City of Light

Chapter FOUR



Paris



April 19



10:20 AM

“Look through the report very carefully,” Rayley said to his translator, a nondescript young man named Carle. “I want to know if there was anything on the maid’s hands.”

Carle obediently flipped through the papers. “It says they were clean, Sir.”

“I know. But does ‘clean’ mean that there was nothing of interest on her hands or nothing at all?”

Carle looked at him with the flat expression of a man who is not paid to be curious.

“The report says the officer who originally examined her was Denis Rubois,” Rayley said. “Go and ask him. She was in the process of helping to prepare dinner when the murderer entered, so it seems there would be some residue from her efforts. Flour or butter or blood, strings from a bean, juice from an apple. Something.”

Carle nodded and left the room, and Rayley picked up the papers on his desk, frowning once again at the line where the investigating officer had described the maid’s hands. “Propre et blanc comme la neige.” The small translation book he carried in his pocket informed him that the officer had described the maid’s hands as not merely “clean” but “clean and white as the snow.” The sort of linguistic extravagance the French were known for, but perhaps a clue as well, for his time at the Yard had taught Rayley that sometimes the absence of something could be as telling as its presence.

They were bringing the maid back in for another round of questioning this afternoon, along with the family housekeeper, and Rayley had been invited to witness the interrogation. If his hosts expected him to sit quietly in the corner, merely observing, they would be disappointed. The scribbled question on the back of Trevor’s last letter had set Rayley’s mind in motion, propelling his thoughts in the very direction Trevor had no doubt intended.

The maid didn’t scream. This much at least was clear. She did not claim to have screamed in her first interview and no one in the crowded household claimed to have heard her. There were two possible explanations for why she would have responded to the presence of an armed intruder with silence. Perhaps the girl was simply not a screamer by nature, even when frightened or startled. Some people went mute in times of crisis. Or, as Trevor’s question seemed to imply, perhaps she did not scream because she was not surprised to find the man in the kitchen.

He had his list of questions at the ready and, judging upon the speed with which Carle normally performed tasks, it would doubtless take him an hour to find Rubois and complete his humble mission. In the meantime, Rayley could return to the other pile of papers on his desk, the ones he had taken care to conceal even from the disinterested eyes of Carle. Ever since he had learned he would be ascending the Eiffel Tower, Rayley had been scouring the records room of the police station for everything he could find on the mechanics of elevators. He’d understood scarcely ten percent of what he’d read and the paltry information he had managed to glean had reassured him not a whit.

Most of the journalistic stories involving elevators were actually descriptions of the far more interesting subject of elevator accidents. Rayley had found at least a dozen newspaper accounts of the ghastly demise of the Baroness de Schack at the Grand Hotel a decade earlier. As the Baron and Baroness had been leaving their suite – which had been merely situated on the second floor, there’s the rub – the Baron had walked down the steps but the Baroness had opted to summon the elevator, which she shared with the operator and another nameless employee of the hotel. For reasons which all the newspaper articles had failed to make clear to Rayley, the elevator elected not to descend as expected, but rather to rise with an alarming speed to the top floor of the hotel, where it struck a beam and them plummeted like a stone, dropping the Baroness and her two companions to a bloody death. The accident had made all the major papers in Europe, and Rayley would daresay those in most of the world, both because of the titled status of the deceased and the particular horrors of death by cerebral congestion. The reputation of the Grand Hotel had been tarnished for years.

So it was quite clear that elevators were infernal contraptions even when merely going up and down, but Rayley could not shake off the memory of Graham’s casual remark about the additional problems facing the engineers for the Tower. These elevators had to rise diagonally. It seemed an utterly unnatural movement and the fact that the French had brought in the Americans to help accomplish the feat did nothing to settle Rayley’s nerves. He knew all too well the dangers inherent in moving a thought from English into French and back, where a man could sincerely believe himself to be ordering lamb and instead be brought a bowl of turtle soup. Engineering directions translated by someone like Carle was an appalling thought.

Speaking of which, the man abruptly appeared back at the door, causing Rayley to shuffle his papers guiltily.

“He said her hands were completely clean, Sir. As if they had just been washed.”

“And no one found that odd?”

“That a kitchen maid would wash her hands?” Carle asked, with an ironic lift of an eyebrow, as if to imply such cleanliness might be a rare thing in England but certainly not in France.

“That she would stop to wash them in the middle of a murder investigation,” Rayley said impatiently. “Never mind. I’ll save the rest of my questions for the interview.”

The maid and housekeeper were already seated in the interrogation room when Rayley arrived, perched on two wooden chairs which were positioned opposite the seven identical wooden chairs which held the officers. It gave the impression that the women were facing a firing squad, an arrangement no doubt designed to intimidate suspects into full compliance and witnesses into full disclosure. Judging by the terrified looks on the women’s faces, the stratagem would undoubtedly work yet again.

He made his way to the center of the front row and lowered himself decisively into the only empty seat, waving Carle over to the corner. Rayley’s presence on the front line of the interrogation seemed to startle the officers, just as he intended. And he further seized the advantage by asking, “Might I go first?”

Without waiting for an answer, or even the translation of his question, Rayley turned toward the housekeeper and said “I apologize for the inconvenience of having to use an interpreter, Ma’am, but I am a guest in your beautiful city and regrettably unskilled in your language.” Carle’s translation earned Rayley back a cautious nod from the woman, who had a simple country face. Something in her manner gave Rayley a flutter of optimism.

“Was the night of the murder, by chance, an evening that Mr. Martin normally had at leisure?”

Carle repeated the question. The woman looked surprised, then nodded.

“Then why was he in the kitchen?”

A peppering of French, then Carle said “The master of the house brought home a business associate for dinner unexpectedly. The lady of the house asked the cook, Mr. Martin, if he would agree to stay and prepare the meal, then take his leisure on the following evening. He agreed.”

“And if there had been no unexpected visitor, what would have happened? I suppose what I’m asking is, how would the family typically dine on the cook’s night off?”

The officer in the chair beside Rayley pointedly shifted his weight and the others began to exchange glances. Their shock at having the interrogation usurped and their mannerly restraint in the face of what seemed to be utterly trivial questions would only last so long. Rayley knew he would have to focus his thoughts very carefully.

“She says,” Carle reported, “that the family would either dine out on such an evening or the maid Jeanne Marie would prepare a light meal of stew or soup.”

“Ah, just as a family would manage the situation in London,” Rayley said, with what he hoped was a winning smile. He was torn between his need to charm the housekeeper and his need to get on with the questioning before the French had him dragged from the room. “So normally on a Monday night, Jeanne Marie would have been in the kitchen alone?”

The officer beside him stilled and gave Rayley a little sidelong glance. At least someone sees where I’m going with this, Rayley thought, as the woman listened to Carle’s latest question and then nodded.

“And in London,” Rayley went on, “the cook’s night off is also the night that certain kitchen housekeeping tasks are performed. The most thorough scrub of the week, the cleaning of the silver, that sort of thing. Might I assume it works the same way in a Parisian home? That anyone familiar with the household routine would have expected Monday night to yield a kitchen full of silver and a young girl alone in the room?”

One of the advantages of having to wait for the circuit of translations was that Rayley had plenty of time to observe the faces of the two women in front of him. The housekeeper was maintaining her slightly quizzical frown, as if surprised to find herself in the presence of what appeared to be an English clairvoyant. But at the mention of the household silver, the maid Jeanne Marie had jerked upright in her chair and gone, Rayley observed with some satisfaction, blanc comme la neige. She was very young and remarkably ugly, but he supposed neither of these things precluded her from having a lover. Or from plotting with that lover to steal from the very household that employed her.

The murmuring of the policemen around him was enough to indicate a general light was dawning on them all. To take matters further on his own would be impolite and unnecessary, so Rayley merely smiled at the housekeeper and said “Merci, madame.” The man to his left, whom he shortly realized was the same Claude Rubois who had originally examined the girl, sprang on the trembling Jeanne Marie like a wolf, and she promptly spewed out her whole story. Rayley could glean a fair amount from context and the tone of her voice, but Carle later filled in the blanks. The boy who had come to the door had been not her lover, but her brother. And yes, the two had planned for him to perform his heist of the family silver on an evening when they believed she would be the only one in the kitchen. Jeanne Marie had no way to warn her brother that the unexpected dinner guest had meant a change of plans and thus that the luckless Mr. Martin would also be present. When he found the cook washing clams at the sink the boy had panicked, performing a clumsy murder when a simple turn-and-run would have sufficed. Emerging from the pantry to find their perfect crime had fallen to disaster, his sister had felt she had no alternative but to cover for him. She had shooed the boy from the kitchen, wiped down the knife he had used, concealed it among its fellows, and then – small but fatal error – had washed her hands before summoning help.

The girl was led away. Fairly gently, Rayley was relieved to note. The housekeeper, sobbing, was taken off in a different direction. A few more officers strode from the room in a hurry, evidently off to arrest the girl’s brother. Rubois slapped Rayley on the shoulder, a gesture that startled him but he raised his eyes to see the man’s chin nodding in an unmistakable gesture of “Well done.”

And then they all were gone, even Carle, and Rayley was left in the room alone. What else could he have expected? He looked at his watch. Barely four, but he felt an urge to celebrate. He could eat at a better restaurant tonight, be supposed, or indulge in a complete bottle of wine. But solitary celebration is a sad thing, so instead he rose to his feet and headed toward the door. There was a telegraph office on the corner. He couldn’t wait to tell Trevor.