Paris Love Match - By Nigel Blackwell Page 0,43
his chest and he forced himself to relax his hands. He stared, brow furrowed, not breathing, with his mouth half open.
“Come on.” She pulled playfully on his arm and winked. “Promise I won’t leave with anyone else.”
He pulled back. “Leave with anyone else? Dancing? People? Fun? Have you forgotten the fact we’re on France’s most wanted list?”
She hung on to his sleeve. “No! Besides, you don’t know that.”
“Know what?”
“That we’re on the most wanted list.”
“We’ve certainly made a good effort to get there.”
She let go of him, slumped onto a low wall and sighed. “So . . . What’s your plan?”
He took a deep breath. “I think the hotel is best. We need to look at the stuff you got from the bank.”
She surveyed the street and pulled out two envelopes. “Let’s just look at them here.”
Piers spun around, looking for Little and Large, or the police.
She pulled him down onto the wall. “Will you stop doing your best to look suspicious?”
He sighed.
She opened the first envelope and pulled out one sheet of heavy vellum. “His will,” she said despondently.
Piers looked it over. It only filled half a page. “He left everything to April.”
Sidney pulled a sheaf of papers from the second envelope. They were layered sheets of thin pink, yellow, and tan paper, glued along one edge. She sighed and handed it to Piers. “Sales receipt for a car.”
He looked down the sheet. “A Renault 5 LE, with optional side stripe and FM radio. Purchased in 1996.”
“Merde,” she said. “This doesn’t tell us anything.”
“It’s the car April mentioned. She called it the old car he worked on every weekend.”
“Sixteen years is pretty old for a car. Even older in Paris.”
Piers flipped through the pages. They were all carbon copies. He saw nothing suspicious, nothing that might be a coded message or a clue. “Bugger.”
“You British, you have such a way with words.”
“What do you expect? We don’t have a clue to anything.”
“You think I don’t know that? Have you forgotten I was the one who walked into the bank to get that crap? Or that I was the one running out when the police arrived?”
“I—”
“Forget it.” Sidney snatched the papers from Piers and they sat in an uncomfortable silence.
“Don’t you know anything else about Auguste?” she said.
“Like what?”
“Anything?”
“I don’t know him any more than you do.”
“Right.”
“I don’t. I never met the guy, and you know as much about him as me.”
“You were in his apartment.”
“So? I told you. It was tidy and practically empty.”
“And you knew which floor it was on.”
“Huh?”
“You knew which apartment was his. Among all the others you could have picked, you knew which one was his.”
“You think I knew him? I never met the guy before for Christ’s sake.”
There was a long silence.
“Besides, the door to his apartment had been kicked in. There was yellow police tape across the entrance. You couldn’t miss his apartment.”
She looked sideways at him. “Really?”
“Really.”
“Oh.”
The silence returned.
A Fiat 500 parked across the street from them and flashed its lights. Piers squinted to see inside. “Great. Little and Large have returned.”
Sidney looked down the street. “There’s a place down there we could eat, get out of their sights. Looks dingy enough. I doubt they’ll have a TV.”
They walked to the restaurant. She was right. The place looked as if it had been swept when the Second World War ended and never cleaned since. The chalkboard outside had an illegible scrawl where the meals should have been written. Sidney didn’t even stop to look; she walked straight in and sat down.
Piers gave up trying to interpret the chalkboard and joined her. “So, what do we do now?”
“Eat.”
“Very funny.”
She ordered an omelet and Piers a steak. Any meal might be his last, so he thought he might as well enjoy it. They sat in silence until the food arrived.
Piers took one look at his meal and knew it might actually be his last: it was almost entirely pink. “I can’t eat this.”
The waiter looked at him.
“English,” said Sidney.
The waiter grunted and scooped the plate away.
Piers threw up his hands. “Great, so now I don’t even get to eat?”
“Don’t be childish. He’s going to cook it some more.”
Sidney ate her food with a tiny fork. She was delicate, taking small portions and eating slowly. Even so, she was finished by the time the waiter returned with his steak.
The waiter dropped the plate on the table. “English,” he said and walked away without waiting for a reply.
Piers tapped the steak with his knife. It wasn’t