I RETURNED to my hotel and put a call to Farrar in Melbourne.
‘Don’t tell me where you are,’ he said, sounding more uptight than I’d ever heard him, ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘I’m in a safe place abroad,’ I said.
‘You’re never gonna be safe. Duncan, you’re wanted for questioning over the murder of Maniguet.’
I felt giddy.
‘What?!’
‘Just listen and listen good. Police were called to an apartment in South Yarra after shots were fired. Cassie Morris’s Subaru was seen coming and going in the middle of the night. And you were seen going into her apartment earlier that evening.’
‘Maniguet died accidentally,’ I said. Farrar was stunned as I told him about the hours after we had dined at ‘The Angry Pheasant’.
‘Duncan,’ he said, ‘you’re not covering for someone else, are you?’
‘No.’
‘You sound so bloody calm!’
‘It was self-defence, I tell you. Did they find the body?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘The car was seen in the Dandenongs in the early hours. Police searched the area where it had been parked.’
‘What do you think I should do?’
‘Stay put.’
‘Would Benns chase me here?’
‘Hard to say. If you were caught by Interpol, he would have you extradited.’
‘But he’s unlikely to fly here just to search for me?’
‘No, he wouldn’t. It would be a needle in a haystack. They’d wait for a definite lead then get the next flight.’
The next move was to develop an escape contingency, which didn’t rely on travelling via the normal air and channel ports. I knew an art dealer who split his time between France, Holland and England. He had his own private jet and Benepharm was one of his larger corporate clients. The company would buy or lease art for our offices worldwide. The dealer was a beefy Dutchman, with a heart of gold and a bank account to match. I phoned him and his wife told me he wasn’t in, but he planned to fly to London from Orly airport for an art exhibition at eleven the next morning.
I stayed at the hotel for the rest of the day and only ventured out at night for a Greek meal in nearby Rue de la Huchette and went to bed early. Continuous sleep was almost impossible and I got up at dawn and went through a yoga routine for an hour.
At nine a.m. I couldn’t resist ringing Cassie again. She seemed distressed and not her sarcasm-cracking self.
‘You sound like you have a cold,’ I said.
‘Oh, it’s nothing.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s Peter. He’s here.’
‘You’ve been crying.’
‘We’ve been arguing. He’s worried about some business deal with the Institute that hasn’t come through.’
‘Do you want to have breakfast?’
Cassie hesitated.
‘I was hoping to see you,’ she said. I liked hearing those words.
‘Then we’d better meet,’ I said. ‘At Les Fleurs again in a half hour?
‘That would be nice. I need a boost.’
I dressed in the only casual clothes Charlie Morten-Saunders had – blue jeans, sneakers, shirt and dark glasses – and sauntered down the street.
It was just after ten a.m. as I approached Les Fleurs restaurant on foot from St Michel and then along St Germain. Cars were bumper to bumper and I had an urge to leap from one car top to the other to get across the Boulevard for a paper. That urge vanished when I saw a woman coming out of Les Fleurs.
She seemed very like Detective-Sergeant O’Dare!
She was looking my way but not at me. I turned and retraced my steps.
Was it her? Could this be an ambush?
First thoughts were to return to my hotel. No wonder Cassie was upset. She must have known. I felt foolish for overlooking the ease in which Benns could have tracked her from Australia. Once he had her car registration he had her name and job and finally the fact that she was in Paris.
I sweated in my hotel room for twenty minutes, unsure of what to do, for I wasn’t certain if it had been O’Dare or not. There was only one way of finding out. I had to ring Cassie. Walters answered the phone. I asked to speak with her.
‘She’s not here,’ Walters said coldly, ‘who is it?’
‘I’m a friend from Australia, Trevor Edwards,’ I said disguising my accent.
‘You’re out of luck. A couple of Australian police have just given her an awful grilling. Accused her of murdering some French agent in her Melbourne apartment.’
‘Where is she?’
‘With the Australian detectives at the local police station.’
‘Is she OK?’
‘Bit shaken.’
‘The bastards.’
‘They’re also after another Australian, a man named Hamilton, who they think is in Paris. Interpol wants to speak with him too. They are going to help set up a Paris dragnet for him.’
I put down the phone.