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

She had imagined this trip to Paris would be the two of them spending afternoons walking along the Seine, reminiscing about Arthur, and James telling her more about him and the work they’d done in secret in the war. She hadn’t imagined herself to be sitting up in bed, alone in an apartment where a dear old friend of hers had recently been murdered, passing the time of day talking to a small, yappy dog.

‘Oh and Magda,’ she winced as she remembered that not only had she interrupted James and Simone in a clinch, but she had let down her old friend, too.

As soon as she opened her bedroom door, Tipper nosed his way in, and by the time she’d put in a call to Magda’s building and left a message to let her know that she’d visit her that very morning, the little dog had nestled himself in her still warm sheets.

Fen slipped back in under the eiderdown and reached over to her bedside cabinet where the slightly torn and grubby napkin containing her grid was sitting. She stared at it and jotted down another couple of words that sprung to mind, so that a little while later, it looked like this:

Once dressed, Fen carefully folded the napkin up and slipped it into the pocket of her trench coat. She felt that somehow these murders were linked to some, if not all, of those words, and that connecting them in a grid could perhaps help her see how they might intersect in real life. But did the degenerate art have any relation to the warehouse or Tipper to the forgeries? It was a puzzle all right, and one she was scared of not being able to solve.

‘I wish I could solve these too,’ she grunted, pulling a brush through her unruly curls. The drizzle and rain last night had sent her neatly rolled hair into wayward tendrils and there wasn’t much else Fen could do except tie the Atelier Lelong scarf over the lot of it. ‘There, fixed,’ she said as she knotted it under her chin and dabbed some lipstick on.

There was no sign of Simone in the apartment – perhaps she’d never come home last night? And if not, had James indeed popped the question? Fen was about to leave when Tipper nuzzled his little nose into her ankle.

‘Fancy a walk too, old chap?’ Fen asked and at the ‘w’ word, his tail started wagging at such a pace she wondered if he might take off. ‘All right, all right, steady on,’ Fen laughed and hooked his lead up to his collar, picked up her handbag and the parcel of clothes she’d put together for Magda and started out towards the Marais. ‘You shall be my accessory today, Tipper, and please,’ she knelt down and held his little fluffy head in her hands, ‘if I start to follow totally innocent strangers around the place, stop me!’

Fen knew the way to the road where the Bernheims were lodging and as she and Tipper neared the down-at-heel neighbourhood, she thought again about how much as a family they had lost. Rose had reminded Fen about the Bernheims’ former apartment near the Champs-Élysées, with its artwork and Persian carpets, its rooms flooded with light from elegant windows twice the size of her own. Fen remembered evenings when crystal chandeliers did a merry job of illuminating their many soirées and parties. Magda and Joseph’s wedding had been one of those glittering affairs and Fen thought back to that first taste of champagne and the weight of the lead crystal glass in her hand.

That night, the apartment had glowed with wealth and opulence, the marble finishes and polished wood reflecting all that glorious light onto the masterpieces on the walls. And now Joseph and Magda were reduced to living in a small tenement in the Marais district. Hundreds of years ago, Fen remembered from her history lessons, the Marais, and the grand Place des Vosges within it, had been the centre for French and Parisian nobility. But it had fallen into disrepair after the revolution in the eighteenth century and had become the home instead to shopkeepers and refugees, among them many Jews. Over the years, the Marais had become the Jewish quarter and because of this it was constantly raided during the occupation, with apartments and shops either locked-up, empty and disused, or with extended families crammed into inhumanely small spaces for them all. Fen shuddered to think where their occupants might be now.

She looked down at the piece of paper she had brought with her on which the Bernheims’ address was written and walked the last few streets towards it. The building itself wasn’t dissimilar to Rose’s, but instead of one apartment per floor, there were three or four, and the communal staircase of this one was dirty with children and animals playing listlessly on it.

Fen picked Tipper up as she climbed towards the second floor, where the Bernheims lived. She jumped a few times as voices shouted out of nowhere and it took Fen a moment to realise that it was just because so many people were now living cheek by jowl. Refugees and displaced families were squeezed into tiny apartments; voices raised and shouting at each other, babies crying and the wireless playing jazz music while dogs barked at each other through the thin walls of the building.

Tipper buried his head into her armpit as she stepped over a pile of old newspapers and cardboard, and Fen herself had to keep her nerve as she saw something dart suspiciously quickly across the landing in front of her, its little tail the last thing that caught her eye as it disappeared into a hole in the skirting board.

Fen knocked at the door and Magda soon appeared, unchaining the lock and letting her in.

‘Magda, hello.’

‘Fen, come on in.’

The Bernheims’ apartment might have been small, but it was immaculate inside. The door opened into a narrow hallway