The Prisoner of the Riviera (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

boxes, and what turned out to be a couple of extra bike pedals, one of which had gouged my right shin. I started cleaning up with my handkerchief, but Pierre unlocked the shop and motioned me inside. He took down a first aid kit with iodine, Nan’s mainstay, several gauze pads, and reels of tape. While he patched me up, I looked at the photographs on the walls: men in Pierre’s blue-and-white-striped kit posed with racing bicycles and, sometimes, with trophies.
    This was the local club, he told me, and he was a member as well as the team’s official mechanic. The parts were for his team leader’s bike, which was getting set up for a big race, and he’d taken the motorbike to save the train fare, a decision that would have been a disaster without me. He was so distressed about my leg that he insisted on riding me down to the front in the sidecar and he was so amusing and decorative that I had him stay for dinner, where he explained bicycle racing and mentioned that the ongoing Tour de France would run through Monaco.
    “We will watch for you,” said Arnold.
    “Oh, Monsieur, I will not be in that race, not even as a domestique , but I hope to work as a mechanic on the Riviera stage.” Then, sensing our all-encompassing ignorance of this splendid event, he began explaining the extraordinary length and difficulty of the race, the climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees, and the hundreds of kilometers of stages that comprised a circuit of the entire country. “And the last stage beginning in Caen, Monsieurs, the martyred city—it will be very moving.”
    In this way, we passed a pleasant evening. After Pierre, who kept training hours, said good night, we remained drinking on the terrace instead of going to the casino or one of our usual bars.
    We left early the next morning for Monte Carlo, and it was two days later, after we were established in a pleasant waterside hotel and losing money hand over fist at the casino, that I visited a news kiosk for the London papers Nan enjoys. Almost as an afterthought, I picked up Nice-Matin , thinking to check on the progress of the famous bicycle Tour.
    Standing under the plane trees in the dappled sunshine, I opened the paper to an article headlined, “Murder in the Var.” Just Nan’s cup of tea, I thought, with the added promise of the guillotine, for my dear nan has a great passion for capital punishment. I was skimming the story when my chest contracted: the victim was known locally as “Madame Renard.” Victor’s supposed widow, the woman I’d visited, was dead, and I had perhaps precipitated this by delivering Victor’s legacy. It took me a moment to digest that idea, before my shock turned to surprise and then doubt when I checked the accompanying photo.
    Instead of the Madame Renard I’d met, who was young with short, honey-colored hair and a wide face with broad cheekbones and an impudent expression, this Madame Renard was older, Arnold’s age if she was a day. With her long nose and bony cheeks, dark hair streaked white, and the large eyes of a tragic heroine, this Madame Renard looked plausible for the widow of a gambler with enemies, but she wasn’t the one who’d collected Joubert’s package.
    I sat down on one of the benches to read the story carefully. The body of Claudine Renard had been found the previous afternoon when one of her neighbors delivered some eggs, found the kitchen door unlocked, and ventured inside. Madame Renard lay in a small stone pantry off the kitchen with her neck broken. There was no sign of a struggle, and it was as yet unclear if the victim had been killed where she was found. There was no information on the time of death, but I profoundly hoped that it was well outside of five p.m. on the afternoon I rang the bell at the Villa Mimosa, even though earlier might implicate my Madame Renard while later suggested that she had met a similar fate. All this was bad in any case.
    Worse was to come. The neighbors, who clearly had been alert