Letreau rushed into his office, leaving Pelleter holding the paper with the message. Once there, he picked up the phone and could be heard barking, “Hello...Get me Fournier...”
Pelleter approached the young officer who had taken the message, still seated at the front counter. He pointed to the phone. “May I?”
The young officer, surprised that he had even been asked for permission, nodded, and managed a “But of course.”
Pelleter spoke to the operator and hung up.
Letreau could be heard saying, “This is a problem, and it’s your problem...”
“Has anyone ever escaped from Malniveau?”
The young officer was startled again at having been addressed. He had clearly been eavesdropping on the chief’s conversation. “Not in my memory and I’ve lived here my whole life,” the young officer said. “But when we were kids they used to talk about the three great escapes since the prison’s been open.”
“Three?”
The officer nodded. “In the 1820s sometime a man faked consumption. He coughed and coughed for days. Then he cut his fingers on the rocks and used the blood to stain the front of his shirt so that it looked like he’d been coughing up his lungs... Of course the warden didn’t want to infect his whole population enclosed like that, so he ordered that the man be brought into town where he was to be quarantined in an old shed... He escaped as soon as he was in town. There was no train here then so he had to go on foot or get a ride and he didn’t want to risk getting a ride, so he didn’t get very far before they caught him...He was in solitary for good after that.”
Pelleter looked across to Letreau in his office, who was pacing as he spoke, the phone cord making a mess of the papers on his desk.
“And the other two?”
“The second wasn’t really an escape. One of the men who worked in the laundry hid himself among the sheets that were to be discarded. Rather typical, I guess. Of course, the sheets were checked before they were taken out the front gate and the man was found, so he didn’t even make it beyond the prison walls.”
Letreau was shouting now in the other room. “You listen, Fournier. You better find a way to get in touch with your boss, because he’s looking at a scandal that may lose him his job!”
The young officer ignored the commotion behind him, flattered at the attention the chief inspector was giving him.
“The last escape was during the war. By then the prisoners were allowed some exercise time outside in the courtyard. Three men got together and planned their escape...They arranged themselves so they would be the last out in the courtyard with a guard just behind them...As the last man stepped out into the fresh air, all three fell back and overpowered the guard, taking his gun and forcing their way back into the prison using the guard as a hostage. They made their way to the front gate, but the warden had a chance to arrange a team of guards outside. They killed two of the prisoners on sight, and the third one surrendered claiming that they had just wanted a chance to serve in the war. He was sent to the trenches and killed there. If he’d just waited that would probably have happened anyway.”
“So none actually made it.”
“Never.”
“Do you think that one could have now?”
“Not without help.”
“That’s what I think too.”
Pelleter touched his hand to his mouth.
“Chief Inspector?”
Pelleter focused on the young officer.
“You went to see Mahossier...I mean, you caught Mahossier. You know the man. What kind of a man could do—?”
Officer Martin broke off, and Pelleter realized that he was glaring at the young man.
Martin swallowed, but to his credit did not look away. “I just wanted to know if you could tell.”
Pelleter tried to relax his pose. The Mahossier business had been big news at the time of the killings and was perhaps not as forgotten as Pelleter sometimes hoped. Officer Martin was just the right age that he had no doubt followed the story avidly, perhaps even deciding to become a police officer because of it. And now here was Pelleter, and there was a murder to be solved.
Pelleter shook his head, trying to soften his expression. “You never can tell. Later, afterwards, of course, and then you wonder if you always knew.” He considered his words. “Men are capable of anything.”
This upset Martin. “But what Mahossier did, I mean—”
Pelleter put a hand on the young man’s shoulder wishing he could honestly relieve his anguish.
Martin said, “I just want to be ready.”
“If you saw the man now, you would know,” Pelleter reassured him, which of course was not quite the same as knowing in advance.
Martin was slightly relieved, and Pelleter forced a close-mouthed smile, thinking of the power Mahossier wielded now because people knew what he had done. He tried to remember the first time he interviewed Mahossier, when he was just a suspect, if he had known then. He really couldn’t say.
Letreau slammed the phone down in his office, drawing everyone’s attention. He was breathing heavily, trying to get control of himself.
The phone on the counter rang and Pelleter picked up. “Yes...Chief Inspector Pelleter...I need you to pull the file on a Marcel Meranger...All known associates, family, friends, accomplices, enemies, anyone...How long will it take...Good, then I’ll wait...”
Letreau came out of his office. His face was red, but he otherwise seemed to be under control. He watched Pelleter on the phone.
Pelleter said, “Wait...Actually I’m going to put another officer on, you give the information to him...He’ll wait for it...Thank you.” Pelleter handed the phone to Martin. “Write down everything he tells you.”
When Pelleter turned to Letreau, the chief of police’s face went a deeper shade of red before he even started talking. “Fournier said he’d look into it.”
“I see.”
“I could—”
Pelleter stepped forward and took Letreau by the arm, leading him towards his office. All eyes were on the two senior men. Once in the office, Pelleter closed the door, and then stood watching Letreau pace once again, working himself up over the situation.
Letreau stopped and looked at his friend. “I’m sorry. We haven’t had an unsolved homicide in this town in thirty years.”
“You don’t have one yet.”
“Fournier said that he would look into whether or not they were missing a prisoner, but that he thought he would know by now if the man had been missing over twenty-four hours.”
“He should. Did you say we would come down there?”
“He said that wasn’t necessary, because he’d be tied up trying to find out what happened and the warden, of course, isn’t there, so if we want to, we should come tomorrow. I told him that perhaps the warden would want to know about this. He said there was no way to get in touch with the warden at the moment, but that he would have everything under control, and that if we felt it was necessary, we could come tomorrow.”
From the outside, it was impossible to read Pelleter’s expression, it appeared to be so calm, but in fact, he felt exactly the same way as Chief Letreau.
“I could kill that man Fournier. He’s so cool. It’s not natural,” Letreau said.
Pelleter had thought the same thing earlier in the day. The man acted as though nothing could surprise him. And the warden rushing out of town like that was a bit convenient too.
Letreau said, “I guess I’m going to go see Benoît again. Take a look at his basement.”
“The baker?”
“I need to do something, damn it!” And Letreau went red once again. “We didn’t know it was a murder when we saw him this morning. Maybe we missed something.”
Letreau went to the hook behind the door to retrieve his overcoat. He pulled open the door. An old woman stood in the public space of the station holding a small soaked dog under her right arm as though it were a handbag. A young man who had not removed his hat was standing next to her, and they were both talking at the same time to the two police officers who normally occupied the desks. The noise of the argument filled the small space of the station, creating an increased sense of tension. Martin was still on the phone, his left hand pressed against his free ear.
Letreau crossed the station, ignoring the scene. Nearly at the door, he said to Pelleter, “Are you coming with me?”
Pelleter said, “Go ahead.”
Letreau went out, the sound of the rain momentarily blending in with the noise of the argument before the door slammed shut.
Pelleter sat down in one of the waiting room chairs watching the scene. There was nothing to do but wait.
The officers managed to get the two parties separated, and the story unfolded that the young man had nearly hit the old lady’s dog with his car as he parked it on the square. The young man claimed that the dog had been in the street. Nobody was hurt.
Pelleter wondered what it would be like to be a policeman in such a town. The weather had everyone on edge.
“Chief Inspector!”
It was Martin at the counter. He had hung up the phone. Pelleter went up to him. “Got anything?”
The young officer handed over a list in the now familiar handwriting. “Here’s the list. It’s a long one.” He was proud of his work, and watched Pelleter expectantly as the inspector scanned the names.
There were at least ninety names on the paper written in small even lines. It was a lot of names to go through, but it could be done if it had to be. Pelleter scanned the list and recognized a few of them from many years ago, but for the most part they meant nothing to him. Many of them were probably also in prison or dead.
“Chief Inspector,” Martin said, and he stood up from his stool to lean over the counter. He pointed to a name on the top of the list. “I thought I recognized that name,” he said.
The name was Clotilde-ma-Fleur Meranger, and a note beside the name identified her as the dead man’s daughter.
“It’s such an unusual first name, I figured how many people could there be? So I had the person on the phone look up whether or not Mademoiselle Meranger had since been married, and it turns out she is. She’s married to Shem Rosenkrantz, the American writer. She’s now Clotilde-ma-Fleur Rosenkrantz.”
The woman with the wet dog had been appeased, and the group was now talking jocularly in more normal tones.
Martin waited for a reaction from Pelleter, and then he said, “They live here in town.”
Pelleter registered this new piece of information. Meranger’s daughter lived in town. If anyone knew anything about this, it would be the daughter.
“Where?”
The Rosenkrantz home was on the western edge of town on the Rue Principale where the houses were spaced further apart before giving way wholly to farmland. It was a small two-story wooden house painted a faint olive green with white shutters. The low fence surrounding the property was more decorative than anything.
The rain was holding steady, but Pelleter had refused a ride to the house, preferring to see the town on foot. The baker’s house where the body had been found was in another quarter of the town, to the north, but that didn’t mean anything. The town was not very large. Meranger could have been on his way to see his daughter, or he could have already been there. And there was still the matter of who had helped him out of the prison, and who would want to.
Pelleter let himself in through the front gate. The house was well maintained, and somehow managed to look cheery even in the rain. At the door, shielded by the overhang, the remaining water streamed off his hat and coat before settling to a steady drip. There were no lights at the front of the house, but he could see that there were some lit towards the rear. He knocked.
A car passed in the street, on its way to town, not yet slowing its country pace.
There was no response from the house. Pelleter knocked again, looking up and around him as if he could gauge if the house was empty.
It was possible that the Rosenkrantzes were out, although in this rain it seemed unlikely. And Pelleter thought they would not have left any lights burning if that were the case. He was thankful for the overhang, but he was growing tired of the sound of the rain, of the weight of his coat, of the clammy feeling of the weather in general.
He knocked again with great force and the door shuddered a little in its frame.
A figure appeared from the back of the house, a silhouette blocking the light, visible through the window in the door. The man came up to the door with quick strides, and pulled it open violently. “What do you want?”
He was about Pelleter’s age. His French was almost unaccented, but something still gave him away as a foreigner. Perhaps it was his manner.
Pelleter showed his papers. “Is Madame Rosenkrantz at home?”
“No. What’s it about?”
“I’d like to speak to her directly.”
“Well, she’s not here. And I’m trying to work. So sorry.” He made no motion to close the door, but by his stance it was clear that he was about to.
“It’s about her father. I think she would want to speak to me.”
The man’s stance opened up, and he took a step so that he was standing at the threshold of the door. “If it’s about her father, then she definitely doesn’t want to speak to you. She’s done with him. Finished. She hates his guts.”
“That doesn’t change that I need to speak to her.”
The man repositioned himself, as if readying for a confrontation. He was a broad man, of a similar build to Pelleter. He had not let himself get soft with age or with the comfort of working at a typewriter. “My wife doesn’t talk to her father and hasn’t for thirteen years. So anything she has to say, I can say right now, which is nothing. You got that?”
Pelleter didn’t answer.
Monsieur Rosenkrantz backed up. “Now I’m working.” He started to close the door.
Pelleter turned slightly as if to go, and then turned back just as the door was almost shut, Rosenkrantz still visible through the window. “One more thing. If your wife no longer talks to her father, then why did she choose to live in the town closest to his prison?”
Rosenkrantz jerked the door back open, and stood glaring at Pelleter as though he were going to start a fight. Instead he slammed the door without answering, and stormed off into the back of the house, disappearing in the low light.
Pelleter found the stump of his cigar in his pocket and put it in his mouth. He chewed it first in the left corner of his mouth and then shifted it with his tongue to the right corner. It was too wet out to light a new cigar, so the stump would do for the walk back into town.
He stepped down from out of the protection of the overhang, walked the length of the path, and out through the gate.
The storm brought an early evening. As he walked through town, many windows were lit, but their lights didn’t extend far beyond the panes of glass. Benoît’s bakery was closed; it kept early hours. The café where he and Letreau had eaten breakfast was lit and filled with evening patrons stopping for a drink before heading home, or having an early dinner. At the edges of the streets, the rainwater was above the cobblestones as it gushed towards the sewer entrances.
Pelleter could have returned to the station, but there was little to report and most likely even less to learn. It also would have made it harder to refuse Letreau’s offer of dinner. He didn’t want the conversation or the comfort. He turned instead to his hotel, the Verargent, at the northeast corner of the square.
He left instructions at the desk that he would be down for his dinner in one hour and he asked to have a toddy sent up to the room.
Upstairs, he peeled off his coat and hat, retrieved a fresh cigar and lit it and then picked up the phone.
“Get me the police station...Yes.” He hung up.
He sat at the edge of the bed, smoking. The phone rang. It was Letreau.
“Yes...No, nothing...She wasn’t there...I didn’t expect as much...No, I’m going to stay in the hotel tonight. My apologies...We’ll meet in the café in the morning and go to the prison...Good. Goodnight...Call if you need to.”
He hung up. The world outside was invisible from the bed, the window a black mirror, but the sound of the rain trickled in, interrupted occasionally by the sound of a motor.
It bothered him that Mahossier had said somebody was killing prisoners and then the dead man in town turned out to be a prisoner.
And the American writer had seemed awfully argumentative, but perhaps if your father-in-law was in prison it would be the cause of some anger. People reacted differently to the police anyway.
A girl brought him his toddy, and he dressed for dinner while he drank. The warm drink, the smoke from his cigar, and the dry clothes made him feel a new man, and he realized that he was hungry. He pushed aside the questions of the day, and went down to dinner in an optimistic mood.
The girl who had brought him his drink was behind the counter reading a magazine. The dining room, just off of the lobby, was a small ill-lit room with six round tables fit close together. There was only one other guest there, at a table in the far corner. Pelleter took one of the smaller tables near the window to benefit from the wall sconce. He could feel the outside cold seeping through the glass windowpanes.
The hotel owner appeared through a door in the back. He clapped his hands together and spoke in a loud voice while still across the room. “Inspector! Your dinner’s coming right away. It’s finished right now. The girl will bring it. Some weather, no?”
The other guest turned from his meal at this performance. He and Pelleter exchanged an embarrassed, apologetic look, and then the man returned to his meal.
The owner was standing over Pelleter now.
“You must tell me all about this business,” the owner said. “A man killed in the streets? In Verargent? No, no, no, no, no.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head.
Pelleter’s good mood soured. It was inevitable in a small town that these things would be discussed, but it was not preferable. “We don’t know,” he said.
“But Benoît found him in the street, the poor man!”
The girl appeared with the meal, chicken in a wine sauce with sautéed asparagus on the side. She set the plate, which was still steaming, in front of Pelleter and stood behind the owner.
“Ah, here it is. You will love it. A personal specialty. Bon appetit.” He turned to the girl, and shooed her away. “Leave the inspector alone. Go, go.” He turned back, and opened his mouth just as Pelleter put the first bite of chicken into his own. Then he must have realized that he too was pestering the inspector, because he said “Bon appetit” again and turned to leave, stopping at the other guest’s table before disappearing into the back.
The food was good, but Pelleter ate mechanically, without tasting it. The owner’s inquiries had once again turned his mind back to the matter at hand. Who had gotten Meranger out of prison, and was he dead before or after?
Halfway through his meal, a young woman appeared in the entryway to the dining room. She was very pretty in a delicate way. She wore an expensive dress, which accentuated her slight form, but it was clear that she was not comfortable in it and used her shawl to cover herself. She stood just inside the entrance looking into the dinning room, turning her wedding ring on her finger with her right hand.
Pelleter waited to let her make up her own mind, and then he waved her in.
She fell forward as though she had been released from someone’s grip, and rushed across the dining room to his table. “Chief Inspector, I am so sorry to disturb you.”
The other guest turned again at the sound of her voice. In such a small town, there was never any privacy, always somebody close at hand. And yet no one had seen or heard a thing the night before when Meranger had been murdered.
Pelleter indicated the chair across from him, and she pulled it out far enough that she could sit at the edge of the seat, not quite committing herself to staying.
“I am Madame Rosenkrantz,” she said, and then looked down at her hands in her lap as though this were something shameful.
“Yes,” Pelleter said. She was younger than he had expected—this girl was no more than nineteen. He could see why Rosenkrantz had married her. She was charming to look at.
She looked up at him. “My husband said that you came to see me.”
“And he let you come out to find me at this time of night in this weather?”
“He was not happy. But in the end he does what I tell him to do.” She looked down again at this confession.
Pelleter tried to imagine the American writer taking orders from a woman, and he saw that it might be possible. “I’m surprised he even told you I had come. He wasn’t happy to see me.”
“That’s just because you caught him when he was working. He’s a different person when he writes. That’s why I often go out.”
“Where?”
“Just out,” she said, and left it at that, her gaze fixed on him, some of her shyness gone. “He said you came about my father.”
“Yes.”
She waited for him to say more, but when he didn’t, she said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She looked down again, and he could tell she was twirling her ring by the movement of her arms. He watched for any change in her expression, but there was nothing, no tears, no surprise. “Murdered?” she said, her voice soft but firm.
“How did you know?” Pelleter said, eager.
“This man the baker found, and then you arriving...” She looked up. “What else could it be?” And with that a nervous smile sought to hide any other feelings.
“Your husband said that you hated your father. That you hadn’t spoken to him since he’d gone to prison. He was very emphatic.”
“Please, please eat,” she said, indicating his food. “I’ve interrupted your meal.”
“Why did you hate your father?”
“I didn’t.”
“You don’t seem very upset over his death.”
“He was dead to me already. But I didn’t hate him. He was still my father.” She shrugged. “He killed my mother.”
Pelleter was surprised. “That’s not in his record.”
“Well he did.” She pursed her lips. “He didn’t kill her directly. He put her in danger, and she was killed. He owed money. He ran away.” She shrugged again. “That’s how these things work.”
Pelleter looked at her again. He saw now that her initial shyness was a product of her current luck, the unexpected wealth of her husband, and her newfound domestic happiness. She was not a stranger to a rougher life. It had probably served her well to remain unnoticed in that life as well, and that would not have been easy as pretty as she was.
“I should think your husband is now a father to you.”
“Because of my age? No, not at all. We’re—”
“Why would someone have wanted to kill your father?”
“He was a bad man,” she said.
“But you can think of no specific reason? There was no one in particular who would have wanted him dead?”
She shook her head, flustered again by his insistence. “No...I don’t know...I had nothing to do with my father.”
He pressed on. “But you went to see him.”
She looked down once more. “Yes,” she said.
“Your husband didn’t know that.”
“No...I don’t think so.”
“Why not tell him?”
She didn’t answer.
“If it needed to be kept a secret, why go see your father at all?”
She looked at him, and her expression was strong. “Because he was my father,” she said.
“When did you see him last?”
“I don’t know. A month ago. Maybe more. I didn’t go regularly. Sometimes a whole year or more...”
“Did he say anything? Was he afraid? Did he talk of being together again soon, of getting out of prison?”
“No. Nothing. We didn’t talk long. Somebody had been killed that week in the prison, but that happens. It was nothing...I never stayed long...Once I was there, I could never figure out why.”
Pelleter watched her. She looked at her hands fidgeting in her lap, then up at him defiantly, then back at her hands, in a cycle. He thought of the American writer, of his bluster. “Tell me,” he said suddenly.
She looked at him in panic. “There’s nothing! That’s it!”
He slammed his hands on the table in fists, rattling the china. “Tell me!”
“There’s nothing! My father’s dead, I just wanted to be sure. That’s all!”
They stared at each other, neither looking away, neither backing down.
At last Pelleter said, “Well, he’s dead.” He picked up his silverware and resumed eating. The food was cold now. It made no difference.
Madame Rosenkrantz gathered herself, taking a deep breath, and then got up. She stood over him for a moment, watching him eat. Then she said, “Are you going to do something about this?”
He looked up at her, watching her carefully for a reaction. “Do you care?”
There was no reaction. “Yes,” she said.
He looked back at his plate. “I am.”
She left, taking strong steps across the dining room, but pausing in the lobby, once again appearing like a lost young girl.
The dining room was quiet. The rain had stopped.
Upstairs, the other diner was just stepping out of the door to the room across the hall from Pelleter’s. He stopped short at the sight of the inspector, and then tried on an ingratiating smile, extending his hand as he stepped up to meet Pelleter halfway down the hall.
“Inspector Pelleter!”
The man took Pelleter’s hand almost against his will and pumped it, blocking the inspector’s path.
“I don’t mean any familiarity. I couldn’t help but hear some of the conversation downstairs. It’s very exciting to meet a celebrity.”
Pelleter freed his hand and tried to step around the man. “A pleasure,” he said.
“Could I ask you a few questions? I hate to be an imposition, but you read things in the papers and you’re never able to tell if they’ve gotten it quite right. Like our own local celebrity, Mahossier.”
The man had placed himself in such a way that Pelleter could not pass him without force.
“Is it true that he kept the children in cages?”
Pelleter felt tired. Was there not enough sadness in the world that people had to revel in the worst of it?
“I remember reading that you found a child in a cage, and that there were other small cages next to it...And that he had dug a pit in his basement where he would force the children to fight each other if they wanted to be fed...An image like that stays with you. I still have nightmares about it, and that’s just from reading the stories. Is it true?”
“Excuse me,” Pelleter said, but he made no attempt to get by.
“I just don’t understand how somebody could do that, how it works. He would kidnap the children, and then starve them...”
The man paused, observing Pelleter with a keen eye, as though he were testing him, to see the effect of this story.
“Meanwhile, he would have two of the already starving children fight each other to set an example. Am I getting this right?”
All these years later and people were still talking about this monster. He should be forgotten, not famous.
The man went on. “Yes. Then the children would fight to the death, and the winner was allowed to eat the other children’s carcasses, locked away until the next battle. Amazing.”
“Why are you so interested?” Pelleter said, determined to give no signs one way or the other.
“Oh, just curiosity, curiosity. I have an amateur interest in the mystery of crime, let’s say.”
Pelleter felt his anger rising. “Excuse me,” he said again.
“Oh, of course, it’s getting late. But just tell me, is that really true? Surely the newspapers must have exaggerated. No one would do that to children just for his own entertainment.”
“I have nothing more to say on this. It was a long time ago.”
“Then maybe you could tell me about our local murder. Have you any suspects there?”
Pelleter took a step forward as though to walk through the man.
The man held his ground so that he was too close, directly in Pelleter’s face. “I don’t believe that anyone could get away with what Mahossier did even if he would do it. You have to tell me that. It can’t be that that is how it was.”
It was as though the man needed some reaction out of Pelleter, as though he were deliberately pushing him to see what kind of a man he was.
“There were really bones with children’s teeth marks on them? That detail always seemed too extreme.”
Pelleter grabbed the man’s shoulder then and pushed him out of the way. The man fell against the wall, and hopped to regain his balance as Pelleter stepped around him. “There’s nothing more to be said.”
The man called at Pelleter’s back, “So it really is true, and you saw all of that. Why didn’t you kill him on sight?”
Pelleter turned back and rushed the man, stopping inches away from his face. “Because that’s not how the law works.”
“When there are murdered men in the streets of Verargent, maybe the law doesn’t work.”
Pelleter glared at the man. He could have told the man of the years of scars on the surviving boy, the evidence of many battles fought and won. That the bite marks on the bones suggested that this last boy had killed no less than six other children in his short life, and that he was still in an institution in the city unable to talk, often in restraints. They had managed to keep that out of the papers, for the boy’s sake.
Instead he said, “Good night,” and turned away.
Behind him the man said, “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just wanted to know.”
Pelleter unlocked his door.
“You—”
But the man stopped himself before Pelleter had even closed the door.
In the room, the inspector felt too wound up for such a small place. Mahossier was one case. He could have told the man of so many other cases over the years that the papers were too busy to notice. Was one horror really more terrible than another when somebody was dead?
And somebody was dead again, and Mahossier was close at hand again. Even if Mahossier had nothing to do with this, it just made Pelleter uncomfortable.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It had just been a tactless man. As he had told Officer Martin that afternoon, people can do anything. Right now, only the questions were important:
Who moved the body?
Why hide that Meranger was a prisoner by changing his clothes?
He shrugged off his jacket and stepped over to the bed. He tried to review his interview with Madame Rosenkrantz as he sank onto the mattress.
Instead, the image of that lone boy in a cage in Mahossier’s basement crowded everything else out. His anger flared up again at the guest from across the hall, and he clenched his fists and ground his teeth.
Of course the papers had left out the smell. Mahossier’s basement had smelled like a latrine outside a slaughterhouse. Pelleter had had to discard the suit he wore that day, because the smell had woven its way into the cloth.
These were the memories that he had to fight against when he saw that clownish glee on Mahossier’s face in the interrogation room at Malniveau. There he had succeeded in being all business. And now some curious civilian threw him off his guard.
He looked at the phone sitting in the pool of light from the bedside lamp. He checked his watch.
It was too late. If he called Madame Pelleter now it would only make her worry.