Chapter Twelve
M ARCH 23, 1931
B OULOGNE-SUR- M ER, F RANCE
Emma and I race over to the others as best we are able. Agatha, Ngaio, and Margery have been backed into a corner of the Gare Maritime by a uniformed official who seems to be lecturing them. Their faces are blank and confused, of course, because their French is limited. Before we reach them, a police officer has joined the station agent.
The gendarme’s finger now points at them, and he shouts, “Le panneau indiqué clairement NE PAS ENTRER . ”
“Apologies, Officer,” I say in French as I try to catch my breath. “My friends do not speak French, so they didn’t understand that the sign stated DO NOT ENTER .”
He turns his dark, angry eyes on me. “That is no excuse. The women entered a restricted customs zone. And continued onward even after this agent”—he gestures to the Gare Maritime official—“called to them.”
“They are awfully sorry,” Emma adds, offering him her sweetest little-old-lady expression.
Reaching into his jacket, the gendarme pulls out a small pad of paper and a pencil. “Contrition is irrelevant. They broke the law and must be cited for it.”
“Please,” I beg, “do not cite them. We are just five English ladies here to tour your beautiful city, and these women had no ill intent.” I shoot them a glance. “Their only crime is ignorance.”
He hesitates, giving the threesome a once-over. “They should consider themselves warned. I will not hold back a second time. Now go!”
Emma and I grab the women by their hands and lead them out of the station. As we slink away, I wonder, Have I orchestrated yet another opportunity for this glorious group of women to be slighted? I hope this treatment doesn’t put the Queens off entirely.
“All we were doing was peering at the passengers as they left their ship,” Margery complains. “We didn’t need to be manhandled in such a rough way.”
“I do believe Ngaio crossed over the official customs line as she stared at the passengers’ arrival,” Agatha explains. “A line that had been clearly demarcated on the ground in yellow paint and placed there to better sort passengers by nationality for customs purposes.”
Ngaio shrugs. “Lesson learned. I still don’t think the punishment fits the crime.”
“Near punishment,” I say, correcting her. “Emma and I arrived in time to waylay the formal citation.”
Margery’s expression is sheepish. “Thank you. Did you two have better luck?” she asks, deftly changing the subject.
“Not unless better luck constitutes bearing the brunt of rude behavior,” Emma sniffs.
“Come, now,” I say. “We did confirm the exact time of the girls’ arrival on the Glendower and the time they planned on leaving.”
“True,” she admits begrudgingly.
I am torn between feeling guilty for placing the women in this situation, frustration over their fragility, and irritation over their behavior. If we are to make headway into the fate of May Daniels, then we’ve got to be nimble, tenacious, and smart. Like our detectives.
“Ladies, pardon me for speaking bluntly, but we’ve got to be made of sterner stuff, as Shakespeare admonished in Julius Caesar . We are not actual detectives, invested with authority to investigate May’s murder, and so we should not be offended when we’re reminded of this fact. But we could take a page from our fictional detectives’ books and use the tools we do have at our disposal.”
“What, pray tell, are these tools?” Emma asks, her tone arch.
“Our detectives adopt personas and disguises, dig into documents and graveyards, pursue suspects in a variety of uncomfortable settings, all in the name of investigating a crime.” I glance at each woman in turn. “One doesn’t see Miss Marple or the Scarlet Pimpernel or Chief Inspector Alleyn or Albert Campion take umbrage and retreat at the first sign of resistance or offense. And one doesn’t observe these detectives acting in the sort of foolhardy manner that would force them off an investigation before it even begins.”
Ngaio’s eyes drift away from me as if she’s not listening, but I see the bloom of pink on her cheeks. I purposely did not single her out by name because resilience, flexibility, and care are traits we all need as we pursue May’s killer.
“We are capable of everything that we’ve imagined for our detectives. And, in some respects, more,” I say.
“What do you mean?” Ngaio asks.
“We are mystery writers and women. And neither has tried to tackle the puzzle of May’s disappearance. Until now.”
This candid little speech is meant to rouse, but I know it’s risky. After all, my relationship with these women—our identity as a group, in fact—is all very new.
Agatha, God bless her, comprehends precisely what I’m trying to do and asks the right next question. “So if we were to head back up the hill to the rue de Lille to visit the stores where May and Celia shopped, what approach should we take with the shopkeepers?”
“I’m no expert. But at the Gare Maritime, we behaved as though we were officials assigned to the investigation—myself included. And it didn’t go very well. Why don’t we act more like ourselves? A group of ordinary English women tourists concerned about what happened to a poor English girl?”
Ngaio snorts a bit at this simplified description, but I continue undeterred. “The discovery of May Daniels’s body is all over the news; we’d have to be living under a rock to not know about it. It’s only natural that we’re curious as we tour this historic locale. And the townspeople might be more willing to share with us if that’s who they think we are.”
“It is worth a try,” Agatha says.
I turn to the other women and ask, “Ladies?” To which they nod.
As we traverse the quay back toward May and Celia’s next stop—the rue de Lille—we pass a lonely-looking inn and restaurant. The H?tel Morveaux is a bit shabby but well scrubbed. It is the sort of lodging one might choose if one had to catch a very late ferry into Boulogne or a very early ferry out; proximity is the primary quality recommending it.
“Should we stop in there?” Margery asks.
“Whatever for?” Emma asks, her face scrunched up as if she’d eaten something sour. “It’s dilapidated.”
Dilapidated? The H?tel Morveaux may not be up to Emma’s standards—and to be fair, it may need a fresh coat of paint—but it is hardly dilapidated. I’ve stayed in far worse, even lived in dingier flats in more marginal neighborhoods. Not for the first time, I wonder how much of Emma’s fastidiousness is authentic. When her family was forced out of their estate by peasants, wouldn’t she have encountered, even stayed in, unseemly accommodations during her time running across the continent? Now is not the time to address it either way, I suppose.
“Perhaps May and Celia popped in to use the toilets. They’d just disembarked from a long ferry ride.”
“There are toilettes in the Gare Maritime, Margery,” Ngaio says, her tone a bit more condescending than I’d like.
“Did you see the state of them? I took one step in and turned right around. I bet the girls did the same,” she replies, and I’m pleased to hear her standing up for herself. And making an astute observation in the process.
“Excellent suggestion,” I say. “I doubt the authorities would have thought of that.”
Margery pivots away from Ngaio and pulls open the cobalt-blue door to the H?tel Morveaux. A bell clangs as we follow her inside. A long wooden desk with a rack of keys is the only greeting we receive at first. I stroll around the little lobby, taking in the small restaurant off to the side.
A dark-haired woman of indeterminate age—she could be twenty-five or forty—finally emerges from a room behind the desk. She’s wearing a white apron over her saffron-colored dress and wipes her hands on it as she approaches us.
“Bonjour, mesdames. Voudriez-vous une chambre d’h?tel?”
“Non, merci. Pourrions-nous avoir les expressos?” I answer.
With a reluctant nod, the proprietress leads us into the empty restaurant, pointing to a table for six near a window. As she busies herself at the tiny bar toward the back, I gaze out at the ocean. What a wondrous, unusual shade its waters are, I think. An opalescent teal color, unlike the dark, stormy waters on the English coast. How the young nurses must have marveled as their ferry arrived in the Boulogne harbor. Sadness for the lost life washes over me again.
Another thought strikes me. Could this be the last vista that May saw before she died? The washroom of the Gare Centrale—the nearby train station, separate from the ferry station—from which she disappeared is supposedly nearby, and no one knows if she was assaulted there or elsewhere. I’m lost in this terrible notion when cups and saucers land on our table with a clatter.
The proprietress is about to walk away, so I ask in French, “Excusez-moi, madame, may I trouble you with a question?”
“ Oui .” She says yes, but she’s impatient. Her body is already turned toward the lobby, and I imagine she has rooms to tend to. She seems to be the only one working at the H?tel Morveaux.
“We’ve just arrived in your lovely town to do a bit of shopping and touring and heard about the poor English girl. Do you think the investigation will affect the sites? We’re quite keen to see the twelfth-century belfry.”
“No—the police are focused on an area outside of town. I doubt normal operations will be affected.”
I sigh in faux relief. “I’m glad to hear the girl didn’t venture into the Old Town. That’s our destination, and it sounds as though we’ll be unimpeded.”
Emma, Agatha, Ngaio, and Margery are chatting in low tones and sipping espresso as if uninterested in our exchange. But Emma’s French is excellent, and I’m certain she’s taking in every word.
The woman shifts in my direction. “You misunderstand me. The young woman and her companion spent time in Old Town shopping. But nothing untoward happened there, and the police canvassed that area when she first disappeared. So you should be able to proceed.”
“You are quite knowledgeable about the goings-on. We are fortunate to stumble across you.”
The woman puffs up a bit at the compliment, then stares at me for a long minute, as if trying to make up her mind about me. Then, all at once, she bursts out with an unexpected revelation. “The girls were here the day Miss Daniels went missing.”
I practically leap up from my seat at this new bit of information. I’d combed the police report, and while it set out biographical information on May and Celia, a statement from the French farmer who found May’s body, and a summary of interviews with Gare Maritime and Gare Centrale employees and the rue de Lille shop owners, there was no reference to the H?tel Morveaux. But I stay still, acting the part of curious tourist.
“You actually served them?” I ask.
Her eyes glitter with a morbid excitement. I suppose her very peripheral involvement with May was an extraordinary event in her daily routine. “Yes, after they got off the Glendower . I remember them because they ordered tea and toast. Most travelers from England want the French coffee and pastries, but the dark-haired girl—the one who went missing—insisted on toast. She had mal à l’estomac, you see.”
A stomachache. This isn’t exactly a shock, or shouldn’t be. After all, plenty of people suffer from seasickness, especially those not accustomed to ocean travel. But something else did surprise me—the lack of mention of the H?tel Morveaux in the report.
“The police must have had countless questions for you,” I reply, hoping to prod her along.
The gleam in her eyes disappears, and they grow dull again. “Only one police officer interviewed me, the one who canvassed the dock area after the nurse went missing. Even then, the gendarme only asked two or three questions, then left.”
“How curious,” I say truthfully. Strange that not another policeman or a single reporter has thought to pull this thread taut. Harriet Vane would never have allowed it to go slack. And neither will we. “What were the girls like? We’ve been terribly upset by the newspaper articles.”
“Pleasant, attractive, like lots of young girls who come through here on day trips. The nurse who went missing wore a well-cut black coat and a little mauve cap with a point.” She outlines a hat and the jaunty manner with which it sat on Miss Daniels’s head.
“A toque?”
“Yes!” She claps. “That’s the name.”
“What about the other girl? I think she had a friend with her?”
“The only distinctive thing about her clothes were her thick gray stockings. A bit heavy and wintry for a fine autumn day.”
This woman has a fine mind for details and astonishing recall. The police were fools to dismiss her. It sounds as though May had taken great care with her appearance—toques are all the rage—but Celia’s fashion choices seem more serviceable, even dowdy. Why the disparity? Had they differing expectations about the day?
“Were the girls friendly? I bet they were looking forward to touring Boulogne.”
“They asked me about the shops. Where they were located in town, the kind available, the hours they were open, that sort of thing.”
This sort of babble with the proprietress does not seem like the sort of chatter girls planning on buying or selling morphine, as intimated by reporters after today’s police briefing, would engage in. Why would they bother asking about stores if they were looking for the drug trade? It is nonsensical.
“Was there a particular shop you recommended?” I ask. “We might want to stop there ourselves.”
“The dark-haired girl was especially interested in a hat shop. So I suggested the millinery on rue de Lille. But I don’t think I mentioned any other stores by name.” A bell sounds in the lobby, and her mouth forms a thin line. “I must return to my duties.”
“Thank you so much for your time, Madame—I apologize, but I do not think I asked your name.”
“Madame Brat,” she says, tearing off the check from a pad in her apron pocket. “Thank you for listening.”