Annette’s note had not given Rupert the address of the apartment where she and Hélène were living; all she had said was that as he had arrived in Paris he should come to the market at St Eustache the next morning and find her at the poulterer’s stall. She might tell him where Hélène was then. Rupert had to accept that his approach to Hélène must be carefully managed and meeting Annette was the first step. He knew he couldn’t assume that Hélène would be pleased to see him; indeed, she might refuse to meet him at all. All he did know was that though he was aching to see her, he would have to wait. So that evening he stayed in his suite and played backgammon with Parker, with André keeping a fruitless vigil in the street.
In the morning Rupert was just finishing his breakfast when Rocher announced that he had a visitor. Thinking it must be Annette, he asked Rocher to bring her into the dining room and to bring more coffee. He looked expectantly at the door and was amazed to see, not Annette, but Simon Barnier walking into the room. He paused in the doorway, staring at Rupert with an implacable hostility.
Rupert got to his feet and, speaking amiably, said, ‘Monsieur Barnier, what a surprise to see you here. How do you do?’
‘None the better for seeing you, Chalfont!’
‘Did you know I was staying here,’ enquired Rupert, ‘or is our meeting here pure coincidence?’
‘I heard you were here,’ replied Simon, ‘and I came to find out why.’
‘I wonder whom you heard it from?’ He paused to allow Simon to answer, but as no answer was forthcoming, he went on, ‘And why I have come, of course, is no business of yours.’
‘It is if it has anything to do with Mademoiselle Hélène St Clair, my fiancée.’
‘Your fiancée!’ echoed Rupert. ‘Allow me to congratulate you. When will you be married?’
‘The date will be set very soon,’ answered Simon, ‘if that is any business of yours.’
‘That is surprising news,’ responded Rupert. ‘I had heard that Miss Hélène was away at present.’
‘Indeed! And who told you that?’
‘Probably the same person who told you that I was staying here,’ replied Rupert smoothly. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, much as I’d like to chat some more about mutual friends, I have business to attend to, which as I mentioned before has nothing to do with you. I’ll bid you good day, monsieur.’
Simon remained in the doorway, barring Rupert’s path, but as Rupert simply walked towards him he gave way, allowing him to leave the room.
‘You haven’t heard the last of this, Chalfont,’ Simon snarled as he passed. ‘You had your chance, but now she’s mine. You’re a married man and you’re in no position to approach her. You sully her reputation by even thinking of speaking to her. I should have known yesterday when I saw that old bag of a housekeeper coming to Paris that she was up to something. Coming to a funeral indeed! What Hélène’s parents will say when I tell them that Madame Sauze has known where their daughter has been all this time, I can’t imagine. Out on the street if she were my housekeeper.’
Rupert made no reply until he reached the foot of the stairs, when he turned back, smiling enigmatically. ‘How fortunate that she isn’t,’ he said.
When he came downstairs again ready to go and meet Annette in the market, Parker was waiting for him in the hall.
‘Just thought you’d like to know, sir, that I saw the man who just left speak to a young man outside. A young man with red hair, which he keeps covered with an old cap. Not a gentleman, dressed in corduroy trousers and a sackcloth jacket. He slipped away to the stable yard, and your gentleman returned to the fiacre he’d arrived in and drove off. The other man is still in the yard.’
‘Good work, Parker. I imagine he’s been left as a tail. We’d better use the trick we used in Padua.’
‘Right-ho, sir. Just give me the word when to start.’
‘Oh, I think we might as well get on with it, but don’t forget there might be two watching us, so keep your eyes peeled. If you think it’s clear, meet me at St Eustache church as soon as you’re sure you’re not being followed.’
Parker grinned. ‘Got us out of a tight spot in Padua,’ he said. ‘Should work here, too. I’ll go round to the stable now. Our friends don’t know about me, so shouldn’t be any trouble.’
Minutes later, as he waited in the hotel hallway, Rupert heard an altercation in the stable yard. Shouting and the grunts and bellows of a fist fight; a horse was whinnying and there was the crash of hooves on cobbles, followed by more and louder shouts as the hotel’s ostlers joined the fray.
Rupert made no effort to go and investigate, but slipped out into the street and vanished into a side alley. Parker would eventually be explaining how he had seen the man with the red hair sliding his hand into the saddlebag of a mare standing ready, waiting for her owner to set out.
Redhead was denying everything, but he had been detained by the ostlers, who wanted no thieves other than themselves in their yard. After more shouting, and threatened fisticuffs, Jacques Rocher made his way outside. Hearing it was Sir Rupert’s man who had seen the thief and caught him red-handed, he had him searched. When nothing was found on him, Rocher told his men to throw him out of the yard with a farewell boot in the backside and an instruction never to show his face at the Hotel Montreux again.
‘I am so sorry that you should have been involved in such an uproar, Monsieur Parker,’ Rocher said as they went back into the hotel. ‘You obviously caught the thief just in time, before he actually managed to take anything from the saddlebag. But with nothing in his hands or pockets we had to let him go. I hope Sir Rupert was not incommoded?’
‘No, monsieur, I’m sure he wasn’t. If you’ll excuse me I’ll go up to his suite.’
Rocher returned through the old oak door to his quarters, and Parker went up to the empty suite and looked down into the street. There were plenty of people about, but no sign of Redhead, or anyone else idly loitering as if waiting for someone.
Parker went back downstairs and walked away down the road, turning into the Boulevard St Germain and taking a circuitous route to St Eustache. When he was quite sure he had shaken any possible tail, he made his way to the church, where Rupert was waiting.
‘I’m going to speak to someone now you’re here,’ Rupert told him. ‘Keep your eyes peeled and if there’s any sign we’re being watched, simply walk past me whistling and we’ll deal with it.’
While he had been waiting for Parker to find him, he had walked through the marketplace and spotted the poulterer’s stall, where Annette was dealing with a customer. He would go nowhere near her until Parker returned without a tail.
Now, he wandered casually between the jumble of stalls, pausing at several before approaching Annette.
Although she had been expecting him, she only saw him at the last minute.
‘Good morning,’ he said with a smile.
Annette looked anxiously about her, but no one seemed to be interested in either of them.
‘We can’t talk here,’ she said and, pointing out the café she and Pierre usually frequented, added, ‘I’ll meet you there as soon as Benny comes back.’
Twenty minutes later they were sitting in the corner at the back of the café with coffee and pastries in front of them.
‘How is she?’ Rupert asked. ‘Is she safe?’
‘She’s quite safe,’ replied Annette. ‘No one knows where we are.’
‘Well,’ Rupert said, ‘I don’t want to worry you, but Simon Barnier turned up at my hotel this morning, warning me away. Saying that he and Hélène were about to get married.’
‘How did he know where to find you?’
Rupert shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just bad luck, I think. He must have seen me yesterday when I arrived. Anyway, he came to the hotel this morning to warn me off.’
Annette stared at him, pale-faced. ‘What did you do? What did you say?’
‘Well, first of all I didn’t say I wasn’t married,’ Rupert said, ‘so he doesn’t think I’m a real threat at present. I don’t know how he found out I was in Paris, but he set someone to follow me when I left the hotel this morning.’
‘You haven’t been followed here, have you?’
‘No, my man Parker dealt with him. However, now they know where I’m staying, they may well try again and it would certainly be better if you didn’t come back to the hotel.’
‘Madame Sauze was here in Paris yesterday. She came to tell me that you were on your way and to warn you not to go to St Etienne. She was afraid you might meet up with Simon Barnier and everything would be stirred up again. Anyway, when she was catching the train she saw him. He was catching it too, though he didn’t see her at the time. The trouble is he did see her at the station when they arrived. She had waited until he’d disappeared but then almost bumped into him as he was getting into a fiacre.’
‘Did he speak to her?’
‘Yes, she told him she was going to a funeral. But the thing is, he seemed to know what was happening at Belair, news that Agathe had only heard herself the day before. He must have someone spying for him there.’
‘Then Pierre must take extra care,’ Rupert said.
‘Aunt Agathe was going to warn him. She considered warning Madame St Clair too, but that would have meant revealing that we were all involved in Hélène’s disappearance, and perhaps lead them to her.’
‘I think we have to leave that end of things to Pierre,’ Rupert said. ‘As long as he’s been warned. I’m more worried about what Simon Barnier is doing here in Paris and how he found me so quickly.’
Silence lapsed about them for several moments as each of them assessed the new situation. It was Rupert who broke it, his thoughts returning to Hélène.
‘Will she see me, do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Annette. ‘She doesn’t know you’re here, and she doesn’t know… well, about your wife. You have to understand she was devastated when you wrote and told her you were married. It was only the second letter she’d had from you since you’d left.’
‘I know. My sister Frances was intercepting our letters, both the ones Hélène wrote to me and the ones I wrote her. Frances has admitted that now and I have all the letters she took.’
‘She didn’t take the one saying you were married,’ pointed out Annette. ‘Why was that?’
‘I didn’t know that she was taking them, but I posted that one myself.’ He looked at her worried face. ‘I had been going to suggest that you bring her to the hotel, where we could meet in private, but clearly we can’t do that now. Simon Barnier will suspect I’m up to something and have the hotel watched.’
‘Well, you can’t come to the apartment for the same reason,’ Annette told him firmly. ‘I’m not even going to tell you where it is, in case you’re tempted to come and bring your shadow with you.’
‘That’s fair enough for the moment,’ Rupert agreed. ‘Look, Annette, you’ve been a good friend to Hélène, and so I’m going to trust you even more than before.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bundle tied up in brown paper. ‘These are all the letters that Frances stole. She didn’t read them, they were still sealed when I got them back. I’ve opened them and when they are read in order, they tell the whole sorry story. Please will you go home to Hélène and tell her that I’m here in Paris? Tell her that Kitty, the girl I married, died with our child in February. Tell her… no, I’ll tell her that myself. Please give her the letters so that she can see I was begging her to write. Ask her to read them all and then ask her if she will let me come to her.’
Annette hesitated and then reached for the bundle and tucked it into her bag. ‘I’ll tell her what you say,’ she promised. ‘I have to get back to the stall now, but if you come and find me tomorrow I’ll tell you.’ She stood up and went on, ‘Don’t come near me again today – if you’re being followed we can’t risk them transferring the follower to me.’
‘Don’t worry, Annette.’ Rupert tried to sound reassuring. ‘I promise you, no one followed me this morning.’
‘Make sure no one does when you come tomorrow,’ warned Annette.
When she had gone, the precious bundle of letters in her bag, Rupert ordered more coffee and waited for her to get safely back to the market stall. When he left the café, he found Parker waiting for him outside.
‘You saw that girl I was with?’ Rupert asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘When she leaves the market later today, I want you to follow her and see where she goes. I want to know where she lives, and make sure no one else is tailing her. I’m going back to the hotel now.’
‘What about your shadow, sir?’
‘Oh, if he’s come back, or I get another, I’ll keep them busy. There’s lots of Paris to see, after all! Report back to me at the hotel this evening and we’ll take it from there.’