Read City of Light (City of Mystery) for Free Online Page B

a great adventure.”
    “Your husband won’t
mind?” 
    Rayley regretted the
words the moment he said them.  Graham looked at him with such exasperation
that he all but rolled his eyes.  I must seem like a stuffy old fool, Rayley
thought.  A prude and a Puritan, a pensioner taking his two grandchildren on
holiday. 
    “I’m quite sure he
would mind if he knew,” Isabel said. “Oh dear. Are we running low on
champagne?”
    “Not for long,”
Graham said, turning to gallop back toward the bar.  He shot Rayley a final
glance that suggested he should try to do a little better this time, so Rayley
swallowed his next question, which was “How on earth can a man not know if his
wife leaves the house before 6 AM?”
    Isabel was gazing at
him quietly.  “You are coming with me, aren’t you?”
    A shift from “us” to
“me” but no indication of what it might mean.  Rayley nodded. “Might I ask you
something?”
    “Please do.”
    “That day in the
café…How did you know I was British?”
    She laughed.  “By
the way you spoke French.”
     
     
    An hour later Rayley
found himself packed into an overcrowded coach with a half-dozen French
policemen of varying ranks crammed in around him.  Their voices were giddy from
free drink, and for once he didn’t mind that he understood not a word of what
they were saying.   He sat in silence, going over the evening again and again
in his mind.  The improbability of it all.
    Did he want to climb
the tower?  Most emphatically not. 
    Would he climb it?
    Yes. If he could
climb it with her.
    The coach was
slowing down on the street where his boarding house stood and Rayley made a
move to push to his feet. He knew from a rather humiliating past experience
that the police coach would not completely stop, but merely slow, and that he
would be expected to leap out at his doorstep.  He dug into his pocket for the
key to the front door and his fingers grazed the latest letter from Trevor
Welles, a letter that had arrived that morning and that he had not yet had the
chance to read. 
    He pulled the
envelope out, squinted at it in the irregular glow of the streetlight.  Trevor
had scribbled something on the back of envelope, evidently a last minute
thought.  The coach slowed.  Rayley jumped, landing lightly on his feet, and waved
goodbye at the coach from which no one waved back.  He turned the envelope over
in his hand, squinted at Trevor’s characteristic scrawl.
    A single sentence. 
A question.
    Did the maid scream? 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    Paris
    April 19
    10:20 AM
     
     
    “Look through the
report very carefully,” Rayley said to his translator, a nondescript young man
named Carle.  “I want to know if there was anything on the maid’s hands.”
    Carle obediently
flipped through the papers. “It says they were clean, Sir.”
    “I know.  But does
‘clean’ mean that there was nothing of interest on her hands or nothing at
all?”
    Carle looked at him
with the flat expression of a man who is not paid to be curious. 
    “The report says the
officer who originally examined her was Denis Rubois,” Rayley said. “Go and ask
him. She was in the process of helping to prepare dinner when the murderer
entered, so it seems there would be some residue from her efforts.  Flour or
butter or blood, strings from a bean, juice from an apple. Something.”
    Carle nodded and left
the room, and Rayley picked up the papers on his desk, frowning once again at
the line where the investigating officer had described the maid’s hands. 
“Propre et blanc comme la neige.”  The small translation book he carried in his
pocket informed him that the officer had described the maid’s hands as not
merely “clean” but “clean and white as the snow.”  The sort of linguistic
extravagance the French were known for, but perhaps a clue as well, for his
time at the Yard had taught Rayley that sometimes the absence of something
could be as telling as its presence.
    They were