Chapter Thirty-Three

“… to Spain as soon as she can. As soon as she can.”

“Uh-huh.” Magda took a sip of her spritzer.

“And Homer Stibb! Twenty-four thousand? That’s a lot of money. I thought we might be talking ten thousand, but twenty-four? He’s not going to be able to manage that without something extra coming in. Unless he was telling the truth about his little bait-and-switch plan. But what business would wait four months for twenty-four thou and then be satisfied with only a bit of it?”

“Mmm.” Magda folded her lips together.

“And Professor Dale pulling in those big prices. She has to be selling something special for that. Even the girl said so. ‘Rare and very unusual.’ And she’s exactly the sort of person who wouldn’t attract attention in a library: an older woman with gray hair, sensibly dressed, quiet … You’d never think to check what she was doing.”

“Mmm.”

Rachel took a breath. She suddenly realized she’d been talking almost from the minute they’d sat down. Looking across the table, she noticed for the first time that Magda was almost bursting with excitement of her own. So much for being a secondary character in someone else’s life! “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—My mistake. Tell me about your day. Did you find anything out?”

Magda let out a gasp as if she’d been holding her breath for hours. “Aurora Dale uses long pieces of string to mark pages!”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“I certainly am not. And that’s not even the best thing. I—No, hold on.” She inhaled deeply, then started again. “I need to explain the setup. There are ten people using the reading room now. Plus me, that’s eleven. The way it worked out, I was able to grab a table to myself, over by the computers. That area gets the least light, so I figured I’d draw the least attention there. Stibb and Dale sat at the table farthest from me. The other people sat between us, but because I sat close to the outer edge of my table, I could still watch them.” She looked at Rachel. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So that’s what I did: I watched them. Well, I pretended I was researching medieval clothing, and I watched them while I looked through books I ordered up. And I saw Professor Dale use the string.”

Rachel felt her heart give a thump. “How long were the pieces?”

“About, uh …” She held her hands up, roughly eighteen inches apart. “Like that.”

Was that long enough to strangle someone? It seemed long enough, but what was the circumference of a neck? Especially a male neck? Frustrated, she realized she would have to wait until she could go home and run a test on Alan.

Magda cleared her throat. “Wait. There’s more.”

“More?” What more could there be?

Magda put her hand in her bag. Rachel leaned forward. Had she managed to steal a piece of the string? Had someone wiped their mouth and Magda stolen the napkin for a saliva sample? But when her hand came out, it held a plastic baggie containing what appeared to be a stub of shiny eraser.

“What the hell?”

“Look at it!” Magda’s voice echoed with barely suppressed excitement. She thrust the baggy toward Rachel. “Go on, look closely.”

Rachel reached out.

“Don’t open it!”

Rachel let the baggy flop over her hand so that the object inside lay on her palm and held it to the window. What she had thought was a shiny eraser was in fact a small eraser stub, in one edge of which someone had cut a slit. Into the slit they had inserted, so deeply that only about a quarter inch of its sharp tip appeared, the blade of an X-acto knife.

“What is it?”

“What is it? What is it?” Magda was outraged. “It’s a shank! A shiv! An Arkansas toothpick!”

“What?” Rachel looked more closely, bending her hand back so the baggy flattened against the eraser. The tip of the blade winked where the light hit it.

“It’s a knife!” Madge sat back with satisfaction. “I found it in the reading room.”

“In the reading room!”

“Under my table, right next to the leg. I dropped a pencil, and when I bent over, something glinted. Then I saw what it was, so I picked it up and put it in the baggy.”

“You had a baggy with you?”

“Yes.” She nodded vigorously. “Before I left this morning, I remembered what the capitaine said about the chain of evidence, so I took a baggy and wiped the inside down with alcool isopropylique and took it with me.”

“Wow. Good prep work.”

“Thanks.” Magda smirked a little at her own cleverness. “Boussicault won’t be able to catch us out this time. The implement is coming to him clean, sterile, and untouched by human hands.”

She seemed so pleased that Rachel hated to pull her back with a question. “The implement?”

“Of the crimes! This is what was used to take the pages from the books!”

Rachel felt even worse. “No, it’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“The page stubs had frayed edges, remember? I told you after the first book was found. And this would make clean cuts. No fraying.”

Magda looked so disappointed that Rachel picked up the baggy and peered at the blade once more, wanting to give her something to cheer her up. There was a long silence before she spoke.

“I’ll tell you what this could be, though. This could be what was used to cut Robert Cavill’s jacket lining.”

Magda lifted her head. “You think so?”

“Yes, absolutely. That was a clean cut.”

“Cavill brought it with him to use when he needed it, then threw it away when he was finished!”

This was not an easy conversation. “Not exactly.” But before Magda could deflate once more, she said, “While you were working, I did some research on Cavill’s jacket.” She explained about the prices. “I don’t think he would slash the lining of his own four hundred–pound sport coat.”

“I don’t know …” Magda frowned. “The prices on Laurent’s list were pretty high. And Cavill wasn’t exactly careful about money. He doesn’t seem like he’d balk at cutting up a four hundred–pound jacket if he was stealing something he could sell for twenty thousand euros.”

“No.” Rachel shook her head. “Cavill spent money to look a certain way to other people, and to provide a certain kind of life for his family. That might seem foolish to us, but it wasn’t wasting money as far as he was concerned. But ruining a four hundred–pound coat by slashing the lining is a waste.”

“Not if you’re going to be able to buy fifty more as a result.”

Magda looked mulish. Rachel decided to try using logic rather than psychology. “Okay, I can see your point. But why would he cut open his coat lining in the reading room? He could have cut it in his hotel room, or even in the men’s room at the Bibliothèque, if he wanted to dispose of the knife blade somewhere where it couldn’t be traced back to him. Why would he wait until he was in the place where it was most important that he not be caught? Or let’s say he did slit it somewhere else. Why would he keep carrying the blade after that, so he could lose it in the reading room?”

This seemed to work. Magda didn’t concede, but she did say, “Do you have a better scenario?”

Her voice was sulky. Rachel understood: first her big moment had fallen flat, and now it was being undermined. Still, she knew she had to go on. “I think so.”

“Fine. Let’s hear it.”

“I think someone else slashed Cavill’s lining. And I think that someone also planted the woodcut on him.”

She waited. Magda’s arms were crossed, but she didn’t say anything dismissive, so Rachel continued. “I think they must have done that, then either deliberately dropped this thing next to the table leg, where they thought it wouldn’t be noticed, or just lost track of it because it wasn’t important anymore.”

Magda considered. “Okay, it’s a hypothesis. But in that scenario both Cavill and the slasher are in the reading room. How could the slasher cut the coat without Cavill seeing him?”

Rachel had been puzzling over this very question for the half hour before their meeting, with no luck. “I don’t know.”

“They’d have to be quick about it.”

“They would.”

“And they’d have to be unobtrusive. You’d need to bring out the blade, get access to the jacket, then to the lining, then make the cut, then slide the folded page in, all without anybody noticing. Who could do that?”

“I don’t know. That’s the part I haven’t been able to figure out yet.”

“It’s a pretty big part.”

“It is.”

They sat in mutual silence until Magda said, “I have an idea, but you won’t like it.”

“I can take it. Tell me.”

“It’s LouLou.”

Rachel didn’t like it. She made a face.

“No, think about it. Who could linger by an empty reading room table for any length of time without creating suspicion? A member of the staff. She pretends to drop off some materials while Cavill’s at the computer or in the bathroom, knocks his jacket off a chair, and while she’s picking it up she makes the slash and slips the page in. No one would pay much attention. Who would know where to dispose of the blade quickly and with the least notice? A member of the staff. She drops a book in the right place, kneels down, shoots the blade under the table, stands up with the book in her hand. Perfectly normal.”

Rachel still didn’t like it, but she had to acknowledge that it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility. She turned the scenarios over in her mind. “But we didn’t find the woodcut in Cavill’s jacket until a week and a half after Giles’s death, and LouLou hadn’t been in the reading room since the day before Giles died. Would Cavill have wandered around for eleven days with a cut in his lining and a piece of paper inside it and not noticed? And, anyway, why would LouLou have put the woodcut in his jacket before she killed Giles? She had nothing to worry about then.”

“Those are very good questions, Watson.” Magda raised an index finger. “But I can answer them. First, Cavill apparently didn’t notice his lining was cut until you pointed it out. Maybe he’s not much of a noticer. Or even if he is, maybe he wore the jacket on the relevant day, hung it up in his tiny hotel wardrobe, and then didn’t wear it again until the day of his interview. It is tweed, and the other one was linen—a much better hot-weather fabric.” Her voice became thoughtful. “If you think about it, time and timing have always been a problem in this case.” Rachel could tell she loved saying case in a casual way. Which was fine, because she loved hearing it.

“We don’t know when the page was taken out of the Supplementum,” Magda went on. “We have no idea when Laurent did his blackmailing, or when the page was removed from the book of psalms.”

“Psalter.”

“Psalter. Thank you. And you yourself pointed out that Giles’s reaction to the missing page suggested he’d known about some earlier theft from a book. It’s perfectly possible that LouLou is an advance planner. Lots of murderers are.” Magda said this as if she’d interviewed thousands of murderers on just that topic. “What if we got the timing wrong? What if Giles already knew that she’d stolen a page from the psalter before he found out about the Supplementum? What if he’d already started to blackmail her, and she’d already planned to kill him over it? She put the page in the jacket in advance because she figured it was worth it to sacrifice one illustration to get rid of suspicion and be free to sell the other, more valuable one.”

Magda stopped, waiting for a response. Rachel felt that perhaps she did deserve to be a secondary character that day after all. Maybe Woman Who Found Out Some Mildly Interesting Stuff, but Nothing as Good as This. Magda’s suggestions were plausible, and in their plausibility they made it impossible to dismiss LouLou as a suspect.

“Okay, those aren’t entirely unlikely hypotheses. But neither is the hypothesis that someone else was able to slash the lining and throw away the blade, too. So we have a number of hypotheses that are equally likely to be wrong.”

Magda cleared her throat. “Or equally likely to be right.”

Rachel sighed, looked at the baggy, then sighed again. “I’ll tell you what else we have. We have what could be a major piece of evidence, which we found as a result of investigating. And we have to hand it over to a police captain who explicitly told us to stop investigating.”

They mulled the grim prospect. At last Magda said, “Do we, though?”

“Do we what?”

“Do we have to give it to him? Couldn’t we just … not?”

“I’m pretty sure your lawyer boyfriend would tell you that withholding evidence is even worse than compromising the chain of evidence—probably even worse than breaking and entering and finding nothing but leaving your fingerprints everywhere. Ask him if you don’t believe me. We have to give it back.”

“I will ask him.” Magda gave a determined bob of her head. “In fact, I’ll ask him tonight.”