His arms tightened around me. “We won’t let that happen.”
No. We would not. God knows I’d tried to keep Eve from killing René, but now that it was done, I had no intention of letting the police get their hands on her. She had suffered enough.
I looked at her, frail and unconscious in the bed, and suddenly I was shaking with sobs. “Finn, she tried to k-kill herself.”
He kissed the top of my head. “We won’t let that happen either.”
We checked out at first light, my arm about Eve’s waist keeping her steady. The clerk was yawning, incurious, and we were out of Grasse in an hour, Finn pushing the Lagonda far past her usual pace. “Gardiner,” he muttered as the gears protested, “you owe me a new car. I’m never getting those bloodstains out of the seats, and this engine is never going to be the same.”
All through that long day of driving, Eve never spoke, just huddled in the backseat like a collection of gaunt bones. Even as we drove into Paris, motoring over the dark waters of the Seine, and she watched as I tossed the bust of Baudelaire out the window into the river, she did not say a word. But I saw her shudder convulsively.
God only knew how, but Finn found a doctor willing to give Eve’s wound a look without asking questions. “You can always find men like that,” he said after the man disinfected, stitched, and left. “Disqualified doctors, old army lads. How do you think ex-convicts get patched up if they don’t want a record that they’ve been getting into brawls?”
Now that Eve had her fingers splinted and her shoulder dressed, had pills for pain and pills to keep infection away, we decided to lay low. “She needs time to heal,” I said, because she was still alarmingly apathetic when she wasn’t being foul tempered. “And Paris is big enough to hide in, if anyone . . .”
If anyone comes sniffing after us when René is found, Finn and I both thought. But we didn’t mention René to Eve, or each other. We found cheap rooms in the Montmartre and let Eve sleep and take her pills and call us names for not getting her whiskey. It was a full five days before Finn saw the announcement in the paper.
Former restauranteur dead outside Grasse.
I snatched the paper, devouring the details. René Bordelon’s housekeeper had come for her weekly cleaning, and discovered the corpse. The deceased was a wealthy man living alone; the room had been ransacked. The passage of days made evidence difficult to collect . . .
I rested my head on the paper, feeling suddenly dizzy. No mention that an old woman and her lawyer had been asking all over Grasse after him. Maybe the police knew about that, maybe they didn’t, but no one mentioned inquiries being made. No one was looking to connect a rich American widow and her imposing solicitor with a bed-bound Englishwoman and her disreputable driver in Paris.
“Five days to find him,” Finn said, thoughtful. “If he’d had family or friends, it would have been sooner. Someone would have telephoned, got worried about him. But he didn’t make friends. He didn’t care about anyone, he wasn’t close to anyone.”
“And I left the photograph on his chest. The one with him and his Nazi acquaintances.” I exhaled slowly, reading the short notice again. “I thought if the police saw he’d been a collaborator, they might not look too hard for whoever had killed him. Robbery or retribution, they’d just . . . let it be.”
Finn kissed the back of my neck. “Cunning lassie.”
I shoved the paper away. There was a photograph of René, courtly, smiling—it made my stomach writhe. “I know you didn’t meet him, but please believe me. He was monstrous.” I was the one who dreamed now about green silk rooms filled with screams.
“I’m glad I didn’t meet him,” Finn answered quietly. “I’ve seen enough monstrous things. But I still wish I could have been there. Protected you both.”
I was glad he hadn’t been. He was the one with a prison record; he’d have been in even more dire danger of ending up behind bars if we’d been caught. Eve and I had been enough, in the end, to take care of René—but I didn’t say so. Finn had his pride, after all. “Shall we go tell Eve she’s probably safe?” I said instead.