Chapter Twenty-One #2
I accepted it; it was too damn cold for gender equality. As the jacket’s heat from Luc’s body warmed me, I realised I wasn’t in shock, unless feeling inclined towards mild hysteria was shock. I was actually feeling quite calm.
‘Do you really think the gun was a replica?’
He sat down on the plastic bench next to me. All we needed was two pints of lager and a packet of crisps to be in a grotty pub garden.
‘I do, if only for the simple albeit prosaic reason that there is no way Tom would have the money to buy a real gun. They cost a packet, even on the black market. He earns very little, and the little he does earn goes down his throat in drink.’
‘An alcoholic chauffeur? Oh, joy.’
‘I know but my father felt sorry for him.’ He looked appealingly at me. ‘Yes, I know what you’re going to say but—’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said, cutting across him because something had just occurred to me. ‘Listen, Tom did have some money – quite a lot in fact.’ I explained my suspicions about the missing three hundred euros.
Luc stared at me, aghast. ‘Why ever didn’t you tell me?’
I looked steadily at him. ‘Partly because I have no proof he stole it but mainly because I was afraid of your reaction. I thought you’d blame me.’
‘Oh, shit.’ He turned his head away, muttering, ‘What a total arsehole I must be.’ Then he swung back to me. ‘I can only apologise again, Alix. It’s entirely my own fault you thought that.’
I drew a deep breath. ‘I don’t think it now,’ I said quietly. ‘I did think it then, but I don’t think it now.’
Our eyes locked for a long moment.
Then, ‘Thank you,’ he said and, standing up, climbed up the cellar steps only to come quickly back down. ‘That door lock is on the other side,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I can get it open from in here. So how the hell are we going to get out?’
‘Tapping morse code on the ceiling? Thought transference to the local fire brigade? How about us digging a tunnel?’
He gaped at me. ‘A tunnel? A tunnel! Alix, you are a genius!’ Bouncing across the cellar, Luc started rapidly unloading the bottles of wine stacked on one of the Ikea racks against the opposite wall and placing them in regimented lines on the concrete floor.
‘Ahem.’ Baffled, I cleared my throat. ‘Pardon me, but is this quite the time to be checking your stocks of Mouton Cadet?’
Luc swivelled round, grinning like an eager schoolboy. ‘You’ve cracked it, Alix. I’d forgotten all about it, but what you just said reminded me. There’s a door opening onto a tunnel in the wall behind this rack, in turn leading up into the garden.’
I stared at him. ‘Now you say that, I recall Billy mentioning it. Something to do with the war, wasn’t it?’
‘No, that’s apocryphal. I think it was far more nefarious, something to do with smuggling in the house that originally stood on this site. But who cares? It’s our lifeline. Help me. We’ll be free in two minutes.’
‘Why did your father have the door locked?’
‘I don’t think it was Dad, actually.’ Luc looked bleak. ‘It was Jess. I used to play in the tunnel with my friends when I was a kid, but once Jess came to live with Dad she was always saying it was unhealthy down there, so at some point she had it locked.’
He ran his fingers round the door frame for the ninetieth time as if he could somehow get a purchase to prise it open.
I couldn’t see it happening. The door was not only firmly locked with no key but the wood rock solid.
Oak, I’d say, probably at least five centimetres thick and seasoned by centuries of history.
It was the only thing of any age or quality in the whole dismal place.
You couldn’t have broken through it with an executioner’s axe.
‘If I only I had a screwdriver,’ Luc lamented. ‘I could take the lock out.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said resignedly, plodding back to the garden bench. ‘Someone will rescue us one day.’
‘Who, pray? Nobody knows we’re here.’
‘At least we won’t collapse from dehydration. We’ll just get drunk.’
Luc came and sat down again next to me. ‘We haven’t any glasses,’ he sighed. ‘Or, for that matter, a corkscrew.’ Unable to sit still, he jumped to his feet and once more crossed the cellar to pointlessly examine the locked door.
Corkscrew… yeah, a corkscrew. I could have murdered a glass of wine.
Perhaps Luc could pull a cork with his teeth…
Corkscrew! I almost fell off the bench as I remembered.
I don’t know how I could have forgotten because the wretched thing had been irritating me on and off all day with clunking against my thigh.
But reverently, with infinite respect, I slowly withdrew Carl’s Swiss Army knife from the leg pocket of my combats.
I opened it. How many functions had Carl claimed it had?
It seemed to have a hundred. I levered out as many as possible without crucifying my nails.
And there it was. A screwdriver. Padding soundlessly across the cellar, I tapped Luc gently on his shoulder, whereupon he jumped about two metres in the air.
‘My God, you gave me a fright!’ he cried.
‘For heaven’s sake.’ I started to giggle. ‘Who on earth did you think it was? We’re not exactly throwing a party down here.’ With a triumphant flourish, I produced the Swiss Army knife from behind my back. ‘There you go, sunshine. Never let it be said that I am not resourceful.’
Twenty minutes later, we were back in the kitchen.
‘Jesus, it was stinky in that tunnel, wasn’t it?
Jess was right. It isn’t just unhealthy down there, it’s a sewer.
’ Taking off Luc’s tweed jacket, I sniffed the sleeve of my jumper, pulled a face and caught sight of my reflection in the kitchen window.
‘And my hair looks as though it’s been nested in by a murder of crows. ’
‘What a beautiful phrase,’ Luc mused dreamily. ‘A murder of crows.’ Off he drifted into a Luc-like little reverie. But presently he came back down to earth. ‘However, you look fine, Alix, miraculously fine, in fact, considering what you’ve just been through.’
‘What I’ve just been through is a deeply pongy tunnel.’
In fact, the tunnel beneath the Villa Matisse had been miraculously fine too, and, even though you might have expected something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, astonishingly cobweb and spider-free.
It was the poisonous smell that did for us, like rotten eggs or something a good deal worse.
Septic tank? Don’t go there. The smell was so bad it must have deterred every arachnid south of Paris.
Once able to draw breath without choking to death on fumes, the first thing we’d done on gaining the kitchen was check our phones.
Weirdly, when Tom had departed on his criminal little spree, he had left both of them reposing peacefully on the kitchen table.
The guy certainly didn’t qualify as what you might call an arch-villain.
He’d also even left not only the Sabatier knife but his gun, which on close examination proved to be, as Luc had indeed suspected, not merely a replica but practically a child’s toy.
Every Matisse cut-out had gone from the salon, however, plus all the other paintings that had hung there, which was doubtless all Tom had been interested in.
Luc had immediately phoned Jess, who had left a stream of messages for him.
‘Nicole is with her,’ he had told me, phone clamped to his ear, to my intense relief.
‘She’s fine, shocked and upset of course, but fine.
I always insisted she go to Jess if she was ever on her own in an emergency.
Jess said Nicole can stay with her for the time being while I sort things out.
As you heard, I explained we had got home to find Tom playing silly buggers. ’
Now we were sitting at the kitchen table knocking back two vast cognacs Luc had poured for us.
‘At least Tom didn’t steal the Courvoisier,’ he said wryly.
‘That would have been beyond serious. Jess thinks I should call the police,’ he then remarked, replenishing our glasses.
‘It seems Tom coerced Nicole into letting him into the house out of hours to steal the pictures by threatening to tell the authorities where she was hiding.’
‘But how did he know? I thought you were keeping it a deathly secret.’
‘I was but, oh, you know.’ Luc exhaled a sigh. ‘Nicole’s been here for months, her presence odd and unexplained. It wouldn’t have taken much for anyone to work out that something was going on with her. I’m aware, for instance, that Billy knew what was what.’
‘But no way would Billy have told Tom! He can’t stand the creep!’
‘Of course he wouldn’t have,’ Luc agreed swiftly. ‘Billy’s a star. No, dim as he is, I have no doubt Tom worked it out for himself.’
I thought a minute. ‘You know, I think Tom tried to do it before, steal the pictures, that is. It was the night I arrived ten days ago.’ I paused, thinking back.
The ten days seemed like ten years. ‘It was well after midnight, and as my taxi drew up outside, I saw Tom running away from the house and thought it weird at the time. Now I realise as well that Nicole was always at her most uneasy when he was around. Not surprising. He was blackmailing her.’
‘The bastard!’ Luc thumped the table with his fist.
‘Are you going to call the police now?’
He drank some cognac. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But what’s not to know?’ I was puzzled. ‘Tom’s stolen your pictures. Of course I realise they must be insured, but, if you don’t mind me saying this, for a man who has just lost a priceless art collection, you seem strangely unbothered.’
Chewing his cheeks, Luc contemplated me for a moment or two before saying quietly, ‘They were fakes.’
‘Fakes? What were? The pictures?’ I frowned, trying to get a purchase on this. ‘Are you saying the Matisse cut-outs and the other works of art that were hanging in your oh-so-elegant sitting room were fakes?’
‘Yeah, fakes. As fake as Tom’s gun. Dad sold the originals thirty-odd years ago when his business began to go down the tube.’