Night Train to Paris by Fliss Chester (best romantic novels to read txt) 📗

as she had admired Rose’s sense of style, she wasn’t sure she could pull off wearing one of her flamboyant patchwork overcoats around town.

Instead, Fen settled down to write a letter home, telling her parents the sad news of their friend’s death. She wiped away tears as they now fell onto the page, as persistent as the long drips that raced down the unshuttered windows of the apartment. She wondered if she should try to contact her brother too, still serving as the army gradually demobbed in North Africa, but she wasn’t sure she had the emotional strength to write the words Rose is dead one more time.

Just as she was sealing the envelope to her parents, there was a knock at the door that sent Tipper into paroxysms of barking.

‘Oh they’re so beautiful! Such colours!’ Fen could hear Simone, who had rushed to answer the door this time – obviously all thoughts of murderers coming back to stalk them gone from her mind – talking to James in the hallway.

Tipper scampered back into the studio and Fen scooped him up, smiling as he writhed in happiness at the attention. She put him down and he soon went back to licking the small pieces of toast, with a thin scraping of pâté on them, that Fen had been feeding him before James’s arrival. They both looked up though as Simone led James into the room. It was hard to see Simone through the size of the bouquet she was holding.

‘Look, Fenella, see what James has brought me!’

‘It’s just a little token, to brighten up the apartment somewhat. Afraid I had to drop a few francs in the local tailor, no sign of that shirt of mine turning up. And the florist was next door, so…’ James said and then wrinkled his nose. ‘Bloody hell, what is that smell?’

‘Bleach,’ Fen said as she quickly withdrew her fingers from Tipper’s sharp little teeth.

‘I had a whim,’ Simone explained, cocking her head on one side. ‘I could not bear the thought of dear Rose’s blood being here, so I scrubbed and scrubbed.’ She placed the bouquet on the chaise longue and showed James her hands. ‘They are better now, thanks to Fen and her hand cream, but I will be in trouble at work tomorrow if they think I can’t model like this.’ She scooped the bouquet up again and took it into her bedroom. Fen watched her as she went, wondering if the flowers would make it back out to help brighten up the whole apartment, or just her room.

‘And how are you?’ James asked Fen as he took the seat opposite her.

‘Oh, you know, coping.’ Fen let Tipper lick some of the meat paste off her fingers. ‘How did you get on with canvassing the other residents?’

‘Ah, yes. Well, interesting bunch. Afraid I didn’t get a chance to talk to them all, several unanswered doors and all that. The countess, though, she was a card. Dressed like an Edwardian grande dame and dripping in diamonds. I had to answer about forty questions about who I was and what I wanted before she opened the door even an inch. Eventually, she let me in and told me that she’d decided to wear all of her jewels as she felt safer with them on her, now that there’s a burglar on the loose.’

‘Oh dear, the police are definitely going down that route then, telling everyone that this was just a robbery gone wrong?’

‘Seems so. She did say something interesting though.’

‘Oh yes?’ Fen’s curiosity was piqued.

‘Yes, she said every time someone comes to call on Rose, she can hear Tipper barking. She says it upsets her Persian cat. Funny snouty-nosed thing it is too. Called Tsarina. Anyway, I digress. She said that yesterday afternoon she only heard Tipper bark once at about two o’clock.’

Fen sat up and Tipper jumped off her lap. ‘Once?’

‘That’s what she said. I didn’t ask Tsarina.’

Fen ignored his joke. ‘Once… Two o’clock was when Joseph Bernheim was meant to call…’ Fen was lost in thought for a moment. ‘So there was a visitor? Now, does that explain the burglary-gone-wrong idea? Or…’

‘Or what?’

Fen brushed some of Tipper’s hairs off her knees and dislodged a few crumbs from the toast too. She wasn’t sure how James would take Henri’s theory about the Arnault brothers, since he was on relatively friendly terms with them, so she took a deep breath and came right out with it. ‘I spoke to Henri Renaud and he suggested it might be one, or both, I suppose, of the Arnault brothers.’

‘Really? What have they got against Rose? I thought they all worked together?’

‘He thinks Gervais might have fallen in with a bad lot and Rose might have forced his hand by threatening to shop him to the police.’

‘A bad lot?’ James furrowed his brow.

‘You know, gangsters and the like.’

‘Gangsters? What utter tosh!’ James clapped his hands down on his knees. ‘I don’t think Gervais could fight his way out of a croissant, let alone get involved with some sort of mafiosi.’

‘Henri called him Gervais “The Wrench”…’

This just made James laugh.

‘We should at least check their alibis,’ Fen suggested, and James, recovered from his laughing fit nodded, then shook his head.

‘I just can’t picture it… I suppose Henri had an alibi ready of his own?’

‘Yes. And he offered it most readily. In his own gallery apparently, on the phone to London, asking about watercolours. I suppose we could check that out somehow if we think we need to.’

‘No stone and all that. He shouldn’t slander Gervais, or Antoine, come to think of it.’ James shook his head. ‘Just because a chap’s not in a three-piece suit…’

‘I know, I know. You weren’t with them, yesterday afternoon, I mean? To provide an alibi?’

‘No… but that’s not to say they’re—’

He was interrupted by Simone coming back into the studio, changed and dressed ready for a night out. She looked demurely elegant, dressed in black to honour Rose, yet the flashes of red at the end