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“I thought I’d be in the hotel by lunchtime, didn’t I?” he told me, patiently. “Only Didier Muret insisted that I lunch with him, and he seemed so damned disappointed by the treasure mix-up that I couldn’t very well refuse. So I went back to his house, had a drink.” He flashed his old familiar smile. “A few drinks, actually. I tried to cheer him up. And then, before I knew it, there it was suppertime, and I offered to go and get a take-away for the two of us. And on the way back, with my pizza,” he told me, “I got this.”
He tilted his head to one side, showing me a patch of bruising that spread darkly underneath the fair hair just behind his ear.
I stared. “He hit you?”
“No.” My cousin smiled. “It’s rather complicated, actually, I’d better let Jean tell it.”
The gypsy leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. It was odd, I thought, to be sitting here so calmly with a man that I’d been trying to avoid these past few days. A man I’d suspected of murder. His voice, when he spoke, was coarse but musical, his English remarkably good. “That night,” he said, “the night Monsieur Muret was killed, I am walking with Bruno,” his dark eyes glanced downwards, at the little dog, “and I see that the door to Muret’s garden, it is open. This is luck, I think. Muret, he keeps much whisky in the house, and the street is very dark there.” His shrug was casual, as though thieving were a wholly respectable pastime. “So Bruno and I, we go into the yard, but before we are in the house we hear voices. Loud voices. I look in the window, and I see the two of them arguing. So I wait. I watch. Muret and the other, they go upstairs. Muret is very angry. Then…” He made a violent gesture with a hand across his throat. It was quite ugly. “Muret he falls, and I see that he is dead. The other man, he sees this too. He comes out of the house, out the back door, into the garden where it is very dark. He does not see Bruno and me—we hide up by the wall—but your cousin,” he paused, and smiled at Harry. “Your cousin, he comes at that moment through the garden door, with his pizza.”
“Bad timing,” Harry admitted.
“There is a little light from the house. And so the killer, he looks at your cousin. Your cousin, he looks at the killer. And—” Again a telling movement of the hand. “He is badly hurt, your cousin. He says to me: ‘Hotel de France,’ and so I try to help him there, but when we turn the corner I see the car, the killer’s car, and so I bring your cousin to my family, where he will be safe.”
I looked at Harry. “So you saw him, then. The man who murdered Didier Muret.”
“That’s just it—I didn’t. It was too bloody dark, and the lights of the house were behind him. I couldn’t see a thing. He knocked me on the head for nothing.” Harry rubbed his bruises ruefully.
My gaze swung back to the gypsy. “But you saw him.”
“Yes.”
“And the man who murdered Paul.”
“Yes.”
I had to ask the question, even though I knew the answer. “The same man?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t go to the police?”
He looked at me as though I had two heads. “The police? This is not England, Mademoiselle. The police, they will not listen to a man like me. They think I tell the lies. And your cousin, he did not see the man who hit him. So…” He shrugged, and blew a puff of smoke. “We talk, we think, we wait.”
“You might have come to me,” I said, a shade reproachfully. I would have known then not to get involved with Neil. I wouldn’t feel this aching emptiness inside me, as though my heart had shriveled to a useless lump of ice. And Paul… Paul might yet be alive.
“I tried this,” was the gypsy’s calm response. “Your cousin, he is not so good the first few days—he cannot keep awake. But he keeps saying ‘the Hotel de France,’ and ‘Emily,’ and in his wallet I find this picture.” He showed me a less-than-flattering snapshot of myself, a few years out of date. “And so I go to the Hotel de France. I look for you. On Friday, finally, you arrive, but it is not possible to speak to you. And so I wait until you go to dinner, I telephone to the hotel, I pretend to be your cousin.”
“Why?”
My cousin answered that. “Jean had to think rather fast that day, I’m afraid. He had to come up with a story that would keep you from worrying, without tipping off the murderer. So he left a message that I’d been delayed—brilliant, really, considering he hardly knew me—and t
hen he kept an eye on you, to see that you weren’t harmed.”
The gypsy smiled. “We frighten you, Bruno and I, I see this. But it is difficult, you understand. Always the killer he is very close to you.”
“Yes, I know.” I looked away more sharply than I meant to. A log fell into the fire with a hiss, and it was an ugly mocking sound, like an old woman’s wheezing laugh in that stale room. My eyes stung and I blinked the wetness back.
“I see the way you smile at him,” the gypsy said, “and I think no, she will not believe me.”
“Well, you’re wrong.” I felt the stubborn lifting of my jaw. “And you could have warned me when I first arrived, you know. I hadn’t met him, then.”
The gypsy frowned. “But…”
Behind us, on the bed, my cousin shifted. “My dear girl,” he said, quite clearly, “of course you’d met him. The bastard dropped you off at your hotel.”
Chapter 29
…the gates were closed
