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photos.
    Lucinde
Godeffroy looked through them.
    “ Take your time, Madame.”
    They had
rather easily decided not to tell her about the body Gilles had
discovered. Lyon was over four hundred fifty kilometres from Paris.
They had their own blaring headlines, and the lady and those big,
beautiful blue eyes had hopefully not already been tainted by the
news coverage.
    This far from Paris, there likely hadn’t been much if
anything.
    “ Aw…” She broke down completely, upon seeing the gentleman as
a young man, standing at the side of the other Madame Godeffroy,
arm in arm at some seaside village. “Oh, God. Diddy…oh,
Diddy.”
    “ So that is Didier?”
    She
nodded through the torment.
    “ For the record, Madame, we need to hear you say it
clearly.”
    “ Yes—that is Didier.”
    She
buried her face in her hands.
    “ Any idea of who that other young lady is?”
    She
shook her head, shuddering all over.
    “ Did he ever talk about his old girlfriends?”
    Nice!
    That was
one way of putting it, thought Hubert.
    She
shook her head, devastated.
    “ Do you have any idea of who that other woman, ah, girl might
be?”
    She
shook her head again.
    “ No…no.” It was wracked out of her in a sob.
    Didier must have been in his mid to late twenties when they
met. A few previous girlfriends might be a given. It was the sort
of thing you probably wouldn’t want to talk about too much.
    He was sort of wondering why she didn’t ask about the other
person in the picture. How significant that might be was anyone’s
guess, and she was definitely a bit of a train-wreck. He wondered
if she knew, somehow.
    She’d
already leapt to the conclusion. How could she not?
    Tailler
got up, needing breath and movement and almost afraid to ask about
the children. Hubert made a point of doing so. Apparently they were
in boarding school. That would leave her alone, just her and one or
two part-time staff, a cook and a maid, which was sometimes not the
best solution. They were only here during daytime.
    It would
be sheer hell to just sit and wait, thought Tailler.
    He
wandered over to the mantelpiece, where there were yet more
pictures. There were Monique and Didier, him and her and the
children, a good looking boy and girl, and other family photos
which he presumed would be her parents. He was wondering who was
who. Didier was an orphan according to the first wife or whatever
she was.
    “ Are these your parents?”
    “ Yes. Didier had no one.”
    “ Ah.”
    For an orphan, a ward of the state, to go anywhere in life or
to make anything at all of themselves, was a real achievement. They
mostly grew up in the poor-house. His own middle-class upbringing
did nothing to dispel those notions. A few years in police work was
an awful dose of reality. Tailler really had been sheltered, accepting that
as the norm and sometimes wondering why anyone would be so errant
as to choose not to live a normal life.
    That was
one way of putting it.
    He had
learned not to judge too harshly.
    After a
quick pause for thought, Hubert went on with the
questions.
    “ And you two have been married about eight years, is that
correct?”
    Her
response was muffled and indistinct, and Tailler turned away from
the pictures to listen.
    “ Okay. How and where did you happen to meet?”
     
     

Chapter Six

     
    By the
time they got out of there, it was late afternoon.
    “ Whew. So that’s really our boy.”
    Hubert
nodded.
    “ Sure looks that way.” They still had to go back to the
hotel.
    They
hadn’t had any dinner, and there was a quick stop at the Lyon
police station. Without a doubt no one, absolutely no one, would
have heard of them, and their benefactor, the redoubtable Sergeant
Roche, would have already gone off duty. It would all take too
long, eating into their valuable time off.
    “ So.” Tailler had a way of cutting to the chase scene. “What
now?”
    “ Dinner, a drink and a show—assuming there is such a thing in
this town.”
    Lyon
wasn’t that