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

features. In better circumstances, I’d have given him the eye. The other visitor was a tall, shambling French police detective with a large, broken nose, full mouth, and small gray eyes, who walked as if his knees and his feet were not in direct communication. Both men were very formal and polite, showed me their identification, and asked for mine. I handed over my passport.
    “You appear to be leaving,” remarked the Frenchman, whose name was Inspector Chardin. Shades of the great genre painter. Would that prove a happy omen? Probably not, for he seemed gratified to have found me packing like a proper felon on the run.
    “Monte Carlo is wonderful,” I said with a nod toward the Monégasque, but I have not been lucky at the tables. Besides, I want to visit the police in Menton.”
    This clearly surprised him. “How so?”
    “Why the story in Nice-Matin this morning, Monsieur. The request for information. Isn’t that why you are here?” I certainly hoped I’d guessed right, because my public-spirited gesture didn’t seem to please him as much as one might have thought.
    “You were a visitor to the Villa Mimosa? Why didn’t you come forward sooner?”
    “I am on holiday. I only saw the paper this morning. And that was just by chance. I’d decided to see how the bicycle race was progressing.”
    “Very well,” said the flic from Monaco in the eager tone of an aficionado. “Vietto is leading. Surely a French victory this year, though look for Brambilla in the mountain stages. Bellissimo is Brambilla.”
    His companion gave him a sour look. “Why were you at the Villa Mimosa?”
    “It’s a long story.”
    “We are at your disposal, Monsieur.” He sat down on the end of the bed and took out his notepad. I started with the shooting outside the gambling club and progressed to the rich, mysterious Monsieur Joubert and the even more mysterious Victor Renard, who might or might not be dead.
    Inspector Chardin looked up sharply at this. “You were supposedly taking his last letter to his wife.”
    “Supposedly—and the letter bore that out. It was a farewell note. He had been very badly hurt, and I’m in position to know that he lost a lot of blood. His death was certainly believable, but there has been no report in the London papers. We took an interest, as you can imagine.”
    Inspector Chardin made a note of this. “So you did not know Monsieur Renard personally?”
    “I don’t believe I had ever seen him before. He was not a regular at the club.”
    “And Joubert?”
    “I just knew him as the proprietor.”
    “Yet you agreed to deliver the letter for him even if it was out of your way?”
    “There were inducements.”
    I described our bargain, and the younger man did a quick conversion from pounds to francs. “That’s a lot of money for a letter.”
    “Too much,” I agreed. “But the packet contained more than a letter.”
    “It would be nice to have a look at that notebook,” the detective remarked when I finished describing the contents of the packet.
    “Madame Renard, the Madame Renard I saw, that is, took it to the rear of the house—undoubtedly to someone else—and came back and pronounced it satisfactory.”
    “Then you left?”
    “I left immediately. I did not want to linger at the villa, which was nearly empty of furniture and unnaturally quiet. I couldn’t believe that anyone lived there, yet I had a sense that Madame Renard was not alone. For one thing, and I didn’t think of this until just now, the whole house stank of cigarette smoke. I have asthma; I notice. But not Madame. I spoke to her in the doorway, and she smelled only of cologne.”
    “But you actually saw no one except the woman calling herself Madame Renard? As far as you know the house was otherwise empty?”
    “No.” I explained my detour to the tower and the two men in their blue smocks and town shoes who came out the front gate.
    “Would you recognize them again?”
    “Hard to say. I saw them from above.