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“Hi,” he greeted me, looking none the worse for wear from his afternoon of being questioned by the police. “You are looking for Monsieur Neil?”
“I thought I heard the violin.”
“That was just me.” He held up a cassette tape, to show me. “I am looking for the tape I gave for Monsieur Neil to listen to. My friend Alain, he wants to make the copy.” There was a small stack of home-recorded tapes piled neatly on the dressing table beside the sprawling hi-fi, and Thierry shuffled through them with a frown. “I thought that I had found it, but no… maybe this one…” Choosing another from the stack, he slotted it into the machine and pushed the play button. A full orchestra sounded the opening strains of a Strauss waltz at an alarming volume, and Thierry quickly punched “stop,” his frown deepening.
I took a small step forward, staring at the hi-fi. “I thought this was broken.”
“What?” He glanced up. “No, I fix it for him two days ago. Ah!” His hand closed round the errant tape with satisfaction. “This one, this is mine.” A brief sound check confirmed the fact, and he returned the first recording to its rightful place in the tape player. “Bien, I put everything back as it was, and Monsieur Neil will not be missing my tape, I think.”
“Thierry,” I asked him, slowly, “could you play that one again, just for a moment?”
“Sure.” He touched the button, and the stirring strains of Beethoven’s Eroica swept past me into the hallway. Not the full, orchestral version, but a solo violin—the part Neil practiced nearly every afternoon. The part he’d told me he knew like the back of his hand.
“He likes to play it loud, yes?” Thierry raised his voice above the piercing sound, and I nodded. Only that was somehow wrong, I thought. Neil didn’t like to play it loud. Can’t set the volume higher than three, or it makes your ears bleed, he’d complained. Thierry went on talking, proudly. “It gives a good sound, this stereo. It sounds exactly like Monsieur Neil playing, does it not?”
It did, at that—exactly like Neil. I hugged myself, trying to ward off the cold cloud of suspicion, refusing to admit the possibility. “All right,” I said to Thierry. “That’s enough.”
Flashing me the irrepressible grin, he switched the recording off. He looked round suddenly, remembering something. “Oh, there is a message for you, downstairs.”
“A message?”
“Yes, an envelope. The man who brought it, he came while you were sleeping, and he said I should not wake you up. He said it was not urgent.”
“Who was it, do you know?” I asked, cautiously.
Thierry shrugged. “The valet from the Clos des Cloches. I do not know his name.”
François? Hugging myself tighter, I followed Thierry downstairs. I could hear Garland, still sitting in the bar, her high-pitched laughter grating like a nail drawn down a blackboard. But her laughter was the only sound that rose above the din of German voices—all those young men, I thought, that I’d seen from outside. Thierry rolled his eyes at the noise. “There is a… how do you say it? A congress this week, here in Chinon. These men do not like the bar at their hotel, so they come here instead. Poor Gabrielle, she should have Neil here, yes? To take the orders for her. Neil speaks good German,” Thierry told me. “Christian says so. But me, I do not like to learn that language. It is not pretty.”
Not pretty, no, but powerful. I started feeling cold again and closed my eyes a moment, letting the jangle of voices mixed with laughter swell around and over me. These walls, I thought, had heard those sounds before: the voices of the German officers who’d lived here in the war. Like living ghosts, the German tourists went on talking, laughing…
“Ah,” said Thierry, jolting me back to the present. “Here is your message.”
It was in truth from François. Not so much a message as a bit of handwriting wrapped round a faded photograph. I thought that this might interest you, the writing read, in French. You see how you resemble her.
There were two people in the photograph, a man and a young woman. The woman was laughing, looking off to one side as though the photographer hadn’t been able to hold her attention long. The picture was black and white, a little scuffed and taken on an angle, but the image was very clear. I had to admit that I did look a bit like Isabelle. We weren’t by any stretch of the imagination twins, but there was something similar about our eyes, the way we held our heads, the line of our noses.
But it wasn’t Isabelle’s face that made me stare. It was the face of the man beside her.
“My God,” I said.
It might have been a portrait taken yesterday. H
e was gazing straight into the camera lens, his dark eyes calm and composed, and although in the faded photograph his close-cropped hair looked white, I knew it wasn’t. It was blond. Just as I knew those dark, dark eyes were blue.
With shaking hands, I turned the picture over and read the penciled line of writing on the back: Hans and Isabelle, June, 1944.
I had forgotten Thierry. He looked across the desk at me, vaguely puzzled. “Mademoiselle?”
“Thierry,” I said slowly, “where is Monsieur Grantham, do you know?”
“I do not know. He went, I think, to the police station to talk to Monsieur Belliveau. The poet—you remember? When I was leaving from the police, they had just brought Monsieur Belliveau for questioning. Not about Paul, you understand. It was about some Englishman who had gone missing. And Monsieur Neil, he tries to help because they were friends, once.”
Of course they were friends. Neil and Victor Belliveau and Christian Rand: they’d all been part of Brigitte Valcourt’s grand artistic parties at the Clos des Cloches. And Belliveau now shared his land with gypsies, so no doubt Neil had met the gypsy with the dog—the one who followed me. “My God,” I said, again. Blinking back the foolish senseless tears of shock, I stared down at the damning photograph. Neil’s own eyes smiled up at me, from the face of another man, his image nearly creased beneath the pressure of my fingers.
There must have been a reason why he hadn’t mentioned his relationship to Hans. Just as there was a reason why he’d put that tape in Thierry’s hi-fi, and set it at a volume that he couldn’t stand. Because it had been Neil playing the Beethoven, it had… I’d seen him. At the end of his practice session, perhaps, but nonetheless… And it was a difficult piece to play—that’s why he’d looked so exhausted when I’d interrupted him; why his hair had been so damp around his face; why he’d been breathing with such effort, as if he’d just been running… running…
“Ah,” said Thierry, glancing beyond my shoulder. “You see? You speak of the wolf, and you see his tail. Here comes Monsieur Neil.”
