Chapter Eighteen #3
Keeping as calm as possible – my heart was thumping like crazy – for the following half hour I checked and counted and checked and counted again.
Luc had given me the money for the Christmas shop in an envelope, unsealed but with the flap tucked in.
It had been a wad of crisp, new, twenty euro notes, one thousand euros he had said, although I hadn’t counted it because it was obviously straight out of an ATM.
The one thousand euros had then stayed in the said envelope and been put alongside the remains of the first money he’d given me, both being kept zipped in their own exclusive compartment of my crossbody bag, any small change going in another smaller but also separate pocket of the bag.
My own supply of cash, of which I was not carrying very much – who does these days?
– were in my wallet with my credit cards.
According to my reckoning of the receipts, there should have been a total of four hundred and twenty-eight euros remaining out of the one thousand euros that had been in the envelope, made up of notes and then, separately, some coinage including a few centimes, which everyone wishes the French would abolish because they’re so irritating.
However, no matter how many times I counted, three hundred euros had gone, was missing, or had vanished into thin air.
During the next thirty minutes, anybody watching me would have concluded this was a woman who’d lost it, the problem being this was precisely what she had done.
She had lost three hundred freaking euros.
This may not seem a vast amount to you, dear reader; depending on the rate of exchange it’s around two hundred and fifty quid.
But to me it’s a lot and, besides, it was the principle of the thing; I must either have mislaid it, or my calculations were up the creek, neither of which I could believe.
I therefore started ransacking my quarter, the boudoir as Emma Mandeville had so unappetisingly dubbed it, or more familiar to me as the Red Room courtesy of Jane Eyre.
Come to that, could there indeed be a ghost in the machine – a light-fingered phantom?
Whatever, it was a big room, with big furniture and plenty of it.
In addition to the canopied bed and a balding crimson velvet chaise longue, there was a large chest of drawers, a wardrobe that could have done business as a stable for a medium-sized horse and a massively ornate dressing table with a million drawers, not to mention two bedside cabinets, a huge carved oak coffer and four upright matching chairs, one with a leg that fell off on my foot when I picked it up to see if there could possibly be three hundred euros lurking underneath it.
Aware I was embarking on a totally pointless exercise in that I hadn’t actually put away my clothes when I moved rooms, preferring to leave them folded in piles on the said chaise longue, nonetheless, I started with the wardrobe, flinging the doors wide to release a musty odour of moth balls, dust and, yes, stale clothes, because the rails were already packed.
Shabby silk bathrobes – male and female – a couple of dinner suits – male only – shirts ancient and modern for both and at least a dozen women’s dresses of the cocktail variety, all of which seemed to date from circa 1960 including one, judging by its label, that was an original Christian Dior.
This last, despite the circumstances, struck me as being worth considerably more than the three hundred euros that of course were not there.
I moved to the chest of drawers and got another eye-opener.
It was crammed with corsets, garters, suspender belts, fishnet stockings and pairs of elbow-length gloves, all in black or red, or both in some cases, with all the expected frills and flounces attached.
No whips, though, although I half expected to find one.
The late Johnny Mandeville had clearly been a man of some imagination, if limited, when it came to sex.
What I could not credit, however, was that anything in this Parisian working girl collection could ever have belonged to or been worn by Jess.
But then, people are ceaselessly amazing.
You think you know them and they can still knock you for six.
The dressing table with my personal toiletries on top proved mercifully empty except for a pair of bondage handcuffs and a couple of splitting boxes of diamante chokers and bracelets, all worthless unless I’d got them wrong and, like the Dior frock, I’d unearthed another small fortune.
A thorough check of the bedside cabinets revealed nothing more than screwed-up paper handkerchiefs – don’t go there – although on the floor underneath one was a dog-eared copy of The Story of O – in French. Actually, that is quite titillating, in English, if soft porn is your bag.
I sat down on the bed, resentfully eyeing the carved coffer.
Absolutely nothing would be gained by opening the lid because I never had and, more discouragingly, God only knows what I’d find in there.
Wearily, I got to my feet and sat down again with my crossbody bag, emptying its entire contents out on top of the duvet, feeling inside for any sneaky holes in the lining through which three hundred euros could somehow have secreted themselves.
Except I knew full well there wouldn’t be any sneaky holes in the lining because the bag was brand new, a Christmas present from my parents.
It contained my passport and driving licence, a small hairbrush, a mirror, a pocket pack of paper hankies, one lipstick, a biro, half a blister strip of paracetamol, a mini notebook and, last but by no means least, a photo in a tiny leather folder of Carl as a baby that I have always carried with me because I love it.
My mobile phone was sitting on the dressing table, alongside my wallet, which I’d also emptied out, and the envelope that had contained Luc Mandeville’s euros.
This was the sum total of my possessions.
I’d searched everything. I had everything I needed except the one thing I wanted – the three hundred fecking euros.
And then I had a brainwave…
‘Alix, I am thinking you are needing a docteur.’
‘No, no, I’m fine.’
I was holding the ice pack Nicole had prepared against the burgeoning lump on the top of my skull.
Unbeknownst to me, she had arrived home to find me on my hands and knees squashed under the considerably smaller dressing table in the downstairs bedroom I had initially occupied.
My brainwave had been me thinking I must have dropped the money there.
I hadn’t. I nearly had brain damage instead.
Of course, discovering me under the dressing table must have surprised Nicole, but I so wish she hadn’t shrieked my name.
The absolutely classic had happened. I had started so violently I had cracked my head.
They say you see stars. Well, I can now assure you it’s true.
A positive galaxy had spun before my eyes.
‘You are looking for something?’ queried Nicole, fetching me a glass of water.
‘I was,’ I replied shortly, gingerly feeling the egg on my head at the same time as thinking hard.
It had just occurred to me that the money might have somehow been stolen.
Not while I was out shopping, but when my bag had been here in my room at the Villa Matisse.
But stolen by whom? Luc would not thieve his own money.
Emma was unthinkable. But then so too were Nicole and Billy.
It was obscene to suspect either of them.
That left the cleaner or… Tom. Madam Mop had always been far too involved with her dustpans to ransack my handbag.
But Tom? All at once I remembered I had left the thousand-euro envelope on the kitchen table overnight and the next morning when I left the room to find a spot for the Christmas tree in the salon.
Tom had been in the kitchen all the time, sitting morosely at the table, alone there with his pot of tea.
Yet, even though the man was a total plonker, the idea that he was a thief made my face contort with a rictus of revulsion.
Watching me, Nicole asked carefully, ‘You are losing something?’
Yeah, too right, I thought. But as she looked interrogatively at me, I knew there was no way I could tell her the truth. I couldn’t tell anybody. I had absolutely no proof.
‘Yes, an ear-ring,’ I extemporised wildly and touching my ear lobe for good measure.
‘Oh, this is so sad.’ She made a little moue of sympathy. ‘He is valuable?’
‘No, no, not at all. Cheap.’
‘Cheap?’ Nicole looked uncomprehending. ‘What is this cheap word?’
‘Um, not expensive, pas beaucoup de l’argent,’ I translated clumsily. I was feeling the onset of a monumental headache. ‘Cheap.’
‘Cheap.’ Nicole repeated the word with satisfaction. Then, ‘Cheap! Cheap! Cheap!’ she trilled like a demented budgerigar.
It really didn’t help matters.
She was, however, absolutely lovely to me for the rest of the day and evening, insisting I lie down for a while on one of the sofas in the salon where she quickly laid and lit the fire, bringing me a rug and a glass of water with some Neurofene.
I must rest, she insisted, and she would cook the steak for our supper.
M’sieur Luc had said he would not be back till very late.
In the event, once I lay down, I fell asleep and slept until early evening when I phoned Carl for our usual daily check-in and found him in a state of great excitement.
‘Mum! Tomorrow the ski instructor is putting me up to a higher class! He says I’m too good now to be with the babies.’
I resisted telling him not to boast. He isn’t a boastful child, and anyway he wasn’t really boasting, just telling me how it was.
‘That’s fantastic, darling. I’m so pleased for you.’
‘Thanks, Mum. This means I’ll be off the stupid nursery slopes and going with real skiers.’
‘Well, you be careful, won’t you?’