Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
It might not have been me they were trying to harm,” Baxter said. They were in his room, having tacitly agreed to retreat somewhere they wouldn’t be overheard.
“Oh, it was you, all right,” Red said darkly. “Everyone knew you were planning to get up first and check the house.” She wandered around his room, taking in the ordered dressing table, the pairs of shoes placed neatly by the door. “Are you always this tidy, or were you expecting company?”
“The former.”
“Are you married?” Red picked up the folding brass alarm clock from the side of Baxter’s bed. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”
“Could we get back to discussing why someone would want me dead?”
“Must be difficult, with your job.”
“There’s no financial incentive, and I haven’t wronged anyone, as far as I know. Which means …”
“They’re scared.” Red finished the sentence for him. “You’re getting too close to the truth. It has to be linked to the evidence we found yesterday.”
“Jade?” Baxter pictured the suspicion on the woman’s face as she looked in her bag, her hard expression when she’d caught him watching her.
“Maybe.” Red took out her phone. “I found the club she must have met Alec at.” She plonked herself next to Baxter and started swiping through screenshots.
“I started with a reverse image search on her LinkedIn profile but couldn’t find anything, which figures—you wouldn’t want to use your professional headshot as your stripper photo, would you? ”
“I most certainly wouldn’t.”
“But then I thought, the club’s going to be near her university, right? And it has to be somewhere Alec would have gone too, so I drew a couple of circles on a map—well, I got ChatGPT to do it—and identified all the clubs where they overlapped.”
Baxter tried to look at the colorful Venn diagram, but the red dots kept moving about.
“I looked at the websites for all those clubs. A few have profiles of the girls—Jade wasn’t listed on any of those—but most have images where their faces are obscured, or just some stage shots.
And I hit the jackpot.” She swiped on to the next screenshot, and Baxter saw an arty, oversaturated photograph of a scantily clad woman arched backward over a chair.
Her face was turned away from the camera.
“How do you know that’s her? Her hair’s quite different.”
“Ever heard of a wig? Anyway, there’s this …” Red zoomed in on the girl’s ankle, where delicate tattooed ivy traced its way down to her heel.
Red swiped to the final screenshot: the venue’s home page. “The Last Temptation. Entry from forty quid, minimum spend applies.”
“I can see why Jade wanted to keep it quiet,” Baxter said. “It’s not exactly the work experience one might expect to find on a lawyer’s résumé.”
“Who was the final guest to go to bed last night?” Red was on her feet again, pacing the tiny bedroom. The constant movement made Baxter feel dizzy.
“Sylvie. She had a cigarette on the terrace, then retired around half eleven.” He caught a flicker of amusement on Red’s face. “What is it?”
“‘Retired.’” She snorted. “You’re so formal. Do you ever kick back a bit? Slob about the house in a manky old T-shirt and eat Cheetos out of the packet?”
“I fail to see the relevance,” Baxter said stiffly. “Now, as I was saying, Sylvie retir—” He corrected himself. “Went to her room around half eleven, leaving only Thierry, Miriam, you, and me in the main house.”
Red held up both hands. “Well, I didn’t try to kill you.”
“That’s exactly what a killer would say.”
Her mouth twitched. “Is that a sense of humor trying to break out?”
Baxter was about to say that he was perfectly capable of being amusing in the right circumstances, but something was tugging at his consciousness, worming its way through the pounding headache: Miriam pushing a mop around as a disguise for searching the guests’ rooms, when surely it would have been easier to flick a duster around …
“Did you notice Miriam’s face when Thierry mentioned her refreshing the water carafes? ” he said.
Red shook her head. “What are you saying?”
“It was almost as though she were cross with him for drawing attention to them.”
“You think Miriam could have killed Alec?” Red was quick, easily following Baxter’s train of thought. “But what was her motive?”
“Alec sexually assaulted her. Thierry was furious about it, and when Alec did it a second time, Miriam was adamant we shouldn’t tell Thierry for fear of what he might do. She was scared they’d lose their jobs, said they needed the money.”
“That’s how men like Alec get away with it,” Red said grimly.
“They hold all the power.” Her eyes darkened, and Baxter realized she was thinking about another time, another place.
He felt a sudden desire to protect her, although he suspected if he were to articulate it, she would tell him she was perfectly capable of protecting herself, thank you very much.
“Maybe they were working together,” Red said.
I will handle it, Miriam had said. Baxter had assumed she’d meant that she would tell Thierry in her own time, but could she have meant … revenge?
“Someone disabled the alarm around the time I heard the hiss of the sleeping gas,” Baxter said. “I think the gang of thieves had someone on the inside, someone who realized that by facilitating the burglary, they could use someone else’s crime to cover up their own.”
“About that …” Red screwed up her face, deliberating over something. “The gang the police were talking about … They were working in this area, but they’re not right now. They were in Toulouse the night Alec died.”
“How do you know that?”
She chewed her bottom lip. “I know stuff.”
“But the sleeping gas is their modus operandi—that’s what the police said.” Baxter frowned. “If it wasn’t them, who—”
A knock at the door made them both jump. “Baxter?”
Miriam.
“I heard you get up,” came her accented voice, “but you did not knock on all the doors as you said … Is everything good?”
“All fine.” Baxter cleared his throat. “Thank you, Miriam. I’ll be right out.”
“That little salope has gone, by the way. I would not be surprised if she took the silver with her …”
Red opened her mouth in outrage, and Baxter held out a warning hand. “I’ll see you in the kitchen in a few moments, Miriam,” he called. Interesting, he thought, that the housekeeper had not been frightened to leave her room, had not wondered if danger might be lurking in the corridors.
“Yes, come and eat,” she said. “Thierry is cooking you a nice breakfast.”
There was a pause, then they heard Miriam’s footsteps making their way down the hallway. Red and Baxter looked at each other.
“If I were you,” Red said, “I wouldn’t eat a single bite.”