She knew she didn’t have a response to that, having only returned from her unsanctioned road trip a few hours earlier, so she shrugged and headed to the elevator.
Finn saw her almost to the door and then headed back down. Grasset’s door was still ajar, and he knocked lightly on the woodwork.
“Come in, Monsieur Harrington.”
Finn stepped inside, and Grasset came out of his living room and gestured toward the kitchen. Now that he thought of it, he’d been in Grasset’s apartment a dozen or so times and he didn’t think he’d ever seen the living room. He was curious about it, and realized that what he had seen of the apartment was too old-fashioned for the building it was in, as if in some way it predated the current construction.
“Please, sit down.” There was already a bottle on the table with two shot glasses. “A drink?”
Finn tried to see what the bottle was, some sort of grappa, and said as he always did, “That’d be great, thanks.”
Grasset sat and poured two glasses of clear liquid. It had an odd viscosity about it that Finn mistrusted. They raised their glasses and drank, and Finn felt the fire lingering in his mouth and throat long after he’d swallowed.
“Good, no?”
“Yeah, it’s powerful stuff.” He showed a cursory interest in the bottle, as if he wanted to memorize the label for the next time he was out shopping, then said, “What did you want to speak to me about, Monsieur Grasset?”
“Ah yes, Monsieur Gibson’s apartment. Yesterday evening, I came in and noticed a light was on. I thought maybe we had left it on so I took the spare key, but when I got there I could hear footsteps inside. I knocked. And a man from the company, from BGS, was in there.”
“You mean he’d moved into the apartment?”
“No, he said he was inspecting it. I asked if someone new would come soon but he said he wasn’t sure.”
“What did he look like, how old?”
“Your age, perhaps. He looked average. Dark hair and, er, a suntan.”
“He wasn’t foreign? I mean, Arabic or—”
“No, and I mentioned it and he said he’d been on vacation, to the Caribbean.” Grasset shrugged nonchalantly, as if he and Finn shared a dim view of people who holidayed in the Caribbean. Finn wasn’t sure what the view was, but as if countering the disapproval, Grasset said, “But he was friendly, very much wanting to talk and ask questions about the building.”
“You hadn’t seen him before?”
“Never.”
“Okay, what kind of questions?”
Grasset topped up both glasses, even though Finn had drunk hardly any of his, then said, “That is what I wanted to talk to you about. He asked about the kind of people who lived here, but then—it was strange the way he changed the subject—he said he’d heard the neighbor’s daughter had run away and he hoped she would be found. I asked him if he had spoken to the neighbors, and he said Monsieur Gibson had told him about it.”
“Gibson left the day after, so he might have heard about it before he went.”
“It’s possible.” Unspoken was Grasset’s suspicion, even based on the little knowledge he possessed, that the visitor to Gibson’s apartment had a specific interest in Hailey’s disappearance. “Monsieur Harrington, people talk to me all the time, and so often they talk about one thing when they want to know another. What a beautiful day, Monsieur Grasset . . . oh, and I haven’t seen Madame Harrington lately. Or they ask directions and then suddenly they wonder if any apartments might be available.” Finn smiled, because it was the truth, and because Grasset was a master at it himself. But Grasset grew serious as he said, “This man last night, he humored me, but he wanted to know only about Hailey Portman.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him everything I know—that the police are not involved, that Hailey ran away, as teenagers sometimes do, and God willing she will come back when she realizes it’s not nice to be alone in the world.”
“That’s good,” said Finn.
Grasset was dismissive of the comment, but said, “When did she come back?”
“Only today.”
“I almost didn’t recognize her.” He tipped the grappa in his glass, first one way, then the other, as if studying the meniscus. “I don’t understand very much of . . . of anything anymore, but if Hailey was my daughter, I would be concerned. This man from BGS, he was very friendly, but why would he be so interested in a young girl like that?”