Chapter Twenty-Two

The next day brought sun, a little more warmth in the air, and a general sense that February might not last forever. What it did not bring was Elisabeth.

All morning Rachel kept an ear open for her arrival, via front door or (would fate be so kind?) back. But there was nothing. Finally, as Fulke held her coat when she was leaving, she said, “Fulke, I’m wondering if Mademoiselle des Troyes has recovered from her cold.” Weak, she thought, but it took her where she needed to go. “Do you think I could speak to her before I leave?”

“Mademoiselle Elisabeth has not been here today.” He spoke from behind her head.

“Oh?” She kept her voice light. “Is she still stick?”

“I don’t know, madame.” He settled the coat on her shoulders and took a step back. “She hasn’t been in contact.”

Something in the way he said it gave her pause. “Since when?”

“Since the day she was ill last week.” His voice held not a trace of irony. “I assumed she was too unwell to call.”

Rachel turned to face him. “She hasn’t been here for five days?”

“Six,” Fulke corrected gently. “Seven, if one includes today.”

Out in the street, she called Magda. “Elisabeth hasn’t been to Edgar’s for a week.”

“A week!”

“Fulke told me.” Rachel felt the wind pull a strand of hair forward. She tucked it behind her ear and leaned more firmly into the phone.

“You don’t think …”

In that pause Rachel heard all her own thoughts: You don’t think I was wrong and now she’s an escaped murderer? Or that I was right and now something’s happened to her? You don’t think the real murderer has done something to her?

“No, no,” Rachel replied to all these unspoken worries. “No, surely not.” Promise of warmth or not, Christ, the wind was cold.

“But what should we do?”

What should we do? Rachel thought. What should you do when one of your chief suspects hasn’t been seen for six days? When one of your chief suspects might be in the process of turning into your third victim? “We should go to her house.”

“We don’t have her address,” Magda pointed out.

Rachel felt the wind whip her legs and rued her decision to wear a skirt. “We don’t,” she said, putting from her mind frostbite and whatever chilblains were, “but we can get it.”

*   *   *

“This is not. How I envisioned. Spending lunch. Today.”

They were on their fourth flight of stairs in a six-story building in the eleventh arrondissement, and Alan’s words came in small bursts. When they reached the landing, he stopped, bracing himself against the banister.

“Detective,” he said, “was not on my job wish list when I was a child.”

Rachel shrugged. “Well, if you hadn’t insisted on coming along instead of just handing over the address, you could have avoided this.”

At last they reached the sixth floor, a long hall off which opened a warren of tiny rooms. A hundred years ago they had been chambres des bonnes, squashing maids into what were not much more than cells. Now, Rachel knew, half of them had been converted into kitchens, and the other half served as rooms cheap enough for students, blue-collar workers, and the occasional single professional trying to save money. Because this was Paris and people would live anywhere if it was affordable, she also knew that half the landlords of these rooms hadn’t provided any heating or cooling. In winter they would be freezing; in summer they would be stifling. And the arrangements the tenants made to combat this would increase the fire hazard level to one she didn’t want to think about. Once again she was grateful for her access to money.

Their footsteps echoed on the wooden boards as they walked down the hall, looking for number 27, Elisabeth’s room. It was at the very end. Rachel saw that it was actually two rooms knocked into one, and thus twice as large as the others. Its white metal door seemed simultaneously pure and vulnerable, although she recognized this as projection. She pressed the buzzer next to the door.

There was no answer. She pressed again, and when nothing happened, she banged on the door with the side of her fist. Nothing.

“What should we do?” Magda whispered.

“I don’t know.” Rachel was determined to speak at a normal level. “I don’t know what we can do.”

“What if she’s in there?”

“She’s not answering, which suggests she’s not in there,” Alan pointed out.

But something about the long hall and its echoing air had spooked Magda. She clutched Rachel’s arm and hissed, “What if she’s in there and she’s dead?”

“No one’s in there dead!” Rachel shook off her hand. Then she softened; the cold and silence did make the place eerie. She patted Magda’s arm reassuringly. “Anyway, if there were a murderer in there waiting, I promise I’d save you.”

Suddenly a dark-haired girl in jeans and a peacoat appeared at the top of the stairs. Without looking up from her portable, she walked down the hall toward them, her left hand groping in her pocket for a key. She seemed to know the distance to her own door by muscle memory, for she never looked up from her device as she stopped at a room maybe three yards away from where they stood. In fact, she probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all had her key not scratched the door plate instead of finding the lock. Thus thwarted, she glanced upward and, in doing so, saw their shapes out of the corner of her eye. She jumped, let the hand with the key fall, and turned to face them. “Can I help you?”

Rachel and Magda froze, but Alan kept his cool. He took a step toward her. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle. I am Monsieur Field, with CorBank USA, and these are my … associates, Madame Levis and Madame Stevens. We are looking for Mademoiselle des Troyes.” He held out one of his business cards. The girl took it, glanced from it to them and back again. Maybe it was the card or maybe it was the fact that criminals do not usually come in groups of one man and two women, but she relaxed and nodded acknowledgment.

“She’s not there.”

“Not there?” Rachel said. “Has she been there at all today?”

“Today?” The girl gave a humorless laugh “She hasn’t been there since last week.”

“Did you see her leave?” Magda stepped slightly forward, making it easier to see and be seen.

“No. But I know she isn’t home because I keep hearing her portable ring, and no one picks up.”

Rachel yelped, “She left her portable?”

The girl looked dubious. “Why are you here, exactly?”

“We have a check for Mademoiselle des Troyes,” Alan said smoothly. “As you may know, she inherited a large sum recently, and she asked for it urgently. We have been trying to contact her so she might collect it.” He gestured lightly at the shut door, suggesting that their many messages lay in the abandoned portable within. “And now, because it’s Friday and we believed she needed it urgently, we’ve come to give it to her.”

Rachel was taken aback to discover that her husband also possessed the true detective’s way with a lie.

Surprisingly, this story mollified the girl. “All I can tell you is that she isn’t there. Have you tried slipping the check under her door?”

Alan looked outraged. He had obviously taken to his role. “Mademoiselle, we are a bank, not her mother dropping by! We cannot slip checks under doors!” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Ah, well, we’ll just have to keep trying. Thank you very much.”

“Thank you,” said Rachel and Magda, echoing him. As they trailed back up the hall to the staircase, they heard the girl unlocking her door.

Once the porte d’entrée clicked firmly shut behind them, Magda stopped abruptly. “She’s not in there,” she said, as if they hadn’t been right next to her all the time. “She hasn’t been there for a week.”

“And her phone’s still there,” Rachel added.

“Kids don’t go anywhere without their phones,” Magda said. “You saw that girl just now; she couldn’t move without hers.”

“Maybe Elisabeth forgot hers?” Rachel was hopeful, but even to her that idea sounded implausible.

“Or it fell out of one of her bags when she picked them up to leave?” Magda’s attempt was equally feeble. They looked at each other.

“I don’t …” said Magda.

“I’m not …” said Rachel.

They both stopped and then Rachel spoke. “What should we do?”

Alan said, “You should go to the police.”

This time, they had to agree.

*   *   *

They sat in the Commissariat de Police on Rue Vaugirard. It had taken some to persuade him, but Alan had returned to work. Then Rachel and Magda had come to this, the commissariat closest to Elisabeth’s building. They had explained their concern to a young gardien de la paix whose Adam’s apple stuck out in his throat like the metal tab in an umbrella shaft. He in his turn called a slightly less young brigadier, who sat across from them and listened intently to their story. Now the brigadier had vanished into the recesses of the building, and they sat alone under the fluorescent striplights of the reception area.

This was decidedly not a domain of walnut furniture and chic receptionists, Rachel reflected. They sat in the curious metal and plastic chairs so beloved of municipal entities, fashioned so that the sitter inevitably ended up with a backache. Where the ceiling above them was once-white plaster now made gray by decades of ingrained dust, the floor below them was once-gray linoleum now made white from years of footsteps and chair legs dragged across it. There was a table with magazines, but it was scuffed oak-look chipboard, and the magazines were Voici and Oops!

“Do you think there’s a hot drinks machine?” she murmured to Magda. The place was too depressing for full volume.

“You could ask.” Magda tilted her head toward the gardien, who was staring at the logbook in front of him with the intensity of a man who yearns to be on the internet. Rachel was just preparing to rise from her seat when the door to the inner recesses swung open and a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, his sport coat open over jeans and his rumpled shirt tucked in, appeared. The brigadier trailed slightly behind him.

“Bonjour, mesdames.” The older man put out his hand. They rose and shook it, first one and then the other. “I am Capitaine Boussicault. My colleague tells me you are here about a girl who has been missing for a week?” They nodded. “Come with me.”

He led them through the door and down one or two identically drab corridors until they reached a large room filled with desks; off the side of it was a smaller room with only one desk and three chairs. He nodded at them to precede him, and they all filed into the smaller room. He gestured for the two women to take the chairs in front of the desk, then shut the door and sat behind the desk. The young brigadier, his hands in his pockets, leaned against the far wall, near his superior, but not next to him.

“Alors,” said the capitaine. “A girl is missing. She has been missing some time?”

Rachel cleared her throat. “Yes. Elisabeth des Troyes.”

“Bon.” He pulled a pad toward him, wrote on it with a pencil he found on the desktop. “How old is she?”

Rachel gave her best estimate. “Twenty-one?”

“And one of you is … her mother?” He looked questioningly from one to the other.

“Oh no!” Rachel was too worried to be offended. “We’re no relation to her.”

“You’re friends?”

“Nooo …” Rachel didn’t feel she qualified as Elisabeth’s friend.

The capitaine looked puzzled. “All right.” He put the pencil down. “How do you know this girl?”

What could she say? Rachel wondered. She’s the employee of my former lover? She and an old boyfriend of mine were working together to defraud the government? How could she define her connection to Elisabeth in a way that was accurate but also sounded sane? She thought for a long moment before she spoke, choosing her words carefully: “We were beneficiaries of the same estate.”

“Ah.” He seemed to accept this, because he picked up the pencil and prepared to write. “Whose estate was that?”

“A man named Edgar Bowen.”

“Edgar Bowen!” He put the pencil down again and looked at the brigadier, who had straightened up.

“You’ve heard of Edgar Bowen?”

“Madame,” the capitaine said, his voice urbane, “everyone here has heard of Edgar Bowen. He’s The Soup Man.” For a moment, his tone became confidential. “Policemen love a striking death.”

“It’s funny you should say that,” Rachel began, but Magda interrupted by clearing her throat with a loud hacking.

“So sorry.” Magda waved a hand. “Dry indoor air.” She beamed. “All better now.”

Knocked off his stride, the policeman latched back onto the original conversation. “Bon, so you were both beneficiaries of Edgar Bowen. And you became close?”

Why not? Rachel thought. It sounded plausible. “Yes.”

“And you noticed her missing because …?”

“Well, we’re both working in Edgar Bowen’s appartement at the moment, but she hasn’t been there for a week.” She added, “And before that she came every day.”

“What does she look like?”

Rachel gave as complete a description as she could of Elisabeth, also describing the various changes of clothes she had seen her in. The capitaine wrote it all down.

“And I understand you went to check on her, but she didn’t answer the door?” Even though his superior wasn’t looking, the brigadier nodded, confirming it.

“Yes.”

Finished writing, the capitaine looked up. “Perhaps she is ill.”

“She isn’t ill,” Rachel said. “We rang the bell and pounded on the door, but no one answered.”

“Perhaps she had just gone out. Perhaps—forgive me,” he put up a hand, “she is avoiding you.”

Magda took over answering. “Well, her neighbor says she hasn’t seen her for a week.”

“But people—even young ladies—do go away for a week. That’s not unusual.”

“But her neighbor says she can hear Elisabeth’s portable ringing and ringing, which means it must be in her room. And what twenty-one-year-old do you know who would go away and leave behind her portable? That is unusual.” Magda sat back in triumph.

The capitaine looked down at his pad, drew a deep breath, and made his hands a steeple in front of his chin. For a second he gazed into the middle distance; then he let out his breath. When he spoke, his voice was measured. “My dear mesdames. What you are telling me is that a young woman of legal age, and of whose life you know little, has not been seen by her neighbor for a week and seems to have left her portable in her home for that same amount of time. Now, I don’t know this young woman even as well as you do, but there doesn’t seem much here to cause alarm. The young lady may have gone on vacation and forgotten her portable, or it may have slipped out of her pocket or baggage as she left.”

“We thought those things!” Rachel interjected. “But then we also thought—” But remembering Magda’s signal earlier, she stopped short.

“You also thought what?” The capitaine’s face was open, his curiosity unfeigned.

The room became very quiet. Rachel could hear the humming of the computer fan and make out the sound of the brigadier rubbing the cloth of his pocket between his fingers. She thought how she’d wanted to go to the police at the start. Now here they were. And Elisabeth could be in real trouble: girls did not just vanish for a week with no cell phone and no word to anyone. They did not. She looked at Magda, whose eyes were pleading with her.

“It’s because of Edgar,” she said.

Magda let her breath out in a gust.

The capitaine took his hands out of the steeple and clasped them on the desk. “Explain, please.” He watched her intently.

“Elisabeth was very attached to Edgar. They worked together closely. And we—we think …” She stumbled over the last phrase.

Magda sighed, but finished for her. “We think Edgar Bowen was murdered.”

The capitaine’s expression changed from serious to astonished, from astonished to amused. He let out a short bark of laughter, then exchanged a glance with his junior before turning back to Magda. “Murdered! And what leads you to this conclusion, that an open-and-shut case of accidental death that occurred when the victim was home alone is, in fact, a murder? Where is your evidence?” He laughed again.

Rachel was stung. “It’s the wine.” Then, hearing how thin that sounded, she explained further. “There was rosé. Edgar didn’t like rosé. He wouldn’t have had it on the table.”

“So you think Monsieur Bowen was murdered because the wine is wrong?” He shared another amused glance with the brigadier. “Truly, madame, you have lived here long enough to become French.”

Rachel flushed. “It isn’t only that. In fact, it isn’t only Edgar.” This time she didn’t stop. “We’re also worried about Elisabeth because another woman close to Edgar died.”

“Ah?” Although the capitaine’s tone was neutral, his lips twitched. Rachel’s face burned at the knowledge that he was humoring her, but she kept going.

“Catherine Nadeau, Edgar’s companion. She’s dead, and the newspaper report of her death said it was suicide over money worries. But we saw her only a week before she died, and she was perfectly cheerful and told us she was solvent. In fact,” she drew a victorious breath, “she had just reopened her store!”

“Yes.” The capitaine nodded, his face and tone no longer patronizing. “I read reports on that event too. The police were called to the scene.” He clicked his tongue. “Always a painful business, such deaths.” He leaned forward and held Rachel’s eyes with his own. “You know, of course, madame, that many suicides seem more cheerful in the days before their deaths. You know that often the decision to end everything, the sudden certainty after a long period of confusion, cheers them. And you know that in many cases suicides occur after people exit depression, for before that the person is too depressed to act on her wishes.” He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, once again steepling his fingers. “And doubtless you have considered that many people who say that they are solvent do so to save face and, in fact, are nothing of the sort.” He thumped down the front legs of his chair and gazed at her, his expression bland.

Rachel sat mute. She pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezing the tender bulbs at the inner corners of her eyes, and looked at the wall behind the capitaine. She knew that to the two men it would seem as if she were weary or embarrassed, or both, but really it was to stop herself from crying. She was worried about Elisabeth; she was a bad detective; and now this man was taking pleasure in humiliating her. She blinked hard to force back the tears.

“And in the case of Monsieur Bowen,” the capitaine continued, his voice now serious, “no, mesdames, I am sorry to disappoint you, but the police investigated. It was the butler’s night off, and before he left, he fixed vichyssoise for Monsieur Bowen to eat. When he came home late, he went straight up to his rooms, and the next morning, when he came to clear away the dishes before arranging the room for breakfast, he found Monsieur Bowen. Found him dead.” He opened his arms and displayed his palms in an expansive gesture. “There was an autopsy, which proved that he drowned in his soup! It was in his lungs. That is all there was to it, wine or no wine.”

“We disagree,” Magda said coolly.

“You may disagree all you like.” He made the exaggerated moue and propulsive exhale that constituted the typical French expression of dismissal. “But the story is very straightforward.” He shrugged an equally dismissive French shrug. “Now”—as he spoke he rose from the desk—“I thank you for coming in. I will look for this young lady, for, like you, I find the situation unusual. And if you leave your contact information at the front desk, I will let you know what I discover.”

This was, Rachel knew, his way of being kind. But she couldn’t forgive him because of it.

As if to prove her right, he added, “But we will say no more about this nonsense of Monsieur Bowen. C’est finis.” He reached out and shook each of their hands. “My colleague will show you out.”

When they finally stood outside the commissariat, Magda took Rachel’s hand and squeezed it. She looked serious, and when she spoke her voice was solemn. “You know,” she said gravely, “I think that young guy kept his hands in his pockets because we gave him a hard-on.”

Rachel was still laughing as they went down into the Vaugirard Métro station.