They fell in through Richard’s door like drunk giggly teenagers, high on adventure. And like illicit teenagers they were met by the stern disapproval of the sensible adult, this time in the form of Passepartout, and he appeared to have his arms folded and a “what time do you call this?” look on his face.
“Oh my poor darling!” Valérie picked him up and cuddled him, kissing the top of his head. “You have been left here all alone in the dark, you poor thing. Did you miss Mummy?” She turned to Richard. “Madame Tablier must have left him here.”
“Well, you can’t expect her to stay all night waiting for us. She’s a busy woman.” Richard wondered just how true that might be. “Anyway, it’s not totally dark; she left the television on as company, presumably.” A violent, dubbed American cop show was showing in the background and he immediately switched it off. No class, he thought not for the first time, no élan, no finesse.
“Ah, Madame Tablier left a note.” She put Passepartout back onto the sofa while Richard turned on some lights. “‘Monsieur,’” read Valérie haughtily, “‘I could not wait any longer. The dog has eaten’—oh my poor Passepartout, what has she been feeding you?—‘and it likes NCIS Detroit. We must talk about that young couple.’ What about the young couple, do you think?”
“Oh, probably sharing a room out of wedlock, I don’t know. I need a drink.” But rather than go and get one, he sat down heavily next to Passepartout. “They seem very sweet; the light was on in the salon when we got back, so they’re obviously up. Maybe they like NCIS Detroit as well?”
“Well, I need a shower to get rid of the rest of this mask, but if they’re up I cannot go through the salon like this.”
It was a fair point, mused Richard, who, groaning with aches and pains, got up and went to the kitchen. “Would you like a drink?”
Valérie was once again standing with Passepartout in her arms and pondered the question as though it were of deep philosophical import. “Yes,” she said eventually and in a way as to suggest life and all its myriad complexities were now solved. “I’d like a pale ale.”
Richard began to wonder what parallel universe the woman operated in. How a woman of Valérie’s grace, poise and whateveryoucallit—he had the words, but wasn’t prepared to admit them to himself—would ever even come across a pale ale, was completely beyond him. It would be like watching Arthur Scargill order a pink gin.
“Of all the drinks, in all the world,” he muttered, “why on earth would you ask for a pale ale?”
“I had one years ago, in England. I was on honeymoon, now when was it…”
Richard had no desire to hear more of Valérie’s former husband, or husbands. “We have no pale ale, madame; we do have champagne.”
“Oh yes, Richard!” she said triumphantly. “I think that we have earned that.”
“Me, too.” And he opened the large fridge. He heard her laughing and he popped his head back around the door. “What’s so funny?” he asked self-consciously.
“Your description of Martin and Gennie!” She laughed again. “I wish I had seen them. You are very English; I can imagine you left out all of the juicy details.”
“Believe me, I have merely reported the facts. It was most un-erotic, I can tell you.” He popped the champagne cork. “I’ll never see cling film or bulldog clips in quite the same way again.” He handed her a glass. “Santé,” he said, looking her in the eye.
“Bottoms up!” she replied and almost spat out her drink in the ensuing giggles.
“Yes, bottoms up indeed!”
It was a while before they calmed down, and Valérie sighed happily. “We did very well tonight, Richard, you and I.”
“Yes, yes, I suppose we did. Well, we know that the Rizzolis are up to no good and that Grandchamps is, at the last count anyway, still alive.”
“I wonder why he went back there, though. He has a prime.”
“He’s far from being in his ‘preeme’!” Richard joked, exaggerating the French accent.
“It’s just an expression,” Valérie added hurriedly.
“Maybe, maybe after all this, he is just a bit, you know, senile?”
“I wonder…”
“The Rizzolis are certainly after him, though, so we must find him, I suppose. How did you get away from them anyway—the Rizzolis, I mean?”
Valérie turned to walk back to the sofa. “Well, after you had gone I realized how silly it was just to sit there and try to break into their phone, right there and then. They could come back at any moment, you know?”
“I do know, they did.”
“Yes, well, I was already on my way out. I hid in the kitchen and they didn’t see me. Then I found you in the hedge there—what were you up to? Running backward and forward like that. You looked very funny. I was watching you for a good long while.”
Richard felt himself blushing again and was grateful he still had on the remnants of the face pack. He knew High Noon almost scene by scene, word for word, and he didn’t remember the part where Grace Kelly, rather than implore Gary Cooper not to face the villains and his own destiny, breaks into a fit of giggles and says, “Oh, Marshal, you do look funny!”
“I thought they had you in there, so at first I was trying to cause a distraction,” he began heroically, but then literally let the mask slip. “Then I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea how to work a bloody gun. Sorry.”
She walked slowly toward him. “And when I stopped you, you had decided to go in after me anyway?”
“Yes,” he said, avoiding eye contact. She put her green-masked hand on his.
“Thank you,” she said simply, and there was an awkward pause. “And now I would like another glass, please!”
He poured each of them another glass. “Are you hungry?”
“Oh no!” It was almost a rebuke. “We’re drinking champagne; who needs food? Unless you have oysters, which are the only things I care to eat with champagne.”
“Nope, sorry, fresh out of oysters.” Richard wondered what she’d have asked for if he’d actually had pale ale in the larder; presumably he’d now be hunting around for some pork scratchings or a slice of black pudding. “So, where do we go from here, then? To the police, to Bonneval?”
“Not yet, no.” She was very definite.
“Why not, why not yet?”
“Well, with what? A gun they may already have a license for? For doing something to the Thompsons that the Thompsons desperately wanted to happen in the first place? For following young Melvil? There is nothing there.”
He saw her point. Apart from the fact that he was now convinced they’d done for poor Ava Gardner, what had they actually done besides? Was unauthorized use of bulldog clips a crime? Richard shuddered at the memory; it should be, he thought, it really should be.
“So, the aim is the same then: find our Monsieur Grandchamps?”
“Yes, exactly, Richard. Is there any more champagne? I’m feeling slightly drunk and I like it very much.”
“Of course,” he said, hoping that was the case. “I’ll get some.” He went off to root around in his cave, which was a walk-in cellar under the stairs. Valérie carried on talking as he did so.
“One way to do that, if their phone yields us nothing, is to follow the Rizzolis…”
“That may be more difficult after tonight, assuming they check out of Martin and Gennie’s,” he called up the stairs.
“We could set Melvil and Marie as bait?”
“That seems a bit harsh. I don’t even know why they are bait. Ah!” He bent down and picked up a dusty bottle of champagne, a 1995 bottle of Heidsieck Blanc des Millénaires. He wiped the label. It had been a wedding present from a good friend, someone long since forgotten or, more likely, who had been put on the list of people “he no longer needed” post-marriage. Well, he definitely felt post-marriage now; best get it while it still fizzed.
“There must have been something in the envelope Melvil posted,” Valérie continued. “He said it was just an electricity bill, but the Rizzolis obviously didn’t think so.”
Richard emerged from under the stairs and immediately opened the bottle. “So we go back to Vauchelles and see what happens at the postbox? Sorry,” he apologized as the champagne fizzed over her glass slightly and onto her hand, which she rubbed.
“Oh look,” she giggled, “your champagne cleans off the mud mask! Tonight I may bathe in champagne!”
Richard was becoming heady enough as it was without that kind of image rattling around his head like a pinball. “The thing is,” he said, trying to stick to the subject, “we could wait there for days and nothing might happen.”
They drank in silence for a while, and Valérie rested her head on the back of the sofa. “Of course”—she began talking to the ceiling—“we could go straight to the source.”
“Meaning?” Fatigue and the champagne had hit Richard, too.
“We break into Monsieur Grandchamps’s house.”
Champagne definitely had a calming effect on Richard. He sat there, taking this in. Under normal circumstances he’d have been stomping around the room, decrying not just the illegality of the proposal but the not inconsiderable danger from assorted mafia assassins, police, and a very jittery, armed twin brother watching from across the road, but enough champagne was tantamount to creating your own locked-in syndrome and he was too tired to argue. “Shall we go now while we’re still dressed for it?” he found himself saying.
“Oh no! I need a shower,” Valérie replied, taking him seriously. “Do you think the young people have gone to bed yet?”
Richard got up and peered through the window toward the salon of the chambre d’hôte. “It doesn’t look like it, no. The TV is still on over there.”
“Can I shower here, Richard? Do you have any pajamas that I can borrow?”
Suddenly the room seemed to pull into sharp focus for him. “Of course.” He tried to say it suavely, but he had the distinct impression he sounded like a teenager whose voice was breaking. “And there’s Alicia’s room made up already, if you want to stay…”
“Thank you,” she said and downed what was left of her champagne. “Now, I will go and get these silly clothes off and wash off this paint.” She got up unsteadily and went to the bathroom.
Richard sat stunned for a second and avoided the “prospective father-in-law” gaze from an unimpressed Passepartout. Then he shot into action. He quickly tidied Alicia’s room, which was a large bedroom and very girly. He put on the light on the bedside table, turned down the covers and closed the shutters, noticing that Melvil and Marie were still up. Good, he thought.
Then he went to his own wardrobe on the landing and got out his best pair of dark-blue satin pajamas with white piping and monogrammed “RA” on the breast pocket. He took them downstairs and knocked on the bathroom door. Inside Valérie was singing to herself in the shower. In truth, she had an awful voice but that didn’t bother him and he opened the door, making as much noise as possible, in case she thought he was sneaking about. He put the pajamas on the towel rail by the door.
“I’ve put the pajamas on the towel rail by the door!” he said loudly, though she didn’t hear him over the shower and her singing.
On the floor were Valérie’s clothes and her boots and on top of them was the gun, the Beretta Pico. Instinctively he picked it up and put it in his own pocket. If asked he couldn’t have said why; partly it was his natural inclination to tidy up—I mean, who wants guns lying around the bathroom? But also, it was just to be on the safe side. It had been a long day, and something about ill-fitting hats, Tex and pale ale was jangling some far-off alarm bells.
“I’ll leave the pajamas on the rail here!” he shouted again.
“Thank you,” she answered this time, and thankfully didn’t continue with the singing.
He put the gun in his pocket, turned and left the bathroom and there, in the frame of the open front door across the hall, stood a fearsome, terrifying sight. Clare Ainsworth, née Randall, stood, feet apart, a small suitcase in each hand hanging by her side and a look on her face that would have had Medusa drummed out of the “turn to stone” club as a rank amateur.
“You were supposed to pick me up,” she said, slowly and menacingly, her nurtured instinct for melodrama cranking itself into gear.
“I—I, er, sorry,” he stammered.
“You were supposed to PICK ME UP!” She moved closer to him, her dramatic tendencies now mixed with her real and powerful emotions.
It flashed across his mind that frankly not picking Clare up was the least of his worries as he presently stood in his hallway in what was left of his camouflage gear, armed, and about to effect a presumably awkward introduction between a highly attractive French woman wearing his pajamas and his soon to be ex-wife. His guess was that the “soon to be” bit might be given a hearty shove; that’s if she didn’t keel over thanks to a surfeit of emotion first.
“Can I take your bags?”
She put them down and stepped away from them, sniffing the air, her eyes narrowing. Clare, a very handsome, attractive woman, dressed expensively and with the latest fashionable Home Counties blond bob was, nevertheless, when the mood took her—which was often in Richard’s experience—quite simply terrifying.
“You were supposed to pick me up,” she said in lieu of commentary as she moved through the rooms, and with each repetition the more menacing it became. She noticed Passepartout on the sofa but ignored him, sensing bigger quarry.
“Erm, good flight?” Richard had literally no idea what to do.
She turned toward him. “Why are you dressed like that?” It was as though she were only just seeing him, as the red mist of anger lifted.
“Oh, you know?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s been quite the evening.” He affected a laugh. “Oh, I’m so pleased to see you.” He moved toward her with his arms outstretched and then she noticed the bulge in his trouser pocket.
“So I see,” she said caustically. “Got your old verve back, Richard?”
He looked down. “Oh, ha! No, I mean, yes, but no.” And he clumsily pulled out the gun, just as Valérie appeared in his pajamas, a towel wrapped around her head and holding a glass of champagne.
Clare looked from Valérie to Richard to the gun, back to Valérie, to the gun and then settled on Richard. “You were supposed to pick me up,” she said weakly, before fainting onto the sofa, narrowly missing Passepartout.