Lovers and Liars Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page B

course, and there were people she had alienated as a result of past articles, certainly. But she could think of no one who would retaliate in this particular underhanded way. With an angry shrug she began to fold up the wrapping paper.
    “Chuck them away, love—I would,” the courier said on a defensive note. He gestured to a trash can up the street.
    “No way.” She set her lips. “I need them. I’m going to find out who sent me this.”
    She began to push the handcuffs, into her bag. The courier hesitated.
    “I could make a few inquiries if you like,” he began. “At my office. They were sent from our City branch—I know that much. I could call in there after work, ask around….”
    Genevieve gave him a grateful smile. “Would you? I’d check myself, but I’m tied up all day.” She handed him her card. “Those are my numbers—work and home. I should be back here around six. Will you call me if you discover anything? I’d be very grateful.”
    The courier promised he would do so; he said that his name was George, and he would call her at home, without fail, after six. He then left for his next delivery, and Genevieve stood for a while on the sidewalk, watching his van disappear. It was cold and beginning to rain. She turned up the collar of her coat and gave a small shiver. Handcuffs. Did that mean that she had an unknown enemy? Or was this anonymous package meant to convey something else?
    She walked across to her car. The rush-hour traffic was heavy, and delayed her further still, but she drove the whole way to her newspaper’s docklands office unaware of the passing time, considering her anonymous present. Halfway there, she finally made the obvious deduction: The sender of these handcuffs was likely to be male—and at that her residual sense of sick unease increased.

PART TWO
AN INVESTIGATION

Chapter 5
    I T WAS TYPICAL OF his ex-wife, Pascal thought, turning into the barren suburban street, to elect to live here, in Paris and yet not in Paris, in surroundings that could scarcely be less French. His former wife, born with a gift for languages, fluent in French, German, and Italian, remained English to the core. She retained a thin-lipped disdain for foreigners, an unshakable belief in their inferiority. “Paris?” Helen had said at the time of the divorce. “Live in Paris? Are you insane? I stay in France only on sufferance, for Marianne’s sake. I’ve already found the perfect house. It’s on the outskirts. It costs five million francs. We can build it into the settlement. I hope you’re not going to quibble, Pascal. It’s cheap at the price.”
    The five-million-franc house lay ahead of him now, just up the street. It was what Helen called an “executive” house. It had seven bedrooms, all expensively furnished, and five of them unused. It had seven bathrooms, a kitchen like an operating theater, a four-car garage, and a view of desolate immaculate turf. It was a house that could have been built in any expensive suburb in the world. Pascal had seen others just like it, equally vulgar, in Brussels, London, Bonn, Detroit. Its bricks were an aggressive scarlet. He had loathed it on sight.
    That morning there was a change in the routine. Normally, by tacit agreement, Pascal and Helen never met. At the end of a visitation weekend, Pascal would pull up outside the house. Helen, watching from the picture windows, would rush to the doorway and hold out her arms. Marianne would run inside, the door would close, and Pascal would drive off.
    This morning was to be different, it seemed. Helen was waiting in the driveway, looking thin, elegant, and irritable. She kissed Marianne in a perfunctory way, and the child ran inside. Pascal wound down the window of his car.
    In English, Helen said: “You’re late.”
    “I know. I’m sorry. The traffic was bad.”
    She raised her eyebrows in a small arc of reproachful disbelief. “Really? Well, it hardly matters. I have nothing else to do except wait