Century Rain Part 4

"What was Mademoiselle White doing in Paris?" Custine asked.

"She never told me, and I never asked. Clearly, funds were not a problem. She may have had some

work, but if that was the case then she kept very erratic hours."

Floyd turned a page on his notepad, thumbing it down to blot the ink on the notes he had already made.

"Sounds like a tourist, spending a few months in Paris before moving on. You mind if I ask how you two got to know each other, and how far that relationship went?"

"It was an entirely harmless a.s.sociation. We happened to meet at Longchamp."

"The races?"

"Yes. I see you've noticed the photograph of my late wife and me."

Floyd nodded, a little ashamed that his scrutiny had been so obvious. "She was very pretty."

"The photograph doesn't begin to do her justice. Her name was Claudette. She died in nineteen fifty-four -only five years ago, but it feels as if I've spent half my life without her."

"I'm sorry," Floyd said.

"Claudette was a great fan of the races." Blanchard got up again and poked around in the fire, to no visible effect. He sat down with a creak of ageing joints. "After she died, there was a long time when I couldn't bring myself to leave this apartment, let alone go back to the races. But one day I persuaded myself to do just that, intending to put some money on a horse in her memory. I told myself that it was what she would have wanted, but all the same I couldn't help but feel a little guilty that I was there on my own."

"You shouldn't have felt that way," Floyd said.

Blanchard looked at him. "Have you ever been married, Monsieur Floyd, or lost a loved one to a slow disease?"

Floyd looked down, chastened. "No, monsieur."

"Then-with all due respect-you can't really know what it is like. That feeling of betrayal...absurd as it was. Yet still I kept going, saving a little money each week, occasionally returning with a small win. And that was where I met Susan White."

"Did the girl gamble?"

"Not seriously. She recognised me only as another tenant and asked if I might help her with a small wager. At first I was reluctant to have anything to do with her, since I almost felt as if Claudette was watching me, as silly as that seems."

"But you did help her."

"I decided that it would do no harm to show her how to study the form, and she placed a bet accordingly. Rather to her surprise, the horse triumphed. Thereafter she arranged to meet me at the races once or twice a week. Frankly, I think the horses fascinated her more than the money. I would catch her staring at them as they circled in the jockeys' enclosure. It was as if she had never seen horses before."

"Maybe they don't have them in Dakota," Custine said.

"And that was as far as it went?" Floyd asked. "A meeting at the races, once or twice a week?"

"That was how it started," Blanchard said, "and perhaps that is how it should have ended, too. But I found that I enjoyed her company. In her I saw something of my late wife: the same zest for life, the same childlike delight in the simplest things. The truly surprising thing was that she appeared to enjoy my company as well."

"So you started to meet up outside the racetrack?"

"Once or twice a week I would invite her into this room, and we would drink tea and coffee and perhaps eat a slice of cake. And we would talk about anything that crossed our minds. Or rather I would talk, since-most of the time, at least-she seemed content to sit and listen." Blanchard smiled, wrinkles splitting his face. "I would say, 'Now it's your turn-I've been monopolising the conversation,' and she would reply, 'No, no, I really want to hear your stories.' And the odd thing is, she seemed quite sincere. We'd talk about anything: the past, the movies, theatre-"

"And did you ever get a look inside her apartment?"

"Of course-I was her landlord. When she was out, it was a simple matter to use the duplicate key. It wasn't snooping," he added a little defensively, leaning forward to make his point. "I have a duty to my other tenants to make sure that the terms of the contract are being honoured."

"I'm sure," Floyd said. "When you were in there not snooping around, did you notice anything?"

"Only that the place was always very neat and tidy, and that she collected a remarkable number of books, records, magazines and newspapers."

"A proper little bookworm, in other words. Not a crime, though, is it?"

"Not unless they've changed the law." Blanchard paused. "There was one thing that struck me as rather unusual, though. Shall I mention it?"

"Couldn't hurt."

"The books kept changing. They were the same from day to day, yes, but from week to week, they changed. So did the magazines and newspapers. It was as if she was collecting them, then moving them on elsewhere to make room for new ones."

"Maybe she was," Floyd said. "If she was a rich tourist, then she might have been shipping goods back home on a regular basis."

"I considered that possibility, yes."

"And?" Floyd asked.

"One day I happened to see her in the street, a long way from the apartment. It was a coincidence. She was making her way down rue Monge, towards the Metro station at Cardinal Lemoine, in the fifth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt. She was struggling with a suitcase, and the thought flashed through my mind that perhaps she had packed her belongings and left."

"Skipping on her rent?"

"Except she had already paid in advance up to the end of the month. Guilty over my suspicions, I vowed to catch up with her and help her with the suitcase. But I am an elderly man and I could not make up the distance quickly enough. Ashamed that I could not be of a.s.sistance to her, I watched her vanish into the Metro station." Blanchard picked up a carved pipe from a selection on a side table and began examining it absently. "I thought that was the end of it, but no sooner had she vanished than she reappeared. No more than a minute or two had pa.s.sed since she entered, and she still had the suitcase. This time, however, it looked much lighter than before. It was a windy day and now the suitcase kept b.u.mping against her hip."

"You told all this to the police?" Floyd asked.

"I did, but they dismissed it. They told me that I had imagined the whole incident, or imagined that the first suitcase was heavier than the second."

Floyd made a careful note, certain-without quite being able to say why-that this was an important observation. "And is this the 'evidence' of foul play you mentioned on the telephone?"

"No," Blanchard said. "That is something else entirely. Two or three weeks before her death, Mademoiselle White's manner changed. She stopped coming to the races, stopped visiting these rooms, and spent more and more time away from her own apartment. On the few occasions when we pa.s.sed each other on the stairs, she seemed distracted."

"Did you check out her rooms?"

Blanchard hesitated a moment before nodding in answer to Floyd's question. "She had stopped acquiring books and magazines. A great many remained in the apartment, but I saw no sign that they were being added to or relocated elsewhere."

Floyd glanced at Custine. "All right. Something must have been on her mind. I have a theory. You want to hear it?"

"Am I paying for this? We haven't discussed terms."

"We'll come to that if we come to it. I think Mademoiselle White had a lover. She must have met someone in the last three weeks before she died." Floyd observed Blanchard, wondering how much of this he really wanted to know. "She'd been spending time with you-innocently, I know-but suddenly her new boyfriend wanted her all to himself. No more trips to the races, no more cosy chats up here."

Blanchard seemed to weigh the matter. "And the matter of the books?"

"Just a guess, but maybe she suddenly had other things to do than hang around bookstores and newsagents. She lost interest in stocking her library, so there was no need to keep on shipping trunks back to Dakota."

"That's a lot of supposition," Blanchard said, "based on a rather striking absence of evidence."

"I said it was a theory, not a watertight case." Floyd took out a toothpick and started chewing on it. "All I'm saying is, there might be less to this than meets the eye."

"And the matter of her death?"

"The fall might still have been an accident."

"I am convinced she was pushed." Blanchard reached under his chair and produced a tin box printed all over with a scratched tartan pattern, a photograph of a Highland terrier on the lid. "This, perhaps, will convince you."

Floyd took the tin. "I really need to watch my figure."

"Open it, please."

Floyd prised the lid off with his fingernails. Inside was a bundle of a.s.sorted doc.u.ments and papers, held together with a single rubber band.

"You'd better explain the significance of this," Floyd said, nonplussed.

"Less than a week before she died, Mademoiselle White knocked on my door. She died on the twentieth; this would have been around the fifteenth or sixteenth. I let her in. She was still fl.u.s.tered, still distracted, but now at least she was ready to talk to me. The first thing she did was apologise for her rudeness during the preceding fortnight, and tell me how much she missed the horses. She also gave me that box."

Floyd slipped free the elastic band surrounding the papers and let them spill into his lap. "What else did she tell you?"

"Only that she might have to leave Paris in a hurry, and that I was to look after the box if she did not return for it."

Floyd glanced through the papers. There were travel doc.u.ments, receipts, maps, newspaper clippings. There was a pencil sketch, carefully annotated, of something circular that he didn't recognise. There was a postcard: a sun-faded photograph of Notre Dame. Floyd flipped it over and saw that the card had been written and stamped, but never sent. The handwriting was neat and girlish, with exaggerated loops and curlicues. It was addressed to someone called Mr. Caliskan, who lived in Tanglewood, Dakota.

"You mind if I read this?"

"Go ahead, Monsieur Floyd."

The first part of the message talked about how the woman was planning to spend the afternoon shopping, looking for some silver jewellery, but that she might have to change her plans if the weather turned to rain. The words "silver" and "rain" had been neatly underlined. This struck Floyd momentarily as odd, before he remembered an elderly aunt who had been in the habit of underlining key words in the letters she sent him. The postcard was signed "from Susan': Floyd speculated that it had been intended for an uncle or grandfather rather than a lover or close friend.

He opened one of the maps, spreading it wide. He had expected a tourist map of Paris, or at the very least of France, but this was a small-scale map of the whole of Western Europe, from Kaliningrad in the north to Bucharest in the south, from Paris in the west to Odessa in the east. A circle had been inked around Paris and another around Berlin, and the two circles were linked by a perfectly straight line in the same ink. Another circle enclosed Milan, which was in turn connected back to Paris by another line. The effect was the creation of an approximate "L" shape, with Paris at the corner of the "L" and Berlin at the end of the longest side. Marked in neat lettering above the lines were two figures: "875" above the Paris-Berlin axis and "625" along that between Paris and Milan. Floyd speculated that these were the distances between the cities, in kilometres rather than miles.

He scratched at the ink with his fingernail, satisfying himself that it was not part of the original printed design. He had no idea what the markings meant, but he speculated that Susan White might have been planning the next leg of her journey, and had been measuring the respective distances between Paris and the two other cities before deciding which to opt for. But what kind of tourist needed to know such distances so precisely? Trains and even aeroplanes did not follow straight-line routes, given the real and political geography of Europe. But perhaps that detail had escaped her.

Floyd folded the map, and then leafed through the rest of the paperwork. There was a typed letter in German from someone called Altfeld, on thick letterhead paper printed with a company insignia for a heavy-manufacturing concern named Kaspar Metals. The address was somewhere in Berlin, and the letter appeared to be in reply to an earlier query Susan White had sent. Beyond that, Floyd's faltering German wasn't up to the task of translation.

"These don't look much like love letters," Floyd said.

"She gave me one other instruction," Blanchard said, "in the event that she did not return. She said that her sister might come looking for her. If she did, I was to pa.s.s on the box to her."

"She was worried about something," Floyd said. "That much we can agree on."

"You're still not convinced that she might have been killed deliberately? Shouldn't you be keen to take

on a murder case? I will pay you for your time. If you find no evidence that she was murdered, then I

will accept your judgement."

"I don't want to waste your money or my time," Floyd said. Custine cast him a sidelong glance, as if questioning his sanity.

"I am authorising you to waste it."

Floyd stuffed the doc.u.ments back into the tin. "Why don't you just hold on to this and see if the sister shows up?"

"Because every day that pa.s.ses is a day longer since she died."

"All due respect, monsieur, but this really isn't something you need concern yourself with."

"I think it is very much my concern."

"What did the police make of the box?" Custine asked.

"I showed it to them, but of course they weren't interested. As I said, entirely too unimaginative."

"You think she might have been a spy," Floyd guessed.

"The thought had crossed my mind. Please do not pretend it has not crossed yours."

"I don't know what to make of any of this," Floyd said. "What I do know is that it never hurts to keep an

open mind."

"Then keep an open mind about the possibility that she was murdered. I owe it to the memory of that lovely young girl not to let her death go unpunished. I know in my heart that someone was responsible, Monsieur Floyd. I also know that Claudette is watching me now, and she would be very disappointed if I did not do my duty to Mademoiselle White."