“They’re still looking,” said Marcel Aubry. A uniformed officer was seated at a monitor to one side of the security booth, scrolling through footage from the day the Roach died.
“Inspector Lüthi, any other hints?” the officer called out, pausing the video. “‘The most beautiful woman in the world’ isn’t much to go on.”
Agnes shook her head, laughing. “When you see her, you’ll know who I’m talking about.” She turned to Aubry. “I was walking through the crowd in the pavilion when it came to me. I saw her on the footage the other day and I remembered seeing her before, in Tokyo when we nearly caught the Roach three years ago.”
“They’re pulling up the Tokyo video at the station. When they find her on one or the other, we can do facial recognition.”
Agnes studied the bank of monitors. “I remember that she turned and walked away from the camera. Before she moved, there was a man with a dark tie to her left. He wasn’t with her, but very near. Perhaps she wanted to give the impression that they were together. He was talking on a mobile phone.”
Aubry called over to the officer, “Got that?”
“Absolument.”
“You think she’s an accomplice,” Aubry said.
“I think it’s an extraordinary coincidence if she’s not connected with the Roach, and if you catch her, you’ll have answers.”
Agnes was still thinking about the Roach when she arrived at the Perrault et Chavanon booth in the Palace pavilion.
Gisele stepped away from a client to greet her. “She’s here, in the back.”
Agnes understood who she was. Marie Chavanon had returned to work.
“She should have stayed home,” Gisele said. “Perhaps you can suggest she leave?”
“Aren’t you happy to have the extra help?” The booth was even more crowded than the previous day.
“Not like this. Madame is in a furor. Now there’s an atmosphere hanging over us.”
“Is that an accusation?” a man’s voice carried from the small back office. “Two days certainly makes a difference. Is there something else you’d like to ask?”
Gisele turned away, shrugging at Agnes, and fixing a smile on her face before circulating among the clients. Agnes didn’t move. A minute passed. She couldn’t hear Marie Chavanon’s response. Finally, Stephan Dupré emerged from the back room, red faced. He stopped when he saw Agnes.
“She shouldn’t be here.” He jerked his head toward the back room. “Talk some sense into her.”
He hastened toward the exit and Agnes followed.
“If you have a moment?” she said when she caught up to him.
He marched to the nearby café bar and ordered a whiskey. “Make it a double.”
Agnes joined him and asked for a glass of tap water. “Tell me more about Guy Chavanon being followed.”
Dupré downed his whiskey in a long swallow and set the glass on the counter. “You’re not interested in what Marie and I are fighting about?”
“Right now, I’m interested in Guy Chavanon.”
Dupré drew in a deep breath; his shoulders rose and fell. He looked away from Agnes. “I’ve always wondered what people will say when I’m dead. What they’ll remember, what they’ll exaggerate.” He nodded toward his empty glass. “I’ve a few photographers who’ve traveled with me into rough places, and they’ll probably talk about my ability to hold my liquor. There’ve been times when we’ve needed it to get through the work.” He motioned to the bartender for a refill. “But you’re here to talk about Guy. Even dead, everyone is interested in him.” He planted both hands on the counter. Agnes wondered if he was meditating.
“What do you think of him?” Dupré finally said. “You must have a picture in your mind by now.”
She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “It’s incomplete. I can’t decide if he was a complex man or a simple one. His life was clearly rooted in his work, yet from all appearances he was a family man. He seemed to live in a world of invention and dreams, distant from the world of business. He was perhaps volatile. He was a scientist and also had an artistic temperament.”
Dupré gave her an appraising look. “You’ve nailed it. Guy was all those things. He was brilliant and he was a screwup.”
“Do you think he invented something important at the end of his life?”
Dupré took a sip of whiskey, savoring it this time. “I don’t know.”
“Whoever broke into the workshop must have expected to find something. You said he was afraid he was being followed.”
“Have you forgotten that I exaggerated?”
“But you didn’t invent it. What did he tell you?”
“He talked about a car parked on the street. He saw it too many times, or at an odd time of the day. It stuck in his head and bothered him.”
“Did he describe the car?”
“He must have, but I don’t remember. I forgot about it.”
“But you remembered at the funeral?”
“I had forgotten, but it came back to me. Don’t know why. Maybe it was the atmosphere that day. The shock that Guy was dead. We look for answers even when we have them.” Dupré rubbed his forehead. “There were days when I was convinced he’d finally done it, invented something meaningful. The other half of the time I knew he hadn’t. We’d built him up as a great thinker. An inventor. But what did he ever create? Mechanical toys, small refinements, not the kind of thing we credited him with. Maybe he’d decided to believe his own myth. Maybe Marie’s right and he was crazy.”
“Did you see signs of mental instability?”
Dupré shook his head. “I don’t know. Fixating on a car, maybe that’s a sign? Guy was always different. Focused. What’s the difference between focused and fixated? Between concern and paranoia?”
“Did Madame Chavanon talk to you about him?”
“I know that she’d given up.”
“On Monsieur Chavanon or the company?”
“I thought both. But who knows.”
Agnes took another sip of water. The Pavilion was crowded but there were few customers in the café bar. The show had a momentum and now was the time for serious purchasing, not chatting with friends and colleagues. “When was the last time you saw Monsieur Chavanon?”
“The day he died,” Dupré said slowly.
“You saw him that day? And you never told anyone? Why?”
“To avoid questions.” Dupré clinked his ice absently. “I saw Guy, but I didn’t talk to him. I intended to. I was watching for him, hoping to pretend a chance encounter. I wanted to catch him alone and outside. Maybe invite him to my place.”
“What happened?”
“Marie was gone for the afternoon. I can see the road from my front porch, and I waited there, bundled up like an old man. Guy drove up and parked near the factory.”
“Do you know where’d he been?”
“No, only that he’d been gone a short while. I assumed he’d picked up a newspaper or concluded some other small errand. I could tell he was in a dark mood when he parked. He spun into the lot in a hurry and headed toward the workshop. I started out to intercept him.”
Dupré seemed to consider what had happened that day. “Maybe if I had, he wouldn’t have died.”
“What stopped you?”
“He got halfway to the workshop, then turned around and walked to the factory. I watched, thinking he wouldn’t spend much time there; it was a Saturday and he might only be picking up something. He stayed a few minutes, then ran back to his car and roared off.”
This matched Ivo’s account of Chavanon’s arrival and departure.
“What were you going to discuss with your friend that day?”
“It was personal, not anything about what happened later.”
“Something about his wife?”
Dupré swallowed and sat up a few inches straighter. “So what if it was?”
“Do you think Monsieur Chavanon would have been surprised?”
The whiskey glass spun on the napkin. The man didn’t reply and Agnes thought she had her answer.
Before she could insist, her phone beeped. She glanced at the screen. The message was from Petit: Blood is human.
Agnes hoped it was a riddle. But she knew it wasn’t. The bloody shed. Dupré’s confessions would have to wait.