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I frowned. “The police?”
“Yes. To say they had found the body of her husband.” He sighed, shaking his head. “It was most sad.”
Presumably he meant his thwarted efforts with the Porsche, and not the death of Didier Muret. I sympathized. “I could ask Monsieur Valcourt, if you like. He might have time to take you for a—”
“No, please,” he broke in hastily. “It is not so important. And besides, it would be more pleasant, I think, to drive with Madame Muret.”
Et tu, Brute, I thought drily. Were there any men around who weren’t smitten by Martine? Smiling, I swung my gaze beyond the tumbling fountain. There was that blasted spotted dog again, I thought. Without its owner, this time. It snuffled round the edges of the phone box at the far side of the square. Now who, I wondered, would a gypsy be telephoning?
When the phone behind the bar burst shrilly into life, I think I jumped as high as Thierry did, then caught myself and smiled. Paul was right, I thought. Simon’s paranoia was definitely spreading.
“A moment,” Thierry begged the caller, as a trio of customers came through the door from the street. He cupped his hand over the receiver and sent me an imploring look. “Mademoiselle, I wonder…?”
“Yes?”
“It is a call for Monsieur Grantham, but he is practicing, and when he practices he always takes his telephone off the hook. I wonder, would you be so good…?”
“You want me to fetch him for you?”
“Please.” He flashed the charming smile at me, the one the poor receptionist, Gabrielle, had such trouble resisting. I was a little more immune than Gabrielle to Thierry’s charms, but his dilemma was very real. The new customers settled themselves at the bar, expecting service. I sighed, and rose half-heartedly to go and break up Neil’s practice session.
A shiver struck me on the twisting staircase, but I shook it off again, blaming it on the cool breeze that drifted through the open door to the terrace. On the first floor landing the air felt distinctly chilly. Here the violin was sweeter, stronger, and even though I knocked two times it kept on playing. He couldn’t hear me.
My third knock was so forceful that it moved the door itself—the handle hadn’t latched properly—and I felt like an intruder as I watched the door swing inward on its hinges. It didn’t open all the way, just far enough to show me one angled corner of the room. And Neil.
It was easy to see, then, why he hadn’t heard me. I doubt if anyone could have reached him at that moment—he was locked in a world that no one else could touch or even visualize. He looked a different person when he played. His eyes were closed as if it somehow pained him, the fleeting and elusive beauty of the music that would not be held, but slipped past the listener almost before one’s ear could register the notes. Neil’s hands moved lightly over the familiar strings, sure as a lover’s touch and twice as delicate. And the strings responded in a way no human lover could, singing pure and sweet and achingly true. It was disquieting to watch.
The violin faltered, and stopped, and my ears rang in the sudden silence. Neil opened his eyes. They were brilliant and beautiful, unfocused, the eyes of a dreamer surfacing. And then he looked toward the open door and saw me and he smiled, a broad exhausted smile that included me in its happiness. “Bloody Beethoven,” he said. “He does make one work for it.”
It was my own fault, I thought later. He’d as much as told me, by the fountain, that whatever happened between us would be up to me, that I would have to come to him. “Whenever you’re ready,” he had said. And now here I was, standing in the doorway of his room, not saying anything, trying desperately to remember what message I’d been sent to deliver, while Neil set down the violin and came toward me. Even when he took my face in his hands, I couldn’t say a word. I only stared at him, and thought, He’s going to kiss me… and then, in a rush of panic, I remembered. “You have a telephone call,” I blurted out.
My eyes followed Neil’s mouth as it halted its descent. “I beg your pardon?”
I cleared my throat, and repeated my message. “Thierry sent me to tell you.”
“I see,” he said. But he didn’t take his hands from my face, and he didn’t move away. We might have gone on standing there indefinitely, staring at one another, if it hadn’t been for Garland Whitaker.
It was difficult to say which sound came first—they seemed to happen all at once, like tracks laid down upon the one recording. I heard the front door slam, and Garland’s voice half screaming and half sobbing words without apparent meaning; and then somewhere someone smashed a glass and through Neil’s window came the first faint wail of sirens in the fountain square.
Chapter 24
And some were push’d with lances from the rock,
Neil moved with calm, deliberate speed. He was downstairs in the entrance lobby before I’d even reached the stairs, and by the time I followed, he and Thierry had between them coaxed some sense from Garland Whitaker. Her eyes were still half wild in her pale bewildered face, and her voice held traces of a shrill hysteria, but her words came easily enough, between small sobbing breaths. I heard the words, of course, but I didn’t for a moment believe them. It simply wasn’t possible.
“No.” My voice, half strangled, made Neil pause and turn his head, but for all his swiftness he was not in time to stop me.
I didn’t seem to touch the ground. I felt the heavy door swing to my desperate push, and heard the screech of tires as I dashed across the narrow road. At the edge of the fountain square, where the château steps wound down between the lovely ancient buildings, the bright red ambulance stood waiting, blue light flashing, doors flung wide. The square was crowded, full of people, questioning and murmuring and elbowing each other for a better view. I pushed my way with purpose to the fountain, searching for one face among the many…
“What is it?” asked a man, ahead of me, and his companion answered, “Someone’s hurt.” Just hurt, I thought. I knew it. Somehow Garland Whitaker had got the story wrong.
But then my eyes found Simon.
They had moved him to one corner of the square, to one of the benches, where he sat huddled like a child with a blanket round his shoulders. Someone had given him a cup of coffee, and a kind-faced man in uniform knelt by him, talking, but Simon didn’t respond. He looked so young, so unutterably young, his frozen face beyond emotion. I shivered in the chill spray of the fountain as the gathered crowd increased the tempo of its murmuring, excited.
The medics were bringing the body down.
“No, don’t look.” Firm hands took hold of me and turned me round, away from the spectacle. Above my head Neil’s voice spoke low and steady. “Don’t look.”
