed the neat letters that Anne Marie herself had stenciled:
Monsieur et Madame Laveaud, Jean Michel,
Rue Alsace-Lorraine, 31,
97110 Pointe-à-Pitre,
Guadeloupe—Antilles françaises.
The hinges had been broken.
For a second, Anne Marie wondered whether the Chantilly lace curtains were inside the trunk.