[Fen Churche 02] - Night Train to Paris Fliss Chester (essential reading .TXT) 📖

Fen frowned, she couldn’t quite tally the buffoonish man she’d met the other night with this new image of him being a Machine Gun Kelly-style operator.

‘Did he threaten Rose then?’ Fen wondered how she had possibly got caught up in all of this.

Henri just shrugged and then laid his hands down on the desk, almost in resignation. ‘I don’t know, Miss Churche, but I do know that she had spoken to me only a few days ago about how she worried that Gervais would be a problem when it came to helping find the paintings. He was no longer trustworthy and had succumbed to a life of crime.’

‘His brother too?’ she asked.

‘I do hope not, as he is my warehouse manager…’

Fen watched as he drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment, then he spoke again.

‘The more I think about it, the more I believe Rose must have said something. Threatened to shop one or both of them in, if only to stop them from revealing…’

‘Revealing what?’ Fen was alert again and wondered what Henri could mean.

‘Ah… I shouldn’t have spoken so carelessly. Never speak ill of the dead and all that.’

‘Please, Monsieur Renaud, if you know anything else about Rose that could help me find out who did this to her…’ Fen begged and then waited as Henri made up his mind.

‘You’re right. There’s no point in secrets now.’ He sighed. ‘Rose was a true and honest person. Her moral compass was unshakeable, but she did have that great talent for forging paintings.’

‘Forging is a strong word…’ Fen trailed off as Henri raised his hand. She let him continue.

‘Forgery is a strong word, but what is the difference between a copy and a forgery? How you sell them, that is what. One is the honest homage to a famous painter, the other a cheap attempt at making money. She had an unbelievably good eye for copying. But only her art dealer, Michel Lazard, can tell you if she benefited more than she should have done from selling them.’

‘Lazard… she told me about him.’

‘Yes, yes. He’s a friend of the Arnaults, you know? Antoine especially, I think. It’s clear to me that somehow the Arnault brothers found out about Rose’s paintings, perhaps they were even benefitting from Lazard without her knowledge? Believe me, somewhere between those two brothers and that two-bit dealer you’ll find your murderer.’

Henri sat back in his chair with a sort of finality. As if his own words had sunk in, he now looked utterly desolate. His skin looked grey and he seemed about ten years older than he had when Fen had first met him, here in this office with Rose just a few days ago.

‘To think,’ he said thoughtfully, and quietly, ‘I was going to surprise her with some good news yesterday, but I was caught up in my own gallery all afternoon.’

‘What was the good news?’ Fen asked.

‘Just that I heard on the art world’s grapevine that one of the paintings by Poussin stolen from Jacob Berenson was listed for auction in Westphalia, in Germany, this last week just gone. If I hadn’t been on the telephone to London organising delivery of a rather good watercolour yesterday afternoon, I might have been able to stop it.’ He took off his glasses again and rubbed his face in his hands.

Fen took it as her cue to leave, and she bid Henri goodbye with his endorsement to carefully look into the affairs of the Arnault brothers ringing in her ears and the address of his warehouse in the suburbs should she want to talk to Antoine.

Just as she was leaving, a thought occurred to her and she popped her head around the door to ask Henri. He was still looking dejected and only raised his head again when he heard her soft knock at the door.

‘What is it, Miss Churche?’

‘Just a thought really. But did you ever hear of a secret agent called The Chameleon?’

Henri stared at her and then shook his head. ‘The Chameleon? I think you’ve confused real life with some American superhero comics. Now, please, I must make arrangements for some of the paintings in my warehouse. Goodbye, Miss Churche.’

Fen nodded and closed the door softly behind her, noting that Henri had not only provided some very good clues for her “two down” but during the conversation had also given himself an alibi for the time of the murder.

Twenty-Two

The rain had, thankfully, lessened to no more than a drizzle as Fen left the Louvre, but there was a definite chill to the air and she pulled her still damp collar up around her neck. She crossed the Seine and popped into a café near the École des Beaux-Arts. She couldn’t quite bring herself to head back into the apartment yet, the image of Rose lying in a pool of blood still so real and visceral in her mind. The smell of brewing coffee and cigarette smoke helped bring her back to the present and she ordered a coffee from the waiter who was wiping glasses behind the bar.

Fen found herself a small table near the window and absent-mindedly pulled a paper napkin out from the dispenser on the table. She had started fiddling with it and curling its edges when an idea occurred to her. Reaching down to her bag, she drew out a pen and then started to write out a few words that stuck in her mind, sliding them together like a grid. There was something, she found, about seeing the words linked like this that helped her sort out the facts and clues in her head and how they might intersect in real life, too.

She had just finished writing out the final word in block capitals when the waiter brought her coffee over. Sitting back and sucking her pen, Fen then took a sip of her coffee. She stared at the grid, which looked like this: