Century Rain

THREE

Floyd swung the Mathis into a narrow street between tall-sided tenements. It was years since he had been on rue des Peupliers, and his memory was of broken cobbles, boardedup premises and shabby pawnbrokers. The road was smoothly asphalted now and the parked autos were all gleaming nineteen-fifties models, low and muscular like crouched panthers. The posts of the electric street lamps gleamed with new paint. The street-level establishments were all discreet, high-class affairs: clockmakers, antiquarian booksellers, exclusive jewellers, a shop selling maps and globes, another specialising in fountain pens. As afternoon turned to evening, the storefronts threw welcoming rectangles of light on to the darkening sidewalk.

“There’s number twenty-three,” Floyd said, easing the car into a space next to the apartment building Blanchard had given as his address. “That’s where she must have fallen,” he added, nodding towards a patch of sidewalk that showed every sign of having been recently scrubbed. “Must have been from one of those balconies above us.”

Custine looked out of the side window. “No sign of damaged railings on any of them. Doesn’t look as though any of them have been replaced and repainted lately, either.”

Floyd reached back and Custine passed him his notebook and fedora. “We’ll see.”

As they got out of the car, a small girl wearing scuffed black shoes and a stained dress emerged from the building and walked out on to the street. Floyd was about to call out to her before she allowed the door to close, but the words stalled in his throat when he saw her face: even in the fading light, some suggestion of disfigurement or strangeness was apparent. He watched her skip down the street, finally disappearing into the shadows between the lights. Resignedly, Floyd tried the glass-fronted door that the girl had just come through and found it locked. Next to it was a panel of buzzers accompanied by the names of the tenants. He found Blanchard’s and pressed it.

A voice crackled through the grille immediately. “You are late, Monsieur Floyd.”

“Does that mean the appointment is off?”

In place of an answer there was a buzz from the door. Custine pushed it experimentally and the door opened a crack.

“Let’s see how this plays out,” Floyd said. “Usual drill: I’ll do most of the talking; you sit and observe.”

That was the way they normally worked. Floyd had long ago found that his not-quite-perfect French lulled people into a false sense of security, often encouraging them to blurt out things that they might otherwise have held back.

The hallway led immediately to a carpeted flight of stairs, which they took to the third-floor landing, both of them wheezing from the climb when they arrived. Three of the doors were shut, but the fourth was slightly ajar, a crack of electric light spilling on to the well-worn carpet. An eye loomed in the gap. “This way, Monsieur Floyd. Please!”

The crack widened enough to admit Floyd and Custine into a living room, where the curtains had already been drawn against the advancing gloom of evening.

“This is my associate, André Custine,” Floyd said. “This being a homicide investigation, I thought two pairs of eyes and ears might be better than one.”

Blanchard nodded courteously towards each of them. “Would you care for some tea? The kettle is still warm.”

Custine started to say something, but Floyd was already thinking about how little time he had before his meeting with Greta and got in first. “Very kind of you, monsieur, but we’d best be getting on with the investigation.” He removed his fedora and placed it on an empty chess table. “Where do you want to begin?”

“I rather expected you to take the lead,” Blanchard said, moving to close the door behind them.

Floyd’s mental image of the caller on the telephone had turned out to be reassuringly close to the mark. Blanchard was a thin, old gentleman in his seventies with a crook of a nose upon which balanced a pair of half-moon spectacles. He wore a kind of fez or nightcap that resisted precise identification; a quilted nightgown covered striped pyjamas, thick slippers his feet.

“Maybe you should go back to the beginning,” Floyd said. “Tell me about the American girl. How much did you know about her?”

“She was a tenant, and she paid her rent on time.” For a moment Blanchard fussed with a fire iron, poking away at the ashes in the room’s enormous Art Deco fireplace. On the mantelpiece, two bookend owls surveyed the proceedings with jewelled eyes. Floyd and Custine squeezed in next to each other on the sofa, shuffling awkwardly.

“That’s all?” Floyd prompted.

Blanchard turned from the fireplace. “She stayed here for three months, until her death. She kept the room two floors above this one. She would rather have had one a little lower—as I think I mentioned, she did not like heights—but none was available.”

“Did she complain to you about that?” Floyd asked. His eyes wandered over the walls, taking in an array of African masks and hunting trophies, none of which looked as if they had been dusted in recent memory. A portrait photograph hung next to the door, showing a handsome young couple in front of the Eiffel Tower. Their clothing and slightly stiff expressions suggested a picture taken at least fifty years earlier. Floyd studied the young man’s face and measured it against the old gentleman who was their host.

“She complained to me, yes,” Blanchard said, easing himself into a chair. “To her landlord, no.”

“I thought you were—” Floyd began.

“I was her landlord, yes, but she did not know that. None of the tenants are aware that I am anything more than another tenant. They pay their rent through an intermediary.”

“Odd arrangement,” Floyd observed.

“But a very useful one. I get to hear their official complaints and grievances and their unofficial ones as well, simply by chatting as we pass on the stairs. The woman in question never expressed her displeasure in writing, but she never failed to complain about the room whenever our paths crossed.”

Floyd flashed a glance at his partner, then looked back at Blanchard. “The girl’s name, monsieur?”

“The woman’s name was Susan White.”

“Married?”

“She did not wear a ring, and never spoke of anyone else.”

Floyd noted down this information. “Did she tell you how old she was?”

“I doubt that she was older than thirty-five. Maybe only thirty. It was not easy to tell. She did not wear as much make-up as the other young women, the other female tenants.”

Custine asked, “Did she tell you what she had been doing before she came here?”

“Only that she had come from America, and that she had some skill as a typist. I should mention the typewriter—”

“Where in America?” Floyd interrupted, remembering that Blanchard had not been certain when they spoke on the telephone.

“It was Dakota. I remember that quite clearly now. It was in her accent, she said.”

“Then she spoke English to you?” Floyd asked.

“Now and then, when I asked her to. Otherwise, her French was much like yours.”

“Impeccable,” Floyd said, with a smile. “For a foreigner, that is.”

“What was Mademoiselle White doing in Paris?” Custine asked.

“She never told me, and I never asked. Clearly, funds were not a problem. She may have had some work, but if that was the case then she kept very erratic hours.”

Floyd turned a page on his notepad, thumbing it down to blot the ink on the notes he had already made. “Sounds like a tourist, spending a few months in Paris before moving on. You mind if I ask how you two got to know each other, and how far that relationship went?”

“It was an entirely harmless association. We happened to meet at Longchamp.”

“The races?”

“Yes. I see you’ve noticed the photograph of my late wife and me.”

Floyd nodded, a little ashamed that his scrutiny had been so obvious. “She was very pretty.”

“The photograph doesn’t begin to do her justice. Her name was Claudette. She died in nineteen fifty-four—only five years ago, but it feels as if I’ve spent half my life without her.”

“I’m sorry,” Floyd said.

“Claudette was a great fan of the races.” Blanchard got up again and poked around in the fire, to no visible effect. He sat down with a creak of ageing joints. “After she died, there was a long time when I couldn’t bring myself to leave this apartment, let alone go back to the races. But one day I persuaded myself to do just that, intending to put some money on a horse in her memory. I told myself that it was what she would have wanted, but all the same I couldn’t help but feel a little guilty that I was there on my own.”

“You shouldn’t have felt that way,” Floyd said.

Blanchard looked at him. “Have you ever been married, Monsieur Floyd, or lost a loved one to a slow disease?”

Floyd looked down, chastened. “No, monsieur.”

“Then—with all due respect—you can’t really know what it is like. That feeling of betrayal… absurd as it was. Yet still I kept going, saving a little money each week, occasionally returning with a small win. And that was where I met Susan White.”

“Did the girl gamble?”

“Not seriously. She recognised me only as another tenant and asked if I might help her with a small wager. At first I was reluctant to have anything to do with her, since I almost felt as if Claudette was watching me, as silly as that seems.”

“But you did help her.”

“I decided that it would do no harm to show her how to study the form, and she placed a bet accordingly. Rather to her surprise, the horse triumphed. Thereafter she arranged to meet me at the races once or twice a week. Frankly, I think the horses fascinated her more than the money. I would catch her staring at them as they circled in the jockeys’ enclosure. It was as if she had never seen horses before.”

“Maybe they don’t have them in Dakota,” Custine said.

“And that was as far as it went?” Floyd asked. “A meeting at the races, once or twice a week?”

“That was how it started,” Blanchard said, “and perhaps that is how it should have ended, too. But I found that I enjoyed her company. In her I saw something of my late wife: the same zest for life, the same childlike delight in the simplest things. The truly surprising thing was that she appeared to enjoy my company as well.”

“So you started to meet up outside the racetrack?”

“Once or twice a week I would invite her into this room, and we would drink tea and coffee and perhaps eat a slice of cake. And we would talk about anything that crossed our minds. Or rather I would talk, since—most of the time, at least—she seemed content to sit and listen.” Blanchard smiled, wrinkles splitting his face. “I would say, ‘Now it’s your turn—I’ve been monopolising the conversation,’ and she would reply, ‘No, no, I really want to hear your stories.’ And the odd thing is, she seemed quite sincere. We’d talk about anything: the past, the movies, theatre—”

“And did you ever get a look inside her apartment?”

“Of course—I was her landlord. When she was out, it was a simple matter to use the duplicate key. It wasn’t snooping,” he added a little defensively, leaning forward to make his point. “I have a duty to my other tenants to make sure that the terms of the contract are being honoured.”

“I’m sure,” Floyd said. “When you were in there not snooping around, did you notice anything?”

“Only that the place was always very neat and tidy, and that she collected a remarkable number of books, records, magazines and newspapers.”

“A proper little bookworm, in other words. Not a crime, though, is it?”

“Not unless they’ve changed the law.” Blanchard paused. “There was one thing that struck me as rather unusual, though. Shall I mention it?”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

“The books kept changing. They were the same from day to day, yes, but from week to week, they changed. So did the magazines and newspapers. It was as if she was collecting them, then moving them on elsewhere to make room for new ones.”

“Maybe she was,” Floyd said. “If she was a rich tourist, then she might have been shipping goods back home on a regular basis.”

“I considered that possibility, yes.”

“And?” Floyd asked.

“One day I happened to see her in the street, a long way from the apartment. It was a coincidence. She was making her way down rue Monge, towards the Métro station at Cardinal Lemoine, in the fifth arrondissement. She was struggling with a suitcase, and the thought flashed through my mind that perhaps she had packed her belongings and left.”

“Skipping on her rent?”

“Except she had already paid in advance up to the end of the month. Guilty over my suspicions, I vowed to catch up with her and help her with the suitcase. But I am an elderly man and I could not make up the distance quickly enough. Ashamed that I could not be of assistance to her, I watched her vanish into the Métro station.” Blanchard picked up a carved pipe from a selection on a side table and began examining it absently. “I thought that was the end of it, but no sooner had she vanished than she reappeared. No more than a minute or two had passed since she entered, and she still had the suitcase. This time, however, it looked much lighter than before. It was a windy day and now the suitcase kept bumping against her hip.”

“You told all this to the police?” Floyd asked.

“I did, but they dismissed it. They told me that I had imagined the whole incident, or imagined that the first suitcase was heavier than the second.”

Floyd made a careful note, certain—without quite being able to say why—that this was an important observation. “And is this the ‘evidence’ of foul play you mentioned on the telephone?”

“No,” Blanchard said. “That is something else entirely. Two or three weeks before her death, Mademoiselle White’s manner changed. She stopped coming to the races, stopped visiting these rooms, and spent more and more time away from her own apartment. On the few occasions when we passed each other on the stairs, she seemed distracted.”

“Did you check out her rooms?”

Blanchard hesitated a moment before nodding in answer to Floyd’s question. “She had stopped acquiring books and magazines. A great many remained in the apartment, but I saw no sign that they were being added to or relocated elsewhere.”

Floyd glanced at Custine. “All right. Something must have been on her mind. I have a theory. You want to hear it?”

“Am I paying for this? We haven’t discussed terms.”

“We’ll come to that if we come to it. I think Mademoiselle White had a lover. She must have met someone in the last three weeks before she died.” Floyd observed Blanchard, wondering how much of this he really wanted to know. “She’d been spending time with you—innocently, I know—but suddenly her new boyfriend wanted her all to himself. No more trips to the races, no more cosy chats up here.”

Blanchard seemed to weigh the matter. “And the matter of the books?”

“Just a guess, but maybe she suddenly had other things to do than hang around bookstores and newsagents. She lost interest in stocking her library, so there was no need to keep on shipping trunks back to Dakota.”

“That’s a lot of supposition,” Blanchard said, “based on a rather striking absence of evidence.”

“I said it was a theory, not a watertight case.” Floyd took out a toothpick and started chewing on it. “All I’m saying is, there might be less to this than meets the eye.”

“And the matter of her death?”

“The fall might still have been an accident.”

“I am convinced she was pushed.” Blanchard reached under his chair and produced a tin box printed all over with a scratched tartan pattern, a photograph of a Highland terrier on the lid. “This, perhaps, will convince you.”

Floyd took the tin. “I really need to watch my figure.”

“Open it, please.”

Floyd prised the lid off with his fingernails. Inside was a bundle of assorted documents and papers, held together with a single rubber band.

“You’d better explain the significance of this,” Floyd said, nonplussed.

“Less than a week before she died, Mademoiselle White knocked on my door. She died on the twentieth; this would have been around the fifteenth or sixteenth. I let her in. She was still flustered, still distracted, but now at least she was ready to talk to me. The first thing she did was apologise for her rudeness during the preceding fortnight, and tell me how much she missed the horses. She also gave me that box.”

Floyd slipped free the elastic band surrounding the papers and let them spill into his lap. “What else did she tell you?”

“Only that she might have to leave Paris in a hurry, and that I was to look after the box if she did not return for it.”

Floyd glanced through the papers. There were travel documents, receipts, maps, newspaper clippings. There was a pencil sketch, carefully annotated, of something circular that he didn’t recognise. There was a postcard: a sun-faded photograph of Notre Dame. Floyd flipped it over and saw that the card had been written and stamped, but never sent. The handwriting was neat and girlish, with exaggerated loops and curlicues. It was addressed to someone called Mr. Caliskan, who lived in Tanglewood, Dakota.

“You mind if I read this?”

“Go ahead, Monsieur Floyd.”

The first part of the message talked about how the woman was planning to spend the afternoon shopping, looking for some silver jewellery, but that she might have to change her plans if the weather turned to rain. The words “silver” and “rain” had been neatly underlined. This struck Floyd momentarily as odd, before he remembered an elderly aunt who had been in the habit of underlining key words in the letters she sent him. The postcard was signed “from Susan’: Floyd speculated that it had been intended for an uncle or grandfather rather than a lover or close friend.

He opened one of the maps, spreading it wide. He had expected a tourist map of Paris, or at the very least of France, but this was a small-scale map of the whole of Western Europe, from Kaliningrad in the north to Bucharest in the south, from Paris in the west to Odessa in the east. A circle had been inked around Paris and another around Berlin, and the two circles were linked by a perfectly straight line in the same ink. Another circle enclosed Milan, which was in turn connected back to Paris by another line. The effect was the creation of an approximate “L” shape, with Paris at the corner of the “L” and Berlin at the end of the longest side. Marked in neat lettering above the lines were two figures: “875” above the Paris-Berlin axis and “625” along that between Paris and Milan. Floyd speculated that these were the distances between the cities, in kilometres rather than miles.

He scratched at the ink with his fingernail, satisfying himself that it was not part of the original printed design. He had no idea what the markings meant, but he speculated that Susan White might have been planning the next leg of her journey, and had been measuring the respective distances between Paris and the two other cities before deciding which to opt for. But what kind of tourist needed to know such distances so precisely? Trains and even aeroplanes did not follow straight-line routes, given the real and political geography of Europe. But perhaps that detail had escaped her.

Floyd folded the map, and then leafed through the rest of the paperwork. There was a typed letter in German from someone called Altfeld, on thick letterhead paper printed with a company insignia for a heavy-manufacturing concern named Kaspar Metals. The address was somewhere in Berlin, and the letter appeared to be in reply to an earlier query Susan White had sent. Beyond that, Floyd’s faltering German wasn’t up to the task of translation.

“These don’t look much like love letters,” Floyd said.

“She gave me one other instruction,” Blanchard said, “in the event that she did not return. She said that her sister might come looking for her. If she did, I was to pass on the box to her.”

“She was worried about something,” Floyd said. “That much we can agree on.”

“You’re still not convinced that she might have been killed deliberately? Shouldn’t you be keen to take on a murder case? I will pay you for your time. If you find no evidence that she was murdered, then I will accept your judgement.”

“I don’t want to waste your money or my time,” Floyd said. Custine cast him a sidelong glance, as if questioning his sanity.

“I am authorising you to waste it.”

Floyd stuffed the documents back into the tin. “Why don’t you just hold on to this and see if the sister shows up?”

“Because every day that passes is a day longer since she died.”

“All due respect, monsieur, but this really isn’t something you need concern yourself with.”

“I think it is very much my concern.”

“What did the police make of the box?” Custine asked.

“I showed it to them, but of course they weren’t interested. As I said, entirely too unimaginative.”

“You think she might have been a spy,” Floyd guessed.

“The thought had crossed my mind. Please do not pretend it has not crossed yours.”

“I don’t know what to make of any of this,” Floyd said. “What I do know is that it never hurts to keep an open mind.”

“Then keep an open mind about the possibility that she was murdered. I owe it to the memory of that lovely young girl not to let her death go unpunished. I know in my heart that someone was responsible, Monsieur Floyd. I also know that Claudette is watching me now, and she would be very disappointed if I did not do my duty to Mademoiselle White.”

“That’s very decent of you—” Floyd began.

“It’s not just decency,” Blanchard interrupted sharply. “There is a selfish component as well. Until her killer is found, there will always be doubts in my other tenants’ minds that perhaps she did fall accidentally.”

“But the police have never made any such suggestion.”

“A suggestion does not have to be voiced,” Blanchard said. “Please—take the box and see where it takes you. Talk to the other tenants—discreetly, of course. She may have spoken to some of them as well. What shall we say, in terms of a retainer?”

Floyd reached into his jacket and took out one of his dog-eared business cards. “Those are my usual terms. Since this is a homicide investigation, my associate will also be assisting me. That means the rates are doubled.”

“I thought you wanted to save me money.”

“It’s your call. But if we’re going to investigate Mademoiselle White’s death, there’s no point in half-measures. Custine and I can cover twice as much ground in half the time it would take me on my own.”

Blanchard took the card and pocketed it without a glance. “I accept your terms. For my money, however, I will expect a swift resolution.”

“You’ll get it, one way or the other.”

“That suits me fine.”

“I need to know what she told you about her sister.”

“That’s the funny thing. Until that last conversation, the one when she gave me the box, she never mentioned any family at all.”

“Did she give you a description of her sister?”

“Yes. Her name is Verity. She has blonde hair, not red—Mademoiselle White was particular about that detail—but she’s otherwise about the same height and build.” Blanchard pushed himself to his feet. “In that respect you are fortunate. I took a picture of her at Longchamp.” Blanchard pulled out a pair of photographs from beneath one of the owls on the mantelpiece. “You may keep both of them.”

“Are these your only copies?”

“No. I had a number of duplicate prints made when I was expecting the police to take an interest in matters. I assumed they would want them for their inquiries.”

Floyd examined one of the pictures of Susan White. It was a full-length shot of her standing up against a backdrop of railings, with the elongated blur of a horse passing behind. She was holding on to her pillbox hat as if the wind had been about to snatch it away. She was laughing, startled and happy. She did not look like someone who would be dead in a few weeks.

“She was an attractive young woman,” Blanchard said, settling back into his seat. “But I hardly need tell you that. She had the most beautiful red hair: it’s a shame that you can’t really see it, bundled up under that hat. She usually wore green. I always think redheads look good in green, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Floyd said.

Custine examined the picture. “Quite a looker. Are they all like that in America?”

“Not in Galveston,” Floyd replied.

Two further flights of stairs led up to the rooms that the American woman had occupied during her last three months of life. Blanchard informed Floyd that the apartment had not been occupied since her fall. “It’s barely been touched,” he added. “The room has been aired out, but other than that it’s exactly as she left it. Even the bed was made. She was a very tidy young woman, unlike some of my tenants.”

“I see what you mean about the books,” Floyd said, the floorboards creaking as he moved to examine the collection Susan White had accumulated. Books, magazines and newspapers occupied every horizontal surface, including a significant acreage of the floor space. But they were neatly stacked and segregated, hinting at a strictly methodical process of acquisition and storage prior to shipment. He remembered Blanchard’s sighting of her making her way to the Métro station with a loaded suitcase, and guessed that she must have made dozens of such journeys every week, if the collection had been changed as often as Blanchard claimed.

“Perhaps you will see some rhyme or reason to it that escapes me,” Blanchard said, hesitating at the threshold.

Floyd bent down to get a better look at a stack of phonograph records. “Were these part of the stuff she was collecting and shipping as well?”

“Yes. Examine them at your leisure.”

Floyd leafed through the mint-condition recordings, hoping for some insight into the woman’s thought processes, but the records were as varied in content as the rest of the material. There were jazz recordings, some of which Floyd owned himself, and a handful of classical recordings, but the rest of the collection appeared to have been compiled at random, with no consideration for genre or intrinsic merit.

“So she liked music,” he commented.

“Except she never played any of those records,” Blanchard said.

Floyd looked at one of the records more closely, studying the sleeve and then the groove of the platter itself with a narrowed, critical eye. Lately, a great many low-quality bootlegs had begun to turn up on the record market. They sounded acceptable to the untrained ear, but to anyone who really cared about music, they were an insult. Rumour had it that the bootleggers were operating somewhere in the Paris area, stamping out the cheap copies in an underground pressing plant. Having been stung by one or two of these poor copies himself, Floyd had learned to sniff them out. It seemed likely that more than a few of the dead woman’s records were bootlegs, but if she didn’t even listen to them in the first place, she had only herself to blame.

Returning the record to its sleeve and standing up, Floyd noticed an old clockwork phonograph tucked away in one corner of the room, next to a more modern valve wireless. “Was that phonograph hers?” he asked.

“No. It came with the room. It must have been there for thirty years.”

“And she never played any of these records on it?”

“I never heard her play any music at all. On the few occasions when I happened to be passing this room or visiting the one below it, I only heard noises from the radio.”

“What sort of noises?”

“I couldn’t hear them properly. She always had the radio turned down very low.”

Floyd rubbed his finger through the dust on the top of the wireless. “Have you used this thing since she died?”

“As I said, the room has been aired, but that is all.”

“You mind if I find out what she was listening to?”

“You are in my employment now, Monsieur Floyd. I authorise you to do as you see fit.”

“I’ll check the balcony,” Custine said, “see how easy it would have been to fall from it.”

Floyd knelt down next to the wireless set, having first smoothed out the scuffed and rucked-up carpet in front of it. It was a twenty-year-old Phillips set in a walnut-veneered cabinet; Floyd had owned one much like it during his first five years in Paris. He turned the wireless on, hearing the hum of warming valves and a crackle from the speaker grille. It still worked.

He felt a breeze on the back of his neck as Custine opened the double doors that led to the balcony. The distant sound of traffic pushed itself into the room, disturbing the silence like a disrespectful guest. Floyd’s hand moved instinctively to the tuning dial, preparing to make the little arrow slide along the illuminated band displaying printed wavelengths and transmitting stations. He knew all the stations that still broadcast the kind of music he and Custine liked to listen to and play. There were fewer of them each year. Fewer each month, it seemed lately.

With the dial where Susan White had left it, Floyd turned up the volume. All he heard was static.

“It’s off-station,” Floyd commented. “Either that or whoever was sending on this wavelength isn’t sending any more.” He took out his notebook, flipped to the first clean page and made a note of the position of the dial. Then he turned it, sliding the arrow from one end of the tuning band to the other. The wireless hissed and crackled, but at no point did Floyd tune in to a recognisable signal.

“Well?” Blanchard asked.

“There must be something wrong with the radio. I should have tuned into something by now.”

“The wireless set was working perfectly before Mademoiselle White occupied the room.”

“And maybe it was working when she was here as well. But it’s dead now, unless every station in France has just gone off the air.” Floyd returned the dial to the approximate position it had been in when he entered the room, then switched off the wireless. “It doesn’t matter. I just thought there might be a clue to her state of mind, if we knew what she had been listening to.”

Custine came back in from the balcony, shutting the double doors behind him. “It’s secure,” he said. He touched his midriff. “The railings come up to here. How tall was she, monsieur?”

“About your height.”

“Then I suppose she might have tripped and gone over, if she was unlucky,” Custine observed. “But there’s no way she could have fallen just by leaning against them.”

“Then discount that hypothesis,” the landlord said. “Consider instead the possibility that she was pushed.”

“Or that she jumped,” Floyd said. He closed his notebook with a snap. “All right, I think we have enough here for now. You’ll keep this room as it is for the time being?”

“Until the matter is resolved,” Blanchard assured him.

Floyd patted Custine on the back. “C’mon. Let’s have a chat with the other tenants, see what they have to say.”

Custine leaned down and picked up the biscuit tin from where Floyd had left it, next to the wireless. “The door to this apartment,” he said, addressing Blanchard. “Was it locked when they found her?”

“No. It was open.”

“Then she could have been murdered,” Custine said.

“Or she could have left the door open because she had something else on her mind,” Floyd said. “It doesn’t prove anything. What about the front door—was that open as well?”

“No,” Blanchard said. “It was locked. But it’s a slam lock. When the murderer left, he would only have had to close it behind him: he didn’t need a key for that.”

“And you haven’t noticed anything missing from here?”

“I’d have mentioned it if I had.”

Custine patted the tin. “Maybe they were looking for this but didn’t find it because she’d already passed it on to Monsieur Blanchard.”

“Did anything in that box look like it was worth murdering someone for?” Floyd said.

“No,” Custine replied, “but when I was at the Quai, I saw people murdered for a loaf of bread.”

Floyd turned to the landlord. “I’ll telephone you tomorrow if I have any news, otherwise I’ll just continue my investigations until I have something worth reporting.”

“I would like to hear from you every day, irrespective of your findings.”

Floyd shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”

“You may call me in the evening. At the end of each week, I will expect a typewritten progress report, together with a breakdown of the running expenses.”

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Something awful happened in this room,” Blanchard said. “I can feel it, even if you can’t. Mademoiselle White was frightened and a long way from home. Someone came and killed her, and that isn’t right.”

“I understand,” Floyd said.

They had almost reached the door when Blanchard spoke again. “There is something I forgot to mention. It might not mean anything, but Mademoiselle White kept an electric typewriter in her room.” He stood with his hand on a large wooden cabinet that was resting on a small bow-legged table. “It was a German model—the name of the firm was Heimsoth and Reinke, I believe—very heavy. This was the box it came in.”

“An odd thing for a tourist to carry around with them,” Floyd said.

“I asked her about it, and all she would say was that she was practising her touch-typing, so that she wouldn’t be out of form when she returned home.”

“You’re right to mention it,” Floyd said. “It’s probably not important, but every bit helps.”

“Perhaps we should look at the typewriter,” Custine said.

“That’s the point,” Blanchard replied. “It doesn’t exist any more. The typewriter was found smashed to pieces on the pavement, next to Mademoiselle White.”