Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
“Chief.” L’Helias saluted as he entered the Rouen brigade chief’s office, disturbing a trio of flies on the desk.
The chief returned his salute. While he had nothing personal against his subordinate, he was rapidly coming to view his reports with the same sense of foreboding he reserved for knocking over the salt or putting the bread upside down on the table.
He sat back in his chair, waiting for the latest round of bad news.
“And what did you discover?”
“It’s been challenging,” L’Helias said. “There’s a lot of traffic on those roads. Lots of carts and carriages. So, we focused on the larger ones. The ones that were big enough to carry six bodies without attracting attention, with teams of four to six horses.” His narrative trailed off.
“And.” The brigade chief motioned for him to continue.
“There were a lot of them.”
“So you said.”
L’Helias nodded, acknowledging the prompt. “And when you ask the locals about suspicious behavior…well…there are a lot of reports about that, too.”
Of that the chief had no doubt. His hand drifted to the piles of papers in front of him.
Demands from Paris to know about the activities of counterrevolutionaries in the area, to assist in the search for escaped Girondists, to provide information on the movements of provincial forces, to report on any shifts in loyalty among his own forces.
He’d considered delaying his report to Paris about the deaths of the six soldiers.
Sending a report without any mention of suspects would be bad.
But if anyone else reported it, that delay would make him look suspicious and that would be worse.
And if he failed to solve the murders…well, that could prove fatal.
“There was one report of a large blue Berlin. The hostlers said that two of the passengers, a man and a woman, looked foreign.”
The chief regarded L’Helias with cautious optimism.
“The hostler’s description of the two jibed with those earlier reports of a pair of English spies operating in the area—a tall blond man with a scar on his cheek and a young woman with brown hair.”
“Weren’t they the pair the murdered patrol was searching for…?”
L’Helias nodded, far less reluctantly this time.
“Seems that there were four passengers in the coach. The man and the woman stayed with the coach, which the hostlers said took the road west, towards the coast. But one of the other passengers, a French man, hired a horse from them and made arrangements to return it to a hostelry in Paris.”
The chief leaned forward. “Now that is interesting.”
“I thought so, too,” L’Helias agreed. “So, I sent a patrol after the coach—no word yet, and I was wondering…about sending men to Paris…but…I’m not sure how the Parisians will react to us to conducting an investigation on their turf...”
“We’ll need to tread carefully. Our men. Their jurisdiction.” The chief steepled his fingers and tapped his paired index fingers thoughtfully against his chin. “Do you have a description of the man who left for Paris?”
“Mid-thirties, about a little shy of 6 feet tall, the hostlers guessed. Not fat. Brown hair, brown eyes, no visible scars.”
“What about the name and address of the hostelry in Paris where he is supposed to return his mount?”
“Yes, sir.” L’Helias pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and checked it. “Before the Revolution it was called the Lily, but now it’s called the Liberty.”
“Send two men to the place. Tell them to follow up on the information you’ve given me, but report what they find to the Paris National Guard. Tell them to wait for Paris’s response before returning and reporting to me.”
The brigade chief smiled grimly, “With any luck there’s a nest of spies in Paris, not here.” And he didn’t add, finding the man in brown will be on their heads and not mine.