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“What? Oh, yeah.” Simon rummaged in a carrier bag, tugging out a long piece of baguette. “I’m surprised those stupid ducks haven’t sunk to the bottom of the river, the way you feed them.”
“Ducks need to eat, too.” Paul took the bread and turned to me, his dark eyes slightly quizzical. “You’re welcome to come with me, if you want, unless you’d rather—”
“I’d love to come,” I cut him off, relieved to find my legs would still support me when I stood. Neil settled back against the bench, the soft breeze stirring his golden hair. He met my eyes and smiled. I was running away, and we both knew it, but he didn’t try to stop me. He seemed quite content to stay behind with Simon and peruse the bulging carrier bags, while I scuttled like a rabbit after Paul.
The crowd surged in around me, swept me on, and shot me like a cork from a bottle onto the Quai Jeanne d’Arc, where Paul stood waiting at the foot of the Rabelais statue.
We sat on the steps, as we had before, with the sloping stone wall to our backs and the river spread like a glistening blanket before us, stretched wide at either end to the horizon. The ducks were clustered out of sight at the end of the boat launch, but the cacophony of paddle and squawk still rose loudly to our ears, nearly drowning out the constant drone of traffic on the quai. The same flat-bottomed punt bobbed gently to the rhythm of the current at our feet, its chain moorings trailing clots of sodden dead-brown leaves.
Paul reached for his cigarettes, nodding at my hand. “What have you got there?”
Vaguely surprised, I looked down at my tightly clenched fist. “Nothing,” I said, a little too quickly. “Just a coin.” I dropped it loose into my handbag, and heard it fall to the bottom with a reproachful clink. Frowning, I ran a hand through my hair. “Listen, could I have a cigarette?”
“Sure.” He held the packet out, unquestioning, and struck the match for me. “That must have been some conversation, back there. He looked like he could have done with a cigarette, too.”
I inhaled gratefully. “Who did?”
“Who, she says.” Paul shook his head and looked away, smiling through a drifting haze of smoke. “OK, since you don’t want to talk about it…”
“There isn’t anything to talk about,” I told him, stubbornly. “We’ve fifteen years between us, Neil and I, and he lives in a different country. And he’s a musician, for heaven’s sake.”
“What’s wrong with musicians?”
“They’re unreliable.” I reached to tap the ash from my cigarette, my expression firm. “Besides which, he’s blond.”
Paul didn’t even waste his breath trying to figure out what that fact had to do with anything. He simply looked at me with quiet sympathy, the way a doctor might look at a patient with a terminal disease. “You’re not making sense,” he pointed out.
“Yes, well.” I rubbed my forehead with a weary hand. “I’ve not been sleeping, that’s the problem. I’m not thinking clearly.”
“That’s OK. It’s the job of the Great Detective to think clearly,” he said with a wink. “Trusty sidekicks are always a little muddle-headed, don’t you know.”
“Right then.” I leaned back, my eyes half closed. “What’s on the Great Detective’s mind this morning?”
“Afternoon,” he corrected me, with a glance at his watch. “It’s twelve-thirty, already. And if you must know, I’ve been thinking about numbers.”
“Numbers?”
“Twenty-two, in particular.” He smiled. “There are twenty-two people with the first name Didier listed in the Chinon telephone directory.”
“How do you know that?”
“I stayed up last night, counting them. It’s a pretty thin directory. So if the man who wrote to your cousin does live in Chinon, he’s probably one of those twenty-two.”
“Twenty-one,” I corrected him. “Didier Muret is out of it.”
“Is he?” Paul sent a smoke ring wafting through the pregnant air. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. I asked Thierry what he knew about Martine’s ex-husband, and it’s kind of interesting, really.”
I leaned back, hands clasped around my bent knees. “Oh yes?”
“Yeah. It seems apart from being a colossal drunk, Didier Muret was one of those guys who likes to flash his money around. You know—expensive clothes, expensive car, buying drinks for everybody.”
“So?”
“So where did he get the money from?” Paul asked. “The lawyer that he used to work for fired him for stealing from the petty cash, and Martine cut him off completely, except for the house. So how could Didier Muret afford his lifestyle?”
I had to admit no easy answer came to mind. “But I don’t see how that connects to my cousin, at all.”
“It doesn’t, really. It’s just one of those things that I tend to wonder about.”
