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

bright, picture-illuminating lights had been turned off and barely any daylight could make it through the blackout blinds. There were shocked gasps and then Fen saw Henri’s face illuminated by a single, bright torch beam. Then darkness again and the room reverberated with a volley of gunshots.

Forty-Four

Pandemonium reigned for what seemed like minutes, though it must have only been a second or so. Fen tried to get her bearings in the dark, while nursing her eardrum that must have been only inches away from the crack of the pistol shots that had rung out among them. Trust Henri to have drawn his blackout blinds before his meeting with Lazard – the privacy they had afforded them then was now cloaking the gallery in darkness.

Ears ringing, but eyes growing more accustomed to the dark, she felt her way along the wall, feeling the cool of the painted plaster under her fingers until she found a light switch. Click. The room was illuminated again and the scene that met her was one of utter horror. Henri had been gunned down where he had stood, his blood, and who knew what else, spread across the pristine white of the gallery wall behind him.

Lazard was on his knees, collapsed to the floor from his chair, but alive and unhurt, while Antoine was clutching his ears. He must have been inches from the shooter too. James was on the floor, but gradually coming up to standing. Fen offered him her hand and he was just about upright, shaking his head as if to dislodge something from his ears too, when Fen heard Joseph Bernheim shout out.

‘Magda! Where is she?’

‘Simone…’ James looked around. Both of the women were gone and Fen realised that the chill breeze that was blowing a few damp autumn leaves into the gallery came from the open doorway.

‘Quick, James!’ Fen pulled him along with her and they left the gallery behind them, running down the colonnade.

‘Look, there!’ James had spotted two bodies lying on the ground at the end of the passage. In a few seconds, they were there with them, James strides ahead of Fen by now. She slowed as she saw him pull Simone off Magda, loosening the young model’s grip from around the older woman’s throat.

‘I’d have been paid more if you’d died with your parents,’ Simone was hissing at Magda.

‘Simone!’ James pulled her fully off Magda and held her against one of the columns.

‘Magda, oh Magda, are you all right?’ Fen fell to her knees beside her friend and, seconds later, Joseph was there too, comforting his wife. ‘What happened?’

Through gasps of breath, Magda explained that she’d seen Simone fire the gun, her face lit briefly by the torch, and had run out of the gallery after her. By dashing after her into the late-afternoon drizzle and tripping Simone up, Magda had thwarted the killer.

Thoughts started falling into place and Fen spoke them out loud, as much to get it clear in her own head as to help the others piece it together. ‘Simone, I was wrong, you’re the murderer, aren’t you? And The Chameleon!’

Simone struggled against James’s arm, which was still holding her securely against the pillar. ‘James, why won’t you defend me? Why are you letting her accuse me like this?’

James just shook his head. ‘Fen,’ he said, his voice a little croaky. ‘Carry on.’

Fen nodded, stood up and then looked back at Simone. ‘I wasn’t wrong about Henri though, was I? Except he wasn’t actually the murderer. You are. You were his weapon.’

Simone rolled her eyes and then raised her eyebrows, inviting Fen to continue, if she dared. She did.

‘You’ve told me enough times that you would do anything not to be poor again. How much was he paying you?’ Fen’s question was met with silence. ‘I see,’ she realised. ‘It wasn’t money. Ah… the apartment. You hardly seemed shocked at all when I said he’d agreed that we could stay on. You knew all the time that the apartment, and everything in it, would be your pay cheque.’

Simone struggled against James, but it was him, rather than Fen this time, who told her to stay still.

Fen continued to join the clues she’d noticed over the last few days together. ‘Tipper doesn’t bark at you. And Henri knew you had the stomach to kill, you were in the Resistance after all and had led many a Nazi officer to their death.’

‘But Rose wasn’t killed with a gun,’ James took over, adding in his own thoughts to Fen’s deductions.

‘No…’ Fen agreed. ‘Mid-afternoon in a residential area… the weapon had to be quieter than that. Or more improvised perhaps. The countess’s cat, Tsarina, got in a pickle over Tipper’s barking at exactly the time we know that Joseph was calling to see Rose. You were already back in the apartment with her, though. And as soon as you heard him yapping, you knew you had to kill Rose quickly and quietly as whoever was approaching would more than likely let themselves in.’

‘Did Rose not think it odd that Simone was home from work?’ Magda had recovered her voice, though was still huddled on the ground in the arms of her husband.

Fen nodded and looked back at Simone. ‘Possibly, though I don’t think she suspected Simone at all. Your employer, on the other hand….’ Fen paused, and rubbed her temples to help her think.

‘What is it? James asked.

‘Just something Christian said about you, Simone, that you were always “popping out to see James”, though it wasn’t so much James as murder you had on your mind those times, wasn’t it? Anyway, you had the perfect opportunity to get as close as you needed to drive that paintbrush through Rose’s throat without her even suspecting, right up until it was far too late.’

Simone just snorted in a derisory way and Fen felt that, far from denying the murder, she was almost itching to add in her own details.

Fen carried on while the stage was hers. ‘You then hid in your