Dan started, “Were you ever tempted to—”
Sylvie put a finger up, silencing him, and she smiled, saying, “There is one more thing that happened. I’ve never told anyone else, but I knew this was a clear indication not to get involved.” Both Dan and Inger stared at her, waiting, intrigued. “We left the apartment later that summer. Neither of us were happy there after what had happened to Sabine, and something hadn’t quite felt right afterwards. You probably think me foolish if I talk of a sixth sense, but we both had the same feeling. And then, when we were packing up to leave, we found two . . . electronic bugs, one behind a picture, one behind a bedside cabinet. We didn’t know what they were, of course, but I took them to a friend at the university and he knew right away. A coincidence? Possibly. But I’m confident, we both were, that somebody had bugged our apartment, and I think what they wanted to discover was if we knew the identity of the man who tried to rape Sabine.”
It was quite a leap, but Dan could understand how they’d made it, and knowing what he knew, he guessed they’d probably been right.
Inger said, “Did you show the bugs to the police?”
Sylvie looked a little wistful as she said, “We were twenty. Innocents, really, but we knew enough, had seen enough scary Hollywood films, to know that it was best we forget all about it. We wouldn’t help Sabine, or find her killer, only bring more trouble for ourselves. So, no, we didn’t go to the police again. You think we were wrong?”
Inger didn’t answer, but it seemed Sylvie was waiting for a response, so Dan said, “No, I think you did the right thing. I’m guessing you never heard any more after you left the apartment?”
“Nothing. But if the bugs were for the reason I think, they would have known by then that we knew nothing, the man at the party, it was a mystery to us. And afterwards, I almost forgot about it.”
Almost, thought Dan, but not quite.
“Thank you, Sylvie, you’ve been more help than you could know.”
She shrugged noncommittally and said, “You’re going to Yousef?”
“Yes. In fact, do you mind if I call him from here?”
She stood and said, “I’ll call him for you, tell him you’re on the way.”
As she reached for the phone she pointed at a sweeping canvas opposite, abstract oranges and browns and sandy yellows. “That’s one of his. He’s very successful now.”
They both got up and looked at the canvas as she spoke animatedly in the background, a light-hearted catching up before the more serious business of telling Yousef about the visitors.
She ended the call and joined them in front of the picture and Dan said, “For some reason I thought he was a sculptor, maybe just because he was in the studio with her that night.”
“You’re right, he did start out with mainly sculpture, but then he moved into painting and became a great success.” She smiled, pleased with herself as she said, “I paid very little for this, back when we were all still poor, and now it’s perhaps the most valuable piece in my collection.”
Dan smiled, thinking of Sylvie, probably never poor the way most people saw it, supporting her artist friends, staying true to them through the years. And Sabine might have remained part of that circle, had the events of fourteen years ago not reduced her role to that of a tactile bronze, a talking point for memories.
She walked them toward the door, pointing out other paintings, ceramic pieces, another bronze, but then Dan thought of something else and said, “Did Sabine ever mention anything about the man who tried to rape her, how old he was or his nationality?”
“Never. I’ve always assumed he was American, because of the party, but I don’t know for a fact.”
Inger beat Dan to it, saying, “Why, where was the party?”
Dan had assumed until this point, and maybe so had Inger, that this had been some drunken student party, but Sylvie said, “It was some dreadful thing, celebrating cultural ties, lots of young and promising artists invited. I’m not sure why Sabine was invited, perhaps she was suggested by her tutor, but it was the kind of thing that seemed to happen back then—there were so many parties. And yes, so it could have been a Frenchman, because there were hundreds of people there, but the party was at the residence of the US Ambassador.”
She shrugged, as if excusing herself for making what might have been a fanciful leap. And she probably didn’t understand the expression on Inger’s face, and on Dan’s, or even begin to appreciate that neither of them thought she was being anywhere near fanciful enough.
Chapter Twenty-five