Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

The Extortionately Dear Departed by David Williams

Over the past few years David. Williams has been concentrating on a police series featuring the Welsh Inspector Parry. Suicide Intended (Harper Collins), the fifth and most recent Parry adventure, sold out in hardcover in both the U.S. and the U.K. The paper-hack, released in late 1999, is still available. Critic William F. Deeck calls the hook, “A fine, civilized and fair-play police procedural.” Whatever this author writes, we can depend on its being finely wrought.

“They are the perfect couple for your... your very generous gift, Monsieur Talbot,” said Pierre Boulanger, a thin, gaunt, stooping figure, thin-lipped, hesitant, and unctuous in his choice of words. He wore small, steel-rimmed spectacles with round lenses and walked always with straight arms held close to his sides. Never given to true familiarity with either of us, he was invariably deferential toward me, and somewhat nervous when my wife Helen was about. I kidded her that he probably lusted after her in spirit.

But, in the end, I was wrong, even about that.

To describe the scam we planned to pull as “generous” was typical Boulanger euphemism. From the start, three months before this, he had chosen never to refer to the illegal side of it, nor even to admit that it owned one. True, we had encouraged him in this, but we had never expected to recruit a collaborator who would enter into the spirit of things with the righteous enthusiasm of a parish priest engaged in unimpeachable good works.

Aged forty-five — three years older than me — Boulanger was a minor official in the regional health office of the French Social Security Ministry, and lived with his widowed mother in a Bordeaux suburb. We had met him when Helen was reclaiming the cost of having had her appendix removed at the local hospital. Because we were both British citizens resident in France, there had been extra formalities to go through.

Boulanger had volunteered to come to the château after Helen had explained on the telephone that since we were in the middle of the grape harvest, and she was still in a delicate state, it would be impossible for either of us to get into town easily for several weeks.

In fact, after speaking with him for a few minutes, my perceptive wife had concluded that he could be the helpmate we had been seeking unsuccessfully for months. His whole manner had exuded selfless, eager cooperation. In the matter of the payment for the appendectomy, he had seemed to be almost ready to waive the formalities and approve it on the phone. But Helen, still following her hunch, had cunningly protested that we couldn’t possibly allow him to do anything irregular or risky, and certainly not before he had even met us. He had replied that while the risk was immaterial, it would be a privilege to make our acquaintance.

He had arrived that first time in the most dilapidated little Citroen Dyane (the rattlebones model with the canvas roof) that I had ever encountered still capable of movement under its own power. The comedy was that he drove the machine as if he was competing in the Monaco Grand Prix — at all of thirty miles an hour maximum, and that only when he was travelling downhill with a following wind. It was droll to watch the car crawling up our curved drive, the driver’s hands, arms, and shoulders, usually so inert, wrestling as if he was desperately trying to control the wheel before he brought the vehicle to a terminal sort of halt somewhat short of the front door. You felt the wheels might at least have thrown up a showering of loose gravel, but they didn’t.

Boulanger had been dressed that day — as he was on most subsequent days — in a worn, fawn cotton jacket, equally shabby but well-creased grey trousers, and a black beret. He had pulled off the beret courteously but with great economy of movement — head inclined to allow the minimum upward and downward action of his right hand and arm — the exercise exposing a glistening, prematurely-bald head.

To be honest, Boulanger’s car just about compared with our château in the elegance stakes. The place was an unlovely, broken-down farmhouse with three acres of not very fruitful vines, all on the wrong side of the hill, in any case, for the ripening of perfect grapes. We had bought it three years before, in a moment of abandon, because it was cheap, and seemed to us to be overflowing with romantic potential. We had tired of our humdrum London jobs — mine at a bank, Helen’s at a bookstore — as well as our even more humdrum existence in commuter land. Confidently, we had opted to exchange all that for a healthy, French rural life, supported by the income our ownership of an honest brand of paysant cru wine would surely generate. The trouble was, it was only the peasants who benefited when we failed to sell the stuff to anyone in the higher echelons of society. Worse, selling the château itself was proving even more difficult than flogging the wine: We’d been trying since year two.

The only possible upside to what had become our penurious state was one that offered financial succour for Helen alone. When we had sold our unpretentious London suburban house for a handsome profit (there had been an English property boom on at the time), Helen had insisted that we insure my life for two million pounds for five years — until we were well established in the new life. She didn’t care for the prospect that if anything happened to me in the interim, she would be left with a wine-producing business to run single-handed, while, by then, possibly encumbered with young children, in a foreign clime. Her own father had been killed in an accident when she was fourteen, and her mother had struggled to keep his business and the family afloat before expiring a few years later herself — Helen believed from exhaustion.

We had paid the whole five-year life insurance premium in advance, to qualify for a fabulously low rate. Even so, there was nothing fabulous in the fact that I had to expire before there could be any benefit.

“Have you ever thought that we could fake your death?” Helen had ruminated in bed one night. We were in the middle of our third abysmal grape-picking season.

“You mean, have me fail to return from a sailing trip? Or have my clothes found abandoned on a lonely beach? They wouldn’t pay out for years in case I turned up again. And if they figured it was suicide, they wouldn’t pay at all,” I countered firmly. I’d checked the policy frequently with vaguely the same sort of idea in mind.

“No, I mean really die. Not you, of course, my sweet. Someone else who we’d pretend was you.”

“You’re not suggesting murder?” My wife is a lovely, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-the-mouth, English-rose innocent. Six years younger than me, she had been piously educated at an expensive Catholic school, at least until the family fortune gave out. The very notion of murderous...

“Of course not,” she responded primly. “But there must be tragic cases of middle-aged Frenchmen dying of incurable conditions, with distraught wives worried like hell over what to live on when they’re left alone. I know I would be.” She was good at entering into the spirit of her fantasies. “Nobody gets much of a pension before they’re past sixty, and the French state widow’s pension is lousy anyway. We simply need to find an impoverished, terminally ill patient who looks vaguely like you, so you can... can swop places,” she embellished, warming to the task.

“And swop wives too?” I questioned.

“Of course. But that bit’s only pretend.” She frowned, as if I’d spoiled her train of thought with such a trivial point, then added, “We promise the couple, say, ten per cent of what we’d get from the insurance company—”

“You mean, two hundred thousand pounds?” I interrupted.

“Yes. That’s more than three hundred thousand U.S. dollars, leaving us with... nearly three million dollars,” she calculated wistfully, as if we had the money already. She was thinking in dollars because we’d originally planned to emigrate to Oregon. That was before we’d both been seduced by the French château. “The husband would have to come away with me somewhere, pretending to be you,” she continued, “before he... he passes on. When he does, I identify the body as yours, and we quietly pay his share to his wife, or whatever.” She paused, then completed with a rare spurt of genuine commercial practicality. “Perhaps it would need to be a down payment of a hundred thousand pounds, and the rest on death.”

“So how would we raise the first hundred thousand pounds, ahead of my untimely demise?” I questioned with feeling.

“We could sell the château for a really knockdown price. We wouldn’t need it anymore.”

She was right there. The place would probably fetch more than that, even in a distress sale. “And what about the ‘wife or whatever’?” I went on doubtfully. “How does she explain what’s happened to a previously ailing patient when what she ends up with is lusty me?”

“As I said, the couple would need to leave where they’ve been living and come away to a place where none of us is known. The wife would want to be with her real husband in any case. To look after him till the end. And she wouldn’t go back to wherever it was they lived before, that’s until after his death, and after the divorce. Then it would be all right.”

“What divorce?”

“Well, she’d need to divorce you eventually, so you could marry me again. That’s after you’d officially enjoyed a miraculous cure. She’d be left with all the money we’d given her. A middle-aged widow with capital shouldn’t find it hard to attract a new man. I feel she’d want to marry again, too,” mused my romantic wife. “The divorce would be uncomplicated. We’d get it someplace where it’s easy.”

“America,” I provided, just to add colour to the crazy scenario.

“Yes, perfect. I expect that’s where we’ll end up in any case.”

“You mean because I wouldn’t always be running into old friends and colleagues there? People who’d read in the paper I was dead.”

“Mm, partly. But I think you’d probably have to grow a beard, too.”

“Only if you will as well, darling, to complete our disguise.”

She giggled, then sighed. “You know, the whole thing would be a true act of mercy. And we’d still be left with all that money, plus whatever remained of what we get for the château. We’d make a fresh start. Something in the country still. Not a vineyard, but with clean air for rearing the children.”

We’d put off having a family till things got better. “What if the couple have kids?” I asked.

“If they do, we’ll have to deal with that when the time comes. You’re being negative, darling,” Helen remonstrated.

“Because the whole thing’s pie in the sky,” I countered. “We’ll never find the luckless patient. And if we do, the idea’s still too complicated.”

Except it was exactly three months later when Pierre Boulanger found what he had termed the “perfect couple” for our generosity — and it was hardly complicated at all.

Boulanger spent most of his normal working day visiting hospitals and the homes of invalids — which is what Helen had discovered during that first telephone conversation. When she was sure we knew him well enough to risk it, she outlined our plan, emphasising its deeply humanitarian aspect. She never mentioned the two million pounds, only the amount of the insurance money we were ready to give to some terminally ill patient and his wife if a swop could be engineered.

Our new acquaintance seemed so moved by our generosity that we seriously thought he would burst into tears. Later, he firmly rejected our offer of a finder’s fee for himself. “It’s for the good of all,” he pronounced portentously. This had been during his third visit to the château in as many days. We had let him recruit himself as an honorary grape picker who stayed each evening to share our simple supper, and which led to his becoming our equally honorary scout for the patient we needed. And who better for the job, it quickly proved, than resourceful Pierre?

Henri and Michelle Rabut were a sad couple. She was forty-seven years old, still very comely, and working at the checkout in a supermarket in St-Jean, a small town close to Limoges. Or that was what she had been doing until her slightly older, farm-labourer husband had been told by the doctors that he had a wasting blood condition for which there was no known cure. He had, at the most, six months to live. Boulanger first met them two months after this when they had applied for extra government assistance. St-Jean was a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Bordeaux, well outside his normal territory, but he had been temporarily seconded there due to illness in the Limoges office. By this time, Michelle Rabut had already quit her job to look after Henri at home — she wouldn’t countenance his spending more time than necessary in a hospital.

Like his wife, Henri Rabut came of simple country stock and was endowed with a heap of innate peasant common sense. He was fatalistic about his condition — a realist resigned to his fate and concerned only to provide for his wife in her widowhood. The couple were childless like us, hut, in their case, due to Henri’s impotence. His blood condition had first been revealed during tests at a fertility clinic.

Miraculously, it was clear from our first meeting that Henri could be accepted as my slightly older brother. If it came to a border official’s cursory glance at a passport photograph, we all believed there was no doubt he could be taken for me. The prospect of the two-hundred-thousand-pound bounty (about two million French francs) had been explained to Henri by Boulanger, and it was a credit to our conscientious go-between that both Henri and his wife considered us heaven-sent and inspired benefactors.

It had been my idea that Helen and the Rabuts should move to England for the remainder of Henri’s life — with me nearby, but in the background. It was bound to be less complicated and quicker if the insurance claim on my life was made in my native country. It would also be wiser, I thought, if no one in the community where the threesome settled had sight of me. In public, Michelle and I would have looked a touch less convincing as a couple than Helen and Henri, a point that might have prompted suspicion or at least nosy enquiry if the four of us had been living together. Better, I thought, to keep things simple, with Michelle posing as the friend and helper to Helen and her sick “husband.”

Henri, although by now seriously debilitated, could still cope with the journey across the Channel with the help of a wheelchair. He didn’t own a passport, so the plan made a useful opportunity for him to acquire one. The photograph used in it was of me, with my eyelids drooped a little, my hair cut short like Henri’s, and my cheeks sucked in to emulate his. We took it as a good omen that the photo fooled the local priest in St-Jean, who signed it on the back as a true likeness of Henri before it went to the passport office. This encouraged us to have Henri travel as me on my passport, and for me to travel by separate route as Henri: That worked too.

As predicted, we had disposed of the château within a week of it being put up for sale, and the money came through much more quickly than expected. This was because the asking price had been so low that the buyer was scared we might change our minds. In fact, we got far less than we had paid originally for the place, but it was sufficient to provide the Rabuts with their down payment, with enough left over to cover our expenses before poor Henri passed on.

Since it was now midwinter, it was easy for Helen to rent a seaside cottage at short notice in a thinly populated part of Devonshire, within reasonable reach of a doctor and a town with a hospital, in case such a facility proved necessary. Once the three of them had settled in, she put it out at the village post-office-cum-store that she, her gravely sick husband Edward, and their indispensable friend and housekeeper Michelle, were there because, despite having lived in France for several years, Edward wanted to see out his last days in the area where he had spent a good deal of his childhood. In fact, the true Edward Talbot had never been to Devon in his life, so that the possibility of anyone local recognising my name but not Henri’s face and build as quite matching it was remote. Helen also told the chatty postmistress that Michelle’s husband was not with them because it would have meant giving up his job in France — an unnecessary sacrifice when it was known that Edward had so little time to live. We had a stroke of luck in the village doctor. His name was Jacques Egbert, and he was a Frenchman who had settled in Devon after marrying a local girl in the mid 1980s. What brief conversations he had with Henri (whom he knew as Edward Talbot) he was delighted to conduct in French, to the great relief of his patient. My surname happens to be as common in France as it is in England, and Helen had explained to the doctor that her husband had been brought up to speak the other language fluently by French grandparents — which, in my case, was not far from the truth.

Jacques Egbert was a competent doctor who kept his searching enquiries at the medical not the social level. Helen insisted on retaining him privately and not as a National Health Service physician. She explained that she and Michelle were determined to nurse Edward at home for as long as it was possible, which could involve an excessive number of house calls. The house calls didn’t bother Egbert at all, while the private arrangement pleased him a great deal: He had very few fee-paying patients.

On his first visit to the cottage, Egbert took blood samples from Henri for analysis. These confirmed the patient’s condition, also the advanced stage it had reached. The doctor was relieved that the two women were well aware that there was no cure for what ailed Henri, only pills and injections to make his life more bearable. Helen played the part of the shortly-to-be-widowed spouse with great conviction, something made easier by the fact that, in the circumstances, Michelle herself showed almost superhuman stoicism.

The burden of frequent house visits did not, after all, come to test the doctor. Henri died of heart failure one night in his sleep, five weeks after he had arrived in England. This poignant event, predicted but deeply sorrowful, in the end came as a relief for Henri as well as for the rest of us. Helen, in particular, had grown immensely fond of him, and the feeling had been mutual. The funeral was a quiet one, attended only by Helen, Michelle, the doctor, and his wife. The body was cremated. Helen kept me informed by telephone at the small Ashley Hotel where I was currently staying, in the inland town of Boddlestone. As a general precaution, I had been changing locations and hotels a good deal since our arrival. I had moved to this one just before the cremation. I missed the service. Apart from the reason that had kept me away to date, I had persuaded myself it wouldn’t have been fitting for me to be present, since I was shortly to make off with the deceased’s wife. Also, to be honest, I didn’t fancy attending my own funeral. After a copy of the registered death certificate had been received by the insurance company, they sent a representative named Plum-ridge to call on Helen by appointment. She described him as a quiet person with the demeanour of a senior clergyman. He also called on Dr. Egbert, but this, he explained with a touch of embarrassment, was normal practice, the sum insured being relatively large. Indeed, he went out of his way to assure Helen that his company had no reservations about the nature of her husband’s sad and untimely demise. It had certainly been untimely for the company.

Before the policy had been issued, nearly four years before, I had been subjected to an extensive medical examination. There had been no suspicion of a rare and terminal blood condition then. Plumridge had earnestly observed as much to Helen, something he combined with his renewed condolences, and the information that the two million pounds would be paid in seven days — which it was.

Shortly after this, Helen had arranged for the second hundred thousand pounds to be transferred electronically to Michelle’s new bank account in Lyons, which Henri’s true widow had set up under Boulanger’s instructions. He had stressed that it would be less noticeable for her to be with a branch of a large bank in a regional French capital.

It was the day before the money was due to be transferred that Pierre Boulanger turned up at Boddlestone. I had discreetly kept in touch with him during our time in England, so he knew where I was staying, as well as about the progress on the insurance payout. We were relying on him to guide Michelle on how to look after her money, as he had done with the first installment when her husband had been alive — and very competently, according to both of them, particularly Michelle. He was hardly a professional “money man,” but was proving a prudent, honest, down-to-earth advisor, which is what Michelle testified he had been to them from the start. He had told us, in his modest way, that he handled his mother’s financial affairs in the same practical fashion.

It was good to know that Boulanger stood so high in Michelle’s esteem, particularly as she had no near relation or friend in business to turn to otherwise. I certainly didn’t wish to become too closely involved in her affairs, since she would shortly be divorcing me.

I hadn’t expected Boulanger to come over from France unannounced. Unfortunately, I had been out when he had telephoned from Dover at nine o’clock in the morning and left a message with Shirley, the Ashley Hotel’s not very bright but curvaceous and leggy receptionist. He had come by car, a new one, he had said, and he estimated he’d be in Boddlestone by one o’clock for lunch.

“Must be a really fast car,” Shirley offered in an awe-struck way — fast cars probably equating with rich and equally fast owners in her estimation.

“It won’t be,” I answered, unconvinced that the thrifty, minor civil servant had treated himself to something capable of covering the distance in the time.

In fact, Boulanger arrived at twelve-thirty in a new beret and a not quite so new, but dashing, open white Porsche, looking flushed and shyly pleased with himself. It went through my mind that the car, though two or three years old, must have cost him a lot more than I would have expected him to spend on a replacement for the Citroen. But then, to my knowledge, he had never overindulged himself before. It occurred to me, also, that I might offer to pay for the car as a present, in lieu of the finder’s fee he had rejected. Indeed, it seemed possible that he now regretted this piece of self-denial, was too meek to say so, but had come in the new car naively hoping I’d take the hint and offer to defray the cost.

By keeping watch for my visitor through the lounge window, I had managed to stop him as he’d been about to climb the hotel steps. It was the kind of establishment where conversations were easily overheard. “Let’s have a late lunch along the coast. It’ll give me a chance to ride in your splendid new motor,” I suggested firmly and loudly after we’d shaken hands. “There was really no need for you to come over, you know.” I added, once we were out of earshot of the building. “And really it would have been wiser if we hadn’t been seen together in public.” I had sandwiches and some beer in a bag under my arm for our lunch. “Terrific car,” I added as we got into the Porsche, and to soften the effect of my admonition. “How much did it cost you, Pierre?” I watched to see if the enquiry would please him as much as I’d surmised it would. But he completely ignored it.

“We have important matters to discuss,” he responded solemnly. “Am I right in believing you originally proposed paying Michelle and her husband five percent of the insurance money, monsieur?” He was still addressing me in his formal way, despite the number of times I had pressed him to call me Edward.

Helen and I had never divulged to Boulanger what the total insurance payout would be. “No, we’d always committed a much larger percentage than that,” I answered, as it happened, quite accurately. Nor did his reference to what had been “originally proposed” register with me when he said it: We had only ever put up one proposal to him. “But, with great respect, Pierre, I don’t think the actual percentage is any of your business,” I ended.

At this point I was directing Boulanger to head the car out of town onto the coast road. He was driving with the ferocity that was so-wildly out of keeping with the rest of his persona — and which made him a good deal more menacing to other road users than when he had been at the wheel of a clapped-out jalopy. I had already needed to remind him several times that in Britain we drive on the left-hand side of the road, not the right. It surprised me that he had reached Boddlestone unscathed.

“Ah, but in the matter of the percentage you are mistaken, monsieur. It is very much my business. Mine and Michelle’s. I am here to tell you we now require the whole of the insurance payment you have received, less two hundred thousand pounds,” he completed.

As if to underline this aggressive and preposterous demand with a matching bellicose action, he gunned the accelerator, forcing the Porsche around an electric milk float whose astonished driver had been easing it out to the centre of the road prior to making a turn. We were still in a built-up area. After completing the foolhardy manoeuvre, my companion frowned intensely, but not at the milkman whose arm-waving protest he had totally ignored.

“What do you mean? It’s Michelle who gets the two hundred thousand,” I expostulated. “And she’s had half of it already, as you well know.” I was now very uneasy — and with good reason.

“But that was only the... the provisional arrangement, monsieur.” We had left the town now, and he had begun racing along at over eighty until I shouted at him that we’d have the police on our tail if he didn’t observe the speed limit. “Michelle has run the greatest risk in all this,” he went on, easing back a little on the pedal. “She deserves the, how do you say, the lion’s share. I believe you and madame have received four million pounds.”

“Nonsense, it was only half that,” I exclaimed without thinking, consumed by a mixture of anger and outrage, but then immediately regretting the disclosure.

“So it was two million, monsieur.” He seemed to have accepted this as fact. “It wasn’t very generous of you to offer Michelle only ten percent. So it’s justice that we match you. You must pay Michelle one million, seven hundred thousand. That’s the total, minus ten percent and the hundred thousand you have already advanced to Michelle. We shall he scrupulously fair in keeping to the revised agreement. Only we need Madame Talbot to transfer what we are owed to Michelle’s bank in Lyons by this time tomorrow.”

“Drop dead, Pierre,” I answered, nearly speechless with fury.

“It would not be in your interests if I dropped dead, monsieur...” he began, as I thought, arrogantly to imply that we were still dependent on his involvement for the pittance being offered.

“And what’s all this ‘we’ business when you speak about you and Michelle?” I broke in before he had finished his sentence. “I don’t believe she’s ready to renege on our original deal.”

Boulanger laughed aloud at this; well, not all that loudly, but he seldom made any noise at all when he showed amusement. “Michelle and I had been in love with each other for several months before I met you and your wife, monsieur.”

“You mean she was unfaithful to Henri? I don’t believe it.”

“I never said she was unfaithful to him. Only that we were in love. We planned to marry after his death. But then, with my sick mother still alive and needing to go into a private nursing home soon, it was a question of finding enough money for everything. Your... your gift was providential.”

“And generous enough as first agreed. So why are you now being so damned greedy? It won’t work, you know,” I pressed, but aware already that we were his hostages.

It was clear now that we had played into Boulanger’s hands by exposing our scam to him in the first place. It must have offered the perfect fulfillment to his wildest dream. And if he shopped us to the insurance company, it was Helen and I who’d go to gaol, not him. He was clean, and we’d never be able to prove differently.

“We are all greedy, monsieur,” he replied in the tone of a sage philosopher.

“But Michelle—” He seemed to have forgotten her — and her complicity.

“Is greedier than anyone,” he broke in primly, as if he regretted her weakness.

“But she’s involved in the insurance fraud, too.”

He outwardly winced at the word fraud, the hypocrite, before he responded. “Only because you took advantage of her simplicity, monsieur, and the plight of her poor sick husband, now dead. Any court, in England or France, would sympathise with her position. Especially if she confessed to everything and appeared as a witness for the prosecution.”

So he had it all figured. “Except, if you shop me and my wife, you’ll lose the money. All of it. The lot.” I said, increasingly convinced that he wasn’t really expecting to get ninety percent of it, that his demand was just an opening gambit. He had to be ready to negotiate. The question was, should I play ball with him, or simply call his bluff? “If I shop you, monsieur, you’ll go to prison,” he uttered flatly, but, as I knew, accurately.

“Nonsense. We’d just be fined and made to give the money back.” Only I wished I could believe my own words. “Tell you what, Pierre,” I continued, “disappointed as I am in you, and my wife will be more so, I’m ready to offer you another... hundred thousand pounds. But that’s absolutely as far as I’ll go. So you can take it or leave it. It’s that or nothing. And remember, if you report us to the authorities, and even if Michelle does witness against us, she’ll even have to give back the money she’s already got from us.” I was not absolutely sure of my ground on that either. Since the first hundred thousand had been paid before we had the insurance payout, it was technically nothing to do with the scam. Even so, it seemed a telling threat.

Boulanger shrugged his shoulders prior, possibly, to challenging the supposition. Except that was the very moment when he’d suddenly had to brake the car hard. He had been travelling too fast again on the approach to a traffic roundabout, and the braking counted for nothing in view of what he did next. Briefly disorientated, he’d followed habit and swung the car right, instead of left. The road had seemed empty, but not once we were driving on it in the wrong direction.

The driver of the articulated truck did his best, but he still hit us broadside. Boulanger was killed outright.

I was still in hospital at the end of two weeks, but mending fast by then. My injuries had been multiple, but not permanent or disabling. I had also been fully conscious when they pulled me from the wreckage, and capable soon afterwards of concocting a story explaining who I was and why I was in England. I identified myself as Henri Rabut, and explained that I had come over from France to collect my wife, Michelle, who was staying in a rented cottage close to Boddlestone with her friend, Mrs. Helen Talbot, whose husband they had both been nursing up to the time of his recent death. Since Mrs. Talbot had not been in any state to be left alone so soon after her bereavement, and since the cottage was small and I hadn’t wished to intrude on a widow’s grief, I had been staying at a local hotel. About my presence in Boulanger’s car, I said he was an old friend on holiday in England and that we had arranged to lunch together.

Of course, it had been urgently necessary to deal with Michelle. In the new circumstances, I didn’t believe she would have the nerve to persist with Boulanger’s blackmail plan on her own, but I had to be sure. Happily, I was right. I confronted her with his admitted perfidy as soon as she and Helen came to the hospital. Helen was profoundly shocked, and Michelle broke down in tears of shame and embarrassment — which to outside observers passed for tears of joy at her “husband’s” survival. Even so, it was as well for our general credibility that this scene took place in a small four-bedded hospital ward, in which I was the only patient that day. Michelle showed surprisingly little grief over Boulanger’s death. It seemed that there had not been much true affection between them — he had simply been using her as he had used us. She more or less threw herself on our mercy, saying that he’d forced her to go along with his disloyal plan against her will. Then she begged us still to give her the second hundred thousand and to let her go back to her birthplace near Lyons. It was significant that, according to her, Boulanger had only declared his love for her, and proposed marriage, the week after he had engineered the Rabuts’ involvement in the insurance scam.

The unhappy woman now planned to buy a farm to work with her brother and his family. She volunteered that she would still cooperate willingly over the divorce, putting proceedings in hand in France immediately. We had already discovered that a “quickee” divorce was as simple there as it was in England or America. Since, by this time, the money we had agreed to pay Michelle would be in her bank account next day, the simplest and smartest thing to do was to pack her off to France straightaway. Indeed, for her to go back by herself, leaving her putative husband-to-be cared for by another woman, would provide useful grounds for the divorce.

So poor misguided Boulanger got his deserts, and a happy ending seemed to be in store for the rest of us.

It was at the end of my third week in hospital that the police came to see me again. At first I assumed the visit was to clarify points in my first statement about the accident, until I realised that these were a different type of police — plainclothes officers, not uniformed, three of them in all, and one of them French. Helen was with them, looking miserable.

My mistake had been in interrupting Boulanger in the car when he was saying it would not be in my interests if he dropped dead — which, of course, is exactly what the wretched man did a split second later. He had pretty certainly been about to inform me that he’d left a letter with a Bordeaux lawyer to be handed to the police if he died suddenly in suspicious circumstances — showing that he trusted me a good deal less than I had always trusted him.

It had been ten days before the lawyer, hearing of Boulanger’s demise, and the manner of it, had decided to take what, on lawyerly consideration, seemed to him the proper action. After that, things had moved fast, with the French and British police and the insurance company working in friendly cooperation.

I was right about one thing. After getting all their money back, the British insurance company decided not to press charges. They didn’t want the case advertised because it would have made them look stupid or careless, or both. After investigation, the police also dropped the idea that I could somehow have been responsible for taking Boulanger’s life — which I clearly couldn’t have been, not without putting my own life in equal danger. Even so, the Crown Prosecutor put me on trial for impersonating a dead person, with criminal intent. Helen and Michelle were charged with complicity.

The hearing took place in England. Michelle was acquitted because her lawyer claimed she had been a grieving widow callously led astray. She’d had to return the second hundred thousand pounds to the insurance company, of course, but she had kept the first one, and there was no legal way of making her give that back to us. We’d hoped she might have shared it with us at least, but it had already been invested in that family farm, or her brother swore it had been, and he was a hard and unsympathetic man who overruled her as easily as Boulanger had done.

Helen was convicted and fined £20,000 — which cleared us out. She has returned to her old bookshop job in London, and glad of the chance.

The judge gave me eighteen months. Thanks to good behaviour, I shall be released next week after serving only half the term.

Except for what Helen brings in, we’re penniless. This is why I hope your production company will consider making a film of our true story, which has yet to be told publicly in the detail I have set down in this letter.

I anxiously look forward to hearing from you.